I don't understand how you use 430 GW/h? You can use energy at a rate of 430 GW but what does GW/h mean? 1 W = 1J/s. 430 GW/h = 430 GJ/(s^2).

Can we replace every power plant on the planet with one of these things then? That would be delightful. Saving the planet and saving money. Who could ask for better.

So, this thing make 100 gigawatts, is it 100 gigawatts an hour? a year? something else? :-)

I want one for my basement. Unlimited energy forever. Screw you ComEd.

if this produces 100 giawatts, how much power does it consume in the same time period?

I was wondering that as well. Is it 100GW an hour? Let's start building a bunch of these like RIGHT NOW. Start shutting down those coal, gas, and nuclear plants.

it says 100GW "in the blink of an eye", which I assume means no more than a second

Surely by 100 gw they mean per hour (otherwise why compare it to the the american power consumption rate per hour.) While this seems really good, I am sure there must be some draw back to it. I'm sure it's just some sort of big explosion (worse case senario) but that is to be expected. If this really is the output per hour, then theoritcally we could replace all of the US power plants with just 5 of these bastards. While this would be a great cheap source of energy, rest assured you will still pay just as much. Either way though i hope they can finish testing these things soon, and get them out into production in a couple years, only major concern is what happens to all the people who work at the power plant, but unfortunately for them this article is not about them, only a better source of power (as it should be.)

funny, I thought they were saying they were putting in 100GW to a pinpoint area to create the fusion process.

I believe attaining fusion is still very power intensive. i wonder if they are geting out more than they are putting in?

Just think of all those Nuclear-powered Aircraft Carriers, Attack Subs, and whatever else that uses (portable) nuke generators we can convert to Focus-Fusion... The world will be much greener and Safer at the same time.

Sounds good so far. I'm assuming that they mean the output after subtracting the input is the 100GW figure. Five of these would be like having 640K of system memory, which is enough for anybody, though. If these function as designed and take over our power production, then we will be needing about two hundred of them by 2050. Everything will be electric if electricity is that cheap, just like so many things are gasoline powered now.

I'm pretty sure that much energy isnt' sustained beyond a second. Too bad because on an even smaller scale, you could build neighborhoods around these things and then re-do the whole freaking world.

"430 gigawatts of electricity every hour."

BARF! I quit reading there. This is not the first time DVICE editors have made this mistake. They should send these highschool interns that they call editors to a basic science class. What a horrible way to represent SciFi.. oh wait, nm.. SyFy has gone down the toilet.. sigghhh.

Really guys, take the criticism to heart.

The draw back is the Electricty company will just buy out the technology and will stop its production and will keep feeding us the bullshit they always have. This is a normal occurance with all the developments these days.

I'm not sure why they're calling this "fusion." By the description given above, they're bombarding boron with neutrons to make helium. But Helium is a less massive element than boron. Wouldn't that mean that they're still performing nuclear fission, breaking down the boron atoms to form helium? Fusion is what happens when atoms combine to form heavier atoms. That doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

But hey, if it works and it's safe, who cares what they call it? This thing could solve energy problems worldwide!

A kWh, or kilowatt-hour, is a measure of electricity. It describes the amount of power (kilowatts) used over a period of time (hours). A 60-watt light bulb that is illuminated for one hour uses 60 watt-hours of electricity, or .060 kilowatt-hours. If it is illuminated for a half hour, the bulb will consume .030 kWh of electricity, or half as much. The average home consumes roughly 20 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, or 600 kWh per month.

You have to lear to think in terms of Wh to understand how we use and talk about power.

Um... I'm no nuclear physicist but... this is still a fission reaction... you are colliding neutrons into an element like boron and breaking it up, releasing helium... if there is a by-product it's not fusion... you're not FUSING anything together... So yeah, it sounded exciting for a minute but... nope

sh3lby, look up "nucleon binding energy" on wickipedia. You will see a dip between the elements Helium and Boron.
This is a pulsed device. Each reactor will generate about 5 megawatts of electricity. Since this is about 1/20th the power generated by a typical power plant, the potential exists to decentralize the power generation process.

"Focus-Fusion-1's waste products will just make them talk funny."

You ever tried to have a conversation with a nuclear physicist? They *already* talk funny. Helium will just make them talk funny in a higher pitch.

The actual power generation portion of each pulse only lasts a few nanoseconds, so the above author is correct. During these few nanoseconds a huge amount of power is generated in a very tiny area. Pulsed at 330 times each second. You get your 5 megawatts.

