“You heard it here first,” quipped U.S. Rep. Donald S. Beyer Jr., who represents the 8th District of Virginia that includes the City of Falls Church. In a telephone town hall with constituents Monday that covered an amazingly wide range of topics over the course of just an hour, Beyer’s breaking news exclamation was in…
Hundreds of times every month, a British scientist sitting in a high-tech control room in an industrial park in the Thames Valley near Didcot clicks his computer mouse.
Digital technologies have disrupted the structure of markets with unprecedented breadth and scale. Today, there is yet another wave of innovation emerging, and that is the decarbonization of the global economy.
We examine potential early markets for fusion energy and their projected cost targets, based on analysis and synthesis of many relevant, recent studies and reports. Seeking to provide guidance to ambitious fusion developers aspiring to enable commercial deployment before 2040, we examine cost requirements for fusion-generated electricity, process heat, and hydrogen production based on today’s…
In an old brick garage on an industrial street in Cambridge. Mass., a team of physicists and engineers are getting ready this month to flip the switch on a 10-ton magnet.
The hottest thing in the solar system is usually the Sun, with its core temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius. But for nearly two minutes on May 28, the title was held by an experimental fusion reactor in Hefei, China. The implications for global politics and security are monumental.
An old joke about nuclear fusion—that it is 30 years away and always will be—is so well-known that The Economist’s science editor forbids correspondents from repeating it. No one doubts sustained fusion is possible in principle. It powers every star in the universe. Making it work on Earth, though, has proved harder. Engineers have tried since the…
Fusion energy developer Helion Energy said yesterday it has become the first private company to announce exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius in its sixth fusion generator prototype, Trenta. It also announced its Trenta prototype recently finished a 16-month testing campaign, completing almost 10,000 high-power pulses.
This week marked two major milestones for fusion energy. On June 15, San Diego-based General Atomics (GA) said it was ready to ship the first module of the Central Solenoid—the world’s most powerful magnet—which will become a central component of ITER, the world’s largest experimental fusion facility that is under construction in France.
A Canadian company, one of several betting on alternative approaches to fusion energy, announced today it will begin to build a pilot power plant next year in the United Kingdom.