The Madison, Wisconsin-based startup Phoenix has scouted a team of nuclear elites for a new frontier: small reactors that can revolutionize medical imaging, munitions scanning, and even non-destructive testing for quality assurance.
The modern quest for Promethean fire is underway in an anonymous office park in Foothill Ranch, California, an hour southeast of Los Angeles. In the park, along a meandering drive, you will find a huge, modern warehouse building with “TAE Technologies” emblazoned on the door. Inside, you will find a 100-foot-long, $200 million fusion-energy experiment…
The decades-old debate over nuclear fusion vs. fission is on the edge of a breakthrough as startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems wins over Bill Gates and other backers. Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor is one of them. Commonwealth Fuel Systems has a system powered by high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets that are key to a push to get a commercial fusion energy system…
When British physicist Arthur Stanley Eddington first proposed in the 1920s that the sun and stars were powered by the fusion of hydrogen into helium, his idea sparked a rush of research and speculation into the possibility of bringing this energy source to earth. It was not long before journalists and pulp fiction authors were…
Scientists, private companies, investors and governments are all growing more confident that smaller-scale fusion energy power systems are closer to becoming a reality than ever before.
Champions of nuclear power in the 1950s predicted it would be too cheap to meter. That didn’t work out. But they were talking about fission. For decades, nuclear proponents have kept alive the idea of safe fusion power. Now the Energy Department has launched a grant program to rev up research into this science-fiction-like technology. For details, Federal Drive…
Since the 1950s physicists have researched something they knew was theoretically possible but technically challenging: the effective generation of fusion energy as a substitute for carbon-based power. The prospect of clean, unlimited, and inexpensive electricity generated by safe devices that will not melt down or produce nuclear waste is a holy grail for climate change. Decades…
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) issued a formal Request for Information (“RFI”)[1] seeking input from all interested stakeholders regarding a “possible cost share program in fusion reactor technologies.”[2] DOE is requesting comments by May 15, 2020.
The various fields of science and technology are so closely connected that a breakthrough in one area can rapidly trigger a chain reaction of breakthroughs in other areas. The “impossible” becomes possible, the difficult becomes easy. Ideas, long since abandoned as hopelessly difficult to realize, suddenly take on new lives.
In an ambitious push to develop and implement nuclear fusion power, a team of 300 researchers just published a massive new report that lays out exactly what the scientific community needs and what it should prioritize to get the ball rolling.