This week is Net Zero Awareness week in the U.K. On the 27th June 2019, the U.K. became the first major economy in the world to pass laws to end our contribution to climate change, committing to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
Nuclear fusion offers the potential for a safe, clean and abundant energy source. This process, which also occurs in the sun, involves plasmas, fluids composed of charged particles, being heated to extremely high temperatures so that the atoms fuse together, releasing abundant energy.
Senior Research Scientist Brian LaBombard is summarizing what might be considered a guiding philosophy behind designing and engineering fusion devices at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Beginning in 1972 with the Alcator A tokamak, through Alcator C (1978) and Alcator C-Mod (1991), the PSFC has used magnets with high fields to confine the hot plasma…
“You heard it here first,” quipped U.S. Rep. Donald S. Beyer Jr., who represents the 8th District of Virginia that includes the City of Falls Church. In a telephone town hall with constituents Monday that covered an amazingly wide range of topics over the course of just an hour, Beyer’s breaking news exclamation was in…
Hundreds of times every month, a British scientist sitting in a high-tech control room in an industrial park in the Thames Valley near Didcot clicks his computer mouse.
Digital technologies have disrupted the structure of markets with unprecedented breadth and scale. Today, there is yet another wave of innovation emerging, and that is the decarbonization of the global economy.
We examine potential early markets for fusion energy and their projected cost targets, based on analysis and synthesis of many relevant, recent studies and reports. Seeking to provide guidance to ambitious fusion developers aspiring to enable commercial deployment before 2040, we examine cost requirements for fusion-generated electricity, process heat, and hydrogen production based on today’s…
In an old brick garage on an industrial street in Cambridge. Mass., a team of physicists and engineers are getting ready this month to flip the switch on a 10-ton magnet.
The hottest thing in the solar system is usually the Sun, with its core temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius. But for nearly two minutes on May 28, the title was held by an experimental fusion reactor in Hefei, China. The implications for global politics and security are monumental.
An old joke about nuclear fusion—that it is 30 years away and always will be—is so well-known that The Economist’s science editor forbids correspondents from repeating it. No one doubts sustained fusion is possible in principle. It powers every star in the universe. Making it work on Earth, though, has proved harder. Engineers have tried since the…