Have we already passed our window for a revolution in energy production ?  Some folks (like me) sure think we’re dangerously close.  While there is little most of us can do beyond climbing onto our soap boxes, there are people in this world ready to step-up and deliver that revolution before the window is forever sealed — along with humanity’s fate.

Canadian start-up General Fusion (love the name) has dug-up an “old” fusion idea and has generously applied today’s technology to the barriers that, at the time, made the idea unfeasible:

The prototype reactor will be composed of a metal sphere about three meters in diameter containing a liquid mixture of lithium and lead. The liquid is spun to create a vortex inside the sphere that forms a vertical cavity in the middle. At this point, two donut-shaped plasma rings held together by self-generated magnetic fields, called spheromaks, are injected into the cavity from the top and bottom of the sphere and come together to create a target in the center. “Think about it as blowing smoke rings at each other,” says Doug Richardson, chief executive of General Fusion.

On the outside of the metal sphere are 220 pneumatically controlled pistons, each programmed to simultaneously ram the surface of the sphere at 100 meters a second. The force of the pistons sends an acoustic wave through the lead-lithium mixture, and that accelerates into a shock wave as it reaches the plasma, which is made of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.

If everything works as planned, the plasma will compress instantly and the isotopes will fuse into helium, releasing a burst of energy-packed neutrons that are captured by the lead-lithium liquid. The rapid heat buildup in the liquid will be extracted through a heat exchanger, with half used to create steam that spins a turbine for power generation, and the rest used to recharge the pistons for the next “shot.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/

While it’s not quite the convenient table-top design we’d all love to have in the trunk of our DeLorean, it sure sounds more promising than the almost mad level of effort, technology and brute force that will be needed to get the international ITER reactor running.

As these answers become massive technological undertakings, things seem to be able to go very wrong, perhaps even more often and more wrong than ever before in our technological undertakings.  Here’s hoping that the “simplicity” of multiple acoustic poundings are just what are needed to get nearly limitless energy production online.

Let’s not paint this window shut forever.