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Energy From Fusion In 'A Couple Years,' CEO Says, Commercialization In Five
TAE Technologies will bring a fusion-reactor technology to commercialization in the next five years, its CEO announced recently at the University of California, Irvine.
"The notion that you hear fusion is another 20 years away, 30 years away, 50 years away—it's not true," said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of the company formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy. "We're talking commercialization coming in the next five years for this technology."
[...] For more than 20 years TAE has been pursuing a reactor that would fuse hydrogen and boron at extremely high temperatures, releasing excess energy much as the sun does when it fuses hydrogen atoms. Lately the California company has been testing the heat capacity of its process in a machine it named Norman after the late UC Irvine physicist Norman Rostoker.
Its next device, dubbed Copernicus, is designed to demonstrate an energy gain. It will involve deuterium-tritium fusion, the aim of most competitors, but a milestone on TAE's path to a hotter, but safer, hydrogen-boron reaction.
Binderbauer expects to pass the D-T fusion milestone soon. "What we're really going to see in the next couple years is actually the ability to actually make net energy, and that's going to happen in the machine we call Copernicus," he said in a "fireside chat" at UC Irvine.
Also at NextBigFuture.
Related: Lockheed Martin's Patent for a Fusion Reactor the Size of a Shipping Container
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @11:17AM (5 children)
I am usually quite skeptical but Lockheed oublicly filed some fusion related patents as well as announced their compact-fusion program. I'd say if Lockheed is at the point of publicly pursuing and funding this type of tech, things are afoot. 5 years may be optimistic but 10 years I would believe.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:06PM (4 children)
They made big promises in 2010. Still haven't even claimed a unity gain reaction. Fusion is destined to always be an "almost here" tech because it would disrupt too much of the world economy.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:45PM (1 child)
We are due for a disruption in the world economy.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday January 18 2019, @05:11AM
They have a recession penciled in for next year but fusion would would be disruption on a whole different level. The whole balance of power in the world would permanently shift. We would still need some oil, planes aren't likely to be electric anytime soon, but the whole Middle East becomes a shitty sandy backwater overnight. Russia? Putin gets hosed right in the squeakhole since energy is their only major export. Those sort of dislocations usually mean war.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:28PM
But hey, at least they advanced it from "always 20 years in the future" to "always 5 years in the future"! :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:49PM
That " 'they' won't let it happen" boogeyman argument is WAY too tired and overused, and has nothing to do with this. It is an "almost here" tech because it is really really hard. You squeeze things here and it always squirts out somewhere else. Hell, to get it to happen just once, you need to use a fission bomb [wikipedia.org].
If this follows a typical cycle, the first net-positive reactors will be enormous and generate a net power that wouldn't be sufficient to charge your phone. If they ever get to where they are viable for a commercial market (which I doubt will be the case), it won't be a global disruptor. All the "big oil" type of companies will already be running commercial-scale reactors, and will have for years. The energy companies have long been diversifying and expanding beyond fossil fuels for a number of reasons; they would all be rushing to establish their own reactors to get a chunk of that market The only thing that would hamstring that would be some idiotic policies to do something like, I don't know, prop up and unviable industry (like the coal industry) for political gain.
Cheap large scale solar should never have happened according to the "they'll never let it happen" argument. You or I can go out and procure our own systems and get completely off the grid, if we wanted, but most of us don't for a variety of reasons that don't have much to do with "them".