![]() He says codes have progressed incrementally over the last decade. That doesn’t necessarily mean the companies are well on their way to success, says Dale Meade, former deputy director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The underlying science and the ability to do modeling and simulation on how plasmas behave have really advanced a lot and out of the public eye.” “But I honestly believe that it is different this time. Such promises have been made before, admits Michael Delage, chief technology officer of General Fusion in Vancouver, Canada, one of five fledgling private ventures that have attracted significant financing. They say their machines could be ready to deliver electricity to the grid within a decade. That’s too long for the globe to wait for a clean new power source with a virtually unlimited supply of fuel, according to scientists and entrepreneurs working on alternative fusion power schemes. After that, an electricity-generating pilot plant will require about another decade to build. Attaining the first sustained fusion reaction, or burning plasma, is scheduled to occur in 2035 at the earliest. The timeline envisioned by the international collaboration for ITER-the colossal, $25 billion–plus reactor under construction in France-is only a little shorter than that. ![]() The old adage is that fusion power is 30 years away and always will be. General Fusion’s prototype reactor has pneumatically driven pistons that compress and heat a liquid metal that surrounds a plasma.
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