Posted on 08/12/2011 10:10:51 PM PDT by Kevmo
Amazon Founder invests in Canadian Fusion Venture
August 12, 2011
http://coldfusion3.com/blog/amazon-founder-invests-in-canadian-fusion-venture
American billionaire, Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon.com has reportedly invested in a Canadian company that is trying to develop a cold fusion process that uses hydrogen and seawater. General Fusion based in Vancouver, British Columbia, reportedly raised $19.5 million in venture capital for the development of a cold fusion or Low Energy Nuclear Reaction process in May. Part of this money apparently came from Bezos’ company Bezos Expeditions.
Jeff Bezos
The funds will be used to finance the building of a plant to demonstrate General Fusion’s cold fusion process. The funds come from a variety of American and Canadian venture capital firms including Bezos Expeditions and the Development Bank of Canada.
Drawing of General Fusion's Fusion device
General Fusion intends to create cold fusion by creating plasma out of deuterium and tritium, trapping it with a magnetic field and compressing it. This would generate large amounts of heat that would power a steam engine that would be used to generate electricity.
The company’s website states that it has applied for a patent for its fusion process and that it intends to build a full scale plant for demonstration. So far there is word on when or where this plant would be built although it would probably be located in Vancouver.
General Fusion is a privately held company which means it has not issued stock. The company is led by Dr. Michel Laberge, a physicist who serves as President and Chief Technology Officer. Laberge was formerly with Creo Products in Vancouver. He has done post doctoral research at the Canadian National Research Council in Ottawa and the L’ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Laberge is apparently the inventor of General Fusion’s process.
Michel Laberge
General Fusion’s CEO is Doug Richardson a former systems engineer and Director of Development with Creo Products. Richardson is an expert on developing and commercializing new products. Like Laberge he holds three patents.
General Fusion CEO Doug Richardson
Bezos role in General Fusion is unclear as is the amount of money he has invested in it. Bezos is the founder, president and CEO of Amazon.com.
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http://coldfusion3.com/blog/amazon-founder-invests-in-canadian-fusion-venture
That is classic hot fusion.
“....development of a cold fusion or Low Energy Nuclear Reaction process in May.”
When I look at the reactor design using magnetic pinch for hot plasma, it isn’t like any cold fusion I have traditionally heard described.
Sounds more like cooler fusion rather than cold fusion.
“That is classic hot fusion.”
That’s exactly what I thought as I read the article. How is this different from a Tokomak, a 30+ year old technology with billions of dollars spent on it and it’s hardly reached breakeven point.
Fusion boosters should consider these facts well.
I don’t know about your numbers, but I know that a hydrogen bomb (i.e. a fusion bomb, which powers the sun) produces significantly more specific energy than my body produces in a thousand lifetimes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
both you (aquila48) and dr_lew (to a lesser extent) are correct.
But first a correction to dr_lew’s statement. The overall energy production density of the Sun is about 1/6 (not 1/1000) of that of a human body. According to NASA, the mean energy production/sec (10^-3 J/kg) = 0.1937.
An average human has a mass of 80 kg and expending about 2000 calories per day, amounting to a per mass per sec energy production density of 1.2 (10^-3 J/kg)
Why such a discrepancy between the energy production density of a nuclear weapon and the Sun? Answer: the nuclei in the Sun spends more than 99.9% of the time colliding with photons, not with other nuclei. The Sun’s radius is close to 700,000 km, a distance that a photon travels (in vacuum) in 4 secs. However, a photon produced at the center of the Sun, takes more than 60,000 years to reach the Sun’s surface. Only a small part of the Sun is the fusion engine. The nuclear weapon is all fusion engine and the photons produced go straight out with little interaction with matter.
A slight correction to aquila48: the tokamak system went beyond breakthrough in England in the early 1990’s using a pure tritium plasma. Which may be why this present system is using a (tritium,deuterium) mixture.
Yup. It looks like a horse race between these guys and Polywell for alternatives to tokamaks.
Interesting. Trying to use magnetic containment to initiate LENR instead of contain high energy fusion. It makes one wonder if hot fusion folks had seen LENR type outcomes from magnetic containment experiments (like the Z-pinch machine) of deuterium and tritium fuels but dismissed them because the energy produced was far lower than they expected, especially when compared to the expense of the machine and field strength they had to generate. In other words, did they see something that would have been relevant had they not been trying to beat a trillion eggs at once with a million horsepower blender that cost billions of dollars and said, “Oh, something for home and commercial bakery use? Pfffft! They could never afford one of these babies!”?
General Fusion intends to create cold fusion by creating plasma out of deuterium and tritium, trapping it with a magnetic field and compressing it. This would generate large amounts of heat that would power a steam engine that would be used to generate electricity.
++++++++++++++++++++++
Cold Fusion??
Sounds a lot more like good old fashioned (Hot) Fusion to me.
Thanks for the ping, are you starting a hot fusion list?
Thanks for the ping, are you starting a hot fusion list?
***No. It says cold fusion in the article, even though it is difficult to see how. Perhaps they use Palladium to assist in the containment.
Those are kilocalories, aka ( big C ) Calories. I just remember that the adult human body is about a 100 watt device. You know you couldn't run on a milliwatt!
Oops. The 100 watt figure would become 100 milliwatts using "little calories".
TNT has about the same specific energy as sugar ( which requires oxygen to burn, of course ) So if you consumed the calories equivalent to a megaton of sugar in a thousand lifetimes, that would be a kiloton per lifetime. My estimate is about 10 tons of sugar ( in calorie, i.e. kilocalorie, equivalent ) per lifetime.
... so, yeah.
However, the sun is not a bomb! It burns very, very slowly. It is simply not hot enough to achieve runaway fusion. There is a recently discovered type of supernova which seems to represent the actual thermonuclear detonation of a star due to "pair production instability". If a star gets hot enough, the gamma rays which carry heat from the core become so energetic that they start producing electron positron pairs. This has the effect of lowering their path length, in effect making the core opaque. This means it heats up faster, and becomes more opaque. When it gets hot enough, it actually becomes a gigantic H bomb.
and you are correct.
All the websites I looked at use calorie with a small c and not a large C.
And the point you make about the engineering aspects of fusion
reaction is also correct. People tend to think at a practical fusion reactor of say, 100 MW, will be compact and that will not be the case at all.
One can say the same thing for any LENR device (low energy/temperature will have to be compensated by very high pressures).
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