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Page added on June 16, 2021
Bezos-Backed Fusion Startup Picks UK to Build First Plant
A nuclear fusion startup backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos will build its first pilot power plant outside of London, potentially accelerating a new way of generating clean energy.
Canada’s General Fusion Inc. is one of about two dozen startups trying to harness the power that makes stars shine. Rather than splitting atoms like in traditional fission reactors, fusion plants seek to bind them together at temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun. Doing so releases huge quantities of carbon-free energy with no atomic waste.
While national laboratories have been trying to build economically-sustainable fusion machines for more than a half century, private investors have only recently joined the pursuit as urgency builds to find new sources of emissions-free power to slow global warming.
“There are a lot of people preparing to take shots on goal right now,” General Fusion Chief Executive Officer Chris Mowry said in an interview. “We now have the first best but there are lots of others lining up.”
Globally, more than $1.5 billion has poured into private fusion startups such as TAE Technologies Inc. and Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the U.S. Public funding from 35 countries has gone toward the $22 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in southern France. The project was supposed to begin testing in four years, though that date is now in doubt after pandemic lockdowns snarled supply chains.
General Fusion’s announcement follows a call in April by the U.S. National Academies of Science for the country to accelerate plans to build a pilot fusion reactor capable of generating electricity as soon as 2035. Last November, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered $17 billion in support for green industries including nuclear power. His government wants an operating fusion plant based on the ITER design by 2040.
Mowry said the U.K.’s support for the General Fusion pilot plant was “very meaningful,” but didn’t elaborate on the size of its financial support. General Fusion, which raised $100 million in its last round of fundraising, is again preparing to tap investors to help finance the project. “At some point we’re going to go public,” Mowry said.
Construction is expected to begin next year on the company’s $400 million facility near the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire. “There’s a great talent pool there that knows how to operate and maintain large fusion machines,” said Mowry.
Read More About How Fusion Could Rescue the Planet from Climate Catastrophe
Culham is currently home to the Joint European Torus (JET) and has become one of the world’s most important fusion-science hubs. But much of the work on that project, which has endured over four decades, will wind down once ITER begins testing in southern France as government funding is redirected toward the newer project. Both JET and ITER are derived from designs first tested in the Soviet Union. Lasers and powerful electromagnets are arrayed around a supercooled, doughnut-shaped container to hold superheated plasma in place that is used to fuse the atoms.
General Fusion’s machine takes a radically different approach. Its magnetized-target fusion reactor compresses a hydrogen target surrounded by a swirling wall of molten metal. Some 500 synchronized pistons that encompass a cylinder fire at a rate of six to 60 shots per minute. Heat from the plasma is transferred into the metal, where it can then be channeled to turbines that produce power.
And unlike the massive future fusion reactors envisioned by ITER that can generate more than 1,000 megawatts of electricity each, General Fusion’s machines will produce just 115 megawatts of power — not enough energy to light up a large city, but more than enough to stabilize grids filled with intermittent solar and wind power. “That’s the sweet spot of distributed energy,” according to Mowry, an engineer who formerly worked at General Electric Co.
Not all physicists agree that smaller fusion reactors like the one General Fusion is building will generate the most cost-efficient energy. But scientists acknowledge that private investors are helping to balance pure research against commercial opportunity.
“It is time to dispel the ideal that fusion is an academic endeavor in pursuit of an energy unicorn,” said International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. “We can see this is around the corner. We are approaching this moment fast.”
61 Comments on "Bezos-Backed Fusion Startup Picks UK to Build First Plant"
Biden’s hairplug on Wed, 23rd Jun 2021 3:39 pm
The US troops haven’t left and already the Afghan military is collapsing:
https://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/politik-ausland/taliban-ueberrennen-afghanistan-hier-ergibt-sich-die-afghanische-armee-76850946.bild.html
Only a matter of a few months and the Taliban will have most of the country.
At least the European empires had duration.
Biden’s hairplug on Wed, 23rd Jun 2021 5:05 pm
A fresh Kunstler:
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/thinking-out-loud/
He thinks that China will make its move against Taiwan soon.
Add to that the known known of the mega-drought that has already developed in the American West and its implications for the food supply (not to mention the electric supply from the great western dams and the water supply to the western mega-cities). And add to that the extremely bad mood the various ethnic and racial groups remain in, due to the years-long DNC-Marxist fermentation of hatred among us. It all boils down to something that looks like an American collapse.
Jeez, the last one you want to be is an apneaman, holy cow!
Biden’s hairplug on Wed, 23rd Jun 2021 11:06 pm
Bye-bye, empire!
https://www.rt.com/russia/527406-merkel-macron-putin-eu/
“Merkel and Macron to propose revival of EU-Russia relations & meeting with Putin – reports“
While Brexit-Britain is playing provocative wargames in the Black Sea, Merkel and Macron want to use the last months of their terms to have a summit with Putin and reset of relations.
