This Machine Might * Save the World *That’S a Big, Fat “MIGHT”

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY THIS MACHINE MIGHT * SAVE THE WORLD *THAt’s a big, fAt “MIGHT” TWO DESKTOP-PRINTER ENGINEERS QUIT THEIR JOBS TO SEARCH FOR THE ULTIMATE SOURCE OF ENDLESS ENERGY: NUCLEAR FUSION. COULD THIS HIGHLY IMPROBABLE ENTERPRISE ACTUALLY SUCCEED? BY JOSH DEAN PHOTOGRAPHS by JOHN B. CARNETT THE SOURCE OF endless energy for bisected by two long cylinders. It’s big but not all humankind resides just off Government immense—maybe 10 times as tall as the little Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the robot man in the lower right corner of the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place page who’s there to indicate scale. and across the parking lot from Shade-O- What Laberge has set out to build in Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. this office park, using $2 million in private The future is there, in that mostly empty funding and a skeletal workforce, is a office with the vomit-green walls—and nuclear-fusion power plant. The idea seems inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, nuts but is actually, he says, not at all far- bearded and French-Canadian. fetched. Yes, he’ll admit, fusion is generally According to a diagram, printed on a considered the kind of nearly impossible single sheet of white paper and affixed with challenge undertaken only by huge HOME-BREWED FUSION General tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision universities or governments. Yes, fusion has Fusion’s proof-of-concept device in looks like a medieval torture device: a metal a stigma to overcome; the image that it is the company’s austere headquarters, ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and fundamentally bogus, always and forever in Burnaby, British Columbia 64 popULAR sciENCE JANUARY 2009 POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE 65 THE FUTURE OF ENERGY 20 years away, certainly doesn’t help. Laberge would probably some soul-searching, Laberge quit Creo, retired to an island off THE IMPROBABLES Michel even admit that the idea of some Canadians working in a the coast of British Columbia, and set out to master nuclear Laberge, left, and his glorified garage conquering one of the most ambitious problems fusion. Four years, several failures and $800,000 later (half partner, Doug Richard- in physics sounds absurd. from friends and family and half from matching government son, with their miniature, proof-of-concept fusion But he will also tell you that his twist on a method known research grants), Laberge surfaced with a contraption that reactor. The device looks as magnetized target fusion, or MTF—to wildly oversimplify, a provided a proof-of-concept for his idea. It’s a shiny steel orb unrefined, but it contains process in which plasma (ionized gas) trapped by a magnetic field the size of a basketball from which dozens of cords protrude. servo-controls accurate to is rapidly compressed to create fusion—will, in fact, work because Imagine those cranial caps from old science-fiction movies, a millionth of a second. it is relatively cheap and scalable. Give his team six to 10 years and and you’ll get the idea. The cords extend out to two dozen a few hundred million dollars, he says, and his company, General capacitors, and the whole thing is wired up to a tower of Fusion, will give you a nuclear-fusion power plant. controls that could have been pulled from a 1950s battleship. If (and this is a truly serious if) Laberge and his team It is the definition of low-tech, and that’s precisely the idea. succeed, the rewards could be astounding: nearly limitless, The metal sphere is now mostly a showpiece. Laberge inexpensive energy, with no chemical combustion by- will occasionally fire it up for potential investors, but by and products, a minimal amount of extremely short-lived large, it’s done its job. In 2006 it proved that a shock wave— radioactive waste, and no risk of a catastrophic, Chernobyl- created by a massive pulse of electricity, for experimental level meltdown. “It’s an astonishing story,” says Mike purposes—can compress a little bit of plasma quickly and Brown, the founder of Chrysalix Energy, the venture-capital violently enough to generate a fusion reaction, however tiny. firm that provided the angel funding for General Fusion, In place of the hugely expensive high-power electrical systems and who now leads the company’s search for backing. used to collapse the plasma in more typical MTF experiments, “If Michel makes it work, he’s a Nobel Prize winner.” Laberge imagines a set of pneumatic rams colliding with the plasma container’s outer shell to