MIT's New Framework Aims to Tackle Nuclear Fusion's Money Problem
Putin Opens New Front in Shadow Fleet Fight With Threat to Seize EU Ships Sodium-ion batteries are gaining momentum… Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… For decades, the joke was that nuclear fusion was and would always be 30 years away.
But a rapid string of breakthroughs over the last five years, catalyzed by privatization and the pressure as well as the support of the AI boom, has changed the calculus and suddenly brought the technology onto a real and achievable timeline.
Nuclear fusion is treated as a ‘holy grail’ of clean energy because, if harnessed in a commercially viable and scalable way, it could provide limitless energy production with zero greenhouse gas emissions and negligible environmental externalities.
In short, it’s a silver-bullet solution for the world’senergy trilemma.
“To power one person’s lifetime, it’s a bathtub of seawater and a laptop battery’s size of lithium,” nuclear physicist Annie Kritcher recentlytoldFortune.
“It’s not a lot of materials, and there’s no [long-term] radioactive waste like we have with fission.” SetOilPrice.comas a preferred source in Googlehere.
The first major breakthrough took place at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in late 2022, when a team of scientists led by Kritcher made a breakthrough that many doubted would ever happen.
The lab achieved ‘first ignition’ when it achieved a man-made fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed for the first time in human history.
Since then, this amazing feat has been recreated, and other breakthroughs have started piling up in fusion experiments around the globe.
Breakthroughs have been achieved in a wide variety of fusion experiments.
The breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was achieved using high-powered lasers, but other extremely promising options use a device called a tokamak that uses ultrapowerful magnets to contain plasma.
China’s tokamak-based EAST ‘artificial sun’ iscurrently on track to achieve ignition by next year, at which point it would become the first fusion reactor to sustain plasma without external heating.
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