Reply To: General Fusion Inc

[nemmart]

If the onion and ion beam capture hit the 80-90% targets then everything will be just peachy.

But I’ve been following this project for a while and there are more twists and turns than a
mountain road. Switch problems that had to be overcome, arcing issues, plasma impurities,
and several redesigns of the cathode and anode…

It’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario where the fusion works, but the engineering to hit
the 80-90% conversion efficiencies fails. This could be for a lot of different reasons, maybe
the ions comes out at different velocities and must be sorted and some energy is lost. Or
maybe the ions come out in a spread out cone and not directly down the axis of the machine.
Who knows. And I’m sure there are even more issues for the onion.

To me, this seems like a significant risk to the project.

So why not have a plan B in place? I would advocate that someone on the LPP team or who
knows what parameters can be tweaked should be looked to see if there is an alternative
configuration that produces more fusion power per shot. We know that a heat engine can
achieve 40% efficiency and as per the earlier post:

> fusion energy output is 4x the input (input energy + 4x for fusion energy=5x input * .4 = 2x
> input, as is the current goal).

I realize that using a heat engine will increase the cost of the energy produced by a FoFu significantly.
But it should still be significantly cheaper than a natural gas plant. It would provide base load power
and would still be a very compelling option.