13 years to limitless energy... | Vital Football

13 years to limitless energy...

Spursex

Spursex

Alert Team
The end of the carbon economy is just around the corner...what will we do and what will be charged for 'limitless energy?'


http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/we-will-feed-nuclear-fusion-electricity-into-the-grid-by-2030-claims-uk-firm_uk_58874f33e4b0208540996944

TECH
Limitless Fusion Energy Is Just 13 Years Away, According To Tokamak Energy
Fusion is the “holy grail” of energy generation.
25/01/2017 10:08 | Updated 3 hours ago

Oscar Williams Tech reporter

Imagine a world where electricity can be produced virtually limitlessly without harming the environment.

This is the promise of nuclear fusion technology. By harnessing the same reaction that powers the Sun, it could usher in a new era of energy generation.

Now a British physicist has laid out his audacious vision for feeding this very same nuclear fusion power into the UK grid as soon as 2030.


At the International Energy Agency in Paris, Tokamak Energy’s CEO David Kingham revealed today that the firm’s reactor is set to start operating this spring, and that a commercial prototype will be built within the next 10 years.

Tokamak’s timelines are among the most ambitious of any firm working towards nuclear fusion.

Researchers at Iter, a £13 billion international project based in France, are aiming for 2050, and even they have faced setbacks.
Tokamak Energy, Instagram.
The inner vacuum vessel of Tokamak Energy’s design.

But Kingham has contended that his firm, the only one to pursue the Tokamak model, is in a prime position when it comes to achieving fusion.

Developed at the Culham laboratory, a world-renowned centre for fusion research, the spherical Tokamak model is a fraction the size of other reactors.

Within the doughnut-shaped reactor, powerful magnets hold in place plasma which is heated using microwaves until fusion occurs.

Kingham told the IEA’s Fusion Power Co-ordinating Committee: “We have developed superconducting magnet technology that will deliver exceptionally strong magnetic fields in a compact tokamak and pave the way for the development of a prototype commercial reactor in less than ten years.”
Tokamak Energy Instagram

Kingham’s claims have previously caused waves in the nuclear fusion sector. In a House of Lords debate in July 2015, Steve Cowley, then head of the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority said Tokamak Energy’s plan “boggles the mind”.

“Claims to investors of being able to get to fusion by 2018 drove us to say, ‘We need to have you at arm’s length,’” said Cowley, who’s also director of the Culham laboratory.

In response, Dr Kingham cautioned that pursuing a single model of innovation, such as the Iter project, is not practical.
Related...

New Fusion Reactor Design Would Allow Us To Create A ‘Star In A Jar’

“Other things pop up, particularly over long timescales. There is a specific risk with the European fusion road map that the slow progress of the ITER device in France will cause a major delay to the whole road map.”

In December, researchers in South Korea set a new record for fusion reaction, maintaining ‘high performance’ plasma in a stable state for 70 seconds.

But the process currently takes more energy to achieve fusion than is released in the process.

In the future however, researchers hope it will become so efficient that a glass of sea water would release as much energy as a burning barrel of oil.
 
A small british company is on track to produce it's first fusion energy reactor within 3 years....A network connected fusion reactor could be as little as 10 years away....

The first company to do this, will be worth untold billions...





https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/st40-has-been-rebuilt-and-successfully-operated-in-our-new-facility/

ST40 has been rebuilt and successfully operated in our new facility

Last year’s milestone achievement of 15 million degree temperatures in the ST40 tokamak was achieved with ST40 in our old building at 120 Olympic Avenue on Milton Park. Soon after, the whole tokamak was dismantled and moved to our new, larger facility. In just nine months it has been rebuilt, upgraded and operated again.

Last week we created plasma in ST40 and successfully repeated experiments from last year, demonstrating that ST40 was back to the level of performance attained before the move.

Additionally, we tested the toroidal field magnets after an upgrade to the power supplies. We ramped the current up to 125kA through the TF coils, producing a field of 1.5T at 0.4m, the highest ever magnetic field in a spherical tokamak.

The whole team at Tokamak Energy are extremely pleased with how quickly we produced hot plasma again after the major upgrade. ST40 will now shut down again for several weeks’ worth of additional engineering upgrades, including the installation of new diagnostics.

When we begin ST40 experiments again later in the year it will be the start of our campaign towards 100 million degrees – fusion temperatures.
 
