Small scale fusion - a new player in town
Some people from the University of Washington have spun off a
company called Helion and are looking to market an over-unity fusion reactor.
They already have a working 1/3 (not over-unity) scale model.
More info
here and a PDF presentation is downloadable
here.
When one is presenting an image, it is often customary to include a human figure to give a sense of scale. Helion does this too. I like their choice of figure:
Doing desktop fusion is not an unusual thing -- the technology was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth (who also invented the television) back in the
early 1960's. These are not plasma globes or anything like that -- they kick out a large volume of neutrons so atomic fusion is happening within a very small space. Hospitals use them to make isotopes.
Even 17-year-old
Thiago Olson built one.
The problem is that they take a lot more energy to run than they give off.
The cool thing is that they seem to scale up so getting a fusor large enough should mean the end of energy worries and the beginning of some major worries for our "friends" in the Middle East and Venezuela.
The other key player is
EMC2 which is getting some funding from the US Navy.
Posted by DaveH at May 8, 2009 10:48 PM