Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/5219
61 www.hplusmagazine.com In an unassuming corner of Burnaby, a lush, green suburb of Vancouver, Bc, I've arrived at the doorway of a company that could potentially change the world. But you'd never know it from the nondescript office park it's situated in, or the bare bones furniture and office equipment I see once I open the door and announce my presence. It's almost as if I've stepped back into the office of an insurance actuary circa 1973, right down to spartan wall decoration and all-male staff. only the "general Fusion" sign on the door indicates anything out of the ordinary. Indeed, general Fusion is anything but ordinary. The startup is pouring brainpower, mechanical skill and sweat into building a low-tech but potentially revolutionary device capable of delivering virtually unlimited clean energy for the planet. and they plan to do it for far less than the billions of dollars governments have put into massive facilities that — even by conservative estimates — won't produce a single unit of power for another couple of decades. "So," general Fusion ceo Doug Richardson says as he shows me into his office, "how much do you know about fusion?" Using fusion as an energy source has been alternately hyped, derided and discounted over the past 55 years, ever since the first h-Bomb burst over Bikini atoll. The potential benefits of fusion are obvious: all you have to do is look up at the sun to see fusion at work. every second of every day the sun generates fusion reactions, expelling enough energy to create a net gain of energy that keeps our planet alive. But creating that net gain from a fusion reaction here on earth, in a safe and easily harnessed way, has confounded the best minds on the planet for more than half a century. "Fusion is easy. net gain is the hard part," Richardson said.