General Fusion in the news

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

The GF concept is quite nice in that they are already considering a full power plant configuration, while most of the others are mainly focusing on the fusion core. It will be interesting to follow how their fund raising goes. They need a lot of money, but they show steady nice progress, so I guess it should not be too hard. In the latest GF Newsletter it is said that the project will run for 5 1/2 years. It was launched in 2017 so that gives a time line until 2022 or 2023.

The Fusion Power Associates Annual Meeting was held last week. It will be interesting to see if the GF presentation contains some new details or if it is the same as the US-Japan CT presentation,

mvanwink5
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by mvanwink5 »

I can't see what else GF has to share as they basically have all the pieces. What they need is a device large enough to flesh out the engineering details for the commercial machine and prove it.

The only thing left is money to do it? No one else that I know of is in that position. On the other hand, there may be some internal argument about the size of machine needed to flesh out the engineering details vs risk. So that may be the hold up and they might have the money commitment right now. Or they may be trying to get more Gruberment cash. The smaller the engineering machine is the quicker the build, the faster to the end design, the lower the project cost.

I dunno which it is.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

Michel Laberge from GF gave the talk General Fusion at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Fusion Power Associates.
http://firefusionpower.org/FPA18_Gen_Fu ... ge_web.pdf

Skipjack
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by Skipjack »

Looks like they still have ways to go. Next prototype will only be 10% of Lawson.

crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

It could also be that they are cautious by targeting a goal that they confidently can meet. If everything works out fine, then it might be possible to push the limit towards higher values of the triple product.

paperburn1
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by paperburn1 »

I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

General Fusion will participate in the 2019 CAP Congress, June 3 – 7, 2019 at the Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, BC)
https://www.cap.ca/congress-conference/congress-2019/ with four contributions:
Dr Michel Laberge, General Fusion's Approach to Magnetized Target Fusion https://indico.cern.ch/event/776181/con ... s/3349496/
Michael Delage, General Fusion Overview https://indico.cern.ch/event/776181/con ... s/3349483/
Dr Myles Hildebrand, Fast Neutron Diagnostics on MTF Compression Experiments https://indico.cern.ch/event/776181/con ... s/3349484/
Michael Delage, Developments in Compression of Magnetized Plasmas https://indico.cern.ch/event/776181/con ... s/3349494/

crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

General Fusion will participate in the 28th IEEE Symposium on Fusion Engineering, 2 – 6 June, 2019, Sawgrass Marriott Resort, 1000 PGA Tour Boulevard, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida 32082 USA with a poster contribution:
Kelly Epp, Formation of a Spherical Tokamak Plasma for Compression in a Liquid Metal Flux Conserver,
Achieving net energy gain with a Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) system requires the plasma to satisfy a set of performance goals, such as particle inventory (~10E21 ions), sufficient magnetic flux (~0.3 Wb) to confine the plasma without MHD instability, and initial energy confinement time several times longer than the compression time. To explore the physics of break-even-scale plasmas, General Fusion (GF) has constructed Plasma Injector 3 (PI3). MTF relies on flux conservation by metal walls and so requires solenoid-free startup with no vertical field coils or toroidal field coils. Therefore the toroidal magnetic field in PI3 is produced by driving current along a single central conductor using a pulsed power supply that also provides a long low-voltage pulse to compensate resistive losses on a multi-millisecond timescale. Once the toroidal field is established, PI3 uses a short (50 µs) pulse coaxial helicity injection, from a magnetized Marshall gun, to produce a self-organized spherical tokamak plasma with minor radius 0.65 m (the flux conserver radius is 1 m). Plasma diagnostics include Mirnov probes, visible imaging, interferometers, optical spectroscopy, Doppler thermometry, Thomson scattering, and FIR polarimetry. The goal is to determine the magnetic profile, stability, and the energy confinement time of the spherical tokamak plasma during the first 7 ms after it has formed in order to evaluate its suitability for compression to fusion conditions by an imploding liquid metal flux conserver. Comparing the data from this device with our smaller SPECTOR Plasma Injector (flux conserver radius = 0.2 m) will inform the design and scaling requirements of the next generation Plasma Injector for the Fusion Demonstration Plant. The PI3 machine is currently operating at low power. It is scheduled to reach full power operation by April 2019. The initial data from the device will be presented.
https://indico.cern.ch/event/749923/con ... s/3253440/

crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

General Fusion describes their latest activities here: https://generalfusion.com/2019/06/slic- ... n-lithium/.

mvanwink5
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by mvanwink5 »

I wondered why they were dragging their heals on funding their demonstrator plant. Doubts, questions. People with big money want every conceivable unknown answered first. I wonder if this device can simulate well enough the large device, but if the small device can give them what they need, well it certainly is worth doing and may save time later on.

I wonder if there is a Country & Western song titled 'Money With Cold Feet'?
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

Skipjack
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by Skipjack »

Looks to me like they still have a long road ahead of them :(

mvanwink5
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by mvanwink5 »

Hard to know. Plasma in the past was the tough hurdle and that has been crossed. Money in the private realm seems to be the tough one when it comes to 100's of millions. Helion has not exceeded 50 million total to date.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

Skipjack
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Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by Skipjack »

mvanwink5 wrote:Helion has not exceeded 50 million total to date.
Thankfully, they have not needed more than that so far. Their full scale prototype was 35 million. If that one meets their milestones, they should not have trouble getting the money they will need for the commercial reactor prototype (which will cost more).

crowberry
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Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by crowberry »

General Fusion has been rather quiet lately, but here is a 1/10 scale model of their full sized reactor:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEIvQWOXoAU6euR.jpg

mvanwink5
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Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:07 am
Location: N.C. Mountains

Re: General Fusion in the news

Post by mvanwink5 »

Yes, that has been around for at least a year, pictures of it first showed up on their Instagram account (Instagram of course is owned by Facebook).

The issue being explored as far as I can tell is how to locate the pistons, what kind of internal grid to make to control the compression wave front, but I can't see how it can be used to study plasma / liquid metal interaction, which is the remaining unanswered question (as far as I can tell).

I think they will need to make a much larger compression chamber.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

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