The BBC has a report on technology billionaires funding a variety of "moonshot" style startups trying to finally come up with a way of producing commercial quantities of power from fusion, such as General Fusion and Tri Alpha - The secretive, billionaire-backed plans to harness fusion.

CleanBreak reports that interest in fusion remains alive and well in the Pacific north west - Amazon’s Jeff Bezos invests in Canadian nuclear fusion startup.

Nuclear fusion startup General Fusion of Burnaby, B.C., has just closed a Series B Funding round worth $19.5 million, bringing its total haul to more than $33 million (likely higher, depending on where grants from Sustainable Development Technology Canada fit in). What’s interesting about this round is that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, through his personal investment firm Bezos Expeditions, has decided to contribute. Bezos’ share of the round was not disclosed, but it’s a sign that the company’s Magnetized Target Fusion technology and its progress on building a prototype is beginning to attract some attention (as opposed to skepticism).

Another new investor in the round is Canadian oil company Cenovus Energy, through its Environmental Opportunity Fund. Bezos and Cenovus join returning investors Chrysalix Energy, GrowthWorks, Braemar Energy Ventures, Entrepreneurs Fund, Business Development Bank of Canada, and SET Venture Partners. …

I have a chapter in my upcoming book, Mad Like Tesla, about General Fusion, its technology and its struggle to be taken seriously. It’s a great company taking the kinds of risks we need to see in this world.

The NZ Herald has an enthusiastic article on a form of "fusion (known as Aneutronic fusion) - Fusion breakthrough a magic bullet for energy crisis ?.

A Florida based research team, however, may have found a solution to the world's energy woes that could provide a clean and near limitless supply of energy in as little as a decade.

Global energy production and consumption is a complex beast and many nations remain heavily reliant on a lethal mix of oil and coal, both of which are finite, and have huge impacts on the environment.

While there is much conjecture on just how long oil and coal reserves will last, the stark reality is that they will both eventually run out.

In the 1950s, many thought atomic energy would allow humanity to dodge the energy crisis, with newly nuclear fission reactors providing an affordable and near limitless supply of energy.

More recently however, incidents such as the Chernobyl meltdown, the growing pile of incredibly toxic nuclear waste and the spectre of rogue nations manufacturing weapons- grade plutonium have taken the shine off nuclear fission.

With the energy requirements of developed nations continuing to grow, and developing nations gaining a serious appetite for energy consumption, demand will soon outstrip supply, and many predict that massive economic and social impacts are probable.

Thankfully, a new type of nuclear fusion energy generation technology holds the potential to provide a cheap and clean source of energy without toxic radioactive waste or the environmental impacts of oil or coal.

Unlike nuclear fission, where the nucleus of an atom is split to release energy, nuclear fusion uses the same process as our sun and works by fusing atoms together to release of large amounts of energy.

Nuclear fusion generates energy leaving little to nothing in the way of by-products, and uses fuels that are plentiful but far less dangerous than the uranium used with conventional nuclear fission reactors.

Whilst physicists have generated nuclear fusion reactions, doing has involved creating the earthbound equivalent of a small star, which in turn has required ultra-strong magnetic fields to contain superheated gases many times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Unfortunately, doing so has tended to consume almost as much energy as was being generated by the fusion reaction. Creating a nuclear fusion reactor that is commercially viable and able to output surplus energy beyond sustaining its own reaction was thought to be at least 20-30 years away.

Thanks to work being done by a group of physicists at the University of Florida, all things fusion related could however be set to change in as little as a decade.

Where conventional fission reactors use uranium which can be refined to make nuclear weapons, the University of Florida's concept uses hydrogen and an isotope of boron called Boron 11, both of which are abundant on earth and can't be used to make atomic weapons.

When fusion reactions occur in the heart of a star such as our sun, atoms are subject to intense heat and pressure which stops the atoms from repelling each other, allowing them to fuse.

To date, experimental fusion projects have largely been focused on generating intense heat so they can fuse, and containing the super hot gases from this reaction consumes most if not all of the energy being produced by the fusion reaction.

The University of Florida have taken a different tack, by putting hydrogen and boron fuel into an accelerator that fires them towards each other at incredibly high velocities. When the hydrogen and boron 11 atoms smash into each other, they fuse, producing fast moving helium nuclei whose motion is converted into electricity.

This new process is clean, highly efficient and most important of all, simple. The output of the new reactor is electricity with its by-product being the same helium gas used to make voices squeaky and party balloons float, so there's no toxic radioactive waste to dispose of.

Initial calculations also show that this new type of fusion generation could produce clean electricity at similar levels but far more cheaply than oil or coal.

In the US, a different approach known as inertial fusion is being perused at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California and the Z-Machine in New Mexico. If Iter is like a conventional power station burning fuel for days or weeks at a time, the inertial projects share more in common with the combustion engine.

NIF blasts tiny pellets of deuterium-tritium fuel with a single 500-trillion-watt laser beam. This is a big number; about 1,000 times the power consumption of the United States.

This gargantuan short-lived laser pulse causes the fuel pellet to collapse and detonate, producing a mini-star for a fraction of a second.

