84-490: General Fusion is a Canadian company based in Richmond , British Columbia , which is developing a fusion power technology based on magnetized target fusion (MTF). The company was founded in 2002 by Dr. Michel Laberge. The company has more than 150 employees. The technology under development injects the magnetized target, a plasma mass in the form of a compact toroid , into a cylinder of spinning liquid metal. The target
168-434: A health threat to humans. It is estimated that a 70 kg (154 lb) person might drink 4.8 litres (1.3 US gal) of heavy water without serious consequences. Small doses of heavy water (a few grams in humans, containing an amount of deuterium comparable to that normally present in the body) are routinely used as harmless metabolic tracers in humans and animals. The deuteron has spin +1 (" triplet state ") and
252-926: A $ 27 million funding round. SDTC awarded General Fusion a further C$ 12.75 million in March 2016 to for the project "Demonstration of fusion energy technology" in a consortium with McGill University (Shock Wave Physics Group) and Hatch Ltd . In October 2018 Canadian Minister for Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains , announced that the Canadian government's Strategic Innovation Fund would invest C$ 49.3 million in General Fusion. In December 2019, General Fusion raised $ 65 million in Series E equity financing from Singapore 's Temasek Holdings , Bezos and Chrisalix, concurrently with another $ 38 million from Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund . The firm said
336-411: A Marshall gun to inject a deuterium plasma into a target chamber. The target chamber’s outer wall is a solid lithium liner contained within a cylindrical composite vacuum vessel. Toroidal coils mounted on the outside of the cylindrical vessel are pulsed and push on the liner to initiate compression. As the liner collapses, the plasma is compressed to higher density and temperature. In January 2024,
420-399: A Vancouver-based venture capital firm, led a C$ 1.2 million seed round of financing in 2007. Other Canadian venture capital firms that participated in the seed round were GrowthWorks Capital and BDC Venture Capital . In 2009, a consortium led by General Fusion was awarded C$ 13.9 million by SDTC to conduct a four-year research project on "Acoustically Driven Magnetized Target Fusion"; SDTC is
504-596: A commercial reactor. In August 2023, the company completed the first close of its Series F raise for a combined $ 25 million USD of funding. The round was anchored by existing investors, BDC Capital and GIC. It also included new grant funding from the Government of British Columbia. In December 2023, the company announced the Canadian government invested an additional CA$ 5 million through Canada’s Strategic Invesment Fund to advance its LM26 fusion demonstration machine at its Richmond headquarters. Beginning in 2015,
588-473: A deuterium nucleus (actually a highly excited state of it), a nucleus with two protons, and a nucleus with two neutrons. These states are not stable. The deuteron wavefunction must be antisymmetric if the isospin representation is used (since a proton and a neutron are not identical particles, the wavefunction need not be antisymmetric in general). Apart from their isospin, the two nucleons also have spin and spatial distributions of their wavefunction. The latter
672-459: A foundation established by the Canadian government. The other member of the consortium is Los Alamos National Laboratory . A 2011 Series B round raised $ 19.5 million from a syndicate including Bezos Expeditions, Braemar Energy Ventures, Business Development Bank of Canada, Cenovus Energy, Chrysalix Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs Fund, and Pender Ventures. In May 2015 the government of Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional Berhad , led
756-416: A fusion reaction in its first MTF prototype. In 2010, it produced its first at-scale plasma injector with magnetically confined plasma. In 2011 it first demonstrated compressive heating of magnetized plasma. A proof-of-concept compression system was constructed in 2013 with 14 full size pistons arranged around a 1-meter diameter spherical compression chamber to demonstrate pneumatic compression and collapse of
840-547: A higher boiling point (23.64 vs. 20.27 K), a higher critical temperature (38.3 vs. 32.94 K) and a higher critical pressure (1.6496 vs. 1.2858 MPa). The physical properties of deuterium compounds can exhibit significant kinetic isotope effects and other physical and chemical property differences from the protium analogs. H 2 O, for example, is more viscous than normal H 2 O . There are differences in bond energy and length for compounds of heavy hydrogen isotopes compared to protium, which are larger than
