mvanwink5, this is an quote from an old article from 2010, that claims that it took General Fusion four years to get external funding, so maybe we should not yet worry over that EMC2 has not succeeded in one years time. The quote by Doug Richardson shows the importance of solid measurements, publications and information in general.
With the exception of Tri Alpha, which secured $40 million in private funding (some of it from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen) three years ago, fusion has proved too risky for even the most daring venture capitalists. General Fusion limped through its first four years supported by a couple hundred thousand dollars from family and friends. “Skepticism and credibility are our top challenges by far,” Richardson says.
Here is source for Helion: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2014/08 ... c-startup/
"In one way, the investment isn’t so unusual: Helion Energy has to hit spelled-out technical milestones before it raises a planned Series B in about a year. The big difference is that it will then take tens of millions of dollars and three to five years to get to what would be considered a beta product in tech, Royan says. But Mithril was structured specifically so it could stay invested in companies for as long as 10 years, he says."
The Navy's 2014 money is not enough for the needed hardware activities, but at least it has bought EMC2 time to get other funding.
It is serious money though, I wonder what it is being used for, perhaps EMC2 is trying to reuse WB7.1 to create high beta and a potential well with big but affordable e-guns? I would think the Navy still has an interest in EMC2 as GF approach is not suitable for on ship power and with Helion's length, I wonder about it too.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
Thanks for the Helion Energy pointer. I listened also to the Tri Alpha Energy PPPL seminar last autumn, but I don't recall any special deadline for 2015.
I doubt that EMC2 will reuse the WB-7, because both WB-8 and the small high beta Polywell are of better design. There is a comparison between WB-7 and WB-8 in the 16th IECF conference talk Polywell.pdf. In the end the available funding will determine as usual what EMC2 can and will do.
WB-7, because both WB-8 and the small high beta Polywell are of better design.
Diagnostics, but WB7.1 also used standoff supported coils. WB7.1 is bigger than MiniB, and smaller than WB-8 so electron guns might be affordable... such was my reasoning.
I'm not holding hope for EMC2 getting VC money to prove potential well + high beta, not after a year on the university circuit tour. Dumped by Navy for a few million in research money after years, is not a ringing endorsement. Perhaps the Navy will reconsider and fund needed e-guns, after all WB is the (only?) fusion power source that is ship size.
Tri Alpha with upgraded C2 sounds promising to finish dealing with the major troubles in 2015, so we'll see. That makes 3 possible in 2015 (GF, Helion, Tri Alpha), what more could greedily we ask?
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
Yes, maybe I discount them too much, but I am unconvinced they have a solid conversion to electric power with high enough efficiency to make their device work economically. LPP's critical conversion plan relies on high conversion efficiency of X-rays, greater than thermal. Yes they have the onion, but will it work? Further, can LPP overcome longevity, cost, and sheer nastiness of beryllium hardware? A whole lot of unexplored 'if' floating around and perhaps some of their funding difficulty. So, I am at fault if the onion works as well as LPP needs and all the other 'if's' work out, and why I put them way behind the big 3. But I am open minded.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
My impression is that LPP P-B11 fusion goals is consistant with Rider's 1995paper, the thermalized plasma cannot reach breakeven if the Bremsstruhlung losses are not recovered at high efficiency .LPP has applied for a patent for the onion skin x- ray photovoltaic approach. I do not know if they have been granted the patent, or even have any experimental validation. This viewpoint does not take advantage of two Polywell claimed modifiers. The slow electrons in the center is not possible with DPF, but the dillution of the boron (10 protons for each boron) is possible. This significanly reduces the bremsstruhlung. I have never been certain how much this effects the fusion rate. The DPF should handle D-D or D-T fusion much easier, but the neutron bombardment in this small dense fusion machine would presumably result in a too short of a lifetime to be practical.
But, for the money it might actually serve as a better neutron source for nuclear weapons research when compared to the multiple billion dollar laser fusion approach.
Um... I'm not sure of the tradoffs. The boron at a MW of 11 and a Z of 5 will, I think have ~ 5 times the energy, and much more momentum than electrons. The speed difference might be ~ square root of the mass difference *Z or ~ (2000*11/5)^0.5 or ~ 65times less velocity. Compared to a deuterium with ~ 62 times less velocity. The velocity will be ~ same ( the mass to Z ratio is similar) . The momentum is ~5 times greater, but the electromagnetic repulsion is also ~ 5 times greater. I'm not sure this would change the likelyhood of fusion much.
What is definatly effected though is the Bremstruhlung though. The ions are conviently considered stationary, and relative to the electrons with ~ 60-65 times more velocity this is a fair approximation. As Bremsstruhlung scales as the square of the Z of the ~ stationary ion and the velocity of the electron, the Bremsstruhlung losses would be almost 25 times worse than with deuterium. The fusion rate corrected for the cross section would only be slightly greater. Dillution schemes with ~ 10 times as many protons, may decrease the Bremsstruhlung loses down to only ~ 3 times that with pure deuterium, The fusion rate would decrease but by how much? From the borons perspective there are the same number of target protons to hit, but from the protons perspective the boron targets are 10 times less.The net effects might be 1/2 the fusion rate of the or some exponential scaling. The ratio of fusion to Bremsstruhlung would improve but I am not sure of the magnitude.
