Fusion News

comsol Brianne Costa | April 12, 2016 We can solve many of the world’s energy sustainability problems by harnessing the power of the sun through fusion energy. Tokamaks are devices that test the practicality of employing fusion energy on Earth. ITER, which will be the largest tokamak on Earth when complete, has required years of … Read more

Differ 8 June 2016 DIFFER’s facility Magnum-PSI produced its first plasma on Wednesday 8 June 2016, a major milestone in the relocation of this unique experiment for fusion wall materials. Magnum-PSI will be fully operational again at the end of 2016, and is the only laboratory setup in the world capable of investigating candidate materials … Read more

PPPL By Larry Bernard, January 25, 2016 It’s natural. In fact, it’s abundant throughout the universe. Stars – and there are billions and billions of them – produce energy by fusion of light atoms. It’s safe. There are no dangerous byproducts. It produces some radioactive waste, but that requires only decades to decay, not thousands … Read more

ITER The next step after ITER will be a demonstration power plant—or DEMO—that will explore continuous or near-continuous (steady-state) operation. Decades of fusion research and generations of fusion devices have contributed to the design of ITER. And ITER, in its turn, will contribute to the design of the next-generation machine—DEMO—that will bring fusion research to … Read more

ITER 06 JUN, 2016 When plasmas ten times hotter than the core of the Sun begin pulsating inside the ITER vacuum vessel, the combined mass of the Tokamak and cryostat (25,000 tons) will need a bit of breathing space. Not much—but enough to accommodate the wobbling, expansions and occasional displacements caused by the tremendous forces … Read more

FuseNet The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) was built at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and started operation in 1999. The goal of the device is to study the physics of spherically shaped fusion plasmas, which are claimed to have several advantages over the traditional doughnut-shaped plasmas. Consequently, there is considerable interest in these … Read more

El Pais NUÑO DOMÍNGUEZ | Madrid | 1 JUN 2016 Can politicians prepare the country’s bid to host an EU test facility for nuclear fusion in time? Inside the European fusion reactor laboratory known as Jet, on the outskirts of Oxford. Scientists believe it is possible to build a reactor capable of generating these kinds … Read more

WNN by David Kingham | 31 May 2016 Fusion reactor development could proceed much more rapidly by scaling down the size of reactors being developed, potentially helping the first compact fusion pilot plants to be ready to produce electricity for the first time within the next decade, writes David Kingham. Nuclear fusion is the creative … Read more

Angle Journal by Edward Hill | 1 June 2016 Relative to traditional fossil fuels, and even fission, nuclear fusion has long promised – and failed – to safely deliver energy. Yet recent developments provide hope that this elusive technology might finally be ready to emerge as both a viable and inexhaustible energy source in the … Read more

Next Big Future May 31, 2016 Startup company Tokamak Energy has published three papers showing size is not an important factor in fusion reactors and proving that a compact spherical tokamak reactor can produce high power. This turns the pursuit of fusion into a series of engineering challenges. The Tokamak Energy plan will overcome these … Read more