Nuclear Fusion

As the question of how to make a laser fusion reactor practical rises, scientists at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have come up with a way for fusion lasers to essentially manufacture their own fuel pellets.

In an outrageously audacious move, Washington-based fusion power startup Helion has signed the world's first fusion power supply deal, promising to deliver Microsoft at least 50 megawatts of clean fusion power by 2028, or pay financial penalties.

Tokamak Energy has released the first images of what its commercial fusion power plant, which it says would safely generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes in the 2030s, would look like.

Most current fusion power projects require tritium – an incredibly scarce and problematic fuel. TAE is targeting cheaper, safer hydrogen-boron (H-B) fusion, and it's just announced a world-first measurement of H-B fusion in magnetically confined plasma.

The US Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration have announced the first-ever achievement of fusion ignition. The breakthrough should "pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power."

Having achieved a self-heating “burning plasma” in the quest for producing clean, limitless energy using nuclear fusion, on closer inspection of that plasma researchers have discovered strange, unexplained behavior of ions within it.

It seems China's Chang'E-5 robotic Moon mission has discovered more than water on the lunar surface. Scientists have confirmed the discovery of a new mineral, a transparent crystal named Changesite-(Y), as well as a promising potential fusion fuel.

Some fusion projects aim to create hundred-million degree working temperatures in magnetically confined plasma. The CEO of TAE Technologies tells us his team's aiming for 10 times that temperature, targeting cheaper, easier and safer boron fuel.

Nuclear fusion is an incredibly complex scientific problem that researchers are coming at from all sorts of angles, and company Zap Energy is starting to make waves through one of the lesser-known approaches.

While stellarator fusion reactors have conventionally featured irregularly shaped magnetic coils, scientists have now developed simpler and straighter versions they say can offer some important benefits.

Scientists have developed a sensor made of incredibly thin strands of sapphire that can withstand extreme heat and radiation, and possibly be put to work in the harsh environment of nuclear fusion reactors and enable more streamlined air travel.

A UK company says it's demonstrated fusion in record time, on a shoestring US$59 million budget, using an innovative new approach that embeds fuel pellets in tiny, falling cube targets, then shoots projectiles at them at 19 times the speed of sound.