Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/amazons-jeff-bezos-backs-nuclear-startup-general-fusion/

by hornokplease • 15 years ago

103 47 15 years ago

MatthewB• 15 years ago

General Electric...General Fusion...oh, I get it:)

smhinsey• 15 years ago

It's a pretty common prefix. There was General Atomics, General Dynamics, and of course, General Motors. Probably more too.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

Disappointed, for selfish reasons, to hear that he's sinking money into fusion instead of thorium-based fission.

Still cool, though.

As a title nitpick, using the N-word to cover both fission and fusion glosses over how utterly different the two things are.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

there is completely different regulatory landscape and thus price to enter the game. Any fission work would involve radioactive elements from the start. Licensing and approval on all the levels from federal to local require investments and political power on the scale well beyond ...

An even if you manage to develop and prototype the fission reactor, the deployment is still and even more subject to that approval problems.

The nuclear fusion work, as long a it is deuterium based (tritium can be bread during the process) and no dual-purpose equipment is attempted to be bought (like very large power lasers or extremely short-impulse discharge devices) can be conducted in your garage ... well until you start getting real neutron flux (or gamma flux before it if you're going fusor way) - either you and your neighbors get serious health damage/killed or you start installing protection from the flux - that would involve money and questions on why would you need so much of boron concrete :)

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

The fission startups out there (most notably TerraPower) do all of their work in silico, and that's representative of fission reactor design in general. Fission reactors aren't prototyped, they're simulated exhaustively, approved, and then built.

You're right, though, that securing the materials for a fusion prototype is less legally fraught.

hartror• 15 years ago

I had the same reaction to the N-word, fusion and fission are a bit too similar for the layman I think.

baggachipz2• 15 years ago

The author's assertion that this project will be impacted by the Japanese disaster shows that she doesn't understand the technology. Fusion != Fission, and in this case there isn't even any radioactive material in the equation. If anything, the Japanese disaster will put more focus on fusion research and development.

/facepalm

cperciva2• 15 years ago

Fusion != Fission, and in this case there isn't even any radioactive material in the equation

Fusion reactors spew neutrons which can create a variety of radioactive isotopes. Most of these are very short-lived, fortunately -- but they do exist, and reactor designs need to take these into account.

(Also, some reactor designs use tritium as fuel, which is of course radioactive to begin with.)

DennisP• 15 years ago

True but the other difference is that fission reactors have to be kept cool. With fusion reactors, the challenge is getting it hot enough. There's never a concern about loss of cooling, meltdown, all that mess.

Also of course, several projects are attempting boron fusion, which doesn't produce neutrons other than from a small portion of side reactions.

hugh32• 15 years ago

Related anecdote: I visited the National Ignition Facility [1] last year, where everything was pretty much up and running but they still hadn't finished putting in all the shielding that needs to surround the target chamber before they start actually doing fusion shots. We were assured that if they had done a fusion shot before installing the shielding then everyone in the (extremely large) building would have been dead due to (if I recall correctly) neutron absorption.

Side note: the National Ignition Facility is freaking awesome.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility

jeffreymcmanus5• 15 years ago

It's worth mentioning here that coal-fired power plants also spew radioactivity into the atmosphere.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

That's not exactly true. There's enough neutron flux in a hypothetical fusion reactor (assuming D-T) for neutron activation of structural materials to be a real concern. There are actually some hybrid fission-fusion designs which use a fusion reactor running at a loss as a neutron source for a subcritical assembly of fission fuel.

You're right that the fission products and high-mass-number alpha emitters have left the picture, though.

rimantas• 15 years ago

  The author's assertion that this project will be impacted
  by the Japanese disaster shows that she doesn't understand
  the technology.

Fukushima incident will impact any project (at least in PR sense) that has "nuclear" in it, no matter how different process is. Germany's actions (hey massive cunami caused problems in some reactors in Japan, let's shut down ours!) is a good example that rationality has little to do in such cases :(

jeffreymcmanus5• 15 years ago

It must be a truism of hacker news that public relations appears to be the biggest impediment to what is likely the biggest scientific breakthrough of the next 10-20 years.

