Wouldn't it be great if those big multinational programs get beaten to the fusion holy grail by some small private enterprise like Tri Allha Energy? The small company is boldly pursuing a different and seemingly more technically challenging approach to achieving fusion but one which offers significant benefits.
https://youtu.be/tm6hpqFtxEk
Exclusive: Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough | Science/AAAS | News
Exclusive: Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough
OOTHILL RANCH, CALIFORNIA—In a suburban industrial park south of Los Angeles, researchers have taken a significant step toward mastering nuclear fusion—a process that could provide abundant, cheap, and clean energy. A privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy has built a machine that forms a ball of superheated gas—at about 10 million degrees Celsius—and holds it steady for 5 milliseconds without decaying away. That may seem a mere blink of an eye, but it is far longer than other efforts with the technique and shows for the first time that it is possible to hold the gas in a steady state—the researchers stopped only when their machine ran out of juice.
“They’ve succeeded finally in achieving a lifetime limited only by the power available to the system,” says particle physicist Burton Richter of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who sits on a board of advisers to Tri Alpha. If the company’s scientists can scale the technique up to longer times and higher temperatures, they will reach a stage at which atomic nuclei in the gas collide forcefully enough to fuse together, releasing energy.
More at the jump.