Source: Financial Times
Biden's hairplug on Thu, 24th Jun 2021 3:04 am
“If there is a war, Australia is ‘frankly stuffed’: Andrew Bolt”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyljMnC_sAM
Australia is finally waking up, 7 years after the warning by Malcolm Fraser:
https://parisberlinmoscow.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/america-australias-dangerous-ally/
“America: Australia’s Dangerous Ally”
And since I have never seen an Australian I didn’t like (apart from politicians), we need to plan to evacuate white Australians from that faraway desert.
We’ll take the ones with serious Dutch ancestry (provided they have children).
Biden's hairplug on Thu, 24th Jun 2021 6:13 am
In America, you can’t protest against Critical Race Theory or face arrest:
https://twitter.com/SBergsma/status/1407680366333382664
Time to end the ZOG-charade, the next wannabee USSR:
https://peakfuture.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/wmbh_012.jpg
Map: Kunstler, “World made by hand”
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 25th Jun 2021 12:29 am
Thanks Clog. I didn’t know Critical Race Theory was taught at public schools in the US. I thought it was only offered as a choice for adults at US universities. Mostly for those choosing the humanities route. I couldn’t possibly imagine anything more damaging to these innocent kids mental health than Critical Race Theory. I hope these brave parents win this heroic battle. Once they are victorious the hero parents can ensure that the many hours that were once wasted on Critical Race Theory every week will be spent on something all American children need – more active shooter drills.
Why are all these videos of supposedly innocent victim right wing-nuts always so short?
Why do they always start right when the supposedly innocent victim right wing-nut is getting arrested & cuffed?
There’s a pattern. Why don’t they show what happened in the minutes just before the poor widdle oppressed victim got arrested?
I wish the videos were longer. Don’t get me wrong. I love watching dumb white men getting arrested by big black police officers, but I’d like to see what happened just before the cuffs went on and I’d really really love to see video of 5 minutes after the arrest when they have all the white trash hand cuffed and lined up against the wall behind the school as they shoot them in the fucking head. You know, the white genocide-N-stuff.
I haven’t seen any white people being genocided myself, nor have I seen any video (evidence) of white people being genocided, but surely the body count must be over a million by now given that certain white people have been hysterically up in arms over this dastardly white genocide for a few years now.
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 25th Jun 2021 1:40 am
Jeff Bezos, ‘inventor’ of the Sears catalogue online is a scum-fuck parasite, which is saying a lot on a planet full of parasites.
Let this quote elaborate.
“What are we to make of creation in which routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types – biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out – not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in “natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.” – Ernest Becker
You’re all diseased
Biden's hairplug on Fri, 25th Jun 2021 2:24 am
I wish the videos were longer. Don’t get me wrong. I love watching dumb white men getting arrested by big black police officers, but I’d like to see what happened just before the cuffs went on and I’d really really love to see video of 5 minutes after the arrest when they have all the white trash hand cuffed and lined up against the wall behind the school as they shoot them in the fucking head. You know, the white genocide-N-stuff.
Yeah, that’s the heeb commissar apneaman for ya, who smells his chance again to organize a little slaughter, just like his brethren did in Sovjet-Russia: slaughtering whites by the millions.
But I’m with ya, apneaman: slaughter those white Americans. Perhaps these notoriously docile yankee sheep will finally grow a pair and did what the Russians did and at least fight a civil war 1917-1922 of 5 years (which they lost). Yankee’s don’t need to win, just organize an uprising.
Where in 1917-1922, Europe and the US were licking their WW1-wounds and didn’t intervene in Russia, this time around, we have the EU, Russia, China and Iran standing by to make very short thrift with the US empire, if a civil war does indeed materialize. Bring it on, apneaman! But remember the adage of your hero Karl Marx: “first time a tragedy, second time a farce”.
Talking about farce:
https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1408143619656015877
“Biden has finally lost his marbles. This is serious.”
America has become a joke. Biden, that is the equivalent of Chernenko, the chairman, shortly before the USSR collapsed.
Biden's hairplug on Fri, 25th Jun 2021 5:33 am
Watch it, commissar apneaman, European intruders in your tax farm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9qQNBWVg8
Dutch artists performing in a US slammer, er… correctional facility.
Biden's hairplug on Sat, 26th Jun 2021 1:46 am
Commissar apneaman lies: “I didn’t know Critical Race Theory was taught at public schools in the US. I thought it was only offered as a choice for adults at US universities. Mostly for those choosing the humanities route.”
So who invented this critical race theory?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag72XyXaWP4
Well, not really a surprise, now is it?
Yes, them again.
FamousDrScanlon on Sat, 26th Jun 2021 6:44 pm
Clog, another youtube video of an overly excitable white man droning on & on is not evidence of anything except that you don’t understand the concept of evidence.
It’s no thing to me, but I’d say all you need to prove CRT is being taught in US public schools is an official copy of the curriculum or a text book. Both are easily obtainable.
What if they were teaching it? What’s the problem this time? Iz white folk worried their kids will try and emulate hip hop ghetto gangsters? Too late.
Btw, happy belated Juneteenth clog.