Ambient office = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 128 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 125 nanosieverts per hour

Pink Lady apple from Central Market = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 134 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 135 nanosieverts per hour

Seedless grapes from Central Market = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 65 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside =99 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Last year, Helion landed a huge five hundred-million-dollar round and TAE Technologies reported four hundred and ten million dollars in investments. Avalanche Energy’s five-million-dollar first round was led by Prime Impact Fund (now Azolla Ventures) and included Congruent Ventures, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital and nearly a dozen small investors.
     Langtry and Riordan credit the space sector for providing something like a model for the development of fusion. That field was once largely dominated by the federal research. Now private companies such as Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Rocket Lab are generating headlines that used to only be provided by NASA. VC funding could launch private fusion research projects in the same way. Riordan said, “I think that our timing was just perfect for that cusp of people saying, ‘I think we can do really wild, tough things in private industry faster and without the bureaucracy red tape’ and are willing to put money down on it.”
     Langtry and Riordan met at Blue Origin (BO), Jeff Bezos’ space company in Kent, Washington. Both of them worked on rocket propulsion systems. They appreciated the BO culture that encouraged employees to take audacious risks and learn from their mistakes. However, recently the existential and increasing visible of impact of climate change has brought their interests back to Earth. Langtry said, “There’s no point in doing a space company if the Earth is on fire.”
     Langtry had been exploring fusion more as his hobby with an eye to using reactors as a propulsion system for space craft. As the two refocused on Earth-bound applications, they set some boundaries for their fusion solution. They did not want to employ giant lasers or massive magnets.
     While researching the fusion field, Langtry found a graduate thesis from a Lockheed Martin researcher named Tom McGuire. The thesis included open source code for simulations for an electrostatic fusion reactor. McGuire’s idea became the basis for AE technology.
     The startup is constructing its fusion generator prototype out of a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom-made parts. They are using something called a Knight trap. It is a type of orbiting ion trap as the core of the reactor. The team created ion guns to fire deuterium ions into the ion trap. A high voltage generator creates conditions in the reactor that produce the plasma in which the ions can orbit, collide, fuse and release energy.
     The team has generated energy in the form of high speed neutrons. They will be adding magnets to the system to create a higher density reactor that produces more energy. They also need to establish a means for transforming the heat energy that is produced into the electrical energy.
     Brieda, the outside expert, said, “There are all these small technical challenges. Until you build something and demonstrate it, it’s still a research project.”
      The most difficult technical hurdle, the AE team said, will be creating sufficiently high voltage on the order of six hundred thousand volts in a small space to make the whole thing go.
       Riordan said, “We learn and make progress on something that looks, from the big picture, so insurmountable. But there’s little baby steps along the way [that] are empowering, exciting to people. And they’re marching towards our end goal.”

Ambient office = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 139 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 155 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 138 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     Nuclear fusion is a carbon-free, virtually infinite source of power that is safer that current nuclear fission reactors. For decades, it has been the “Holy Grail” of the energy sector. The ultimate fusion reactor is the Sun, of course. Hobbyists can create fusion reactions. The challenge is to generate sustained fusion in a system that produces more energy that it requires to operate and efficiently captures the energy that is released.
      In the past, fusion research was largely driven by government funded projects that focused on large-scale efforts like the twenty five billion dollar International Thermonuclear Experiment Reactor (ITER) in France or the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore in California.
      But that dynamic is changing. Currently, venture capital dollars are funding smaller, private efforts as the world scrambles to create and deploy new clean tech and climate tech to prevent the most-dire predicted impacts of global warming. There is a growing community of fusion research enterprises in the Pacific Northwest that includes Avalanche Energy, Helion, Zap Energy and CTFusion in Washington state and British Columbia’s General Fusion.

     Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan are the founders of Avalanche Energy. They are taking a less conventional route to the development of commercial nuclear fusion. Their approach depends on a small-scale solution and does not require the tremendous temperatures and pressures needed by other systems such as the popular tokamaks. They are curious why no one else has tried their approach and wonder if anyone has shown any reason why it will not work.
     The startup has raised five million dollars in a seed funding round, secured by a Patent Corporation Treaty (PCT) International Patent. Just recently, they emerged from the stealth mode they had been operating in. A few weeks ago, the AE team generated their first neutrons via fusion.
     Avalanche Energy was launched in 2018 and this summer it opened its research facility just down from the Seattle’s Museum of Flight and the original Boeing site. It has grown to ten employees and hopes to double that by the end of this year.
     Other fusion ventures are geared toward larger-scale energy production for utilities and other large energy consumers. This is creating multiple niches in the fusion research field. Langtry said, “There’s actually not a lot of competition. It is really collaborative.”
      The fusion reactor that AE is developing with be about the size of a large shoe box (one-foot diameter and two-feet long). It could be deployed as multiple units to power cargo ships, airplanes and other sectors of the economy that are going to be difficult to transition from fossil fuel. They estimate that it would take six of their reactors to power a passenger car.
     Lubos Brieda is the president of Particle in Cell consulting. They recently provided a third-party evaluation of the startup’s proof of concept. The Los Angeles-area engineer is enthusiastic about the future of small-scale approaches to fusion. He said, “The future is in these small reactors.”
Please read Part 2 next