Right now we just buy deuterium off the shelf, it is low cost and plentiful. You can get deuterium by electrolysis of heavy water, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

Perhaps low cost (25L, ~$600) is relative, depending on the purity, but am unsure how much scale a project like this would use.

I love this question because it helps illustrate just how different fusion is from other energy sources. If it works, a 50 MW Fusion Engine would run for 5-10 years on a single 55 gallon drum of heavy water.

I wouldn't be surprised if that cost is still a drop in the bucket compared to salaries though. How much deuterium is a startup like this likely to go through in a month?

Totally correct. Right now we simply purchase D2 gas in small quantity so the price is relatively high. But even at those prices we'll probably spend on the order of only $100 per month on D2 when we're operating.

Their patents are easily found.

https://www.google.com/patents/US20140023170 https://www.google.com/patents/US20110293056

It's not a completely novel approach, and it's probably not a great investment compared to some other fusion startups, though I am glad people are investing in this rather than idiotic app companies. Kudos to the big-Y for taking on some useful risk. $1.5M is cheap, and should be dished out to many such companies.

Interestingly, the inventor seems to be interested in using the technology to build rockets. If they achieve > break-even, this might actually be a better use for the technology, as it is not obvious how to extract power from the plasma based on their patents, but it would be real easy to just shoot some plasma out one end of the thing for a dandy rocket engine. I guess MHD would work, and would not be a patentable innovation, but this really looks like a space rocket to me.

Heavy water (oxygen + deuterium) bonds slightly stronger then normal water (oxygen + hydrogen). So you cascade water over electrosis (pump voltage though water causing hydrogen and oxygen to separate). And you get a higher and higher percentage of deuterium with each stage.

This how the German's did it in WW2.

It's probably just referring to the separation of heavy water from normal water, which is then electrolyzed to produce the deuterium.