Edison's Idea
Factory to Ignite 2 Industrial Revolutions? Privately-Funded Hot Fusion Program
Aims At 2010 Energy Break-Even
Posted on : 2010-03-30
Anticipating net energy in 2010 or 2011, Energy Made Cleanly CTO Matthew R.
Wood plans to aggressively minimize commercialization delays by building 2,500
local college collaborative network of DPF-based aneutronic fusion energy labs
funded by alumni, business, and community leaders to address several clean
energy challenges. Economy, solar, and bio fuels also to benefit.
(PRWEB) March 30, 2010 -- Anticipating net energy in 2010 or 2011,Energy Made
Cleanly CTO Matthew R. Wood plans to aggressively minimize commercialization
delays by building 2,500 local college collaborative network of DPF-based
aneutronic fusion energy labs funded by alumni, business, and community leaders
to address several clean energy challenges. Economy, solar, and bio fuels also
to benefit.
"Building a huge open-source network makes the mammoth perceptual challenges
such as lack of public awareness, funding, and regulatory politics much more
manageable,” said Energy Made Cleanly president and CTO Matthew R. Wood, who
plans to spread the key scientific and financial risks as thinly as $100 per
business and community leader threatened by new EPA regulation, the Cap And
Trade Bill, and the coming C.L.E.A.R. Act. Funding and control remains in each
donor’s community. No federal research funds are jeopardized.
Such a network’s numbers are intriguing. 2,500 campuses raising $1M per year
results in $2.5G of private capital. At $100 per donor, this represents at
least 25 million influential donors- possibly enough to isolate and challenge
any lobbying group that believes it can’t benefit from virtually free energy.
The science is equally intriguing. Of three currently practical fusion fuels,
only the scientifically ambitious hydrogen-boron-11 (pB-11) eliminates the
inefficient and expensive steam turbine generators whose high capital costs
prevent atomic fission power plants from delivering on their promise of cheap
electricity.
Three groups are pursuing pB-11 fusion with the entirely different reactor
configurations known as Colliding Beam Field Reversed (CBFR), PolyWell, and
Dense Plasma Focus (DPF). All pB-11 reactors offer the ability to directly
convert their fusion products into electricity using induction and the
photovoltaic effect. No new science is required, although the photovoltaic to
electricity converter is a significant tooling and engineering challenge which
could produce high paying jobs for decades as increasing power densities are
marketed and the new tooling is adapted to solar cell production.
All hot-fusion reactors confine their electrically-conducting but extremely
unstable plasma in magnetic bottles as they’re brought up to the required
density and temperature for enough time to release more nuclear binding energy
than it took to start the reactor. Fusion is far easier than profitable fusion.
Only the DPF configuration avoids the capital expense of external
electromagnets. It operates as a pulsed power supply which concentrates peak
magnetic fields in excess of 12GG into a microscopic magnetic bubble only 8 to
10 microns across. 12 billion times the earth’s magnetic field is far stronger
than external electromagnets can produce. The repeating pulsed operation makes
it immune to runaway chain reactions and melt-downs. Nor can any aneutronic
fusion reactor explode or create radioactive waste. Each cycle takes just over
a millionth of a second. 360 cycles per second is expected to make 5MW of net
power in production machines.
Industrial heaters will be the first markets, profitable at something less than
electrical break-even by reducing fuel bills, according to Wood. At or above
electrical unity, these furnaces, ovens, and boilers operate entirely
pollution-free.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc. is developing the Focus Fusion 1 aneutronic
fusion reactor to achieve energy break-even in 2010. EMC’s plan is to clone
this machine at least 2,500 times in the US to efficiently provide the NRC with
extensive experience in permitting and supervising the design, construction,
operation, and modifications on these research reactors to streamline the
application for a DPF-based Aneutronic Fusion licensing category.
Regulatory, teaching, and tooling careers could be among the first clean energy
jobs created by a DPF network, which could be adapted to other branches of
science needing search engine visibility as well.
This new licensing category is presently believed to be the largest single
hurdle to fully integrating DPF-based fusion power into society. It’s expected
to require overwhelming public support in the form of making written AFIPS-
Aneutronic Fusion Integration Plans- the key hot button issue that all other
campaign issues revolve around in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. Cheap,
clean energy should lower the cost of health care, bio-fuels, and desalination
plants to name just a few industries.
At stake is the ability to buy as many 5 to 20MW reactors needing only 400
square feet and costing $300,000 FOB as an engineer needs to power any project,
creating genuinely negative carbon footprints in the process.
A more detailed version of Mr. Wood’s plan, including clean energy job creation
potentials, can be downloaded from EnergyMadeCleanly
About Energy Made Cleanly, bootstrapped by serial entrepreneur Matthew R. Wood,
is in the business of eliminating the perceptual roadblocks hampering nearly
all organizations’ business plans and operations. Contact him for consulting
and speaking engagements.
