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Unlike nuclear fission — the process used in the world’s nuclear plants today, which is generated by the division of atoms — nuclear fusion leaves no legacy of long-lived radioactive waste.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private company spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans what it calls the world's first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virginia, to generate ...
But the biggest news arrived in December 2022 when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), an inertial fusion facility whose primary mission is to test the reliability of the U.S.’s ...
Last year, scientists using laser beams at a U.S. national lab in California repeated a fusion breakthrough called ignition where for an instant the amount of energy coming from the fusion ...
Fusion ignition is the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining. This occurs when the energy being given off by the reaction heats the fuel mass more rapidly than it cools. In other words, fusion ignition is the point at which the increasing self-heating of the nuclear fusion removes the need for external heating. [1]
Experiments in 2020 and 2021 yielded the world's first burning plasmas, in which most of the plasma heating came from nuclear fusion reactions. [11] This result was followed on August 8, 2021 by the world's first ignited plasma, in which the fusion heating was sufficient to sustain the thermonuclear reaction.
Indeed, the ignition success has spurred public sector investment and excitement in the buzzy world of private fusion, though high interest rates have taken a bite out of new venture capital funding.
This kind of fusion reactor would consist of two parts: Targets which can be small capsules (<7 millimeter diameter) that contain fusion fuel. Although many kinds of targets have been tested including: cylinders, shells coated with nanotubes, solid blocks, hohlraum, glass shells filled with fusion fuel, cryogenically frozen targets, plastic shells, foam shells and materials suspended on spider ...