Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A brand new technology has been in the works that promises to make sustainable nuclear fusion a reality. It’s been promising in testing and continues to make progress. So much so, that the scientists in question have a ‘solid’ plan of having it actionable in as little as 15 years…ish.
To be fair, the joke I just appropriated is usually told about cold fusion, while the progress I mocked is legitimate science around the regular kind of hot fusion? I guess? Hot enough anyway. Japan’s JT-60SA Fusion reactor is actually planned for scientific study of fusion, and uses magnetic fields from superconducting coils to contain a cloud of absurdly hot plasma, to experiment with various ways to potentially initiate fusion and produce net positive energy.
How hot, you may ask? The four-story-high machine is designed to hold a plasma heated to 200 million degrees Celsius for about 100 seconds. I assume that they didn’t design it for the full 2 minutes because of something to do with the metric system. There are parallel efforts going on in Europe, but Japan hopes that this research enables them to have a real-life proof-of-concept fusion reactor, hilariously acronymed DEMO, online by 2050.