Home-Brewed Fusion General Fusion’s proof-of-concept device in the company’s austere headquarters, in Burnaby, British Columbia John B. Carnett
Posted on 05/06/2011 12:24:35 PM PDT by Red Badger
This is the fusion company that PopSci said might save the world
Bring up the prospect of fusion power, and often eyes glaze over. It’s not that it’s not a thrilling prospect--cheap and inexhaustible energy would solve a lot of problems here on planet Earth--but it’s been such a pipe dream for so long that it’s often hard to make people care. But at least one person with a proven track record in recognizing potential when he sees it has taken an interest in a fusion-powered future: Amazon founder and gazillionaire Jeff Bezos has thrown $19.5 million to Canada’s General Fusion to fund further research.
PopSci wrote about General Fusion back in late 2008, when the company was just getting underway in its efforts to completely upend the global energy paradigm in an office park British Colombia. At the time the company said it could provide data that would prove that fusion is indeed possible within three to four years. We haven’t seen that (publicly) yet, but whatever Bezos has seen apparently impressed him.
General Fusion is pursuing what is called Magnetized Target Fusion. In a few words, this technique essentially uses a magnetic field and plasma to break lithium down into helium and tritium, which is then separated and mixed with deuterium, which then fuses into helium (that’s a wild oversimplification, in case you were wondering).
That fusion of tritium and deuterium--both forms of hydrogen--into helium releases a huge burst of energy, which can be harvested into electricity. So where you’ve basically started with cheap and plentiful lithium, you end up with a massive amount of energy and harmless gas as a byproduct--no radioactive mess to clean up (or ceaselessly worry about).
We’re nowhere close to being able to do this. But whoever gets there first is pretty much a lock for a Nobel Prize and a massive return on investment. So maybe Jeff Bezos the venture capitalist is taking a gamble on a far-fetched idea. Or maybe he sees a short-term potential that others don’t. Whatever the impetus, this second round of funding is aimed at producing a demonstration of General Fusion’s technology rather than some kind of finished product, so don’t expect your local utility to start fusing isotopes any time soon.
Home-Brewed Fusion General Fusion’s proof-of-concept device in the company’s austere headquarters, in Burnaby, British Columbia John B. Carnett
We’ve been disappointed in these things before. But I still suspect that something like this may be possible.
Even the founder of Amazon can have the wool pulled over his eyes. But he seems to be a pretty sharp guy. And unlike the inventor of Facebook, he actually offers people something extremely useful, rather than merely fashionable, as I have found over the years.
I’d love for it to be true.
“....this technique essentially uses a magnetic field and plasma to break lithium down into helium and tritium,”.....
Which is Fission.
So then, how much energy is required to start this fission reaction, what additional “undesireable” byproducts are produced, how much energy is produced from the fusion reaction and what’s the delta between the fission and th fusion reaction?
Hmmmm.
Does
not
compute.......
But he also invested in Blue Origin, which is trying to make a go of the old DC-X, a vertical take off and landing rocket.
Even when DC-X was proposed it was understood that it was 30%-50% overweight and could not make orbit. But it was to be a "technology demonstrator" and hopefully someone could come up with enough mass reductions to make it work.
Or you could just build a better rocket and forget about trying to defeat the staging equation.
A bit of a bridge too far.
And so, probably, is this.
And the liquid lead heat transfer system...I don't know if even that's possible to do without pumping in enormous amounts of energy into processing the lead to make it pure enough to be functional in this system.
Maybe I'm completely off base here, but just seems like this is a whole lot of money right down the drain. I do hope, however, that the data that results from the experiments and exploration of the technology eventually gets released.
Thanks, dog, you beat me to it.
For those who don’t understand the explanation, I’ll break it down into bits.
If the energy used to fission lithium into helium and tritium...
is greater than that generated by the fusion of deuterium into tritium...
then there is no excess energy generation for marketing to the public.
It is an interesting scientific demonstration and nothing else.