Have you noticed that General Fusion seems to have switched to a more restrictive publicity policy than in previous years? This years slides at the Fusion Power Associates meeting have not been published and the talk at PPPL has been put behind a password. Previously their plans for upcoming meetings and conferences were posted on their web page well in advance, but now it seems that it is receiving much less updates. They continue to give interviews for popular articles, but there mostly the news content is rather low.
One new article is Tech firm aims to 'save the world' with nuclear reactor. The interesting bit of information is that the cost of the 3-year prototype reactor is quoted to be $500 M, which is significant more than the earlier estimate of $150 M. With a project like this where the design is being worked on to the get the physics working it is of course hard to make good cost estimated years in advance. General Fusion has already big investors, so if the results are good enough the increased costs estimate is probably not a problem, because in the long run they will need even larger investments. It would still be interesting to know what has driven the cost estimate for the prototype reactor upwards.
Compared to the billion-dollar undertakings in U.S. and Europe, the $500 million needed to build General Fusion’s commercial reactor prototype over three years seems paltry.
Compared to the billion-dollar undertakings in U.S. and Europe, the $500 million needed to build General Fusion’s commercial reactor prototype over three years seems paltry.
While scientists love to think this way, this is not the calculus of the investor. There are all kinds of risk that have to be managed, and when someone says something like this, any investor will note they're not actually coming to grips with the realities of the risk. For example, given $500M, what assurance does the investor have that GF's leadership team will work out? Likely they will but the investor needs to look at that team. It's far too easy for folks to take the money and retire, and suddenly you wonder what happened to your money. The risk associated with the team is just the first of may, and in GF's case, perhaps not a bad risk. But what about the market. There are several other fusion approaches being worked. What if one of them comes to market first, or even second but is cheaper to operate? With the state of the Poly up front, and folks like Lock-Mart in competition, it's hard to swallow the risk pill to the tune of half a billion dollars, and know that money won't get flushed.
Investors and entrepreneurs are not in the business of risk taking, so much as in the business of risk reduction. You find answers to risk; you don't ignore nor minimize them.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
The technology risk in any of these fusion concepts is still way too high for most investors who could put, say, $300 million into this kind of deal. Also, the development and payback period is too long as well, 7 to 10 years. A $300 million deal on this speculative of technology is going to be syndicated like crazy because no one wants to take all of the risk. We think most of these concepts can work. But we don't know until they are actually developed. There is a good chance they will not work. If they don't, there is no return at all out of the deal because what technology that is developed has no other commercial application. The investment would be a total loss.
If I had the wealth of Michael Dell or the Google guys ($10-20 billion), I would still want to syndicate before putting money into these fusion concepts. I would look for Chinese and Japanese, perhaps Korean partners to syndicate the deal. I would also want to put together a larger deal, say $2 billion or so, to finance ALL of the serious concepts. The reason is because its like wild-catting or any other venture investing. Out of the real concepts (excluding Tri-alpha and LockMart because they are already well-funded), one or two of them might work. But no one knows which one until its actually developed. The bet is somewhat hedged by investing in all of them.
That is all exactly right. IMHO, the real trouble is that people like scientists generalize about the whole risk-management issue by deciding "that is someone else's job" and as result, they always have these completely unrealistic expectations. In order to risk huge money, you have to find a way to reduce the risks.
I'm constantly wading through this process, because I'm trying to get M-E physics commercialized. In order to do this, what I've done is find quick and easy projects that go to the larger task can can be done cheaply and easily in order to later bootstrap through the process of creating a commercial MET. Despite this and the fact I can indeed sell a bag of sand to an Arab, it is always very hard going. I'm not interested in working with stupid people, and smart people want to see you've managed the risks. You can't just make generalizations like in this article above and pretend the possible outcome necessarily justifies half a billion dollars risk. GF isn't going to get this funding.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
It looks like GF is honing their publicity with different ways of telling their story, and that is a telling sign. Also I think the increase in prototype funding is partly a reflection of Gilliland's hand in raising the support money, partly a reflection of uncertainty (such as 200 pistons vs 300 pistons), and partly a result of what GF has learned it will have to develop to achieve the stable spheromak under compression (such as the current conducting jet of lithium down the center of the vortex). Tricky techniques take time and manpower to tune and make adaptations to get right ($$$). Still, it looks like GF is much more confident in their outcome even if the time to begin building the prototype has drifted into the future. The question boils down to when to initiate the prototype build as they are quickly running out of hurdles to report on that won't take the large machine to tinker with.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
Michael Delage from General Fusion will give a 20 min presentation at the upcoming BIL conference in Vancouver on Saturday the 21st of March at 4:20 PM local time. Looking at past events it seems that there might be a live stream available, but that is not mentioned on the web page. Some past BIL events have had their videos posted on Youtube.
