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Advances in inertial confinement fusion and innovative modeling have brought nuclear fusion closer to reality, offering insights into high-energy-density physics and the early universe.

The pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion as a source of clean, abundant energy is moving closer to realization, thanks to advancements in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). This method involves igniting deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel by subjecting it to extreme temperatures and pressures during a precisely engineered implosion process.

In DT fusion, most of the released energy is carried by neutrons, which can be harnessed for electricity generation. Simultaneously, alpha particles remain trapped within the fuel, where they drive further fusion reactions. When the energy deposited by these alpha particles surpasses the energy input from the implosion, the plasma enters a self-sustaining “burning” phase. This significantly boosts energy output and density.

Researchers in Japan made a groundbreaking discovery that could bring us closer to sustainable energy from nuclear fusion reactors, paving the way for longer-lasting, more efficient clean energy systems.

In a recent study, the team developed protective coatings to enhance the durability of materials used in fusion reactors, addressing a key challenge: material degradation from extreme heat and corrosive liquid metal coolants.

Fusion reactors, which mimic the sun’s energy production process, hold huge potential as a limitless source of clean energy. However, their intense environment makes it difficult to find materials that can endure prolonged exposure to high temperatures and corrosive coolants like lithium-lead alloy.

Scientists have simulated a groundbreaking solution to boost fusion efficiency by eliminating “slow modes,” unhelpful waves that waste energy during plasma heating.

Using 2D simulations, researchers demonstrated how a slight tilt in the Faraday screen can enhance energy transfer, bringing us closer to sustainable fusion energy.

Heating plasma for fusion: the challenge.

When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022, the world’s attention turned to the prospect of how that breakthrough experiment — designed to secure the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile — might also pave the way for virtually limitless, safe and carbon-free fusion energy.

Advanced 3D printing offers one potential solution to bridging the science and technology gaps presented by current efforts to make inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants a reality.

“Now that we have achieved and repeated fusion ignition,” said Tammy Ma, lead for LLNL’s inertial fusion energy institutional initiative, “the Lab is rapidly applying our decades of know-how into solving the core physics and engineering challenges that come with the monumental task of building the fusion ecosystem necessary for a laser fusion power plant. The mass production of ignition-grade targets is one of these, and cutting-edge 3D printing could help get us there.”

As energy-hungry computer data centers and artificial intelligence programs place ever greater demands on the U.S. power grid, tech companies are looking to a technology that just a few years ago appeared ready to be phased out: nuclear energy.

After several decades in which investment in new nuclear facilities in the U.S. had slowed to a crawl, tech giants Microsoft and Google have recently announced investments in the technology, aimed at securing a reliable source of emissions-free power for years into the future.

Earlier this year, online retailer Amazon, which has an expansive cloud computing business, announced it had reached an agreement to purchase a nuclear energy-fueled data center in Pennsylvania and that it had plans to buy more in the future.


Amazon’s plan, by contrast, does not require either new technology or the resurrection of an older nuclear facility.

The data center that the company purchased from Talen Energy is located on the same site as the fully operational Susquehanna nuclear plant in Salem, Pennsylvania, and draws power directly from it.

Amazon characterized the $650 million investment as part of a larger effort to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Photons, electrons, and other particles can propagate as wave packets with helical wave fronts that carry an orbital angular momentum. These vortex states can be used to probe the dynamics of atomic, nuclear, and hadronic systems. Recently, researchers demonstrated vortex states of x-ray photons and proposed ways to realize such states for particles at higher energies (MeV to GeV). But verifying high-energy vortex states will be challenging, because characterization techniques used at lower energies would perform poorly. Zhengjiang Li of Sun Yat-sen University in China and his colleagues at Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics propose a new diagnostic method for high-energy vortex states. Their approach would reveal such states through an exotic scattering phenomenon called a superkick.

