"Fuse" jumps the Silicon Valley Shark

[Paul_Schatzkin]

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Here's the latest from my daily Google alerts:

Inside a Fusion Startup's Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony

This is an account of an event held last summer to launch yet another VC funded fusion startup, Fuse Energy Technologies written by one Jaron Lanier, one of Silicon Valley (and Redmond, WA)'s more iconoclastic personalities.

Lanier's account doesn't have a whole lot to say about fusion, nor this particular start-up's approach, but it does illustrate what a hot topic fusion has become among the monied tech cognoscenti. The stage is set:

An audience composed of venture capitalists, US military and intelligence agency officials, physicists, and San Francisco artists have been invited to a secret event. They enter through an imposing vault door to take their places in rows of seats that feel tiny in the shadows of a vast space. Behind them is a sea of refrigerator-sized capacitors....

... and the mention of those "giant capacitors" is about as close as this account gets to describing why these people are supposedly there.

From there it's all... 21st century musicians, models, robots and celebrities. That's how you harness the sun, folks!

If you want to know anything about the approach, this video offers some insight:

Titan produces one terawatt of power."

... for a few nano seconds.

Did I hear somebody say "putt putt fusion"?

I will also link this video interview with Fuse Energy's founder, JC Btaiche (who started the company when he was 19 years old).

I do like some of the things he says about the potential impact that fusion will have on the culture and economy, how it will decentralize energy production and distribution, etc.

But, somehow I just don't think we have a lot to worry about on that front when we're firing up giant capacitors to terawatts of discharge for whole nano seconds.

--PS

P.S. I don't think we've covered this one here before... I did look through the topics under this forum, but a search for just the word "fuse" ... well, that word gets used a LOT around here...

[Joe Gayo]

"Fuse" is an attempt to be the next generation of Sandia's Z-pinch. My opinion is the goals are beyond fusion, similar to NIF.

[Paul_Schatzkin]

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Like what… what’s “beyond fusion”?

Never mind, I just answered my own question after finding this video from Forbes.com:

This 24-Year-Old Raised Millions To Solve Energy Problems Using Fusion Technology

Starting about 1 minute in:

... develop radiation testing facilities to simulate the effects of nuclear weapons on machinery. Fuse hopes to generate revenue from government contracts to support its long term R&D efforts – a business model that has excited Silicon Valley investors ... enough to pour $20-million into the company.

Then about 2:30 in,

Fuse is currently in talks to raise another $20-million for a Series A funding round.

So, fusion is just the carrot to get Silicon Valley to hold the stick.

Mission accomplished.


—PS

[Richard Hull]

Start ups abound and are as doomed as all prior startups are and were doomed.

There is an industry based fusion update issued about every two weeks or so. You tube is filled with these "fusion industry updates"

Here is the latest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFiUiqClflM

I found it incredible that Pacific Fusion just got a 900 million dollar boost!!!! Folks, that is close to a billion bucks in chasing "fools gold" for one single fusion promising entity. Moola contributed by fusion ignorant morons seems to abound. Real soon now is reborn!!

I watched Paul's suggested video and found it good in that honesty abounded with all the folks interviewed stating all the issues with their or any putt-putt boat fusion. "Cyclic Rate or Duty Cycle" is the show stopper. How will they capture and store or convert the terawatt or later petawatt bursts?
Not only a "rep rate issue" but a useful conversion of megamp currents over nano or even long stretched out micro-second pulses to distributable 24-7-365, electricity.

Nothing I have in my home that plugs into the wall outlet demands nano-second electricity.

Fusion energy, years in the making and years in the failing. Billions in the treasure lost down the fusion rabbit hole.
Read it and weep.....

Richard Hull

[Cinar Kagan]

I might be wrong here but something caught my eye.

Is it a terajoule or a terawatt pulse. It might be a play of words. They might be indicating watt like 1 ampere second through a 1 volt potential.

Should 1e12*1e-9 be around 1e3, essentially a kilojoule pulse? I find this a low probability as even some of the "fusion devices" we build and operate at an amateur scale run continous(wave) at this power level.

I might be just talking non-sense.

Cinar Kagan

[Paul_Schatzkin]

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I found it incredible that Pacific Fusion just got a 900 million dollar boost!!!! Folks, that is close to a billion bucks in chasing "fools gold" for one single fusion promising entity. Moola contributed by fusion ignorant morons seems to abound. Real soon now is reborn!!

Personally, I find this whole idea of the "Fusion Industry Association" laughable.

An "industry" is defined as:

...a group of businesses, organizations, or individuals that produce goods or provide services related to a specific field of economic activity.

Of particular interest is the use of the word "produce."

It seems to me the only thing the Fusion Industry "produces" is piles of ash from what were once large piles of capital.

The day will come when every VC in Silicon Valley will bar their door to fusion startups.

Today is obviously not that day.

--PS

[Rich Gorski]

Fuse is not a fusion reactor it's a big big high voltage, high current, 100 nanosecond pulse generator. They want to use it to dump huge amounts of energy over a very short time into some kind of fusion reactor that they haven't defined. It could pump lasers, ion generators, or whatever for fusion. Here's their white paper on it.

Experimental results of a 330 GW impedance‑matched Marx generator

fuse.pdf

(2.19 MiB) Downloaded 17 times

They claim their Marx generator can dump 1 Terrawatt of power into a 2 ohm, impedance matched load in 100 nanoseconds.
P = I^2R so I = sqrt(1E12/2) or SQRT(0.5E12) or 707KA... and voltage would have to be... V = P/I = 1E12/7.07E5 = 1.4E6 volts...1.4 Mega volts

if it does this in 100 nanoseconds then the capacitor stored energy is
E = P*t = 1E12 * 1E-7 = 1E5 Joules or 1/10 Mega Joule.

I wish I had one of these pulse generators in my lab.

Rich G.