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It represents a nearly limitless source of energy that is clean, safe and self-​sustaining. fuse, yielding a reaction that produces an enormous amount of energy. To date, the most successful fusion experiments have succeeded in a half minutes, although not at the same time, and with different reactors.
Table of contents

• Nuclear Energy - The Practice
• Nuclear fusion
• Here's what you need to know about the warming planet, how it's affecting us, and what's at stake.
• Nuclear Energy - The Practice

Scientists are making progress. They point to the fact that the rate at which they've increased fusion energy output is greater than that of Moore's Law, the famed predictor of computing power. Enter the Bruce Waynes of the world. The approaches that people like Bezos and Allen are backing are long shots compared with Iter, prioritising engineering simplicity over scientific certainty. But with high risk comes the potential for high reward: an economical, scalable design for a fusion reactor is the kind of globe-altering idea that could earn an investor a lot of money — and, perhaps even more valuable amid Silicon Valley's boom and bust, an enduring legacy.

Maybe that's what Jeff Bezos saw when he invested in General Fusion. Whether Bezos seeks investment return or glory is unclear. His fund's minimalist website doesn't offer a phone number, and emails asking for comment for this story went unanswered. He has invested in technologies that might not fit with the traditional venture-capital model, but that he still thinks should be supported because they could have a big impact. A worker inside a plasma heating system in a more traditional government-funded fusion reactor design Credit: Getty Images.

The concept that's attracting all this capital isn't original; an idea similar to General Fusion's was studied by the US Naval Research Laboratory in the s.

But it took a plasma physicist in the throes of a midlife crisis to dust off the old designs and recognise how modern technology could again make them relevant. The year was , and Michel Laberge, General Fusion's founder and chief scientist, had recently quit his increasingly unchallenging job at the laser-printing company Creo to take on bigger issues.

At Creo, Laberge had learned how to apply his physics knowledge — he has a PhD in plasma physics — to real-world product development. He also saw how a small company willing to stray off the beaten path can cut larger organisations off at the pass. Laberge knew there were lots of off-path fusion approaches out there. Here's how it works: first, magnetic fields are used to confine a superheated plasma of volatile deuterium and tritium isotopes.

This plasma is then injected into a sphere, where it's briefly contained in a vortex of liquid metal. Next, pistons converging towards the centre of the sphere simultaneously strike an anvil at the end of their cylinder, sending a shock wave into the plasma. This burst of energy causes the plasma to compress and the deuterium-tritium fuel to ignite — producing, in theory, a tremendous burst of energy.

This video is no longer available. Importantly for investors, General Fusion's reactor doesn't demand state-of-the-art lasers or football-field-sized facilities, like the government-funded projects that Bezos, Laberge and company are seeking to outpace. If this design is so great, why was it abandoned? When the newly unemployed Laberge unearthed old patents related to the idea, he saw the presumptive reason.

Picture a balloon: if you compress it at one point more than at any other, it's likely to pop. A plasma is similar; if it's not compressed uniformly, it essentially falls apart. To work, the pistons must strike the anvils at precisely the same time. Laberge realised that you could only achieve that synchronicity with modern-day computers.

Supporting himself and his family with the proceeds from selling stock in his old company, Laberge spent the next couple of years developing the concept. He eventually built a small prototype — a humble-looking contraption still on display in General Fusion's reception area — and was able to produce a few neutrons. Today, the company has some 65 employees and occupies two buildings in an unassuming office park near Burnaby Lake.

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Leading me into the high-ceilinged, cement-floored space behind the firm's offices, the now year-old Laberge presents General Fusion's prototype reactor, a spiky sphere about four metres in diameter which looks a lot like a giant naval mine. Wires protrude from everything, transmitting reams of data to computers in a loft above for analysis.

Here's what you need to know about the warming planet, how it's affecting us, and what's at stake.

Laberge says the company has adjusted the design of its reactor countless in the last few years. It's a sobering reminder of the enormity and complexity of General Fusion's undertaking that, more than a decade after its founding, the company is still working on clearing some fairly early fusion hurdles, like keeping its plasma at a high enough temperature for a long enough period for fusion to take place.