I truly hope for a different result, but Bezos should be prepared to lose $19.5 Million.
The first law of thermodynamics says you don’t get something for nothing, and the second law says that you get less out than you put in.
On the other hand, in the course of fluctuating from fission to fusion and back, IF this process breaks down a certain amount of matter into energy, then it could work.
I’m not saying that’ll happen. But it’s at least theoretically possible. Whether at room temperature, I don’t know.
The odds are that this will go nowhere. But you never can tell for sure.
“The odds are that this will go nowhere. But you never can tell for sure.”
Like I said, I hope to be wrong. We could use a break when it comes to safe and cheap energy.
All that is missing is a couple of flux capacitors and they will be home free.
Nothing but a fraud.
The nuclear reaction is that Lithium-6 absorbs a neutron and splits into He-4 (a/k/a helium) and H-3 (a/k/a, hydrogen-3 or tritium). Tritium then fuses with H-2 (a/k/a deuterium), making He-4 and a very high energy neutron (14.1 MeV).
Here’s one problem - The Lithium-6 absorbs thermal (low energy neutrons) so you have to slow down those 14.1 MeV neutrons. We know how to do this, but you’re not doing it in the plasma.
Here’s the showstopper - you need one neutron to be absorbed by the lithium, and the deuterium - tritium reaction only produces one neutron. So, unless you can have every neutron produced by the deuterium - tritium reaction be absorbed by lithium, you are going to run out of the tritium produced by the lithium. And you cannot rig a system so that every neutron will be absorbed by lithium. Some of the neutrons will leak out of the system and be lost while some will be absorbed by structural materials.
Let us assume that somehow every neutron produced from the deuterium - tritium reaction gets absorbed by lithium-6. We still need to process the lithium to extract every single tritium atom. No one is that good of a chemical engineer.
I can come up with schemes to multiply the neutrons (slow them down and run them through a nearly-critical uranium lattice, for instance). You get a lot of energy, but you also produce highly-radioactive fission products.
And, of course, those high-energy neutrons will be absorbed in structure materials, causing them to become radioactive.
Back when I was in grad school in the 1970s, my advisor, whose PhD thesis was, at that time, the second most cited paper in fusion reactor (tokamak) blankets, which face the same problems I describe above. He argued that one had to have 20-20 vision to see a practical fusion device, by which he meant we might see one by the year 2020. So here we are 35 years later, and, while I no longer pay much attention to fusion, we really are not much closer to a practical machine than we were in 1975.
Bezos can kiss his investment good-bye.
Maybe they found a loophole in the Second Law of Thermodynamics..............
Lithium is really not that cheap or plentiful. There are numerous people worried about how we’re going to build EVs and equip them with lithium batteries.
Ihad an interesting visit by a PhD in Geology, Charles Helsley, and his wife also a PhD in Geology, who taught at the U of Hawaii. the both retired and now they are involved in Developing a fusion process that will replace all the fossil fuel energy which has peaked and starting to decline.
I have always been skeptical of the fusion process because of the extremely high temps involved and the resultant containment.
Without getting too technical. there are three basic process that are being worked on, One uses laser technology to compress and contain the pellet(Tritium coated with lithium)., The other two systems use Heavy Ion accelerators and magnetic chambers to contain the energy.
The project in France ITER seems funded and projects energy out put by 2018. You can check its web site http://www.iter.org/proj
The one being developed by Dr. Helsley uses 16 heavy isotopes directed at the ‘pellet’ timed to hit simultaneously to create the fusion, with the product being heat. One of the other by products is a bio fuel that can replace oil. Fusion generates no radioactive waste and is fail safe.
Check out their web site at Scientific References » Fusion Power Corporation - Clean Energy for the World
There is also a presentation he made that is on you tube that runs an hour which explains the economics and system. It runs an hour and will put you to sleep so have a cup of coffee handy. at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2emKoMgZ03U
Great what you said about the SSTO idea, imho.
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