Side trips on the road to fusion

Physics Today 01 February 2019 A California startup has a multipronged approach to help pay for its decade-long quest to demonstrate fusion at a commercial scale. The approach includes a novel concept to become a part-time scientific user facility funded by the Department of Energy. TAE Technologies also is soliciting tax breaks and other financial … Read more

Is Fusion Power Within Our Grasp?

Forbes By Ariel Cohen | Jan 14, 2019 Inside the ITER Tokamak reactor during operationCCFE, JET Two recent developments in the world of fusion power are giving scientists and policymakers newfound optimism for the elusive ‘holy grail’ of energy technologies. The first is a discovery by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory … Read more

Nuclear fusion, a disruptive power source for crowded cities

CBC By Don Pittis | Jan 21, 2019 Private sector push and new tech means nuclear fusion is closer than ever Thousands of fans at a hockey game between the Winnipeg Jets and the St. Louis Blues holding up phones, evidence of our modern need for energy density that green power will have trouble supplying. … Read more

Nuclear Fusion: We’ve Discovered a Way to Stabilize Super-hot Plasma

Newsweek Allan H. Reiman and Nathaniel J. Fisch On 1/15/19 Scientists have worked for decades to control nuclear fusion, wherein isotopes of hydrogen fuse to form helium, thereby releasing enormous amounts of energy. The nuclear fusion reaction is the same process that produces the vast energy of the Sun. If achieved, it would provide a … Read more

Finally, Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality

medium.com Brian Bergstein | Jan 3, 2019 Scientists inside a fusion reactor, UK. Photo: Monty Rakusen/Getty Long considered a joke, or a pipe dream, fusion is suddenly making enormous leaps The idea first lit up Dennis Whyte when he was in high school, in the remote reaches of Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1980s. He wrote … Read more

How ‘miniature suns’ could provide cheap, clean energy

BBC By Emma Woollacott | 16 November 2018 Our sun is a huge nuclear fusion reactor. Can we mimic its energy-making process on earth? We’re just five years away from harnessing almost unlimited power from “miniature suns”, some start-ups say: nuclear fusion reactors that could provide abundant, cheap and clean energy. In a world of … Read more

Billionaires Chase ‘SpaceX Moment’ for the Holy Grail of Energy

Bloomberg by Jonathan Tirone | October 29 2018 (Bloomberg) — Not long before he died, tech visionary Paul Allen traveled to the south of France for a personal tour of a 35-country quest to replicate the workings of the Sun. The goal is to one day produce clean, almost limitless energy by fusing atoms together … Read more

A new path to solving a longstanding fusion challenge

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office | October 9, 2018 Novel design could help shed excess heat in next-generation fusion power plants. A class exercise at MIT, aided by industry researchers, has led to an innovative solution to one of the longstanding challenges facing the development of practical fusion power plants: how to get … Read more

MIT Plans New Fusion Reactor That Could Actually Generate Power

Extreme Tech November 7, 2018 Fusion powers the Sun, and thus all life on Earth. However, generating usable fusion power here on Earth has proven difficult. For decades, experimental reactors have achieved fusion at low levels, but never has there been net power generation. MIT says it has the tools to make true fusion power … Read more