924-407: A liquid metal vortex. The pneumatic pistons were used to create a converging spherical wave to compress the liquid metal. The 100 kg, 30 cm diameter hammer pistons were driven down a 1 m long bore by compressed air. The hammer piston struck an anvil at the end of the bore, generating a large amplitude acoustic pulse that was transmitted to the liquid metal in the compression chamber. To create
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#17327799682701008-414: A neutron and an "up" state (↑) being a proton. A pair of nucleons can either be in an antisymmetric state of isospin called singlet , or in a symmetric state called triplet . In terms of the "down" state and "up" state, the singlet is This is a nucleus with one proton and one neutron, i.e. a deuterium nucleus. The triplet is and thus consists of three types of nuclei, which are supposed to be symmetric:
1092-557: A plasma by a liquid metal wall, despite this being a key technology required for their powerplant. Nor have they demonstrated a liquid metal shaft, or a means of re-establishing high vacuum conditions in the short time interval (<1 s) between pulses. In General Fusion’s most recent conceptual design, the MTF power plant proposed by General Fusion would produce about 300 MWe from two 150 MW machines running in tandem. As of 2021, General Fusion had received $ 430 million in funding. General Fusion
1176-414: A process that uses hydrogen sulfide gas at high pressure. While India is self-sufficient in heavy water for its own use, India also exports reactor-grade heavy water. Formula: D 2 or 1 H 2 Data at about 18 K for H 2 ( triple point ): Compared to hydrogen in its natural composition on Earth, pure deuterium ( H 2 ) has a higher melting point (18.72 K vs. 13.99 K),
1260-598: A ratio of as much as 23 atoms of deuterium per million hydrogen atoms in undisturbed gas clouds, which is only 15% below the WMAP estimated primordial ratio of about 27 atoms per million from the Big Bang. This has been interpreted to mean that less deuterium has been destroyed in star formation in the Milky Way galaxy than expected, or perhaps deuterium has been replenished by a large in-fall of primordial hydrogen from outside
1344-773: A spherical wave, the timing of these strikes had to be controlled to within 10 μs. The firm recorded sequences of consecutive shots with impact velocities of 50 m/s and timing synchronized within 2 μs. However it was found that the wall of the liquid metal vortex turned to a spray soon after the arrival of the pressure wave. From its inception until 2016, the firm built more than a dozen plasma injectors. These include large two-stage injectors with formation and magnetic acceleration sections (dubbed "PI" experiments), and three generations of smaller, single-stage formation-only injectors (MRT, PROSPECTOR and SPECTOR). The firm published research demonstrating SPECTOR lifespans of up to 2 milliseconds and temperatures in excess of 400 eV. As of 2016,
1428-544: Is Greg Twinney. The company's website states Greg joined General Fusion in 2020 with a well-established track record of executive leadership. Serving as General Fusion’s chief financial officer for two years, he expanded the company’s investor base and helped to launch the Fusion Demonstration Program. In 2022, he took the top spot as General Fusion’s chief executive officer. Greg’s experience prior to joining General Fusion demonstrates his ability to set
1512-542: Is about 10.6% denser than normal water (so that ice made from it sinks in normal water). Heavy water is slightly toxic in eukaryotic animals, with 25% substitution of the body water causing cell division problems and sterility, and 50% substitution causing death by cytotoxic syndrome (bone marrow failure and gastrointestinal lining failure). Prokaryotic organisms, however, can survive and grow in pure heavy water, though they develop slowly. Despite this toxicity, consumption of heavy water under normal circumstances does not pose
1596-422: Is about three times that of Earth water. This has caused renewed interest in suggestions that Earth's water may be partly of asteroidal origin. Deuterium has also been observed to be concentrated over the mean solar abundance in other terrestrial planets, in particular Mars and Venus. Deuterium is produced for industrial, scientific and military purposes, by starting with ordinary water—a small fraction of which
1680-417: Is about three times that of Earth water. This figure is the highest yet measured in a comet. H HR's thus continue to be an active topic of research in both astronomy and climatology. Deuterium is often represented by the chemical symbol D. Since it is an isotope of hydrogen with mass number 2, it is also represented by H. IUPAC allows both D and H, though H is preferred. A distinct chemical symbol
