Fusion News

WNN 14 December 2016 The Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) tokamak-type nuclear fusion reactor has achieved a world record of 70 seconds in high-performance plasma operation, South Korea’s National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) has announced. The KSTAR tokamak (Image: NFRI) The institute, based at Daejeon, 160 km south of Seoul, said a fully non-inductive … Read more

seeker.com Dec 7, 2016 New tests verify that Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X fusion energy device is on track to safely suspend plasma in magnetic fields. For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same … Read more

PPPL By John Greenwald | December 8, 2016 Challenging process that occurs throughout the universe now better understood (Photo by Elle Starkman/Office of Communications; photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison) Physicists Masaaki Yamada and Ellen Zweibel Scientists are closer than ever to unraveling a process called magnetic reconnection that triggers explosive phenomena throughout the universe. … Read more

Nature By: T. Sunn Pedersen, M. Otte, S. Lazerson, P. Helander, S. Bozhenkov, C. Biedermann, T. Klinger, R. C. Wolf, H. -S. Bosch & The Wendelstein 7-X Team Published online: 30 November 2016 Abstract Fusion energy research has in the past 40 years focused primarily on the tokamak concept, but recent advances in plasma theory … Read more

Next Big Future December 06, 2016 Scientists are developing supercomputers that will be 50 times faster than todays by the 2020s, which wil enable the first complete simulations of nuclear fusion reactor plasma The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) leads a team of institutions that is developing a computer program that will run on the … Read more

Dr. Scott Hsu and Dr. F. Douglas Witherspoon Developing a cheaper, faster pathway to economical fusion power Dr. Scott Hsu is a fusion physics research scientist interested in obtaining cost efficient, clean energy for the world. His work, pursued with Dr. F. Douglas Witherspoon and others, focuses on plasma-implosion research for an alternate-fusion approach. Read … Read more

South China Morning Post | Thursday, 08 December, 2016 China acknowledged as global leader in the field and world’s only nation increasing funding into research to draw energy from ‘artificial sun’ On a quiet, scenic peninsula jutting out into Hefei’s Dongpu Reservoir, physicists recently set a world record, creating hydrogen plasma, hotter than the core … Read more

Physics December 7, 2016 A laser-based fusion experiment demonstrates that liquid fuel capsules could rectify problems encountered with ice-based fuel capsules. Don Jedlovec/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The strategy of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is to use high-power lasers to rapidly heat and compress a hydrogen fuel capsule. The fuel is typically frozen, but new work … Read more

Science Alert FIONA MACDONALD | 6 DEC 2016 At the end of last year, Germany switched on a new type of massive nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, and it was successfully able to contain a scorching hot blob of helium plasma. But since then, there’s been a big question – is the device … Read more

PPPL December 2, 2016 Physicist Sam Lazerson Physicist Sam Lazerson of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has teamed with German scientists to confirm that the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device called a stellarator in Greifswald, Germany, produces high-quality magnetic fields that are consistent with their complex design. The … Read more