A section of the fusion machine being tested at General Fusion's
facility outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. General Fusion is
hoping to implement a long-shot strategy that could produce fusion
energy in the next few years.
The world would be a very different place if we could bottle up a bit
of the sun here on Earth and tap that abundant and clean energy supply.
Governments have spent many billions of dollars to develop that energy
source, fusion energy, but it's still a distant dream. Now a few upstart
companies are trying to do it on the cheap. And the ideas are credible
enough to attract serious private investment.
One
such company is hidden away in a small business park in the suburbs of
Vancouver, British Columbia. Nothing seems unusual here — there's a food
distributor, an engineering firm and small warehouses. But on one door
there's a sign suggesting that all is not normal.
The sign says "General Fusion" and warns people with pacemakers to proceed with caution.
The
reason for that caution can be found behind bulletproof walls that
surround an experimental machine. This gleaming metal structure could be
out of a science fiction movie set. It stands 15 feet tall, is
crisscrossed with wires and is covered with aluminum foil. Two men are
hunched over an instrument, troubleshooting.
The
machine is flanked with banks of electrical capacitors, which hold —
and release — the amount of energy you find in a stick of dynamite. A
siren warns to stay clear: The system is charging up, and with all that
electric charge, some piece of hardware could go flying.
This
plasma ray gun is part of a bigger instrument, which is still under
construction. The goal, simply put, is to create a small piece of the
sun and harness that energy.
"This is an
insanely ambitious project," says Michel Laberge, the brains behind the
project. He's a physicist and inventor with a rusty beard and a
college-casual wardrobe.
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