A Canadian firm, with an investment from Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, says it plans to build a major prototype fusion energy project in the UK. Started in 2002, General Fusion, which has at least $100 million from multi-billionaire Amazon chief Bezos, has struck a deal with Britain’s UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Independent newspaper reported, to build a plant that is 70% the size of a what might be a commercial, energy-producing, reactor at the UKAEA’s Culham site in Oxfordshire.
The General Fusion plant will not produce electricity, and its success is a decided long shot. The BBC reported that the Culham project is scaled to cost about $400 million. That’s pocket change compared to the large, international fusion energy project in France, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, which has been laboring since 2007 to come up with the beginnings of commercial fusion energy, with expenditures of some $20 billion and an optimistically projected date of 2035 for proof of concept.
General Fusion says it hopes to have its demonstration completed in 2025.
Both General Fusion and ITER plan to use magnets to confirm the devilish nuclear plasmas necessary to reproduce and control the heat of the sun to eventually boil water and make electricity. Neither General Fusion nor ITER would produce electricity. ITER is betting on a Russian-based Tokomak technology, which has proven difficult to harness for many years.
According to General Fusion, hydrogen plasma is injected into a cylinder surrounded by a wall of an unspecified liquid metal, possibly lithium. The company says that “the liquid metal wall absorbs energy from the fusion reaction which can then be pumped to heat exchangers. The liquid metal also protects the solid outer wall from damage, and can be combined with liquid lithium to breed tritium within the power plant.”
Then, says General Fusion, “Using practical, existing technology, steam powered pistons compress the plasma to fusion conditions. Not requiring the exotic lasers or giant magnets found in other fusion approaches, steam pistons can be practically implemented in a commercial power plant.”
In over a century of hopes and optimism for an endless and potentially environmentally friendly generation (although there are lots of doubts about the environmental benefits”, fusion power has seen false starts, failures, fiascoes, and frauds, with little practical success. Nevertheless, the world continues to bank on the promise of fusion.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)