Fusion power on the cheap? Not so outlandish…
My feature in the Toronto Star today is about General Fusion, a Vancouver-area startup that believes it can build a prototype of a nuclear fusion reactor for $50 million within four years. While the multibillion-dollar ITER and U.S. fusion programs are using costly lasers and electromagnets to achieve “net gain” — that is, creating a fusion reaction that releases more energy than put it — the folks at General Fusion are cleverly pursuing a mechanical approach that uses concentrated sound waves to compress a deuterium-tritium plasma and trigger a fusion reaction. The key, as you’ll see, is the use of precision digital controls that simply didn’t exist back in the 1970s when the idea of magnetized target fusion was first explored.
You can read the article for more details and a deeper explanation of how it works. General Fusion recently secured $13.9 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada so it can pursue its prototype development, contingent on the company raising another $30 million or so from private investors. SDTC‘s average deal size is around $3 million so the fact it’s giving General Fusion nearly five times that amount speaks to the credibility of what it’s doing.
My readers would know that I love an underdog, and this certaintly counts as one of them. Unfortunately, Canada doesn’t have a fusion program and all expertise and experience around nuclear technology is around fission reactors — i.e. Candu. But if General Fusion can show four years from now that its approach can achieve net-gain, the company will have no problem attracting investment and attention from some of the world’s best nuclear minds.
Tags: General Fusion, ITER, Magnetized Target Fusion, Michel Laberge, net gain, nuclear fusion
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:49 am
[...] FUENTE – CleanBreak – 20/04/09 [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
I think the quote from your article sums it up the best- ‘high risk, high gain.’ But very well worth it. I still believe that we will need some sort of consistant, reliable baseline power generation, and that it should probably be nuclear, to go with renewable energies- obviously, though, if fusion reactors could become a reality, it would be exponentially greater than our current Nuclear Reactor technologies. I wish them success in their pursuit of thinking outside the box- if only I had a spare $50 million lying around;-)