The Z-machine takes a different approach, channelling half a trillion watts through a spider's web of hair-thin wires surrounding the fuel pellet. The result is much the same: a big crunch known as a Z-pinch and the birth of a star.

If a steady stream of mini-stars can be created, then a power station could be constructed. The Z-machine has already achieved fusion in a test run, and NIF hopes to follow in its footsteps in 2010. The challenge will then be to smooth the rough edges of the technology in order to mass-produce economically viable, reliable power stations.

This is no mean feat, but there seems to be no fundamental reason to doubt that it is possible.

When fusion is mentioned, a common reaction in some circles is to say, "It's always 30 years away, so let's not invest too heavily".

In fact, the fusion engineers of 2009 are speaking of building the final generation of experimental reactors now.

If they succeed, Iter and her sisters should be capable of putting electricity on to the grid some time in the early 2030s. This long-term and final solution to the energy crisis depends of course on sustained public investment at current or preferably significantly increased levels.

This is a challenge that I believe we must confront now, and not tomorrow. At some point in the future, we will generate our power by nuclear fusion; there is simply no other way to deliver the trillions of watts needed to make life comfortable for all the citizens of our planet.

To this statement nobody objects. The question is therefore not "if" but "when", and it is my view that the "30 years away" argument simply doesn't wash.

John F Kennedy used to tell a story about a French general who asked his gardener to plant a tree. "What's the rush?" replied the gardener. "It will take 30 years to grow."

The general looked him in the eye, and said in an urgent tone: "Thirty years? Then you had better plant it immediately."

Technology Review has an article on research at MIT into better controlling fusion reactions using pulsed radio waves - Better Control for Fusion Power.

Nuclear fusion could prove an abundant source of clean energy. But the process can be difficult to control, and scientists have yet to demonstrate a fusion plant that produces more energy than it consumes. Now physicists at MIT have addressed one of the many technological challenges involved in harnessing nuclear fusion as a viable energy source. They've demonstrated that pulses of radio frequency waves can be used to propel and heat plasma inside a reactor.

MIT's doughnut-shaped fusion reactor, the Alcator C-Mod, uses magnets to confine hydrogen in a turbulent, electrically charged state of matter called a plasma. By infusing large amounts of energy into the plasma, physicists can kick off fusion reactions that, in turn, release large amounts of energy. The MIT reactor is too small to generate practical fusion reactions that generate enough energy to keep themselves going--what's called a burning plasma. But the researchers have been working on ways to achieve this state in larger reactors, such as the planned International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

The challenge is keeping the plasma confined in a stable rotation, with just the right amount of turbulence and the ideal temperature gradients so that it keeps burning. Traditionally, physicists control plasmas by injecting high-power beams of inert atoms. Controlling turbulence and temperature is critical: the better confined the plasma, the smaller the reactor needs to be and the less power required.

When directed well, inert beams in today's reactors "have substantial momentum and drag the plasma with them," says Earl Marmar, head of MIT's Alcator project. They also "heat" the plasma, supplying energy to kick-start fusion reactions. Marmar anticipates that in the future, the beam technique simply won't work: it will be able to impart enough energy, but not enough momentum.

MIT researchers led by John Rice and Yijun Lin have experimentally demonstrated that radio waves--which will be able to penetrate large plasmas like ITER's--can give plasma both energy and momentum.

Cool green building(s) of the week from Inhabitat is the CEA's new ITER complex at Cadarache in France - The ITER Complex: A Gorgeous Green Enclave.

Juan Herreros Architects designed this gorgeous green complex to seamlessly integrate into the sweeping undergrowth of a forest bustling with biological activity. The verdant structure features an elongated low-profile layout to help it blend in with the treetops, situating it as “a new species that respects, protects and enhances the forest”. An excellent example of low-impact green architecture, the design recently took second place in an international competition to design a new building for the CEA Cadarache Research Center. ...

There’s no word on the projected focus of the complex, but the CEA is engaged in a broad range of research that includes climate and environmental sciences as well as alternative energies including hydrogen and solar power.

CNet's Green Tech Blog has a post on a venture capitalist who believes that commercial power generation using nuclear fusion will be available in the not too distant future. The article says that the process uses lithium - "a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal" - though that may not remain the case indefinitely if lithium-ion battery production continues to accelerate ("peak lithium" is a concept that has already been broached),

Nuclear fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says.

"Within five years, large companies will start to think about building fusion reactors," Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, said in an interview at the Clean Tech Investor Summit taking place here this week. In three to four years, scientists will demonstrate results that show that fusion has a 60 percent chance of success, he said.

If van Lierop were some crazy guy off the street with an old stack of Omni magazines, you could dismiss him. Fusion--which extracts energy from nuclear reactions without the dangers associated with nuclear fission--has been studied for decades, but has yet to go commercial. Van Lierop, however, isn't a random individual. He is one of the earliest and more active investors in clean tech: Chrysalix started investing in clean energy in 2001. The firm's limited partners include BASF, Shell, and Rabobank.

Chrysalix's optimism is pinned on an angel investment the company made in General Fusion, a Canadian company that says it has found a way to hurdle many of the technical problems surrounding fusion. The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with conventional electricity.

The company uses a technique called Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.

The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct. MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur, according to the General Fusion's Web site. General Fusion has also filed for several patents.