This Machine Might* Save the World

Popular Science ^ | January 2009 | Josh Dean

[SunkenCiv]

Two desktop-printer engineers quit their jobs to search for the ultimate source of endless energy: nuclear fusion. Could this highly improbable enterprise actually succeed? The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian. According to a diagram, printed on a single sheet of white paper and affixed with tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision looks like a medieval torture device: a metal ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and bisected by two long cylinders. It's big but not immense -- maybe 10 times as tall as the little robot man in the lower right corner of the page who's there to indicate scale. What Laberge has set out to build in this office park, using $2 million in private funding and a skeletal workforce, is a nuclear-fusion power plant... he will also tell you that his twist on a method known as magnetized target fusion, or MTF -- to wildly oversimplify, a process in which plasma (ionized gas) trapped by a magnetic field is rapidly compressed to create fusion -- will, in fact, work because it is relatively cheap and scalable. Give his team six to 10 years and a few hundred million dollars, he says, and his company, General Fusion, will give you a nuclear-fusion power plant.

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

The article is online now.

[fanfan]

[MAD-AS-HELL]

ah man..not a french canadian! You know if things don’t go his way in marketing this he’ll end up having a hissy fit and breaking it for no one to enjoy!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks fanfan, didn’t think to ping ya. [blush]

“Fusion We Can Believe In”
CosmicLog | Dec 16, 2008 | Alan Boyle
Posted on 01/01/2009 11:41:19 AM PST by Wonder Warthog
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2157279/posts

[LiberConservative]

The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -

Should that read "vomit carnage-green walls"?

[fanfan]

That’s OK, Sunken Civ.

:-)

[The Great RJ]

This won't happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.

[The Great RJ]

This won't happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.

[The Great RJ]

This won't happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.

[The Great RJ]

This won't happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.

[Hazwaste]

Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

[big'ol_freeper]

Stutter much?

[ffff]

aw crap...that problem is solved.....we just burn CORN....
good ole iowa corn....

i dont know if u noticed it before ...but its freakin RENEWABLE....yes indeedy it IS....

i say fie on those snot noses who say makin ethanol is an energy sink.........

look at it this way.......ETHANOLITY has got to be good since the concept was hatched and enacted by our good ole us congress itself...

lets us back up our elected leaders and ..give peace and korn a chance..

consider this also in the also.... THE THING IS FREE, paid for by the federal gumment...

aks yerself... why cant we dabble in fiascos IF there is no cost involved? why why why?

i reserve the balance of my time....

...

[Bon mots]

Do you really think so?

Do you really think so?

Do you really think so?

Do you really think so?

[GiovannaNicoletta]

bookmark

[Twinkie]

tap into yellowstone!

[SunkenCiv]

;’)

[elfman2]

A lot of moving (”banging”) parts and lots of heat...

[Radl]

Wasn’t there a machine called the “IT” that was going to save the world or at least change it?