Could the recent new interest in the moon be linked to this ? There may be quantities of helium 3 ( a fuel which can be used in fusion) on the moon. Despite the volatile sounding name, fusion power is said to be much safer than current fission methods. It's taken 70 or more years to get to this stage and it's still not known if it's possible to create mini suns on earth.
 
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Nick Real Deal said:
Could the recent new interest in the moon be linked to this ? There may be quantities of helium 3 ( a fuel which can be used in fusion) on the moon. Despite the volatile sounding name, fusion power is said to be much safer than current fission methods. It's taken 70 or more years to get to this stage and it's still not known if it's possible to create mini suns on earth.
Click to expand...

I doubt the interest in the moon has any bearing, mining and transporting Helium 3 to earth would make it incredibly costly and you'd have to strip mine and heat vast quantities of the moons surface to provide enough for what is project to be needed to power a few hundred fusion reactors - and Earth may need thousands. However, you can create limitless helium from seawater. That said a Russian company Energia claimed in 2006 that it would have a permanent moon base in 2015 and harvest Helium-3 by 2020. It goes without saying, their claims are so far pure pie in the sky.

Fusion reactors under development that appear to be producing more energy that it takes to create a fusion reaction look like betting the farm on hydrogen isotopes; eg. Deuterium which be distilled from all forms of water, but concentrations are higher in sea water. Which of course is widely available, harmless, and virtually an inexhaustible resource. In every cubic metre of seawater, there are 33 grams of deuterium. Deuterium is routinely produced for scientific and industrial applications, and how to handle store and use it is well known.

The next big step isn't reproducing the much higher temps needed (that's been done) but containing the plasma created in a containment field for long enough to have a useful sustained reaction; new types of magnetic/even star trek type force fields are already under development - some scientists believe they'll have a viable answer within 3-5 years. If that happens, fusion reactors will be a reality.
 
if it was that easy, Scaramanga would've been contracted by the Saudis by now to upend it.... third nipple and all.

ditto with quantum-computers and Wan Bissaka solving the RB question in lillywhite.
 
Roger More said:
if it was that easy, Scaramanga would've been contracted by the Saudis by now to upend it.... third nipple and all.

ditto with quantum-computers and Wan Bissaka solving the RB question in lillywhite.
Click to expand...
It's not easy, it's taken 70 years to get to this stage.
 
Finally, Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality
Long considered a joke, or a pipe dream, fusion is suddenly making enormous leaps

Brian Bergstein
Follow
Jan 3 · 14 min read

The idea first lit up Dennis Whyte when he was in high school, in the remote reaches of Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1980s. He wrote a term paper on how scientists were trying to harness fusion (the physical effect that fuels the stars) in wondrously efficient power plants on Earth. This is the ultimate clean-energy dream. It would provide massive amounts of clean electricity, with no greenhouse gases or air pollution. It would do it on a constant basis, unlike solar and wind. Whatever waste it created would be easily manageable, unlike today’s nuclear power plants. And fuel would be limitless. One of the main ingredients needed for fusion is abundant in water. Just one little gram of hydrogen fuel for a fusion reactor would provide as much power as 10 tons of coal.
Whyte got an A on that paper, but his physics teacher also wrote: “It’s too complicated.” That comment, Whyte says with a hearty laugh, “was sort of a harbinger of things to come.”
Indeed, over the next few decades, as Whyte mastered the finicky physics that fusion power would require and became a professor at MIT, the concept seemingly got no closer to becoming reality. It’s not that the science was shaky: It’s that reliably bottling up miniature stars inside complex machines on Earth demands otherworldly amounts of patience, not to mention billions and billions of dollars. Researchers like Whyte knew all too well the sardonic joke about their work: fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.
That line took on an especially bitter edge one day in 2012, when the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would eliminate funding for MIT’s experimental fusion reactor. Whyte was angry about the suddenness of the news. “It was absolutely absurd — you can put that in your article — fucking absurd that happened with a program that was acknowledged to be excellent.” But above all, he was dismayed. Global warming was bearing down year after year, yet this idea that could save civilization was losing what little momentum it had.

Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor in Germany, 2017. Photo: Picture Alliance/Getty
So Whyte thought about giving up. He looked for other things to focus on, “stuff that wasn’t as exciting, quite frankly,” but stuff that would be achievable. “Everyone understands delays in projects, and science hurdles you’ve got to overcome, but I saw fusion energy being used for something accelerating away from us,” he says. “You start getting pretty dejected when you realize, in your professional career, you’re never going to see this happen.”
As it turned out, Whyte never really walked away. Instead, he and his colleagues and graduate students at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center figured out a new angle. And last winter, MIT declared that Whyte’s lab had a fundamentally new approach to fusion and threw its weight behind their plan with an unusually public bet, spinning out a company to capitalize on it. An Italian oil company and private investors — including a firm funded by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — put at least $75 million into the company, known as Commonwealth Fusion Systems [CFS]. The startup intends to demonstrate the workings of fusion power by 2025.
The recent progress is remarkable, says the founder of one startup developing fusion power. “The world has been waiting for fusion for a long time.”​
Real, live, economically viable power plants could then follow in the 2030s. No joke. When I ask Whyte, who is 54, to compare his level of optimism now to any other point in his career, he says, simply: “It is at the maximum.”
But it’s not just MIT. At least 10 other startups also are trying new approaches to fusion power. All of them contend that it’s no longer a tantalizingly tricky science experiment, and is becoming a matter of engineering. If even just one of these ventures can pull it off, the energy source of the future is closer than it seems.
“It’s remarkable,” says David Kingham, executive vice chairman of Tokamak Energy, a British company whose goal is to put fusion power on the grid by 2030. “The world has been waiting for fusion for a long time.”
Imagine that I told you I was developing a special machine. If I put power into it, I could get 10 times as much out. Because of the undeniable laws of physics, I could show you on paper exactly why it should be a cost-effective source of vast amounts of electricity.
Oh, here’s the catch: My paper sketch would come true — especially the part about it being cost-effective — but only if I built the machine just right. Which might require materials that haven’t been invented yet. Until I perfected that design, my machine would use up more power than it produced. And I couldn’t get close to perfecting the design without spending years and years building expensive test machines that would reveal problems that I would try to address in subsequent versions.
If it seems crazy, well, that’s the story of fusion power.
Fusion definitely works. You see it every day. Our sun and other stars blast hydrogen atoms together with such intense force that their nuclei overcome their normal inclination to repel each other. Instead they fuse, sparking a reaction that transforms the hydrogen into helium and releases cosmic amounts of energy in the process.
We also have great paper sketches for fusion power machines. Fusion happens inside stars because of the crushing pressure created by their gravity. To generate that effect inside a fusion reactor, ionized gas — which is called plasma — must be heated and compressed by man-made forces, such as an ultra-powerful magnetic field. But whatever the method, there’s just one main goal. If you get enough plasma to stay hot enough for long enough, then you can trigger so much fusion inside it that a huge multiplier effect is unlocked. At that point, the energy that is released helps keep the plasma hot, extending the reaction. And there still is plenty of energy left over to turn into electricity.
The problem is that we’re still plugging away on predecessors to the machines that could generate that effect. Ever since the 1950s, scientists have used spherical or doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks, including the one at MIT that lost funding a few years ago, to create fusion reactions in plasmas bottled up by magnetic fields. But no one has done it long enough — while also getting it hot enough and dense enough — to really tip the balance and get it going. Heating the plasma and squeezing it in place still takes more energy than you can harvest from it.
So, that’s the name of the game in fusion: to get past that point. ITER, a mega-billion-dollar reactor being built in France by an international consortium, is designed to do it and finally prove the concept. But ITER — which is also way behind schedule and over budget — overcomes the limitations of previous tokamaks by being enormous. It’s the size of 60 soccer fields, which probably isn’t an economical setup for power plants that the world will need by the tens of thousands.
 
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) under construction. Photo: Christophe Simon/Getty
Could you go the other direction, and instead make fusion machines much smaller, which is also to say much less expensive? That is what motivates all the fusion startups. Several have decided the answer is to use something other than a tokamak and its circular coils of magnets. They’re updating old designs, including hitting plasma with lasers, or cooking up new ones, such as compressing it with something like a particle accelerator. One startup plans to push on the material with pistons.
But Whyte and his colleagues at MIT made a different decision, one that could prove crucial to making fusion power arise sooner than people expect. Even though things looked dire a few years ago, when their fusion machine lost funding, Whyte’s team decided to double down on tokamaks. As Whyte saw it, why try to invent something totally new when you could take advantage of all those decades and billions spent researching tokamaks? Instead, they would rethink the design to make tokamaks modular and much cheaper and weave in brand-new materials that can induce and confine a fusion reaction.
After getting the news of the funding shutdown, the university, and other supporters of the program, persuaded Congress to grant a temporary reprieve. They could keep running their fusion reactor into 2016, enough time for experiments to be finished and to keep PhD students going on the research they had come to MIT to undertake. And then they dug in.
The most intriguing questions Whyte and his students were exploring had to do with how tokamaks could produce lots of electricity without being gigantic and expensive. MIT’s tokamak, which still sits in a two-story tall, garage-like room in a former Nabisco cookie warehouse, generated a magnetic field by running electricity through copper coils that surrounded a round metal chamber. In that chamber, plasma would be heated with microwaves and other methods to millions of degrees. On one of its last runs, it set a new record for plasma pressure while hitting 35 million Celsius.
Just outside the chamber, the vital measurement isn’t heat, but cold. The magnets that squeeze the plasma in place have to be kept well below minus-200 Celsius, or else their performance will degrade from a buildup of electrical resistance.

