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This Machine Might Save the World

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Under Technology · 1 Comment 


This is the machine that will save us.

“Two desktop-printer engineers quit their jobs to search for the ultimate source of endless energy: nuclear fusion. Could this highly improbable enterprise actually succeed?”

What Michel Laberge has set out to build in this office park, using $2 million in private funding and a skeletal workforce, is a nuclear-fusion power plant. nuclear fusion is the process by which multiple like-charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus. It is accompanied by the release or absorption of energy.

His twist on a method known as magnetized target fusion, or MTF — to wildly oversimplify, a process in which plasma (ionized gas) trapped by a magnetic field is rapidly compressed to create fusion — will, in fact, work because it is relatively cheap and scalable. Give his team six to 10 years and a few hundred million dollars, he says, and his company, General Fusion, will give you a nuclear-fusion power plant.  If (and this is a truly serious if) Laberge and his team succeed, the rewards could be astounding: nearly limitless, inexpensive energy, with no chemical combustion by-products, a minimal amount of extremely short-lived radioactive waste, and no risk of a catastrophic, Chernobyl-level meltdown. “It’s an astonishing story,” says Mike Brown, the founder of Chrysalix Energy, the venture-capital firm that provided the angel funding for General Fusion, and who now leads the company’s search for backing. “If Michel makes it work, he’s a Nobel Prize winner.”

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One Response to “This Machine Might Save the World”
  1. jerry sersland says:

    by pass the money and sell it to people that can
    build make supply and help
    in any way for a percent of it its faster and they
    have the stuff or resources at hand
    and a old man once told me if you cant do it for sure hire someone that can
    well good luck

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