Latest Fusion reactors Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers wrote in the journal Physics of Plasmas about experiments that helped reveal details of a cooling process that could potentially bring practical fusion closer. Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun, and a team at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) says they have taken steps that could potentially help develop fusion power. One reason self-sustaining fusion reactions are a difficult accomplishment is...

Researchers around the world are working on an efficient, reliable way to contain the plasma used in fusion reactors, potentially bringing down the cost of this promising but technically elusive energy source. A new finding from the University of Washington could help contain and stabilize the plasma using as little as 1 percent of the energy required by current methods. “All of a sudden the current energy goes from being almost too much to almost negligible,” said lead author Thomas...

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Oct. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ITER (meaning "the way" in Latin), a global organization of the European Union, China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea and the United States, currently is building the world's largest and most advanced experimental nuclear fusion reactor in Cadarache, France, has selected Intergraph's SmartPlant(®) Enterprise suite of products to handle the assembly, commissioning and construction of the plant, as well as its operations and...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories have completed successful preliminary tests on magnetically imploded tubes called liners, which are intended to help produce controlled nuclear fusion at scientific "break-even" energies or better within the next few years. The results of this research will be published in Physical Review Letters (PRL). Scientific break-even is one of the major performance measurements in fusion energy...

Researchers at a recent worldwide conference on fusion power have confirmed the surprising accuracy of a new model for predicting the size of a key barrier to fusion that a top scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed. The model could serve as a starting point for overcoming the barrier. “This allows you to depict the size of the challenge so you can think through what needs to be done to overcome it,” said physicist Robert...

UT researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental fusion reactor Imagine a world without man-made climate change, energy crunches or reliance on foreign oil. It may sound like a dream world, but University of Tennessee, Knoxville, engineers have made a giant step toward making this scenario a reality. UT researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental reactor that can demonstrate the feasibility of fusion...

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. Their research focuses on characterization of oxide dispersion-strengthened, reduced-activation steel for the reactor structure. Thermonuclear fusion promises to be a possible solution to the current energy crisis. It is produced when two atomic nuclei of light elements combine to...

News from the 53rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics 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. Using a new microwave instrument based on the same principles as police radar guns, researchers from UCLA observed the complex interplay between plasma turbulence and...

News from the 53rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics Research on the Alcator C-Mod experiment at MIT has made an unexpected connection between two seemingly unrelated but important phenomena observed in tokamak plasmas: spontaneous plasma rotation and the global energy confinement of the plasma. Self-generated flows, the spontaneous plasma rotation which arises even when there is no external momentum input, can have a strong beneficial effect on plasma transport and...

News from the 53rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics A key challenge in producing fusion energy is confining the plasma long enough for the ionized hydrogen to fuse and produce net power. Suppressing plasma turbulence is one approach to this, but the resulting increase in energy confinement is usually accompanied by undesirable increases in particle and impurity confinement, which can lead to plasma contamination and ash accumulation—and reduced power. At MIT's Alcator...