While the world’s only major fusion power effort — ITER — continues to trundle along, with an eventual first-fusion date of 2027 at a cost of more than $20 billion to taxpayers, there’s a small lab in New Jersey that says it can produce fusion power within a year, with a total spend of just a few million dollars. This lab uses a much cheaper and easier method to reach nuclear fusion — called Focus Fusion — with the massive added benefit that its fusion reactors are small enough and safe enough to deploy domestically. To be honest it sounds too good to be true — but rest assured that Focus Fusion, at least to my eyes, is the real deal. This isn’t some kind of magical, inexplicable witchcraft like cold fusion: Focus Fusion appears to be based on cold, hard science. This could actually be it.
The key to Focus Fusion is a dense plasma focus device and a form of fusion called aneutronic fusion. These are both completely unlike current controlled fusion systems — such as the American NIF, European JET, or international ITER — which use massive magnets or lasers to create magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. Both inertial and magnetic confinement fusion require massive, billion-dollar setups that are hard to build and tough to fund.
The following video neatly explains what a dense plasma focus device is.
To read more and view the video, click here.