The arms of General Fusion's prototype reactor, which contain pistons, makes it look like a giant explosive mine Credit: General Fusion. But despite progress, plasma temperature remains General Fusion's greatest challenge. Other experts are more circumspect. Compression in the reactor at General Fusion must be timed perfectly otherwise the reaction will fail Credit: General Fusion. In the end, General Fusion's success may depend not on whether it can keep its plasma hot, but on whether it can keep its investors' interest.

But venture capitalists' patience is limited. Around 1, miles km south of General Fusion's headquarters, you'll find another firm at the vanguard of venture-backed fusion — or, more likely, you won't. Tri Alpha Energy, based in Orange County, California, has been notably secretive for most of its year existence. For years, it has had no public address, no readily available contact information — not even a website, and the progress being made there was published mainly in scientific journals. Two of the company's scientists approached for this story did not reply.

This low profile hasn't kept investors from noticing the company: Tri Alpha's backers include Paul Allen; the Rockefeller family's venture-capital firm, Venrock; and the Russian government's nanotech-investment arm, Rusnano. In keeping with the theme of secrecy, Allen's company, Vulcan Inc, doesn't list Tri Alpha in its investment portfolio, and a Vulcan spokeswoman declined requests to interview someone there about the fusion firm. The plasma inside a tokamak reactor must be confined In recent months, however, Tri Alpha has been more open about its efforts; in addition to establishing a web presence, its researchers have begun to speak about their work publicly , and the media has been invited to visit the company's facility.

In August last year, they also claimed a breakthrough in maintaining the ball of superheated gas necessary for the reaction to work. The advantage of a field-reversed configuration over a tokamak is that its engineering is much simpler. But from a physics perspective, the technology is far less well-developed.

The heat inside a fusion reactor like this earlier design would be immense Credit: SPL. To make matters more difficult, Tri Alpha is aiming to use a fuel made up of the isotope boron and a proton, rather than the more basic deuterium-tritium blend. This fuel would produce less radioactivity than deuterium-tritium, but would demand much higher temperatures, and experts are dubious of its feasibility. Like other private fusion firms — and in contrast to public efforts — Tri Alpha is taking an engineering-first, physics-later approach to fusion, says Zarnstorff.

So, one has to be a little forbearing — and encouraging, really — of people trying to go beyond just doing the basic science. Source: New Energy Times A fundamental principle in electrochemistry is that, when one applies a certain amount of electrical energy to an electrolytic cell, one expects a commensurate amount of heat to come out of the cell. In a standard electrolytic cell, calculating the amount of energy coming out of the system is normally straightforward.

However, what Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann discovered see question below was that the amount of heat coming out of the cell was a thousand times greater than it should have been, based on any known chemical reaction. An excessive amount of heat was coming from the experiment. It did not, in any way, match the amount of electrical energy going in plus other accounted-for energy losses. And this was their fundamental historic discovery: Something within the cell was releasing a new, "hitherto unknown" Pons-Fleischmann source of potential energy.

When will LENRs be a commercial power success? Source: New Energy Times This is perhaps the most frequently asked question. Nobody really knows when LENRs will be a commercial power success; it is the big mystery at the moment. Simply, the science is still not sufficiently well understood.

Although the research community knows a great deal about the related phenomena, it still does not know the factors necessary to bring it forward to a viable technology. Factors include how to consistently turn it on and turn it off, up or down. Many researchers think that the greatest problem to be solved is a materials science issue. Researchers do not understand the specific atomic composition of the source materials - palladium or nickel, for example - that are required to make it work.

The characteristic differences among batches appear to be at the nanoscale or atomic level. Consequently, this research is extremely difficult to perform without a large, well-equipped laboratory, and few researchers have had the means to study the subject properly.

The second-greatest challenge is to remove the enormous quantities of heat from the cells quickly enough. The heat tends to melt and deform the host metals, rendering them useless.

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Are there any commercial LENR technologies now? Source: New Energy Times No. Despite occasionaly hyped promotions in the last two decades, there are no commercial LENR devices. The main problem is that the science is poorly understood. No technology can be developed until the science is understood. LENR devices likely will be small and relatively inexpensive. These characteristics often lead people to expect that small companies can produce commercial devices now.

However, even after the science is clearly understood, practical devices likely will require high technology to manufacture. Eventually, real commercial LENR devices will hit the market.