Fusion experiments inch closer to break-even goal

CBS news October 8, 2013, 12:47 PM The unified lasers at the National Ignition Facility deliver 1.8 megajoules of energy and 500 terawatts of power, which is 1,000 times more than the United States uses at any one moment. DAMIEN JEMISON/LLNL Fusion energy has proven an elusive goal — a running joke is that humanity … Read more

Lord of the Rings

The world has now been given the dark Ring of Power. Unlike the fantasy “Ring of Power” the real version is very tiny; in fact, it is the size of an atom. But the “ring’s” punch is even bigger than expected. The evil it is capable of bringing to the world is also just as … Read more

Fusion Energy Production by Deuterium Particle Injection

This visualization was created using simulations run on the supercomputers at the National Center of Computational Sciences and shows the expected operation of the ITER fusion reactor. This reactor is currently being built by a global coalition in Cadarache, France and is expected to begin the first experiments in 2020. To produce fusion reactions, the … Read more

Fusion’s Missing Pieces

Scientific American, June 2012 Volume 306, Number 6 Geneva was cold and gray when air force one touched down in November 1985. President Ronald Reagan had come to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, the newly appointed leader of the Soviet Union. Reagan was convinced that the risk of catastrophic nuclear war was high, and he wanted to … Read more

Fusing Fusion Concepts: Plasma-Jet driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion (PJMIF)

American Security Project Dec 20, 2011 The fusion projects we often hear about fall into one of two camps: Magnetic Confinement Fusion (MCF) or Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). Of course, each project has its own spin on fusion. For example, MIT’s Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) follows the tokamak model commonly used in MCF, but instead … Read more

Apparent breakthrough in nuclear fusion silenced by shutdown

CBS News The preamplifiers of the National Ignition Facility are the first step in increasing the energy of laser beams as they make their way toward the target chamber. LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY Scientists have come one step closer to harnessing the power of the sun. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have passed … Read more

The myth of renewable energy

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Dawn Stover | 11/22/2011 – 15:29 DAWN STOVER Stover is a science writer based in the Pacific Northwest and is a contributing editor at the Bulletin. “Clean.” “Green.” What do those words mean? When President Obama talks about “clean energy,” some people think of “clean coal” and low-carbon nuclear power, … Read more