Friday, July 15, 2011

Al Fin Energy: More About General Fusion

The General Fusion (near Vancouver, BC, Canada) approach to nuclear fusion is called "magnetized target fusion," which is a hybrid of magnetic and inertial confinement fusion approaches.
 What gets my attention is this:
 General Fusion is building upon research information developed at the different national labs, and attempting to create a relatively small-scale, low-cost fusion reactor using deuterium-tritium gas, magnetic confinement, and acoustic compression.[emphasis added]

Now, the big problem that I see with tokomaks which are being used by the ITER project, is that they are so big. If you can shrink the whole apparatus down to a small size, then the amount of energy needed for fusion is correspondingly decreased, and the magnetic confinement strategy can be more modest. This is interesting because of that as well as the acoustic compression technique.

Incidentally, I think the "cold fusion" techniques may be helping hot fusion in that it is showing new ways to reduce the requirements that are needed to be met so that fusion can occur.

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