1764-740: Is also an investment committee member for Future Fund: Breakthrough, a UK government-backed direct co-investment fund for late-stage deep tech companies. Klaas started his career with McKinsey & Company in Amsterdam. From there, he joined Vanenburg Group where he established and managed a corporate venturing team that led investments in Europe, Israel and the US, which included WebEx. Klaas has an MSc in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology, and an MBA from Insead. General Fusion's approach
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#17327799682701848-624: Is another one of the arguments in favor of the Big Bang over the Steady State theory of the Universe. The observed ratios of hydrogen to helium to deuterium in the universe are difficult to explain except with a Big Bang model. It is estimated that the abundances of deuterium have not evolved significantly since their production about 13.8 billion years ago. Measurements of Milky Way galactic deuterium from ultraviolet spectral analysis show
1932-413: Is antisymmetric under nucleons exchange due to isospin, and therefore must be symmetric under the double exchange of their spin and location. Therefore, it can be in either of the following two different states: In the first case the deuteron is a spin triplet, so that its total spin s is 1. It also has an even parity and therefore even orbital angular momentum l . The lower its orbital angular momentum,
2016-418: Is barely bound at E B = 2.23 MeV , and none of the higher energy states are bound. The singlet deuteron is a virtual state, with a negative binding energy of ~60 keV . There is no such stable particle, but this virtual particle transiently exists during neutron–proton inelastic scattering, accounting for the unusually large neutron scattering cross-section of the proton. The deuterium nucleus
2100-579: Is based on the Linus concept developed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) beginning in 1972. Researchers at NRL suggested an approach that retains many of the advantages of liner compression to achieve small-scale, high-energy-density fusion. According to Laberge, Linus could not properly time the compression using the technology of the era. Faster computers provide the required timing. However, this claim
2184-453: Is called a deuteron . It has a mass of 2.013 553 212 544 (15) Da (just over 1.875 GeV/ c ). The charge radius of a deuteron is 2.127 78 (27) × 10 m . Like the proton radius , measurements using muonic deuterium produce a smaller result: 2.125 62 (78) fm . Deuterium is one of only five stable nuclides with an odd number of protons and an odd number of neutrons. ( H, Li , B , N , Ta ;
2268-822: Is chaired by Klaas De Boer, who currently chairs AIM-listed Xeros Technology Group and serves on the Boards of SmartKem and veriNOS pharmaceuticals. His bio on the company's website says Klaas has over 20 years of venture capital experience spanning Europe, North America and the Middle East. From 2006 until 2021, he was the Managing Partner of Entrepreneurs Fund, where his managing portfolio included companies such as inge GmbH (sold to BASF), Technolas Perfect Vision (sold to Bausch & Lomb), Prosonix Ltd (sold to Circassia), Lifeline Scientific Inc (sold to Genext), New Motion (sold to Shell) and Optinose (Nasdaq listing). Klaas
2352-543: Is designed to achieve fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius (10 keV) by 2025 and progress towards scientific breakeven equivalent by 2026. This was an adjustment to its previously announced Fusion Demonstration Program. In June 2021, the company announced it would build 70% of a full-scale fusion demonstration plant in the UK as part of a public-private partnership with the UK Government . General Fusion's CEO
2436-402: Is in the s = 1 , l = 0 state. The same considerations lead to the possible states of an isospin triplet having s = 0 , l = even or s = 1 , l = odd . Thus, the state of lowest energy has s = 1 , l = 1 , higher than that of the isospin singlet. The analysis just given is in fact only approximate, both because isospin is not an exact symmetry, and more importantly because
2520-496: Is mechanically compressed to fusion-relevant densities and pressures, by anywhere from a dozen to hundreds (in various designs) of steam-driven pistons. In 2018, the firm published papers on a spherical tokamak and a recent conceptual design was presented at the 30th IEEE Symposium of Fusion Engineering (SOFE). In August 2023, the company announced an updated plan to build a new fusion demonstration machine – Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) – at its Canadian headquarters. The company says LM26
2604-477: Is naturally occurring heavy water —and then separating out the heavy water by the Girdler sulfide process , distillation, or other methods. In theory, deuterium for heavy water could be created in a nuclear reactor, but separation from ordinary water is the cheapest bulk production process. The world's leading supplier of deuterium was Atomic Energy of Canada Limited until 1997, when the last heavy water plant
