BLUE BELL, Pa., May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS), today announced it had signed a four-year framework agreement

Scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Oxford University (United Kingdom) and the University of Michigan (USA) have joined efforts to develop new materials for thermonuclear fusion reactors.

Recent experiments carried out at the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego have allowed scientists to observe how fusion plasmas spontaneously turn off the plasma turbulence responsible for most of the heat loss in plasmas confined by toroidal magnetic fields.

A key challenge in producing fusion energy is confining the plasma long enough for the ionized hydrogen to fuse and produce net power.

Tokamaks—a leading design concept for producing nuclear fusion energy—can, under certain rare fault conditions, produce beams of very energetic "runaway" electrons that have the potential to damage interior surfaces of the device.