It was a graduate student who suggested that the MIT team see what would happen if they made magnets out of a newly developed superconducting tape. A superconductor conducts electricity so well that it doesn’t build up electrical resistance and this new tape maintains that property, even at slightly higher temperatures than other superconductors do.
Using less energy on cooling could make a tokamak cheaper to run. But that benefit was minor compared to the other things Whyte’s group figured out. As they plotted out ways of winding the tape into coils in a tokamak, they realized this method could double the strength of the magnetic field they could exert on a plasma. Increasing the field strength is crucial because plasma is wild. It’s unstable and evasive, and only overwhelming force can keep it from spreading out and cooling too much.
Perhaps best of all: using this tape instead of rigid superconductors could make the machine 10 times smaller.
That led them to another problem with traditional tokamaks. If you need to replace parts of the machine, you have to take the whole thing apart and put it back together. That’s unacceptable for a power plant in regular use. And again, one of Whyte’s graduate students had a great idea. If you apply the superconducting tape in sections, with joints, the magnets can be snapped on and off for quick and easy repairs or upgrades.
“This was the beginning of the ‘aha!’ moment,” Whyte says. “The people who are in CFS were in that class.”
Other big ideas kept coming. One of the great things about fusion is its inherent safety. It’s impossible for this tiny star to slip out and cause trouble, because the plasma’s weird physical state can’t be sustained outside of the magnetic field. Still, the plasma does send something out that you’ve got to deal with: neutrons.
Fusion projects generally aim to fuse two forms of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is readily available in seawater, but tritium is very rare, so you have to make it. (More on that in a minute.) In this version of fusion, 80 percent of the energy that is released comes out in the form of neutrons. These are subatomic particles that have no electric charge, so they’re not contained by the magnetic field. They come flying out like angry spittle.
In fusion experiments measured in seconds or less, flying neutrons aren’t a big problem. But over time, they can be nasty. These particles jump a foot and a half from the plasma and have enough energy to rearrange the atoms in the tokamak’s inner wall, eventually degrading it. What to do about that in a power plant that needs to run for long stretches?
Whyte describes the answer with a wry smile. “We turned the problem around,” he says.
In essence, the MIT plan takes a ride on the neutrons by catching them in a liquid. Neutrons wreck solid materials by scrambling the order of their atoms, but liquids are already disordered, by definition. In the design that CFS is developing, the neutrons pass through an inch or two of steel and then barrel into a liquified salt, which they essentially just heat up. Then, that molten salt can be pumped around a power station to generate electricity. By the way, there’s lithium in the molten salt, and when neutrons hit lithium, they create tritium, which you can take out and use to fuel the fusion reactor.
 
