Reply To: Toshiba's "Micro Nuclear Reactor" – it's not fusion, but it's here now

[Ivy Matt]

Tulse wrote: If I had $20 million, instead of putting it all into one highly speculative basket, I’d give $5 million each to those three different approaches, with a promise of additional $5 milllion to the first group to show breakeven. So much of this basic research is done on a shoestring, and given that all these approaches require far less capital than tokomaks or ICF in order to produce useful information, I’d think spreading around a bit of seed money to lots of approaches would be a more efficient way to produce the desired goal.

I don’t have any inside knowledge or anything, but it seems to me that Tri-Alpha doesn’t have much trouble raising funding and EMC2, although it doesn’t get a whole lot of funding, seems to be receiving a sufficient amount so far. As long as the Navy is getting the results it wants, I imagine they’ll have a safety net.

AaronB wrote: Wow. Maybe they’re closer to achieving the fusion dream than we’d thought. 😉 LPP would gladly take $5M in seed money, and do a lot of good things with it. Forget $5M, we’d take $1M and see how close we could come to breakeven!

I don’t know, maybe you’re going about this the wrong way. $1 million is a paltry sum. Maybe you should be telling people you need to raise $200 million to develop the commercial demo device, and investors will be quicker to open their pocketbooks. 😉

zapkitty wrote: Tri-alpha is secretive but I’m sure having the name Jeff Bezos would result in a red-carpet guided tour complete w/ plushy CBR souvenir.

Tri-Alpha has Paul Allen, though.

zapkitty wrote: FF is an open book.

I hate to say it, but that might be a problem. I don’t know why it should be, though. At least LPP has a patent. It’s my understanding that General Fusion hasn’t been granted any patents yet.

zapkitty wrote: Musing aloud, the only outstanding issues with FF that wouldn’t be solved with net power would be capacitor wear and, to a lesser extent, electrode wear.

Some people would also argue that both methods of energy capture are unproven, and the actual amount of energy captured will be much less than is supposed. I really don’t know enough to opine on that, though.

zapkitty wrote: but this really does seem like the money is being steered to the least likely candidates… again…

The way I’d put it is that the approaches that seem to me most likely to bear fruit soonest are receiving the least amount of funding. Then again, from what I’ve read, General Fusion is aiming for a demonstration of net power in 2013. Assuming they actually achieve it, the only ones I know of who I think could beat them are LPP, NIF, maybe EMC2, and possibly (who knows?) Tri-Alpha.