form a shock wave. This is ON THE MAD-SCIENTIST appearance scale, where his idea is truly different. Laberge is maybe a 4 out of 10; he’s a little rumpled and But there is much distance to cover before Laberge’s wears out-of-style wire-rimmed eyeglasses. But get him a little idea leads to a device that generates electricity. “This is not agitated, and he starts to tug at his hair and slips to maybe making energy,” he says of his machine. “I’m dumping 100 a 5 or 6. Discussion of spending money on something other kilojoules of energy, and I’m making about one nanojoule. than research will do it. Office supplies! Hotel rooms! Human But it shows that the technique of crushing the plasma to Resources! These are necessary costs for operating a company high density has some merit to it, and getting a few fusion his reactor is operating at net gain, it will power itself. Fuel test at anything close to full power. “This is one third the travel but irritating distractions for a physicist with big dreams and neutrons out”—neutrons are a telltale sign of a fusion for fusion—deuterium and tritium—is plentiful and cheap. and one one-hundredth the pressure,” Laberge says as he flicks a limited capital. reaction—“well, I call them my marketing neutrons.” Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen found in seawater; in switch. Nothing happens. Laberge and his business partner, Doug Richardson, an Laberge has the same ultimate goal of every fusion theory, one gallon of seawater has the potential energy of 30 “Hmm. Why is there no power here?” He tugs at two engineer who also studied physics, met at Creo Products, a researcher—to achieve “net gain,” which means to put out gallons of gasoline. Tritium is mildly radioactive and has a 12- extension cords, one of them an orange indoor-outdoor Vancouver-based developer of prepress-imaging technology now more energy than is put in, and not just, say, 1.5:1. To make year half-life, so it’s a little harder to find, but it can be derived job like the kind you use to plug in a weed whacker. As the owned by Kodak. They worked together for 11 years on thermal a viable power source, you need far more than you put in, from lithium. Conveniently for General Fusion, Canada has cylinder pressurizes, it sounds like a burbling fish-tank filter. printer heads and other highly precise mechanical devices, anywhere from 10 to 25 times as much. “We must simulate the world’s largest stockpile of tritium. “5, 4, 3, 2, 1—0!” Laberge says, and flicks a switch. The piston making a very comfortable living, until Laberge found himself star-like conditions for the fuel” in order to make fusion Laberge’s own energy has now turned toward a long fires. It’s no louder than a kid hitting a tom-tom drum and staring at 40 and had a midlife crisis. happen, says Richard Siemon, a professor of physics at metal tube lying on the floor nearby, a piece about the size is . underwhelming, not even remotely the kind of far-out “I said, ‘What am I producing here?’ ” he recalls, leading the University of Nevada and a former director of fusion and shape of a ship’s cannon. That’s the first piston housing experiment you’d expect to see when dropping by a nuclear- the way to the warehouse area of General Fusion’s small and research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The hydrogen for the theoretical reactor—step 1 of many in the quest fusion start-up. To Laberge, that’s exactly the point. decidedly unfuturistic headquarters. “I am producing a machine isotopes used as fuel have to be held at about 270 million for a commercial fusion power plant. General Fusion’s “It’s pretty basic, boring stuff,” he says. “Look in your car. that makes printing so cheap that it can fill your mailbox with degrees F. The plasma must then be compressed. As you reactor will one day rely on 200 of these housings, each There’s no superconducting magnet in there. There’s pipes and lots and lots of junk mail. The main use of my productivity is to might imagine, this requires an enormous amount of weighing some 2,200 pounds and holding a steam-powered pistons and tubes. That’s what I want. I want to make a fusion cut down the forests. And I look at the energy situation, and it’s electricity (and an equally enormous infrastructure) or an piston that weighs 220 pounds. Operated by servo-controls machine at a sort of car level. And that’s why we can make it for going down the drain at pretty high speed. So I knew I had to do alternative method of compressing the plasma. accurate to a millionth of a second, the pistons will fire $50 million and they”—government and university coalitions— something.

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