The quest for Fusion Energy has been approached through decades in different manners. Most of the contributions are done by the governmental sector, National Laboratories and Universities given that its duration is expected to be long and therefore not so well suited for normal investors.
This scenario has recently started to change with the Venture Capital, where investors are free to speculate in high-risk and high-compensation projects, as explained by BBC Future its recent article.
One of such fusion ventures is going on in the far side of Vancouver, in the British Columbia, where a Canadian based company called General Fusion (GF) performs tests in a different approach to Nuclear Fusion. Using shock waves, a superheated plasma contained in a vortex of liquid metal is induced to fuse.
The most intriguing characteristic about GF, however, is not its non-orthodox approach to Fusion but its investor. Jeff Bezos is a Billionaire CEO and founder of the e-commerce Amazon. He is well known for his venture investments, one of them being the Aerospace Engineering company Blue Origins (BO). BO plans to create commercial suborbital human space-flight beginning in 2018.
Investment situations like the one at GF are becoming surprisingly more common. Another example of venture capital addressed to the Fusion Pursuit is the company called Tri Alpha (TA). It is backed by Paul Allen, from the Rockefeller’s venture-capital company, and Russian government’s nanotech-investment arm, Rusnano. Their backing did not become public until recently, and the reasons for public approach, or lack of it, remain still unknown.
TA’s move towards fusion, using a much simpler engineering approach known as a field-reversed configuration, is similar to the one used by ITER. Another idiosyncrasy from TA is its fuel. In contrast of the Deuterium and Tritium mixture which is commonly considered as the most promising fusion fuel mixture, Boron-11 is supposed to be used instead. The advantage is that the radioactive waste generated by tritium would be diminished, but the increase in energy needed to reach fusion leaves the experiment orders of magnitude away of reaching ignition.
Whether mega-projects or venture-investments will succeed, only time will tell us, but unfortunately, time is something definitely important for an investor. One may say that there is a need for a larger approach to projects with global impact in the future of humanity, but unfortunately one cannot withdraw the economical constrains of present days.
The need of new sources of energy is very well know, and the necessity of new approaches to meet this need is greater than ever. Technical barriers are left to scientists and engineerings to deal with, whilst for the layman is left waiting – and hoping that we will succeed on time.