This setup isn’t perfect, however. Blanketing the tokamak’s steel wall with molten salt will lessen, but not eliminate, the damage that the neutrons would otherwise cause to the metal. It will have to be replaced every so often. Just how often? That’s a crucial question for the cost of a power plant.
For now, Whyte says, the metal barrier should last a year or two. That’s not great, so materials that better withstand neutrons have to be developed, to extend the lifespan of that wall. That looks doable; reducing the erosion of the wall in fusion reactors is a long-standing field of research.
But the issue is nonetheless significant enough that General Fusion, the company that intends to compress plasma with pistons, plans to keep a solid metal case relatively far away. It will directly surround the plasma with liquid metal that gets pumped off to convert its heat to electricity. There will be lithium in that liquid, too, to breed tritium.
Even if the MIT team manages to extend the life of the barrier, there’s another issue: The neutron bombardment will eventually render the metal radioactive.
Is that a big problem? Well, one of the novel things about a fusion company called TAE Technologies, which has raised $600 million from Google, the late Microsoft founder Paul Allen, and other luminaries, is that it plans to fuse hydrogen protons with boron, a reasonably abundant element, because that reaction emits hardly any neutrons. TAE’s co-founder and CEO, Michl Binderbauer, says that because of its cleaner profile, hydrogen-boron fusion is “the single shining opportunity for mankind.”
But since we’re talking about fusion, of course there’s a catch. Hydrogen-boron fusion is much harder to pull off: The plasma has to get to billions of degrees, not millions. And the “reaction rate” is much lower, which means less fusion happens. TAE is going to start with deuterium-tritium fusion before trying to work its way up.
In the meantime, Whyte and just about everyone else in fusion thinks deuterium-tritium fusion is well worth gunning for. Any radioactive components in MIT’s design will be relatively small and have a short half-life. The material would be nowhere near as problematic as the stuff that comes out of nuclear power plants today. If fusion plant operators have to replace the inner wall from the reactor Whyte envisions, they’d “put it in a swimming pool for 10 years,” he says. “And then you can walk up beside it.”
Before any of that happens, CFS will try to pull off fusion’s most elusive trick: doing something ahead of schedule.
With the investment it’s raised, the company has about three years to test components of its reactor design, especially those still-unproven new magnets. Then, it will need to raise hundreds of millions to build a prototype reactor, at a location to be determined. The company has said it intends to get that reactor running by 2025. But its CEO, a former MIT graduate student named Robert Mumgaard, says it could happen even sooner.
Alas, fusion timelines still have a habit of slipping, even in private companies. Over the past few years, the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and a few startups, said they hoped to show working prototypes by now — possibly even ones that achieved the ultimate, a net power gain. That hasn’t happened. When I asked for updates, I got some vague replies, ranging from “we are hard at work” to “the preliminary results are promising.”
If fusion power just won’t work, “I’m scared for the world,” says the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems.​
I got the most reassuring answer from Christofer Mowry, CEO of General Fusion.
His company said in 2017 that it hoped to get its first prototype running in three to five years. It’s really more like five years from now. But, he says, that’s because the company has needed time to raise “a few hundred million dollars,” not because fusion science is still iffy. Because so many companies are trying to make fusion power practical, and because demand for it will be so high, “I’m 100 percent confident that this is going to happen,” Mowry says. “Are we going to have commercial fusion power plants on the grid by 2030? Maybe. But it won’t be 50 years, I can tell you that.”
At CFS, Mumgaard sees parallels with the story of human flight. Before the Wright brothers finally got a plane off the ground, a lot of people tried and got kind of close. Plenty of observers assumed that meant human flight would always remain a fantasy. But all that time, through all those failures with gliders and flapping man-made wings, engineers were systematically probing aerodynamics. The Wright brothers built on that knowledge and combined it with insights about control mechanisms that they had from working with bicycles. And only then, was it obvious: yes, humans can fly.
“When you have the insight into a piece of technology and you get it over that hump, it goes,” Mumgaard says. “We’re think we’re at this point.” He refers to his company’s plan to build a prototype as the Kitty Hawk moment.
But what if that parallel breaks down? What if fusion power just won’t work, or won’t work at a cost that anyone will be willing to pay? Then “I’m scared for the world,” Mumgaard says.
And it’s hard to cheer him up on that point. None of the existing carbon-free alternatives seem suited to the scale of the climate problem. Conventional nuclear power is unpopular and expensive. There aren’t many more waterways to dam. For solar and wind to be the primary answer, you’d need epic amounts of batteries, which might be environmentally or economically prohibitive.
When I pose the same question to Whyte, I get a slightly different answer. He sounds like a person who has considered what would happen if he gave up on this dream, and then renewed it instead. “I would never say ‘if we don’t develop fusion we’re not going to make it,’” he says. “But, boy, I’ll put it the other way around: If you make fusion economical, you have given yourself an arrow in the quiver which is almost unmatched in going after this.”
“We’re giving it our best shot,” he continues. “Others are giving it their best shot.” And then he slaps his hand on the table in front of him for emphasis. “Let’s get there.”
 
Interesting update Ex. Would it be better to pool the investment into a central group so that they can all work together instead of one trying to get there first and get the rewards.

