“You might want to cover your ears,” a senior engineer at First Light Fusion tells me, as we gaze at a bank of screens that looks like a mini version of a Nasa control room. I reach for some ear plugs.
The idea of fusion power has intrigued scientists for nearly 100 years, when they first discovered the process that powers the sun and stars. A fusion reaction, which occurs when atoms fuse together, could generate four times more energy than today’s fission reactors, and about four million times more than burning coal, without producing any…
Former baseball star Alex Rodriguez is backing a startup that’s trying to develop a power plant run off of nuclear fusion — a niche of the energy industry that’s increasingly capturing investors’ attention.
SHINE Medical Technologies LLC today announced that the company has changed its name to SHINE Technologies LLC. SHINE’s new name highlights the company’s core technological competencies, skilled team and focus as a next-generation nuclear technology company.
The fusion age is upon us. This week, a major breakthrough was achieved in a key technology for commercial fusion power, and very likely sets up the first ever net-energy-out fusion plant being commissioned four years from today.
Fusion took a key step forward in its movement from the lab to commercial viability with the successful test of a key technology — a very powerful magnet that uses very little energy.
In 2015, a group of physicists at MIT did some calculations to rethink how we’re approaching the problem of fusion power. High-temperature, nonmetallic superconductors were finally commercially available and could allow the generation of stronger magnetic fields, enabling a simpler, more compact fusion reactor. But the physicists behind the work didn’t stop when the calculating was done;…
During the summer of 1985, I was a part of an engineering team at Los Alamos National Lab working on the first design of a fusion reactor based on the then very advanced spherical-tokamak (ST) concept. At a group lunch toward the end of the effort, our team leader, Robert Krakowski, reflected philosophically.
On 8 August 2021, a laser-initiated experiment at the United States National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made a significant breakthrough in reproducing the power source of the stars, smashing its own 2018 record for energy released from nuclear fusion reactions 23 times over.
It sounds thoroughly implausible: a technology that could replicate the chemistry of the stars, unleash nearly unlimited clean energy and safely power the world for centuries.