In a warren of warehouse units in Burnaby, 60 scientists at General Fusion are building the components for a $70 million prototype fusion reactor that, by their own admission, has less than a 50% chance of success.
Erich Vogt, a retired physicist and director emeritus at the TRIUMF subatomic physics lab, puts the odds a bit lower: zero.
What venture capitalists like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will get for their money – $32.5 million, so far – is just a test reactor to prove the process can work. If it does, a commercial reactor-power plant would cost $1 billion and take at least another six years to build.
?This is a long shot,? admitted Michael Delage, vice-president of business development for General Fusion. ?But the payoff is so big.
?What we?re saying is, ?Look, it?s going to cost us a few tens of millions of dollars to figure out if this is going to work.? And if it does, there?s a path to fusion here that?s less expensive and way faster – decades sooner – than everybody else is expecting.?
?Everybody else? includes the US$30 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in the south of France and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California.
But neither the NIF nor ITER projects include systems for extracting the heat produced and turning it into usable energy, Delage said – General Fusion?s does.
?General Fusion?s great potential is that it reaches commercialization early in the next decade, at least 15 years ahead of the other technologies,? Delage said.
Although its engineering challenges are staggering, its potential as a fuel source is likewise huge.
Safe and clean, fusion has the added benefit of having a virtually inexhaustible fuel supply: seawater, where two of three basic elements for fusion – deuterium and lithium – are found in abundance.
A third element – tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen – is harder to come by (tritium?s world inventory is just 30 kilograms). Fortunately, tritium is not only a fuel, it?s also a byproduct of fusion.
?Fusion would be a good energy source, if it is ever realized, because of the abundance of deuterium and lithium in our world,? Vogt told Business in Vancouver.
?But the approach being used by General Fusion in Vancouver had almost no chance at all in even achieving proof in principle ? and even if it did, the technical obstacles in then producing a workable reactor are so great that this project has essentially zero chance in succeeding.?
Apart from the engineering challenges fusion poses, Vogt also believes a fusion reactor could pose a public hazard.
He said large charges of electricity, extreme heat, molten lead and high-pressure mechanics all mean there is a danger of some kind of explosion.
Any such explosion would be on the scale of an industrial accident, not a nuclear meltdown, said Michel Laberge, General Fusion?s founder and CTO.
?It?s not going to be enough energy to put the public in danger,? said Laberge, a former head physicist at Creo Products.
Jordan Morelli, a physicist at Queen?s University?s department of physics, engineering physics and astronomy, disagrees with Vogt on the safety issue. ?It?s definitely right that it?s a very ambitious and optimistic project,? he said. ?As for a public safety hazard, [Vogt] is completely off the mark. It?s no more dangerous than any other research project.?
Johan Frenje, a research scientist at MIT?s plasma science and fusion centre, agrees with Morelli that the amounts of radioactive material General Fusion plans to use poses no public hazard. ?I would say it?s a non-issue, really,? he said.
The company is still three years away from completing a prototype reactor, and has yet to choose a site. However, it?s unlikely it will be built at General Fusion?s current location in Burnaby.
?The biggest problem with the place here is the ceiling?s too low,? Laberge laughed.
The company will need a licence from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to conduct any tests, and Laberge still has one big challenge ahead of him before he even applies: he needs to raise another $40 million to build the reactor chamber where all the promised magic will take place.
So far, he has managed to drum up $32.5 million in private money from investors like Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, Cenovus Energy and Bezos Expeditions.
?They have some very serious investment,? Morelli said. ?The City of Burnaby should be tickled pink that they?re operating there. That?s a very skilled workforce that they?ve brought into the Vancouver area.?
One of the investors is the Canadian government, which has committed $13.9 million through Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
Vogt has questioned that investment, saying the project did not meet the proper peer review that is typically needed to qualify for federal funding.
?It appears to be unproven science masquerading as achievable technology,? Vogt wrote in an opinion piece in the July-September 2010 issue of Physics in Canada.
TRIUMF subsequently issued a statement emphasizing that Vogt was speaking as a private citizen and scientist in his criticisms of General Fusion, not as a TRIUMF spokesman. ?
How it works
There are two ways to unlock the power of the atom. You can break it apart through fission (think atomic bomb). Or you can crowd it together with other atoms under such intense pressure and heat that they fuse, releasing large amounts of energy.
In General Fusion?s magnetized targeted fusion process, a swirling vortex of molten lead and lithium flows in and out of a spherical chamber three meters in diameter.
Into the centre of that lead-lithium blanket, a hot deuterim-tritium plasma is injected and suspended using magnetic energy. It needs to be suspended because if it touches the chamber wall, it loses the intense heat (150 million degrees Celsius) needed to cause fusion.
On the outside of the spherical chamber are 200 large pneumatic pistons that, when fired, send shock waves toward the centre where the plasma implodes, fusing the deuterium and tritium into helium and releasing free neutrons.
The friction of the neutrons moving through the liquid lead will increase its temperature, and as it flows out if the chamber, heat exchangers tap the heat, to create steam, which drives turbines to produce electricity.
The neutrons hitting the lead-lithium blanket also break apart the lithium ions, creating more helium and more tritium.