It's such a massive project, the sooner it happens the better. The new ground they are uncovering with solutions to the problems like bi products which can form the elements required for the fusion, the cooling, the radioactive degradation of the metal casing etc is revolutionary and unchartered territory, as they say like man's first powered flight. The problems are surmountable and they will get there, it's just a case of when.
 
Nick Real Deal said:
Interesting update Ex. Would it be better to pool the investment into a central group so that they can all work together instead of one trying to get there first and get the rewards.

It's such a massive project, the sooner it happens the better. The new ground they are uncovering with solutions to the problems like bi products which can form the elements required for the fusion, the cooling, the radioactive degradation of the metal casing etc is revolutionary and unchartered territory, as they say like man's first powered flight. The problems are surmountable and they will get there, it's just a case of when.
Click to expand...


Better to have multiple attempts at solving the problem going on at the same time.
 
80deg16minW said:
Better to have multiple attempts at solving the problem going on at the same time.
Click to expand...

The first project already had their funding pulled by US investors. Multiple attempts all hitting the same problems with individual funding is a waste of money , time and fine minds . This is a massive global power resource and it needs global funding.
 
Nick Real Deal said:
The first project already had their funding pulled by US investors. Multiple attempts all hitting the same problems with individual funding is a waste of money , time and fine minds . This is a massive global power resource and it needs global funding.
Click to expand...

Not yet.
 
Check out Star Treks Enterprise power source.Spooky !! We already had the flip communicators and giant screen two way link up. Tasers, not phasers. Anything else come true ?
 
80deg16minW said:
Better to have multiple attempts at solving the problem going on at the same time.
Click to expand...

I was at a Fusion energy company in Milton Keynes this week; we're within spitting distance of solving all the build problems, and close to dealing with the containment issues.

It's a pure commercial race now, this will be all done dusted within 10 years and the winner(s) are set to make untold billons.

But it will be akin to the race to promote DC v AC back in 19th century.
 
Nuclear fusion start-up backed by Jeff Bezos to build first reactor in UK

General Fusion's demonstration plant in Oxfordshire will cost $400m

By Matthew Field 17 June 2021 • 11:22am

unnamed_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqBe6O56qrl4zbRlMQqI7UBFVse9JsN00kzbUr3IXHaGo.jpg

General Fusion's planned Culham demonstrator plant Credit: General Fusion

A nuclear fusion start-up backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has picked Oxfordshire for its pilot nuclear plant in a bid to create a new source of abundant clean energy.
General Fusion, a Canadian start-up, is hoping to crack the problem of using the power at the heart of stars to generate electricity.
Nuclear fusion involves the binding of atoms together at temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun, rather than traditional fission, which involves splitting atoms. The process should release vast amounts of carbon-free energy without harmful nuclear waste.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority said on Thursday it had reached an agreement with General Fusion allowing the start-up to build its first demonstration plant at the authority’s Culham campus near Oxford.
Construction on the plant, which will be 70pc of the size of a true fusion reactor and be able to heat its hydrogen plasma fuel to 150m degrees Celsius, will begin next year and is expected to finish in 2025.
The Canadian company raised $100m (£71m) for its technology last year, but the plant is expected to cost a further $400m.
Its investors include Mr Bezos and Shopify founder Tobias Lütke. The start-up has secured support from the Government to fund the project, although the figure has not been disclosed.
The cost will be a fraction of the cost of ITER, a nuclear fusion megaproject being built in the south of France that is estimated to cost €22bn (£18.8bn).
ITER uses lasers and electromagnets that hold superheated plasma in a giant, doughnut-shaped container known as a tokamak, to produce fusion reactions. The total size of ITER’s site is about 60 football fields.
General Fusion’s technology takes a very different approach. Its spherical reactor compresses hydrogen in a ball of molten metal using 500 pistons that squeeze the core by firing up to 60 shots per minute. Heat from the reaction can be used to produce power.
general-fusion_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGuGfsQgEu4uQ6a1bMVE_Az3HZn5FdKxp6MHkf4EytLk.jpg

Part of General Fusion's reactor Credit: General Fusion
Its reactor is only going to produce a fraction of the power planned by ITER - about 115 megawatts compared to 1,000 megawatts, but it is aimed at providing backup power generation and grid support to other renewable energy sources.
Amanda Solloway, the science minister, said: “This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I’m thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project.”
Christofer Mowry, chief executive of General Fusion, said: “This is incredibly exciting news for not only General Fusion, but also the global effort to develop practical fusion energy.”
 
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