A superkick is a theorized effect occurring when an atom placed near the axis of a vortex light beam absorbs a photon. Under such conditions, the atom may get kicked to the side with a transverse momentum greater than that carried by the photon. Li and his colleagues considered a similar superkick involving electrons. They analyzed the elastic head-on collision of two electron wave packets at 10 MeV, one in a vortex state and the other in a nonvortex one. According to their calculations, two electrons in the beam, upon scattering, would acquire a nonzero total transverse momentum that could be detectable. The researchers predict an unmistakable signature of the vortex state: The momentum imbalance increases as the collision point gets closer to the vortex axis.

The researchers expect the superkick effect—which has never been observed—to be detectable with realistic experimental settings. They say the idea could be extended to high-energy vortices of photons, ions, and even hadrons.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that was spun out of a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research labs, announced plans this week to break ground on what it calls “the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant.” The plant which is expected to come online sometime in the early 2030s, according to the company, will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The plan is certainly an ambitious one, starting with how the energy will be generated. Nuclear fusion is a notoriously difficult process that involves fusing together two light atomic nuclei into a single heavier one, resulting in the release of a massive amount of energy—it’s estimated to produce four times as much energy as nuclear fission reactions. The reaction that nuclear fusion generates is the same kind of reaction that powers the sun.

It’s not hard to imagine why one would want to be able to harness the energy of the sun. It is hard to actually, ya know, do that, though. To date, nuclear fusion has proven elusive—at least in a way that would produce usable energy. In 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reached nuclear fusion “ignition” for the first time, meaning they successfully produced an excess of energy from the reactions. Prior to that breakthrough, which has since been replicated, it took more energy to produce the reaction than energy that came from it.

Heating plasma to the ultra-high temperatures needed for fusion reactions requires more than turning the dial on a thermostat. Scientists consider multiple methods, one of which involves injecting electromagnetic waves into the plasma, the same process that heats food in microwave ovens. But when they produce one type of heating wave, they can sometimes simultaneously create another type of wave that does not heat the plasma, in effect wasting energy.

In response to the problem, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have performed computer simulations confirming a technique that prevents the production of the unhelpful waves, known as slow modes, boosting the heat put into the and increasing the efficiency of the fusion reactions.

“This is the first time scientists have used 2D computer simulations to explore how to reduce slow modes,” said Eun-Hwa Kim, a PPPL principal research physicist and lead author of the paper reporting the results in Physics of Plasmas. “The results could lead to more efficient plasma heating and possibly an easier path to fusion energy.”

How do you find and measure nuclear particles, like antineutrinos, that travel near the speed of light?

Antineutrinos are the antimatter partner of a neutrino, one of nature’s most elusive and least understood subatomic particles. They are commonly observed near nuclear reactors, which emit copious amounts of antineutrinos, but they also are found abundantly throughout the universe as a result of Earth’s natural radioactivity, with most of them originating from the decay of potassium-40, thorium-232 and uranium-238 isotopes.

When an antineutrino collides with a proton, a positron and a neutron are produced—a process known as inverse beta decay (IBD). This event causes scintillating materials to light up, making it possible to detect these antineutrinos; and if they can be detected, they can be used to study the properties of a reactor’s core or Earth’s interior.

Imagine if we could take the energy of the sun, put it in a container, and use it to provide green, sustainable power for the world. Creating commercial fusion power plants would essentially make this idea a reality. However, there are several scientific challenges to overcome before we can successfully harness fusion power in this way.

Researchers from the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) Ames National Laboratory and Iowa State University are leading efforts to overcome material challenges that could make commercial fusion power a reality. The research teams are part of a DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program called Creating Hardened And Durable fusion first Wall Incorporating Centralized Knowledge (CHADWICK). They will investigate materials for the first wall of a fusion reactor. The first wall is the structure that surrounds the fusion reaction, so it bears the brunt of the extreme environment in the fusion reactor core.

ARPA-E recently selected 13 projects under the CHADWICK program. Of those 13, Ames Lab leads one of the projects and is collaborating alongside Iowa State on another project, which is led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).