Discuss funding sources for polywell research, including the non-profit EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation, as well as any other relevant research efforts.
"Within five years, large companies will start to think about building fusion reactors," Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, said in an interview at the Clean Tech Investor Summit taking place here this week. In three to four years, scientists will demonstrate results that show that fusion has a 60 percent chance of success, he said.
Wal van Lierop
If van Lierop were some crazy guy off the street with an old stack of Omni magazines, you could dismiss him. Fusion--which extracts energy from nuclear reactions without the dangers associated with nuclear fission--has been studied for decades, but has yet to go commercial. Van Lierop, however, isn't a random individual. He is one of the earliest and more active investors in clean tech: Chrysalix started investing in clean energy in 2001. The firm's limited partners include BASF, Shell, and Rabobank.
Chrysalix's optimism is pinned on an angel investment the company made in General Fusion, a Canadian company that says it has found a way to hurdle many of the technical problems surrounding fusion. The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with conventional electricity.
He is about five years and six months in error on his first prediction. Big companies were thinking about building Bussard Fusion Reactors last May.
The coolest thing about this post is that it pointed me at General Fusion and what they are doing. The patent is a great read and a great idea. An elegant solution that solves several problems with one idea. I love elegant solutions.
I have no idea how General Fusion's tin-can fusion could ever work. It looks to me like the plasma would cool long before they got any kind of collisions going.
scareduck wrote:I have no idea how General Fusion's tin-can fusion could ever work. It looks to me like the plasma would cool long before they got any kind of collisions going.
The "elegant solution" comment refers to the idea which is brilliant whether it works or not. Use the fusion reactor blanket to actually create the fusion (MTF style) and to take the resulting thermal energy out of the system. The fusion reactor blanket is at the center of the machine at the time of fusion insulating the rest of the stuff. That is what is such a cool idea.
Anyway... the plasma is supposed to cool. They are using a cold plasma. The shock wave rapidly compresses it to fusion temperatures.
The MTF approach consists of producing a cold, low density plasma and rapidly compressing it to thermonuclear conditions.
Whether it will work for break even in practice is beside the point. The new invention of how to do MTF is what is brilliant. It is at least as brilliant and elegant as imagining a way to remove the imposible to shield cathode out of the middle of a fusor is.
There should be room in this field for explorations of these kinds of brilliant ideas. I am sure there are people associated with ITER saying "I don't see how it could EVER work" about the polywell.
It is such a mechanical kluge. There is no way they are going to get 200+ mechanical plungers synchronized to the required phase difference. And suppose they could. What happens when the system starts to wear?
Then again a couple of their concepts still need some work. Like the rotating lithium blanket with the void in the middle. No one has seen one of those in operation yet. And the little matter of injecting the fuel without disturbing the lithium blanket. And then you have to get all this functioning many times a second.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
MSimon wrote:It is such a mechanical kluge. There is no way they are going to get 200+ mechanical plungers synchronized to the required phase difference. And suppose they could. What happens when the system starts to wear?
Then again a couple of their concepts still need some work. Like the rotating lithium blanket with the void in the middle. No one has seen one of those in operation yet. And the little matter of injecting the fuel without disturbing the lithium blanket. And then you have to get all this functioning many times a second.
... but still a very cool idea and a great read. The patent is actually intelligable which 95% of patents I read are not. Read like a novel.