South Korean researchers have maintained plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds inside a tokamak fusion reactor.
Fusion energy has long been hailed as the holy grail because of its potential for limitless amounts of clean energy. But that promise has trailed reality for decades, with billions of dollars in research leading to few breakthroughs. Now there’s optimism that is about to change, partly because of new startups funded by the likes of Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.
Yahoo Finance went inside the country’s largest magnetic fusion facility for an exclusive look, to explore the challenges of bringing this technology to commercial use for the latest episode of NEXT.
“The race is on to actually see who can develop this and who can get it to the masses the fastest,” said David Callaway, former editor-in-chief of USA Today and founder of Callaway Climate Insights, a news and information service focused on the business of climate change.
A National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) research team has developed the world’s first n-channel diamond MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor). The developed n-channel diamond MOSFET provides a key step toward CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor: one of the most popular technologies in the computer chip) integrated circuits for harsh environment applications, as well as the development of diamond power electronics. The research is published in Advanced Science.
Semiconductor diamond has outstanding physical properties such as ultra wide-bandgap energy of 5.5 eV, high carriers mobilities, and high thermal conductivity, which is promising for the applications under extreme environmental conditions with high performance and high reliability, such as the environments with high temperatures and high levels of radiation (e.g., in proximity to nuclear reactor cores).
By using diamond electronics, not only can the thermal management demand for conventional semiconductors be alleviated but these devices are also more energy efficient and can endure much higher breakdown voltages and harsh environments.
According to Altman, AI will require vast amounts of energy to operate, and nuclear fusion would be the best bet for its source.
Princeton researchers have trained an AI to predict and prevent a common problem arising during nuclear fusion reactions — and they think it might be able to solve other problems, too.
The challenge: If the Spice Girls were physicists, their song “2 Become 1” might have been about nuclear fusion, a reaction that occurs when two atoms merge.
Fusion releases a tremendous amount of energy in the form of heat — it’s what powers the sun and other stars — and if we could harness the reaction here on Earth, we would have a near limitless source of clean energy.
In preparation for a permanent human colony on the Moon, DARPA has awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman to develop a lunar railway concept, as part of the 10-year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study.
Running a train on the Moon may seem profoundly silly, but there is some very firm logic behind it. Even as the first astronauts were landing on the Sea of Tranquility in 1969, it was realized that a permanent human presence on Mars would require an infrastructure to maintain it. That includes mines for water ice, nuclear power plants, factories, and railways.
Though many people think the Moon is small, it is, in fact, a very large place with a surface area equivalent to that of Africa. Over such an expanse, even a limited presence would require some sort of a transport system to link various outposts and activities.
TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque told The Financial Times it plans to start work on a site in Wyoming in June even if it hasn’t got a permit by then.
Tokamak Energy reveals new laser technology which will be installed on its world record-breaking ST40 nuclear fusion reactor.
The particle accelerators that enable high-energy physics and serve many fields of science, such as materials, medical, and fusion research, are driven by superconducting magnets that are, to put it simply, quite finicky.
The Australian Synchrotron, a crown jewel of Australian scientific infrastructure, is making major strides towards sustainable energy independence. The nuclear research facility recently completed the installation of 3,200 solar panels which now blankets the facility’s rooftops. This move is expected to generate substantial savings and support Synchrotron’s world-class research.
The state-of-the-art particle accelerator has now gone green with a 1.59 MW/ 1,668 kWh rooftop solar system. The facility will save about $2 million in energy costs over the next five years.
