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Future Energy eNews/ IRI/ Nov 25, 2007
Posted on Sunday, November 25, 2007 @ 18:56:41 UTC by vlad

General 1) World Renewable Energy Assembly - Bonn Germany renews a committment to energy
2) Transmutation Gets Revived - UK book reports on cold fusion work from Northeastern University
3) Advanced Energy Research Organization - Announces energy invention incentive
4) Plastic Membrane Passes CO2 Selectively - New polymer membrane blocks methane, not CO2
5) Plastic That is as Strong as Steel - It also is transparent as well as being strong
6) Low Swirl Injector (LSI) Combustion - Has near-zero emission of NOx and lowered CO2
7) Fusion to Save the World - Garage scientist aims to thwart OPEC with his device


5) Garage scientist aims to thwart OPEC

Nathan VanderKlippe, Financial Post Published: Friday, November 16, 2007

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2785016f-0338-4253-b594-aeee1ca49385&k=57937

Cold fusion would solve world's energy woes. Trouble is no one so far has made it work

Tucked away in the back corner of an old mattress warehouse in this Vancouver suburb sits a silver sphere not much larger than a human head. Like some mad inventor's futuristic Chia pet, it sprouts numerous wires that lead to banks of capacitors, batteries capable of delivering their charge at lightning speed.

It could easily pass for a school science project from some overly keen teen -- complete with its very own home-made flourishes, like a particle detector hidden inside a stovepipe and held together with black electrical tape.

But if this is a science project -- and in many ways that is what it is for Michel Laberge, the 40-something PhD who has spent five years building and perfecting it -- it is among the most ambitious ever conceived. This modest assemblage of wires and dreams is in fact a home-brew nuclear-fusion reactor -- if reactor is the right word to describe a device that has in the past few years achieved a micro-second's worth of miniscule energy output just seven times.

But for Mr. Laberge, a slightly dishevelled Quebecer who built his fusion device in an old gas station on an island near Vancouver, it is the prototype for something enormous -- something that, in his words, "will actually save the planet."

He admits it is a lofty goal.

"This is an outrageously ambitious project," he says. "Thousands of physicists have spent billions every year for the last 40 years [trying in vain to produce fusion] and I'm saying I'm going to take those guys and do it."

Mr. Laberge is hardly alone in the corner of the country that bred the hydrogen fuel cell more than two decades ago. Ballard Power Systems Inc. pioneered that technology, which promised cars that dripped nothing but water from their tailpipes, not far from where Mr. Laberge and his three-man company, General Fusion, are working today.

Last week, Ballard announced that it had sold off its automotive fuel cell division and admitted that the hydrogen-powered car remains little more than a distant dream. Ballard will now focus on the decidedly less glamorous work of making fuel cells for forklifts, backup power and cogeneration units that produce power and heat for homes.

But if Ballard has stumbled, the tech-friendly environment its early successes fostered in B.C. is flourishing, with dozens of small to medium-sized companies working on everything from fuel-cell-powered cell phones to revolutionary new kinds of batteries.

Few, however, embody the bold promise of new technology as well as Mr. Laberge, who has drawn around him some of the same people who first saw Ballard's promise. One of them is Michael Brown, now executive director of Chrysalix Energy Management, Canada's largest clean energy venture capital fund.

"If this form of fusion works, this is worth not millions but more than billions," Mr. Brown said. "I used to say that you can have a one-comma opportunity, a two-comma opportunity or a three-comma opportunity. This may be a four-comma opportunity. You write out a number with zeroes and four commas, that's a big number."

The reason: if fusion works, it will use as an energy supply a material -- deuterium -- that is so prevalent it could power all of earth's needs for millions of years. And it will do it cheaper than coal power, completely without greenhouse gases and without risk of nuclear meltdown (a coal plant produces more radiation than a fusion plant would).

If it were achieved, fusion could almost instantly end the most vexatious issues confronting society today: climate change and peak oil.

There is no dispute that the "if" needs to be bolded, capitalized and triple underlined, given that vast sums of money and the world's brightest scientific minds have so far been unable to create a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it sucks up. Most have been abysmal failures.

