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

[Tulse]

General Fusion’s approach seems absurd to me — not physically impossible, just absurd in a Rube Goldberg, “I can’t believe how silly that thing sounds” way. And I can’t imagine that they will have breakeven by 2013, largely because I don’t think they can even physically build the ridiculously complicated reactor by then, with its 200 pneumatic pistons firing simultaneously to send shockwaves through a sphere of spinning liquid metal to compress a plasma toroid, all in a device several stories tall, and requiring absurdly precise timing. There is no way that anyone could build such a large, mechanically complex device requiring precise tolerances and have it researched and characterized and debugged and working in two years. Absurd.

And, out of all this, they’re still just heating up water to produce steam to run a turbine to run a generator, like we have for about a century.

This is fusion done by orks.

I really do wish that LPP could find its own angel investor from among the rich digital entrepreneurs. Tri Alpha has Microsoft’s Allen, and now GF has Bezos — perhaps LPP could interest Elon Musk in a potential power source for the next stage of SpaceX vehicles and Tesla cars.