Wired – Big nuke vs little nuke: how the nuclear establishment is stifling innovation
Wired – Big nuke vs little nuke: how the nuclear establishment is stifling innovation
By Mark Piesing | 21 February 12
“We just need millions of dollars to crack fusion, when the international community is talking about billions,” says Dr Philip Wallace, scanning FaceTime for my reaction from his office on an industrial estate in Richmond, Washington State. Wallace is president of nuclear startup Helion Energy, founded to commercialise the work of “maverick scientist” Dr John Slough, inspired in turn by research from the 1960s into confining plasmas.
Helion made headlines in New Scientist last year after claiming in a peer-reviewed research paper that they had developed a working “Fusion Engine” that had already “performed fusion” on a small scale by colliding together balls of plasma at high speed. The paper then went on to show that with $20 million (£12.6 million) and an engine only three times larger, they could achieve in less than two years what ITER, the $15 billion (£9.45 billion) international fusion project, hasn’t been able to: break-even. This is fusion’s holy grail — the point at which the experiments generate the same or more energy than they use up. Once the energy the reaction produces exceeds the energy needed, fusion power becomes a reality.
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