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2688-403: Is not borne out by the literature as various Linus devices with no timing constraints, including systems using single pistons, were built during the experimental runs during the 1970s and demonstrated fully reversible compression strokes. General Fusion's magnetized target fusion system uses a ~3 meter sphere filled with liquid metal. The liquid is spun, creating a vertical cavity in the centre of
2772-476: Is one of two stable isotopes of hydrogen ; the other is protium, or hydrogen-1, H. The deuterium nucleus ( deuteron ) contains one proton and one neutron , whereas the far more common H has no neutrons. Deuterium has a natural abundance in Earth's oceans of about one atom of deuterium in every 6,420 atoms of hydrogen. Thus, deuterium accounts for about 0.0156% by number (0.0312% by mass) of all hydrogen in
2856-439: Is symmetric if the deuteron is symmetric under parity (i.e. has an "even" or "positive" parity), and antisymmetric if the deuteron is antisymmetric under parity (i.e. has an "odd" or "negative" parity). The parity is fully determined by the total orbital angular momentum of the two nucleons: if it is even then the parity is even (positive), and if it is odd then the parity is odd (negative). The deuteron, being an isospin singlet,
2940-460: Is the ratio found in the gas giant planets, such as Jupiter. The analysis of deuterium–protium ratios ( H HR) in comets found results very similar to the mean ratio in Earth's oceans (156 atoms of deuterium per 10 hydrogen atoms). This reinforces theories that much of Earth's ocean water is of cometary origin. The H HR of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko , as measured by the Rosetta space probe,
3024-429: Is thought to have played an important role in setting the number and ratios of the elements that were formed in the Big Bang . Combining thermodynamics and the changes brought about by cosmic expansion, one can calculate the fraction of protons and neutrons based on the temperature at the point that the universe cooled enough to allow formation of nuclei . This calculation indicates seven protons for every neutron at
3108-434: Is thought to represent close to the primordial Solar System ratio. This is about 17% of the terrestrial ratio of 156 deuterium atoms per million hydrogen atoms. Comets such as Comet Hale-Bopp and Halley's Comet have been measured to contain more deuterium (about 200 atoms per million hydrogens), ratios which are enriched with respect to the presumed protosolar nebula ratio, probably due to heating, and which are similar to
3192-490: Is thus a boson . The NMR frequency of deuterium is significantly different from normal hydrogen. Infrared spectroscopy also easily differentiates many deuterated compounds, due to the large difference in IR absorption frequency seen in the vibration of a chemical bond containing deuterium, versus light hydrogen. The two stable isotopes of hydrogen can also be distinguished by using mass spectrometry . The triplet deuteron nucleon
3276-493: Is used for convenience because of the isotope's common use in various scientific processes. Also, its large mass difference with protium ( H) confers non-negligible chemical differences with H compounds. Deuterium has a mass of 2.014 102 Da , about twice the mean hydrogen atomic weight of 1.007 947 Da , or twice protium's mass of 1.007 825 Da . The isotope weight ratios within other elements are largely insignificant in this regard. In quantum mechanics ,
3360-498: The H had been highly concentrated. The discovery of deuterium won Urey a Nobel Prize in 1934. Deuterium is destroyed in the interiors of stars faster than it is produced. Other natural processes are thought to produce only an insignificant amount of deuterium. Nearly all deuterium found in nature was produced in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, as the basic or primordial ratio of H to H (≈26 atoms of deuterium per 10 hydrogen atoms) has its origin from that time. This
3444-471: The Solar System (as confirmed by planetary probes), and in the spectra of stars , is also an important datum in cosmology . Gamma radiation from ordinary nuclear fusion dissociates deuterium into protons and neutrons, and there is no known natural process other than Big Bang nucleosynthesis that might have produced deuterium at anything close to its observed natural abundance. Deuterium is produced by
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3528-417: The electromagnetic interaction relative to the strong nuclear interaction . The symmetry relating the proton and neutron is known as isospin and denoted I (or sometimes T ). Isospin is an SU(2) symmetry, like ordinary spin , so is completely analogous to it. The proton and neutron, each of which have iso spin-1/2 , form an isospin doublet (analogous to a spin doublet ), with a "down" state (↓) being