Yet history has taught that men in garages working with shoestring budgets can do remarkable things. Take the Wright brothers, for instance, or Craig Venter, the surf-bum-turned-scientist who sequenced the human genome at a pace and cost considered impossible.

That those examples are exceedingly rare has not tempered Mr. Laberge's ambitions, despite his unlikely path into his current field. As a student, he had studied laser physics before landing a job at Creo Inc., the B.C. maker of printing technology that was bought out by Eastman Kodak Co. in 2005.

Two weeks before his 40th birthday, however, he looked at his life's work and gulped.

"I said, 'Ok what am I doing here? I'm making printing so cheap that I can fill your mailbox with junk mail. This is what my hard work produces here -- cheap junkmail'," he said.

Thinking back to his PhD studies, which had brought him into contact with fusion, he quickly latched onto that idea.

"I knew that the energy situation of the planet is a complete disaster -- and we're going straight for total disaster -- so we need some solution to that," he said. "I decided that fusion is the solution so I say, 'Ok, I'm quitting Creo and I'm going to do fusion myself'."

Begging and borrowing from friends and family, he managed to cobble together enough cash to begin his work.

Where nuclear fission produces electricity by splitting apart atoms -- a process that can release enough energy to level cities -- fusion is exactly the opposite. It works to join atoms together, a process that also produces enormous energy.

But it is exceedingly difficult to achieve because it involves melding together the protons of two atoms that naturally repel. The only way to do it is to create a shockwave in a sphere that will press together the atoms in the centre with extraordinary pressure and temperatures of 100-million degrees Celsius.

Sustaining those conditions has proven impossible in the nearly eight decades since fusion was first proposed as a theory. The world record is the production of 16 megawatts of power for less than a second, and the most intensive global effort to beat that mark is a hugely expensive one. ITER, a recently formed international research and development project whose partners include the European Union, Japan, China, India and the United States, plans to build a fusion reactor in France with a budget of 10-billion euros, a construction time of 10 years and no ambitions to produce marketable electricity.

Mr. Laberge believes he can build a functioning prototype fusion unit for $50-million in half a decade, and produce commercial electricity with a $500-million reactor. General Fusion has already raised $1.4-million this year, and has pencilled-in commitments for another $5-million to $6-million as part of a financing campaign.

He is not crazy. Although he has not described his successes or methods in refereed publications -- "basically because I really don't like writing papers," he says -- some of Canada's leading fusion physicists say there is no reason to doubt he has achieved fusion.

They do, however, question whether he can succeed.

"What he has done is not enough because everybody can get fusion. It doesn't take anything," said Emilio Panarella, a long-time fusion scientist with the federal government who now runs Ottawa-based Fusion Reactor Technology, Inc., and has his own backyard project to solve the fusion puzzle.

"But the objective is so important that any enthusiastic person that joins this race is to be applauded not reprimanded."

Mr. Laberge himself is strikingly upfront about his own somewhat modest successes. In well over 30 tries, he has created fusion in only seven, and each produced an infinitesimal amount of energy.

Not only that, it now takes him a week between attempts. For fusion power to work, he needs to be able to make an attempt once a second. He figures that a bigger machine that produces compression with steam-powered pistons, instead of the bits of exploding foil he currently uses, will solve those issues.

But for that to work, he will need to make steam-powered pistons act with space-age precision. For atoms to stick together, they need to be hit with a perfect compression wave that will come from all sides of the sphere at exactly the same time. It is akin to compressing a balloon without letting it get misshapen -- except Mr. Laberge has to synchronize the compression from 200 different pistons in one-millionth of a second.

Whether Mr. Laberge can pull it off remains a potentially show-stopping question that he hopes to answer in the next two years with a pared-down, $10-million prototype.

If he can, he will be about 60% of the way to creating fusion power. Still, there is no doubt that those investing in this gambit are rolling the dice, and Mr. Brown hopes to convince big oil and utility companies to invest as one strategy for his retrieving his money if the technology doesn't work.

"The chances are that we will lose our money," he admits. "But it's not one-in-a million odds. I think we're in the 20% to 25% likelihood of getting through the first part, and if we do succeed the prize is unbelievably big. So from a risk-reward perspective, this is a risk that's worth taking."

----------

Future Energy eNews is provided as a public service courtesy of www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org


 
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