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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

A California-based fusion company thinks it’s cracked one of energy’s toughest problems: how to make fusion efficient, powerful, and not absurdly expensive.

TAE Technologies, along with researchers from the University of California, says its reconfigured prototype—cheekily named Norm—could deliver 100 times the power of other fusion devices while running at half the cost of older designs.

The team’s research, published [nature.com] in Nature Communications, focuses on improving something called a field-reversed configuration [pppl.gov] (FRC)—a setup that holds piping hot plasma in place without relying on the gigantic magnets seen in traditional fusion designs like tokamaks. According to a TAE release published this month, FRC-based machines can achieve 100 times [tae.com] the fusion output of typical tokamaks with similar magnetic field strengths and plasma volumes.

[...] If the claims hold up, this could be a major leap toward commercial fusion power, something that’s remained perpetually “30 years away” for, well, more decades than that. But it’s still early days—Norm is a prototype, not a power plant, though the terms are not mutually exclusive if Da Vinci has anything to say about it in 2030.

Nevertheless, probing new ways of inducing fusion reactions—and streamlining those processes to make them more efficient—is a positive step toward commercial fusion energy. But it’s hard to be enthralled by those steps when you consider how many times the fusion timeline has slipped—and will probably keep slipping.

[Source]: GIZMODO [gizmodo.com]

Hype or the real deal. What do you think ?

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