Richard Martin also reported earlier that after three decades of expensive government-funded research that has failed to produce tangible breakthroughs, nuclear fusion has gone from a promising source of effectively limitless power to something more like a punch line. In the past year, that has started to change, however. Several privately funded companies and small university-based research groups pursuing novel fusion reactor designs have delivered promising results that could shorten the timeline for producing a prototype machine from decades to several years. Commercial power generation from fusion is still a long way off, but the outlines of such a reactor can now be perceived.
Traditional fusion research has centered on large, doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks, which exert powerful magnetic fields to compress high-temperature plasmaâ€â€roiling balls of charged particles that fuse to form helium, releasing large amounts of energy in the process. The challenge is to contain the hot plasma and keep it stable, the fusion reactors of today, such as the one at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in southern France, use giant coils of electromagnets that consume much more energy than the machine actually produces. ITER, which draws scientists and funding from China, the European Union, India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S, is projected to cost dozens of billions of dollars to produce a working reactor sometime in the 2030s. Maybe.
Two recent developments, offering new and faster pathways to energy-producing fusion reactors, have galvanized the fusion community. Tri Alpha Energy, based in Foothill Ranch, California, said in early August that it has succeeded in keeping a high-energy plasma stable for five milliseconds, but needs to remain hot enough and long enough to keep the plasma stable and contained.
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