Posted on 02/16/2008 9:10:32 PM PST by neverdem
INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--Nuclear fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says.
"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.
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.
The company uses a technique called Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.
The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct. MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur, according to the General Fusion's Web site. General Fusion has also filed for several patents.
Other firms, such as Venrock, have invested in nuclear fusion, but most avoid it. Lierop claims that's because most don't understand the fundamentals. (Interestingly, Venrock's partner overseeing nuclear investments, Ray Rothrock, is a nuclear engineer.) It is also politically volatile.
"I want to see it succeed, not only because I would make a lot of money, but because it would solve many of our problems," he said.
Other notes from van Lierop:
• Although onshore wind power is mature, companies building offshore wind turbines have to figure out a way to deal with corrosion and maintenance. It is going to be a big problem that we will hear more about in the next few years.
• Municipalities will soon begin to explore solar microgrids. In this scenario, neighborhoods will get a substantial portion of their power from local solar plants. By delivering power locally, utilities will save on the costs of transporting power.
• Tax breaks and tax holidays may replace solar subsidies in some areas. Electricity is taxed, but utilities offer subsidies to those who install solar power. By switching to microgeneration, cities will find it easier to just forgo taxation rather than try to run a subsidy program.
He's not a big fan of corn ethanol. "Corn ethanol is a scam," he said.
That it is!
The title made me think that the Viet Cong were building nukes.
You don’t say...
LOL That flashed in my mind.
Economically viable fusion is just 30 years away - just like it was in 1950.
Bussard Fusion is coming. It will take a MASSIVE amount of inertia before the doe will allow it to become live. I suspect by 2025, Bussard’s fusion machine will have been put through the paces and will making energy.
(Fusion, in the hands of “BIG SCIENCE”, will forever only be “studied” and not “designed” .... Rickover, for all his faults, was a decider, a designer, and an engineer. Not a “scientist” in a trillion dollar ivory tower.)
Charley’s got nukes?
Let’s hope it works.
Anything which is doable and worth doing does not take decades or trillions of dollars to do. The idea of energy from fusion is a joke.
It takes one to know one.
This guy’s a quack, he’s been selling one scientifically impossible version of fusion after another for years now. Not a thing he says should be given any value whatsoever. In this latest version of quackery he wants us to believe that a Li -> He reaction can yield net energy, what a moron.
Maybe they don't make a plant because they can't make a commercial or even test plant..
OR......... "they" would..
How true. I think of CTNF as being like socialism in the old USSR(do you realize it’s been gone for 19 years now?). One day the russian people woke up and realized it was all a scam, all it took was for Reagan to give them some real competition in Star Wars/SDI funding. They went broke. What will the investors in this latest CTNF scam say when they go broke too?
The hell of it is that a lot of poor people are paying the price at the grocery store.
I figure if and when fusion becomes economically viable that big utilities and governments will be all over it. There won’t be a need for some startup to raise money from suckers.
Actually, they’ve gotten Bussard/polywell fusion to begin approaching breakeven, and it’s definitely more than theoretically possible at this point.
The Navy is currently funding further development for future use in the new railgun-equipped DDX destroyers and CGX cruisers.
In the private sector, Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission are actually holding it back... because Bussard screwed up when he set the “we will allow no fusion but Tokamak-type” rules back some 30-40 years ago. Ooops.
So, airplanes were not worth doing?
That only took us, oh, what, 4000 years?
Yeah. besides being a complete scam in terms of energy production and pollution reduction, an even bigger scam, it is completely moronic to make expensive fuel out of our basic food and feed stock. Akin to making Lead out of Gold.
I’d also want to know where he is going to get his “cheap” Lithium. We have lots of it, all tied up in salts because it reacts aggressively with almost anything. The metal is produced by an energy-hungry process of electrolysis of a molten salt. The current market price is $50/lb. but if this Li-He process becomes viable I’m sure the price will go through the roof.
I believe that Li + H -> 2He does produce energy.
“The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested.”
That would be fission, as well.
I don’t blame them for glossing that part over. “fission/fusion” power doesn’t sound as green as plain ol’ fusion.
Since the 1970’s, I’ve been hearing this is just 15 years away.
A Saudi will be Gov of Texas and a US President first.
We reject all efforts to find ANY Alternative fuel sources.
Fusion ping!!
For decades, no centuries, CO2 was also considered a harmless, inert gas that we could safely dump into the atmosphere. If fusion were commercialized, just how long would it take for the envirowackos to discover that He is not a "harmless gas"?
What to the VC know about fusion?
ping for future.
Helium is a noble gas (so doesn’t react with much), and is light enough to escape Earth. Hence why helium is manufactured for things such as balloons.
Building at World Trade Center is a showcase of terrorproof technologies
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
I’d also want to know where he is going to get his “cheap” Lithium. We have lots of it, all tied up in salts because it reacts aggressively with almost anything. The metal is produced by an energy-hungry process of electrolysis of a molten salt. The current market price is $50/lb. but if this Li-He process becomes viable I’m sure the price will go through the roof.
Umm . . . if "we have lots of it," and it becomes more useful, we will mine and refine lots of it, and the price will more likely go down than up. Economies of Scale, and all that . . .
It’s been coming for 50 years.
VC: Venture Capitalist.
VC: Viet Cong.
Coincidence? We think not.
< }B^)
Indeed. Not quite in the same class as Global Warming but a scam nevertheless.
Hey now - I don’t rag on engineers...well, ok, at least not in public...
bump
But controlled? No, it isn't coming. If a little VC money were all it took, the tens of billions poured into it by governments would already have done the trick.
Lyndon Larouche was on top of the Fusion project news till the oil companies ganged up on him and had the US Government shut him down. ;o
He was an equal opportunity fusion flak, promoting the physics at Princeton and the Soviet Union.
Don't tell that to senators and congressmen from Iowa, Nebraska and a few other plains states... And don't tell that to Algore, residents of Hollywierd and all the global warming alarmists... And don't tell that to Presidential wannabe candidates, caucus-goers from Iowa and (I'm sorry to say) President Bush. They don't want to hear it.
Funding for fusion power research and development is still scarce compared to what it needs to be. However, progress has been by tiny steps, a day at a time, and no amount of funding would speed up that process of inspiration. The big steps come from new reactor design and that is where the funding could be vastly increased. Also, increased funding might encourage more students to show up in physics class and progress might then come a little quicker.
Thanks for the ping.
bmflr
This is the non-selling point of fusion...it was always fifteen years away...and is still fifteen years away today. I have serious doubts that they can ever be done. I’d even rate the concept of time travel having a higher possibility than fusion now.
I like this sentence: “At the end of the burn phase, as the metal continues to collapse to the axis, a jet of hot molten metal will probably squirt axially in both directions out the ends of the experiment, making survivability of end-on diagnostics also questionable.”
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