Free Republic

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...

Science The Future May Be Getting Close to Reality in Vancouver, With D-Wave and General Fusion March 18, 2014, 2:11 PM PDT By Liz Gannes   Vancouver is a land of scenic harbors, tall mountains and startups trying to harness the limits of physics.In town for the TED conference, I had the occasion to visit two such companies yesterday: D-Wave and General Fusion. D-Wave, a quantum computing company, is all about the very cold and the rather tiny. It has built enormous refrigerators that each house a single chip, laced with “qubits” that can be in the superposition of...

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....

A picture from the patent filing for what General fusion is trying to build with backing from Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital. GF will build a ~3 meter diameter spherical tank filled with liquid metal (lead-lithium mixture). Rams use compressed steam to accelerate pistons to ~50 m/s. Make compression wave in the liquid metal. Microsecond of fusion once per second. Note: This could be considered like a variant of "steam punk nuclear fusion" made real if it works.