A research team from the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories has discovered a way to keep the fusion plasma from eroding divertor walls inside tokamak fusion machines. The researchers believe that this could enable them to achieve "scientific breakeven" (i.e. the amount of energy produced by the reactor is greater than the energy input) within two or three years – a "holy grail" of nuclear fusion development which has not yet been achieved.. The tokamak method is one of the most promising technologies for producing nuclear fusion. In a tokamak fusion machine, up to several million amps of … Continue Reading →

Scientists have been working on developing nuclear fusion power generation since the early 1950s. The main problem has always been that more energy has been required to produce the reaction than is produced. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California believe that their latest experiments will overcome the problem. Their technique uses lasers to concentrate isotopes of hydrogen. The pressures and densities achieved are close to what occurs in the sun. At these densities. mass becomes energy in the form of heat which can be used to drive a turbine. A demonstration reactor is expected to begin testing later … Continue Reading →

A Canadian company, General Fusion, claims that it can build a relatively low-tech prototype nuclear fusion power plant within the next decade for less than a billion dollars. For decades, billions of dollars have been spent on research into ways of building a practical fusion reactor for electricity production. The major problem is creating a controllable fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it and most scientists believe that achieving this will take several more decades and cost tens billions of dollars. General Fusion’s approach involves building a metal sphere about three metres in diameter … Continue Reading →