3612-427: The quantum state of the deuterium is a superposition (a linear combination) of the s = 1 , l = 0 state and the s = 1 , l = 2 state, even though the first component is much bigger. Since the total angular momentum j is also a good quantum number (it is a constant in time), both components must have the same j , and therefore j = 1 . This is the total spin of the deuterium nucleus. To summarize,
3696-427: The reduced mass of the deuterium is markedly higher than that of protium. In nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy , deuterium has a very different NMR frequency (e.g. 61 MHz when protium is at 400 MHz) and is much less sensitive. Deuterated solvents are usually used in protium NMR to prevent the solvent from overlapping with the signal, though deuterium NMR on its own right is also possible. Deuterium
3780-524: The strong nuclear interaction between the two nucleons is related to angular momentum in spin–orbit interaction that mixes different s and l states. That is, s and l are not constant in time (they do not commute with the Hamiltonian ), and over time a state such as s = 1 , l = 0 may become a state of s = 1 , l = 2 . Parity is still constant in time, so these do not mix with odd l states (such as s = 0 , l = 1 ). Therefore,
3864-757: The 2023 Fusion Industry Association report, the company has 150 employees and has raised approximately USD $ 300,000,000+. In 2023, the firm reduced headcount significantly and announced that it was building a new machine, “LM26”, with the goal of achieving breakeven by 2026. The Fusion Demonstration Plant being built in the UK will be delayed. Magnetized target fusion has a number of challenges . General Fusion's founder and Chief Science Officer noted several specific difficulties that are not present in DC tokamaks . These include, but are not limited to: Laberge stated that these challenges were still to be solved. Indeed, General Fusion are yet to demonstrate mechanical compression of
3948-436: The Universe became cool enough to form deuterium (at about a temperature equivalent to 100 keV ). At this point, there was a sudden burst of element formation (first deuterium, which immediately fused into helium). However, very soon thereafter, at twenty minutes after the Big Bang, the Universe became too cool for any further nuclear fusion or nucleosynthesis. At this point, the elemental abundances were nearly fixed, with
4032-440: The beginning of nucleogenesis , a ratio that would remain stable even after nucleogenesis was over. This fraction was in favor of protons initially, primarily because the lower mass of the proton favored their production. As the Universe expanded, it cooled. Free neutrons and protons are less stable than helium nuclei, and the protons and neutrons had a strong energetic reason to form helium-4 . However, forming helium-4 requires
4116-481: The company announced that it had completed 200,000+ plasma shots, filed 150 patents/patents pending, and that headcount had passed 200. PI3 reached 10 ms confinement times and temperatures of 250 eV, almost 3 million degrees Celsius, without active magnetic stabilization, auxiliary heating, or a conventional divertor. Its primary compression testbed, a 1:10 scale system using water rather than liquid metal, has completed over 1,000 shots, behaving as predicted. According to
4200-480: The company reported it had achieved symmetrical compression of a solid lithium ring within a few weeks of announcing LM26 and had built and began operating a compression test bed for LM26 called Prototype 0. The Fusion Demonstration Program is a 70% scale prototype which was being built in Oxfordshire, UK with a reported cost of US$ 400 million. It had been announced that the core technology had been proven out and
4284-418: The deuterium nucleus is antisymmetric in terms of isospin, and has spin 1 and even (+1) parity. The relative angular momentum of its nucleons l is not well defined, and the deuteron is a superposition of mostly l = 0 with some l = 2 . In order to find theoretically the deuterium magnetic dipole moment μ , one uses the formula for a nuclear magnetic moment with g and g are g -factors of
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#17327799682704368-675: The energy levels of electrons in atoms depend on the reduced mass of the system of electron and nucleus. For a hydrogen atom , the role of reduced mass is most simply seen in the Bohr model of the atom, where the reduced mass appears in a simple calculation of the Rydberg constant and Rydberg equation, but the reduced mass also appears in the Schrödinger equation , and the Dirac equation for calculating atomic energy levels. The reduced mass of
4452-414: The firm conducted three crowdsourcing challenges through Waltham , Massachusetts-based firm Innocentive . The first challenge was Method for Sealing Anvil Under Repetitive Impacts Against Molten Metal. General Fusion successfully sourced a solution for "robust seal technology" capable of withstanding extreme temperatures and repetitive hammering, so as to isolate the rams from the liquid metal that fills
