A longstanding joke holds that practical fusion power is about 20 years away—and always will be. One simple phenomenon explains why practical, self-sustaining fusion reactions have proved difficult to achieve: Turbulence ...
Apr 29, 2013
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Eighteen-year-old Taylor Wilson has designed a compact nuclear reactor that could one day burn waste from old atomic weapons to power anything from homes and factories to space colonies.
Mar 01, 2013
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US ITER and its vendors are moving into a new fabrication phase for the toroidal field magnet system in the international ITER fusion reactor. Cabling and conductor fabrication are now underway in New Hampshire ...
Feb 19, 2013
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How would you like to replace your water heater with a nuclear reactor? That's what Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, hopes to help bring about. It would tap the enormous ...
Feb 19, 2013
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A researcher at the Universidad politécnica de Madrid (UPM, Spain) has patented a nuclear fusion reactor by inertial confinement that, apart from be used to generate electric power in plants, can be applied ...
Jan 14, 2013
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An international team of physicists has calculated the efficiency of a reaction involving an incoming electron kicking out an electron from the metal beryllium (Be) or its hydrogen compound molecules, in ...
Jan 11, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Using ESA's Cluster quartet of satellites as a space plasma microscope, scientists have zoomed in on the solar wind to reveal the finest detail yet, finding tiny turbulent swirls that could play ...
Dec 19, 2012
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(Phys.org)—New hardware lets engineers maintain the plasma used in fusion reactors in an energy-efficient, stable manner, making the system potentially attractive for use in fusion power plants.
Oct 11, 2012
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The most unambiguous data to date on the elusive 113th atomic element has been obtained by researchers at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science (RNC). A chain of six consecutive alpha decays, ...
Sep 26, 2012
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Power from nuclear fusion reactors has the promise to be safe, sustainable and limitless. But science has not been able to bring fusion energy to the commercial energy market. This is partly because the operating limits of ...
Sep 11, 2012
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American researchers have shown that prospective magnetic fusion power systems would pose a much lower risk of being used for the production of weapon-usable materials than nuclear fission reactors and their ...
Mar 29, 2012
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The superconducting cables designed for the ITER fusion reactor (cost: 16 billion euros = $21.2 billion) are unable to withstand the planned forty to sixty thousand charge cycles. Barring a solution, the ...
Feb 08, 2012
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Using a heating system, physicists have succeeded for the first time in preventing the development of instabilities in an efficient alternative way relevant to a future nuclear fusion reactor. It’s an ...
Jan 13, 2012
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In the race against world governments and the wealthiest companies to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor, a small, innovative Canadian firm is hoping to bottle and sell the sun's energy.
Nov 30, 2011
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Research on the Alcator C-Mod experiment at MIT has made an unexpected connection between two seemingly unrelated but important phenomena observed in tokamak plasmas: spontaneous plasma rotation and the global ...
Nov 11, 2011
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