The DVICE article is wrong (as usaul, apparently - too bad they can't hire some people who are scientifically literate). The Focus-Fusion reaction fuses hydrogen and boron (there's a fission step involved, breaking down the boron to helium and hydrogen) and produces helium; I'd say it's likely that the net result is 3 helium atoms for each hydrogen-boron pair,

By the way, looking at the Lawrenceville Blog, it appears that the first operational test generated about 18 watts. If that is in fact correct, this is a breakthrough - it would be the first net positive energy generated by a fusion reactor.

Old man, I think you must have misread the blog. Net positive power has not yet been demonstrated. In fact the first pulses have been done using helium as a fill gas. Currently deuterium is being used, which allows a measurement of neutron energy. But we don't anticipate achieving better than break even until about a year from now.
Technical spokesman Focus fusion

LOL@old man dote

quote:
"Focus-Fusion-1's waste products will just make them talk funny."

You ever tried to have a conversation with a nuclear physicist? They *already* talk funny. Helium will just make them talk funny in a higher pitch.

I wondered if anyone else would pick that up!

Get your units straight. The watt is a unit of power. The watt-hour is a unit of energy. A watt-second is a joule.

"Watt-hours per hour" is meaningful. "Watts per hour" is meaningless.

I'm embarrassed for DVICE.

Someone is working to solve the energy problem which is more than most of the arm chairers are doing with their comments, probably some professors in their ivory towers or on mount olympus.

Whether the units are wrong is stupid to even bring up.

The point is someone out their is really trying to solve our energy problem and I say "Bravo"

No one is really mocking the technology, think the main issue was with the poor writting of this article. Also just to point out that the people who are solving this problem are not the professors, usually once someone becomes a professor they stop this kind of work, i believe the saying is "Those who cannot do, teach". Anyway i think we can all agree that this small fission/fusion reactor (i don't know much about the generation of electricy) is nice, but the article is rather poorly written.

"Whether the units are wrong is stupid to even bring up."

Are you crazy, of course the untis are important. The writer might as well have said it produces a million goombawidgets over an hour. It's like when people try to use lightyear when they are talking about time. It's like a divide by 0 error. It is meaningless without proper units. You can't have power per unit time. You can produce an amount of power. And if you do that for a finite amout of time you have produced an amount of energy. The units are not interchangeable. The writer needs to tell us it can maintain an average power output or tell us how much energy it can produce in a given time. Otherwise, it is meaningless.

At present fusion is only *break even* as in the get out as much as they put in. the article states that they are pushing 100GW through a point the size of a pin, so iow they are using one quarter as much energy as what the entire US uses in an hour to create a *break even* fusion reaction.

Whoops, My bad. A conventional power plant typically generates about 1 gigawatt. These are 5 megawatts each. So each fusion generator generates 1/200 the electricity of a conventional plant. Not! 1/20th as I stated above. Pardon the decimal point please.

The Focus Fusion process is designed to work with hydrogen and Boron-11, not neutrons. The protons (ionized hydrogren) and boron fuse, then decay into 3 heliums. NB the early experiments will be done just with deuterium to verify the plasma conditions.

The device is designed to be pulsed at several hundred Hz. So although a small amount of energy is released per pulse, a focus fusion device running at ~300Hz could produce a few MW of nett power output. If the experiments verify the theoretical models.

Conventionally nuclear reactions involving light nuclei are termed fusion and those over the mass of iron are fission. This is due to the shape of the binding energy per nucleon curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_energy#Nuclear_binding_energy
Most nuclear reactions involve combining two nuclei (or a nucleus and a neutron or proton) followed by the breakup due to the amount of energy available due to the mass difference between the compound nucleus and the final end products.

The beauty of the focus fusion approach is that there are no appreciable neutrons or radioactive products produced. Also since the products are all charged the energy can be recovered much more directly to electricity than conventional fission power stations, and proposed tokamak fusion designs which rely on heating water to drive steam turbines.

mkeblx, GW/h means Giga Watts per hour

Watt-hour.

Yeah and it's also zero point energy too I expect. More rubbish from dreamers.

hahaha, this is so funny. Love the comments so far. And I know at least one person got a failing grade in college... yea the whole comparing professors who work so hard to teach unruly "students" to someone who sits haughtily on Mt Olympus.

Anyway, yes, the units are important. I refer you to the September 99 Mars landing. Yea, they learned that proper units are important!

Great idea in theory. What this article neglects to explain is how they're going to resolve the one problem no scientist has figured out yet: how to make a container that can hold a thermonuclear reaction that reaches temperatures around 11 million degrees Kelvin (as fusion reactions normally do).

To answer some questions cross check some research, look up http://www.fusor.net/ these are people who have also been working toward hydrogen and Boron fusion.