4536-465: The firm demonstrated compression of a water cavity into a controlled, symmetrical shape. Also in 2021 the company agreed to build a demonstration plant in Oxfordshire , at Culham , the center of the UK's nuclear R&D. The plant is planned to be 70% of the size of a commercial power plant. The company claimed it had validated all the individual components for the demonstration reactor. In 2022,
4620-567: The firm had developed the power plant's subsystems, including plasma injectors and compression driver technology. Patents were awarded in 2006 for a fusion energy reactor design, and enabling technologies such as plasma accelerators (2015), methods for creating liquid metal vortexes (2016) and lithium evaporators (2016). In 2016 the GF design used compact toroid plasmas formed by a coaxial Marshal gun (a type of plasma railgun ), with magnetic fields supported by internal plasma currents and eddy currents in
4704-427: The flux conserver wall. In 2016, the firm reported plasma lifetimes up to 2 milliseconds and electron temperatures in excess of 400 eV (4,800,000 °C). Around 2017 the company performed a series of experiments referred to as PCS (Plasma Compression Small). These implosion experiments used a chemical driver to compress an aluminum liner onto a compact toroid plasma. Because the implosions involved chemical explosives,
4788-469: The funds would permit it to begin the design, construction, and operation of its Fusion Demonstration Plant. In January 2021, the company announced funding by Shopify founder Tobias Lütke 's Thistledown Capital. In November 2021, the company completed an over-subscribed $ 130M Series E round. Investors included Bezos, Business Development Bank of Canada, hedge fund Segra Capital Management and family-office investors. Funds were to be dedicated to constructing
4872-697: The galaxy. In space a few hundred light years from the Sun, deuterium abundance is only 15 atoms per million, but this value is presumably influenced by differential adsorption of deuterium onto carbon dust grains in interstellar space. The abundance of deuterium in Jupiter 's atmosphere has been directly measured by the Galileo space probe as 26 atoms per million hydrogen atoms. ISO-SWS observations find 22 atoms per million hydrogen atoms in Jupiter. and this abundance
4956-464: The groundwork to create massive shareholder value for technology-enabled companies. He worked in varied C-level roles in complex industries, moving companies through all stages of maturity and scale, across all functions of the businesses. Michel Laberge is the founder and Chief Science Officer of General Fusion. Michel is a physicist with overall practical experience in plasma physics and modern plasma diagnostic techniques. He has extensive knowledge of
5040-453: The intermediate step of forming deuterium. Through much of the few minutes after the Big Bang during which nucleosynthesis could have occurred, the temperature was high enough that the mean energy per particle was greater than the binding energy of weakly bound deuterium; therefore, any deuterium that was formed was immediately destroyed. This situation is known as the deuterium bottleneck . The bottleneck delayed formation of any helium-4 until
5124-418: The isotopic differences in any other element. Bonds involving deuterium and tritium are somewhat stronger than the corresponding bonds in protium, and these differences are enough to cause significant changes in biological reactions. Pharmaceutical firms are interested in the fact that H is harder to remove from carbon than H. Deuterium can replace H in water molecules to form heavy water ( H 2 O), which
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#17327799682705208-566: The latest technologies related to electronics, computers, materials, lithography, optics and fabrication and is experienced in designing and constructing test apparatuses to evaluate technical concepts. Prior to establishing General Fusion, Michel spent nine years at Creo Products in Vancouver as a senior physicist and principal engineer. His roles included inventor, designer, and scientific project leader on projects that resulted in more than $ 1 billion worth of product sales. The board of directors
5292-419: The long-lived radionuclides K , V , La , Lu also occur naturally.) Most odd–odd nuclei are unstable to beta decay , because the decay products are even–even , and thus more strongly bound, due to nuclear pairing effects . Deuterium, however, benefits from having its proton and neutron coupled to a spin-1 state, which gives a stronger nuclear attraction; the corresponding spin-1 state does not exist in
