Nuclear fusion comes in all shapes and sizes, and while donut-shaped tokamaks are the most common, many companies and universities are investigating other ways to bring star power in cheaper and more ...

For decades, scientists have been working to develop reactors that can achieve fusion to meet the increasing need for clean and limitless energy. The success of such experiments depends on multiple ...

A research group has achieved a new plasma confinement regime using small 3D magnetic perturbations that simultaneously suppress edge instabilities and enhance core plasma confinement in the ...

It’s rarely appreciated just how much more complicated nuclear fusion is than nuclear fission. Whereas the latter involves a process that happens all around us without any human involvement, and where ...

A team of fusion researchers at TAE Technologies, Inc., in the U.S., working with colleagues from the University of California, has developed a new type of fusion technology that the company claims ...

Scientists have developed a new approach to fusion plasma control inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi. The approach involves tailoring magnetic field imperfections to improve plasma stability ...

Magnetic confinement fusion represents a promising avenue for realising sustainable and high‐yield energy production. In these systems, plasma – a highly ionised state of matter – is contained within ...

Although the idea of containing a plasma within a magnetic field seems straightforward at first, plasmas are highly dynamic systems that will happily escape magnetic confinement if given half a chance ...

Contour plot of electron temperature (left) and radial profiles of electron temperature (center) and ion temperature (right) across an island, with ion temperature showing a gradient observed ...

(Editor’s note: The following article originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in October, 1971. It is reprinted here in full in November 2024—so readers can get a sense of how ...