Company Profile of General Fusion
A website called nextbigfuture.com did a quick profile of General Fusion, a Canadian-based company that is seeking to build a prototype fusion reactor on a much faster timescale and at much lower cost compared to other fusion projects. Backed by venture capital, the startup company hopes to have a working reactor by 2020. From the article:
Michel Laberge knew he couldn’t beat the existing multibillion-dollar fusion labs at their own game. So instead, he decided to combine ideas from the two current approaches to make a vastly cheaper machine
Canadian startup General Fusion has designed a machine to generate fusion power by smashing together two variants of hydrogen atoms: deuterium, which has one neutron and one proton, and tritium, which has two neutrons and one proton.
The result: helium gas (which will get released into the atmosphere) and vast amounts of energy, which will get captured and turned into electricity. The company is still constructing its prototype. Here’s how it’s supposed to work.
Getting Started
1. Two large injectors heat the deuterium and tritium gas to 1 million degrees Celsius, turning it into plasma, an electrically charged gas.
2. Puffs of the plasma are shot into the center of a spherical tank filled with spinning, molten lead.
3. The spinning vortex of metal creates magnetic fields that trap the plasma in the center of the sphere.
To read the full article, click here.