5376-404: The lower its energy. Therefore, the lowest possible energy state has s = 1 , l = 0 . In the second case the deuteron is a spin singlet, so that its total spin s is 0. It also has an odd parity and therefore odd orbital angular momentum l . Therefore, the lowest possible energy state has s = 0 , l = 1 . Since s = 1 gives a stronger nuclear attraction, the deuterium ground state
5460-586: The nuclear force. In both cases, this causes the diproton and dineutron to be unstable . The proton and neutron in deuterium can be dissociated through neutral current interactions with neutrinos . The cross section for this interaction is comparatively large, and deuterium was successfully used as a neutrino target in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory experiment. Diatomic deuterium ( H 2 ) has ortho and para nuclear spin isomers like diatomic hydrogen, but with differences in
5544-407: The number and population of spin states and rotational levels , which occur because the deuteron is a boson with nuclear spin equal to one. Due to the similarity in mass and nuclear properties between the proton and neutron, they are sometimes considered as two symmetric types of the same object, a nucleon . While only the proton has electric charge, this is often negligible due to the weakness of
5628-515: The ocean: 4.85 × 10 tonnes of deuterium – mainly as HOD (or HO H or H HO) and only rarely as D 2 O (or H 2 O) (Deuterium Oxide, also known as Heavy Water )– in 1.4 × 10 tonnes of water. The abundance of H changes slightly from one kind of natural water to another (see Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water ). The name deuterium comes from Greek deuteros , meaning "second". American chemist Harold Urey discovered deuterium in 1931. Urey and others produced samples of heavy water in which
5712-458: The only change as some of the radioactive products of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (such as tritium ) decay. The deuterium bottleneck in the formation of helium, together with the lack of stable ways for helium to combine with hydrogen or with itself (no stable nucleus has a mass number of 5 or 8) meant that an insignificant amount of carbon, or any elements heavier than carbon, formed in the Big Bang. These elements thus required formation in stars. At
5796-467: The outer solar atmosphere at roughly the same concentration as in Jupiter, and this has probably been unchanged since the origin of the Solar System. The natural abundance of H seems to be a very similar fraction of hydrogen, wherever hydrogen is found, unless there are obvious processes at work that concentrate it. The existence of deuterium at a low but constant primordial fraction in all hydrogen
5880-679: The pistons. In addition to its role in compressing the plasma, the liquid metal liner shields the power plant structure from neutrons released by the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction, overcoming the problem of structural damage to plasma-facing materials . The lithium in the mixture breeds tritium. In August 2023, General Fusion announced it intends to build a new fusion demonstration machine called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) to achieve important technical milestones using Magnetized Target Fusion . LM26 aims to achieve fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius by 2025 and progress towards scientific breakeven equivalent by 2026. LM26 will use
5964-403: The plasma to the range where the fuel atoms fuse, releasing energy in the form of fast neutrons and alpha particles . This energy heats the liquid metal, which is then pumped through a heat exchanger to generate electricity via a steam turbine. The plasma forming and compressing process repeats and the liquid metal is continuously pumped through the system. Some of the steam is recycled to power
6048-404: The rare cluster decay , and occasional absorption of naturally occurring neutrons by light hydrogen, but these are trivial sources. There is thought to be little deuterium in the interior of the Sun and other stars, as at these temperatures the nuclear fusion reactions that consume deuterium happen much faster than the proton–proton reaction that creates deuterium. However, deuterium persists in
6132-498: The ratio of these two numbers, which is 1.000272. The wavelengths of all deuterium spectroscopic lines are shorter than the corresponding lines of light hydrogen, by 0.0272%. In astronomical observation, this corresponds to a blue Doppler shift of 0.0272% of the speed of light , or 81.6 km/s. The differences are much more pronounced in vibrational spectroscopy such as infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy , and in rotational spectra such as microwave spectroscopy because
6216-475: The ratios found in Earth seawater. The recent measurement of deuterium amounts of 161 atoms per million hydrogen in Comet 103P/Hartley (a former Kuiper belt object), a ratio almost exactly that in Earth's oceans (155.76 ± 0.1, but in fact from 153 to 156 ppm), emphasizes the theory that Earth's surface water may be largely from comets. Most recently the H HR of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as measured by Rosetta