The first team to reach net power out (and there are many teams around the world working on different paths to this at the moment) will have no trouble explaining it to people in a way that will differentiate it from dirty nuclear power. Getting to net power out will be, by far, the more challenging part.

lispm4• 15 years ago

Germany did not shut down the reactors because of Tsunamis. There are none in Germany.

Germany did shut down the more problematic reactors for a security check. The question is whether the reactors survive a scenario, where multiple systems are failing (like in Japan). This can be caused by operator errors, terrorist attacks, earth quakes (yes, germany has earth quakes), etc.

Compare that with the US, which has several reactors which are much more dangerous than most German ones, has some in very dangerous earth quake zones, etc. The US did mostly nothing.

I know which government I prefer.

andrewcooke• 15 years ago

or your comment shows you don't understand politics?

baggachipz2• 15 years ago

If a leader doesn't understand the difference between fusion and fission, that's another issue entirely. Not saying they do, by the way.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

If a random blogger doesn't understand the difference, what are the odds a random Joe understands?

The collective opinion of Joe is what constitutes public opinion, and public opinion is (as I understand it) one of the biggest obstacles.

heyrhett• 15 years ago

I hope he wasn't inspired by "Wall Street II"

jjordan• 15 years ago

Glad to see someone with a long-term vision. Tapping fusion power will solve the world's energy issues, and that is a good thing.

wcoenen2• 15 years ago

Tapping fusion power will solve the world's energy issues, and that is a good thing.

Is it though? Exponential growth always has to end in disaster sooner or later.

Global energy use in 2008 was estimated at 474 exajoules. At a 8% yearly growth rate in consumption, it would take only 120 years to increase that to 5 million exajoules, thereby producing more waste heat than the energy which the earth receives from the sun. It's likely that we would be in serious trouble long before that.

(If the 8% growth rate seems high, I took it from the growth rate in oil consumption before the first oil shock in the 1970s. This seemed like a reasonable model for growth in a world with limitless energy supply.)

jeffreymcmanus5• 15 years ago

It's actually not reasonable; since the 70s there have been significant pushes toward efficiency on a variety of fronts which make pre-1970s energy consumption statistics inapplicable.

ck2• 15 years ago

Wait, there is a viable chance at (controlled) fusion within the next decade?

That would be massive news, I mean of the century, no?

Cushman• 15 years ago

It would probably be the most significant technological development in human history thus far.

mortenjorck• 15 years ago

Probably not the next decade. I've seen fusion researchers referred to as "the cathedral builders of our time"—their work will take decades, and they might not see success within the span of their careers, or even lifetimes.

But yes, controlled, sustained, repeatable fusion reactions could be a black swan on the order of the internal combustion engine for the 21st century.

sp332• 15 years ago

Fusion isn't so hard. What's hard is getting a reaction big enough for "breakeven", which means getting more energy out than you put in. From there, it's even harder to capture that energy in a useable form and then use that energy to continue the reaction. So, fusion isn't so hard. Useful fusion is hard.

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

What's with that photo? The shaven head, leather armchair, and expression, juxtaposed with the story about nuclear reactors, make it look like he's channeling a supervillain. Paging Hank Scorpio.

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

Here's the triad which must seem attractive to billionaires:

High Risk -- High Capital Cost -- High Impact.

By risk I refer to financial risk. By impact I refer to the changes the new thing would wreak and the concomitant profits that would follow.

Fusion fits the bill nicely. With a few billion bucks I reckon I would happily sling a million here and there for a low probability of obtaining still further billions.

Element_• 15 years ago

I submitted an old article about these guys last year: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-12/machine-might-... the article includes a video of their proposed design and an interview.

andrerobot• 15 years ago

Is the name Elastic Fusion Power appropriate?

troymc• 15 years ago

General Fusion is taking a different approach to fusion than anything previous. Their website has a great summary:

http://www.generalfusion.com/

If they (General Fusion) can make their idea work... wow. Kudos to Bezos and the other investors for backing them.

Also did you notice the author chose to use a Bezos photo taken by Steve Jurveston (Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson)? It's a small world indeed!

known• 15 years ago

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/product.html also sounds interesting

kristianp• 15 years ago

Pity he isn't investing in Emc2, the maker of the Polywell. http://www.emc2fusion.org/

Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion

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