Circa 2016
MIT has been developing a small fusion reactor prototype, three of which could power the City of Boston if they were fully built. Though the project lost federal funding for its current fusion device, the school plans to press ahead on building a new, more advanced prototype.
It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth.
The next step will be building SPARC, a smaller-scale version of the planned ARC power plant. The successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical, clearing the way for rapid design and construction of that pioneering device can then proceed full speed.
Zuber says that “I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy, based on the demonstrated performance of the magnets. The next step is to scale up, to build an actual power plant. There are still many challenges ahead, not the least of which is developing a design that allows for reliable, sustained operation. And realizing that the goal here is commercialization, another major challenge will be economic. How do you design these power plants so it will be cost effective to build and deploy them?”
Someday in a hoped-for future, when there may be thousands of fusion plants powering clean electric grids around the world, Zuber says, “I think we’re going to look back and think about how we got there, and I think the demonstration of the magnet technology, for me, is the time when I believed that, wow, we can really do this.”
Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972. On the one hand, there was a dark piece of radioactive natural uranium ore, extracted from a mine in Africa. On the other, accepted scientific data about the constant ratio of radioactive uranium in ore.
Examination of this high-grade ore from a mine in Gabon was found to contain a lower proportion of uranium-235 (U-235) — the fissile sort. Only a tiny bit less, but enough to make the researchers sit back and scratch their heads.
Two developments in 2025 will mark a decisive shift in the decades-old quest to generate cheap and abundant energy from nuclear fusion.
The magnet coil also reached a record for stored energy by 3.7 megajoules.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has completed testing of its Central Solenoid Model Coil, a critical component in building its SPARC tokamak reactor.
Scientists have developed a novel technique using high-energy particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research located at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Detailed in a newly published paper in Nature, this method complements lower-energy approaches for studying nuclear structure. It offers deeper insights into the shapes of atomic nuclei, enhancing our understanding of the building blocks of visible matter.
“In this new measurement, we not only quantify the overall shape of the nucleus — whether it’s elongated like a football or squashed down like a tangerine — but also the subtle triaxiality, the relative differences among its three principle axes that characterize a shape in between the ‘football’ and ‘tangerine,’” said Jiangyong Jia, a professor at Stony Brook University (SBU) who has a joint appointment at Brookhaven Lab and is one of the principal authors on the STAR Collaboration publication.
Deciphering nuclear shapes has relevance to a wide range of physics questions, including which atoms are most likely to split in nuclear fission, how heavy atomic elements form in collisions of neutron stars, and which nuclei could point the way to exotic particle decay discoveries. Leveraging improved knowledge of nuclear shapes will also deepen scientists’ understanding of the initial conditions of a particle soup that mimics the early universe, which is created in RHIC’s energetic particle smashups. The method can be applied to analyzing additional data from RHIC as well as data collected from nuclear collisions at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It will also have relevance to future explorations of nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider, a nuclear physics facility in the design stage at Brookhaven Lab.
Researchers have developed a method to precisely locate hydrogen atoms within nanofilams, a breakthrough with significant implications for superconductivity and other material properties.
Their study, employing nuclear reaction analysis and ion channeling, revealed how hydrogen and its isotopes are distributed within titanium nanofilms, offering insights into tuning the material properties for various applications including hydrogen storage and catalysis.
Impact of hydrogen on material properties.
Researchers use the H.E.S.S. Observatory to overcome the challenge of detecting high-energy cosmic-ray electrons and positrons, revealing their likely origins close to our solar system through advanced data analysis techniques.
The Universe is filled with extreme environments, from the coldest regions to the most energetic sources imaginable. These conditions give rise to extraordinary objects like supernova remnants, pulsars, and active galactic nuclei, which emit charged particles and gamma rays with energies far exceeding those produced by the nuclear fusion processes in stars—by several orders of magnitude.
Challenges in Cosmic Ray Detection.
Banks of computer screens stacked two and three high line the walls. The screens are covered with numbers and graphs that are unintelligible to an untrained eye. But they tell a story to the operators staffing the particle accelerator control room. The numbers describe how the accelerator is speeding up tiny particles to smash into targets or other particles.
However, even the best operator can’t fully track the miniscule shifts over time that affect the accelerator’s machinery. Scientists are investigating how to use computers to make the tiny adjustments necessary to keep particle accelerators running at their best.
Researchers use accelerators to better understand materials and the particles that make them up. Chemists and biologists use them to study ultra-fast processes like photosynthesis. Nuclear and high energy physicists smash together protons and other particles to learn more about the building blocks of our universe.
The plan includes seven major recommendations.
The first is creating a new state authority to oversee nuclear development. They’ll also establish a single point of contact to help companies navigate the complex permitting process.
Education is also a big focus of the plan. It calls for partnerships with community colleges and universities to train workers for these high-tech jobs.