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Fusion Power Corporation Sacramento, California www.fusionpowercorporation.com Fusion Power Corporation is a new energy technology company. The Fusion Power Corporation (FPC), a California C Corporation formed in 2009, believes that the solution to the energy problem is the rapid development of a new source of base load energy using the use of the technique known as RF Accelerator Driven Heavy Ion Fusion (RFAD-HIF). This technique was thoroughly researched in the 1970's and has repeatedly been endorsed by the world scientific community. The technique uses a moderate sized accelerator to provide the driver energy necessary to compress and ignite the fuel. Model calculations show that the ratio of energy out to energy in can be as high as 500. This means that the cost of energy produced by an HIF system should be comparable to the cost of the energy in old oil. Moreover, a single accelerator can provide the ignition energy necessary to create from a fusion reactor complex the energy equivalent of a giant oil field (500,000 barrels of oil per day) with no carbon impact on the environment. The FPC is designing a fully operational fusion power system using a heavy ion RF accelerator as the driver to compress and heat the Deuterium/Tritium (DT) pellet in a reaction chamber. Heavy ions, accelerated to about half the speed of light have sufficient energy to both compress and heat the DT fuel pellet to conditions that enable the fusion of the DT atoms to form Helium and an energetic neutron. The resulting products have slightly less mass than the reactants and release large amounts of energy, in accordance with the equation introduced to all of us by Einstein in 1905, namely E=MC2. The energy released is very large and results in the creation of a plasma fireball. The temperature in this fireball is very high, more than enough to vaporize any material within a few feet of the center of the explosion. Thus the reaction must be confined within a strong reaction chamber about 30 feet in diameter. As the plasma cools, energy is extracted by a combination of processes and this energy is used to create useful products such as heat, hydrogen for synthetic carbon neutral liquid fuels, electricity, and potable water. Each pulse results in the release of the energy equivalent to that released in the burning of 1.6 barrels of oil. In a fully developed system, there is a pulse every 10th of a second, in one of the 10 reaction chambers. This results in the production of the energy equivalent of 16 barrels of oil per second or 1.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Clearly, the production of this much energy means that the system is large and will require a substantial investment, but no more than the investment in a giant oil field. Development of a RFAD-HIF power plant requires a complicated set of internal and external relationships. These vary from compliance with governmental regulations that govern the production of electricity from thermonuclear power plants to the local issues of increased road traffic. But they also include corporate relationships, such as the licensing of IP from existing IP holders, to the relationships between end users of the power. FPC firmly believes that, by 2050, fusion will be the source of most of the world’s energy. This is not wishful thinking, it is simply a way of stating that all other forms of energy that are based on the use of finite fossil fuel sources must decline in the next few decades. This decline will provide a major impetus for the rapid increase in the utilization of this new form of energy. The modern world survives – and prospers – by the use of prodigious amounts of energy. Our global consumption of fossil fuel energy has increased nearly 8 fold in the last 60 years although our global population has only increased 2.5 times. Our fossil fuel resources are finite so this rate of usage has a limited life – oil is likely to peak in a few years, if it has not already peaked, and coal will follow suit in a few decades. Peaking does not mean that supply necessarily immediately declines but it does indicate that significant growth is no longer possible. Even the nemesis to many, nuclear fission energy, has its problems with safety as evidenced by recent events in Japan and waste management issues that are still unresolved after decades of effort. New units are likely to require the use of reprocessed fuel and/or plutonium with its complex security requirements to prevent it from being used to make ‘bombs’. The maintenance of our current level of energy consumption, let alone its growth to satisfy the needs of less developed economies, will require a new base load energy source. Biomass, solar, and even wind energy are likely to grow too slowly to even meet the rapid decline of fossil fuel resources that will begin in the next few years. These forms of energy generation generally have low energy return for energy invested and will not meet the future global demands for energy. Nuclear fission takes years to permit, fuel availability is problematic, and severe containment, security, safety and waste management issues abound. Our only real hope for a large new energy source is to rapidly bring fusion power on line.