Laberge’s General Fusion
(6) Comments
Discuss In ForumsMTF-Magnetized target fusion.
Give his team six to 10 years and a few hundred million dollars, he says, and his company, General Fusion, will give you a nuclear-fusion power plant.
He’s in Canada, so that’s Canadian dollars. But still very pricey compared to Focus Fusion.
Yes, another fusion approach. Find out more about Laberge in this article.
Choice observations from the article:
Yes, fusion has a stigma to overcome; the image that it is fundamentally bogus, always and forever 20 years away, certainly doesn’t help.
We can certainly relate!
But after some soul-searching, Laberge quit Creo, retired to an island off the coast of British Columbia, and set out to master nuclear fusion. Four years, several failures and $800,000 later (half from friends and family and half from matching government research grants), Laberge surfaced with a contraption that provided a proof-of-concept for his idea. It’s a shiny steel orb the size of a basketball from which dozens of cords protrude. Imagine those cranial caps from old science-fiction movies, and you’ll get the idea. The cords extend out to two dozen capacitors, and the whole thing is wired up to a tower of controls that could have been pulled from a 1950s battleship. It is the definition of low-tech, and that’s precisely the idea.
But will it work? Another contender for the fusion prize. Now, if only there were a fusion prize.
We are collecting alternative approaches to fusion here under “Fusion Alternatives”. Thanks to Zareh for pointing out this approach.
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More evidence of high energy ions in DPF
Comments
A few years too long, and a few orders of magnitude too expensive. Buh-bye!
this sounds (no pun intended) a lot like bubble fusion aka sonofusion. except this is direct kinetic rather than induced (by resonance?) in water. (and the “piston"s are like the driving magnets in a speaker.) and where sonofusion is a hypothesis to explain a phenomena (sonoluminescense), this is kinda the other way around - here you’re trying to create the phenomena in a very direct mechanical way.
Hey, I read something in the news the other day, did some surfing, and have some thoughts. If anybody else thinks I am not just being a total idiot and they know how to create a new thread for general comment, feel free to do so and move this.
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If I understand correctly, the General Fusion guys are building a prototype reactor, not just a research device. They appear to be ahead of everybody that is public knowledge.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/06/27/fusion/index.html?
CNN June 27, 2011
“General Fusion aims to achieve net gain fusion experimentally in 2012. By 2018, it plans to complete a power plant prototype that would generate 100 megawatts, enough to power about 100,000 homes.”
‘We would like to be in a commercial stage of being able to take orders and build power plants by the end of the decade,’ said Michael Delage, General Fusion VP of business development.”
From what I’ve read, but I can’t remember all the places I was looking, they are building the prototype now. It is a 3m diameter sphere with big air hammers on the outside, and MTF spheromak (semi-stable plasma rings, like plasmoids but much larger) generators at the top and bottom. The MTF technology has already been well developed elsewhere, but it does not achieve critical density / temperature. By banging the hammers and focusing the shockwave inside the sphere with a fluid, spheromaks at the middle should go critical. Banging some hammers on a fluid filled sphere is not exactly new science- this is just a massively complicated engineering problem (mostly involving synchronizing the hammers). As the articles says, shortly (within a year or so) they should have enough hammers and a good enough synchronization algorithm for a critical reactor that achieves break even.
Then there are a couple of years of practical issues- their demonstrations so far have used water as the fluid and a tube through the water for the plasma which gets crushed by each shot. The plan is to use molten lead for the fluid to protect from the fusion neutrons, put lithium in the lead to breed tritium as a source for DT fusion, and spin up the molten lead lithium mixture to make an opening in the middle for the plasma like the opening in water as it spins around a sink before going down the drain. They will also will need to build the rest of the around 200 hammers the system needs for full operation, all synchronized to generate a shockwave in the middle on time-scales of microseconds. These are more engineering issues, nothing ‘scientific breakthrough’-ish about it.
Once they get all this to work, they shoot it once a second, take heat out of the molten lead using a heat-exchanger / steam turbine combo, and they have a fusion reactor power generator. This is a big-ugly-absolutely no finesse way of getting MTF to work, not very attractive to your average fusion scientist, but the thing is it is just an expensive engineering problem. The guy named Laberge who dreamed all this up was engineering parts for Kodak printers, but he actually got his doctorate in plasma physics when he was younger and was interested in fusion at the time, and he decided to go back to his roots and do something for the world. His company is getting the money it needs. A fund with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, just put in $20 million, and they already had millions.
I think it is quite possible General Fusion will be selling reactors before there is a prototype DPF. And their reactors will be big, ugly, noisy, expensive, deal with bunches of radioactive material from the tritium and high energy neutrons, and not very reliable. Kind of like first generation analog cell phones. Not considering the radioactive part.
My point is that their success could be a very good thing for the fusion field, and for LPPX in particular. How many billions of dollars every year are invested in cell phone technology these days? Would all that money be invested if the initial hurdle of demonstrating some type of cell phone had not occurred? Why expect DPF to be the first commercial fusion reactor? Once we get past investors thinking about fusion as something that will never actually happen, to thinking about the merits of various types of reactors, I expect DPF to take off. Especially considering the radioactive part.
Thanks TimS! Yes, we’re talking about it in the forums. I just connected this post to the new forum post. Thanks for finding (and effectively updating) this post, I had forgotten about it.
Comment link test.
TimS and Happyjack27, you are avatar/profile pic free. Got a moment, update your profiles!
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