It sounds like "cold fusion" ala Bogden Maglich and his "migma". This really isn't a new idea, but if some one has managed to achieve "break-even", or managed to build one which produces more power than it requires to start reaction, I would really like to see it....

We can't replace the entire power output with 5 of these things. The biggest power drain is via transmission, and reducing the number of power plants would actually make that problem worse.

Ok , this may be the stupidest (?) question in the world but here goes!!! If this thing is this cheap to produce , this small in size , this safe in end by products/disposal ,this energy efficient and all these other GOOD THINGS----- then why the heck isn't the government (fed/state/local etc) private sector and individual user jumping on this in a heart beat? I mean if it is this good ( and I truley hope it is) I would buy and install one or more myself to provide all my energy needs (aside from my personal trnsportation). I would refinance my house if need be because this thing would pay for itself in no time at all . A system to sell back (or bank or what ever) all my excess could help provide all kinds of energy to local ( and other ) needs for utilities ( lights ,motors , pumps etc) in area's that are direly needed such as rural or remote lacations in our own counties, states, nation even world wide . Utility companies shouldn't feel treatend because they could upgrade & modernize all there infrastucter (?) remove all above ground poles , wires, towers etc because the costs to do this would be more than recuoped in this endever and NO need to pass this on to an alreadystraped consumer. I would back and support any company that undertook this endever on ( and I am sure most people would too) and this company would make a fotune in cost reduction by not being petrol or coal dependant. SOOOOO------why is this NOT being highly highly supported??????

Bet the gas companies, and politicians who benefit from them, will be trying their hardest to wipe out this idea.

Anything that requires fuel of any kind will advance greatly. All the stuff of science fiction is about to come true again.

I agree with KR3.Like the guy who has a 120 MPG Mustang in Ohio, they won't let the secret get to the public.

I am guessing that the 100 gigawatts through a pin-point in the blink of an eye is what was needed to start the reaction, and rather than have a brown out, I would also hope it uses a capacitor to slowly store up the energy needed then flash release it all at once to get the ball rolling.

If these produce 5 megawatts power each, we would need 100,000 of these to produce 500 gigawatts , if they each costed $1 mill a pop.... $100,000,000,000.

I think this will be like solar panels, the first few generations were a nice idea but not really practical, the ones they have out on the markets today are 4-5X better than the first sets made and are now something worthy of considerations.

As a grad student in physics, I like to read about all kinds of physics research. It's been several months since I've read anything in this area and it's outside of my area ( astrophysics ), but last I read, the problem was still sustaining a reaction. The longest sustained reaction was/is a couple of seconds, and the plasma is usually contained within strong magnetic fields.

Wyophysicist,
It's a pulsed reaction each pulse lasts just nanoseconds.
diskdoc,
A new coal burning facility to be built in Megs county Ohio was just canceled. The one gigawatt facility was going to cost 3.2 Billion dollars.
The cost of 200 fast fusion generators (which would also generate one gigawatt) would be 60 million dollars. And this does not even take into account the difference in fuel costs.

Good call Jimmy T. It is a pulsed reaction. I just did a bit more reading into this and it seems that this is worth researching further, but Dvice hasn't mentioned the problems for this work. Apparently, electrode erosion, the time it takes to charge the capacitor, and some other things are still major technical hurdles. I'm also hesitant to believe the president of Focus Fusion, Eric Lerner, as his radical theories for Cosmology and the Big Bang (he's apparently a Cosmologist too) have been shown to be highly improbable. However, it is the nature of science to question the status quo and examine alternatives to even well known and accepted theories, even if you are proven likely wrong later on.

100 GigaWatts? Great Scott! Are you insane?! All we need is 1.21 GigaWatts!!!

I believe he used the term jigawatts not gigawatts. Not that units matter when powering a flux capacitor.

I'd believe the flux capacitor actually worked before this thing.

Without getting into anything technical (possibly because the author didn't discuss anything technical (or facts)), if this thing actually worked it would already have been bought and licensed by local power company or perhaps General Electric, Hitachi, Westinghouse, Mitsubishi, etc....

C'Mon son.

There are other solutions which are being ignored: http://www.crossfirefusor.com

the oil & electricity companies wont let it happen. with things like these, i wonder if these scientists go missing one day...in some kine of a conspiracy. we are talking about billions of dollars in revenue.

but if it does go through, we will live in a world where nations wont fight for oil. we could avoid global warming. and live like kings with robots doing everything for us..... grow food for us, cook for us, do physical work for us. it will be like a paradise.

then we could explore space and go where "no man has gone before"

if only the electricity & energy companies don't act like devils.