6300-619: The same time, the failure of much nucleogenesis during the Big Bang ensured that there would be plenty of hydrogen in the later universe available to form long-lived stars, such as the Sun. Deuterium occurs in trace amounts naturally as deuterium gas ( H 2 or D 2 ), but most deuterium atoms in the Universe are bonded with H to form a gas called hydrogen deuteride (HD or H H). Similarly, natural water contains deuterated molecules, almost all as semiheavy water HDO with only one deuterium. The existence of deuterium on Earth, elsewhere in
6384-632: The sphere. The firm awarded Kirby Meacham, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer from Cleveland, Ohio, the $ 20,000 prize. Richmond, British Columbia Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.226 via cp1108 cp1108, Varnish XID 189592402 Upstream caches: cp1108 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:46:08 GMT Deuterium Deuterium ( hydrogen-2 , symbol H or D , also known as heavy hydrogen )
6468-401: The sphere. This vortex flow is established and maintained by an external pumping system; liquid flows into the sphere through tangentially directed ports at the equator and exits radially through ports near the poles of the sphere. A plasma injector is attached to the top of the sphere, from which a pulse of magnetically confined deuterium - tritium plasma fuel is injected into the center of
6552-408: The system in these equations is close to the mass of a single electron, but differs from it by a small amount about equal to the ratio of mass of the electron to the nucleus. For H, this amount is about 1837 / 1836 , or 1.000545, and for H it is even smaller: 3671 / 3670 , or 1.0002725. The energies of electronic spectra lines for H and H therefore differ by
6636-669: The tests took place outdoors in remote locations. The tests were destructive and could only be executed every few months. These tests were carried out to advance the understanding of plasma compression with the goal of advancing toward a nuclear-reactor scale demonstration. As of December 2017, the PI3 plasma injector held the title as the world's most powerful plasma injector, ten times more powerful than its predecessor. It also achieved stable compression of plasma. In 2019 it successfully confined plasma within its liquid metal cavity. From 2019 to 2021 it increased plasma performance. As of 2021,
6720-454: The two-neutron or two-proton system, due to the Pauli exclusion principle which would require one or the other identical particle with the same spin to have some other different quantum number, such as orbital angular momentum . But orbital angular momentum of either particle gives a lower binding energy for the system, mainly due to increasing distance of the particles in the steep gradient of
6804-417: The vortex. A few milligrams of gas are used per pulse. The gas is ionized by a bank of capacitors to form a spherical tokamak plasma (self-confined magnetized plasma rings) composed of the deuterium–tritium fuel. The outside of the sphere is covered with steam pistons, which push the liquid metal and collapse the vortex, thereby compressing the plasma. The compression increases the density and temperature of
6888-641: Was not among the eight companies to receive funding as part of the United States Department of Energy Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. Investors included Chrysalix venture capital , the Business Development Bank of Canada —a Canadian federal Crown corporation , Bezos Expeditions , Cenovus Energy , Pender Ventures, Khazanah Nasional —a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund , and Sustainable Development Technology Canada (STDC). Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital,
6972-523: Was ready to be put together and that the plant was to commence operations in 2027. However the plant was put on hold in 2023 when the company announced that it would instead build a different machine in Canada aimed at demonstrating breakeven by 2026. The plant had several key differences from the commercial power plant concept: The firm was founded in 2002 by former Creo Products senior physicist and principal engineer Michel Laberge . In 2005 it produced
7056-557: Was shut down. Canada uses heavy water as a neutron moderator for the operation of the CANDU reactor design. Another major producer of heavy water is India. All but one of India's atomic energy plants are pressurized heavy water plants, which use natural (i.e., not enriched) uranium. India has eight heavy water plants, of which seven are in operation. Six plants, of which five are in operation, are based on D–H exchange in ammonia gas. The other two plants extract deuterium from natural water in
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