Jeff Bezos Is Backing an Ancient Kind of Nuclear Fusion

 This tech could be more practical than tokamaks.

By Caroline Delbert 

“Smaller fusion reactors could have their breakthrough moment far sooner than large projects."

The Jeff Bezos-backed General Fusion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems both are targeting 2025.

These reactors use extraordinary magnets to pressurize elements into superhot plasma.

Two competing nuclear fusion companies, each with venture capital superstars as major investors, say we’re approaching the “Kitty Hawk moment” for their technology as early as 2025.” 

Magnetized target fusion (MTF) dates back to the 1970s, when the U.S. Naval Research Lab first proposed it. But MTF’s proponents say the technology is now bearing down to reach the commercial power market.

What is this tech, and will it be viable before the competing fusion model of tokamaks, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)?

Like a tokamak, an MTF reactor involves hot plasma contained by a powerful magnetic field. But where a tokamak is heated by extraordinary outside power, the MTF reactor made by Canada’s Jeff Bezos-backed General Fusion is pressurized to superheat the plasma—like a party filled with dancing people where the room continues to shrink around them. This pressure is applied by pistons that coordinate to make a pressure wave.

spectrum.ieee.org

From there, the rest is a more prosaic business. Hot neutrons escape the plasma and are captured in the liquid metal, and their energy powers a heat exchanger to make power. And with a main chamber of “just” 10 feet in diameter, General Fusion’s MTF reactor is considered small for a fusion technology intended to self sustain and generate power after reaching plasma ignition.

General Fusion’s reactor for magnetized target fusion. The pistons are used to pump liquid metal to compress the plasma.

Meanwhile, the American company Commonwealth Fusion Systems operates with a 10-ton magnet at the heart of its fusion reactor. The superconducting magnet will trap and pressurize hydrogen to induce a powerful plasma reactor. Last year, TechCrunch said Commonwealth’s technology is a hypothetical “leapfrog” of the entire current generation of plasma tokamak reactors.

Credit:www.popularmechanics.com