![]() That's done through intense magnetic fields, which form a kind of invisible bottle to contain the hot swirling soup of protons and electrons, called a plasma. "It's really a watershed moment, I believe, in fusion science and technology," he says. Whyte, who is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, says this week's demonstration represents a major milestone, addressing the biggest questions remaining about the feasibility of the SPARC design. It's really a fundamentally new energy source." But once the technology is proven, he says, "it's an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time. "The challenges of making fusion happen are both technical and scientific," says Dennis Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which is working with CFS to develop SPARC. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world's first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes. We just have to figure out how to utilize it."ĭeveloping the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress. ![]() ![]() "The amount of power that is available is really game-changing." The fuel used to create fusion energy comes from water, and "the Earth is full of water-it's a nearly unlimited resource. "Fusion in a lot of ways is the ultimate clean energy source," says Maria Zuber, MIT's vice president for research and E. That advance paves the way, they say, for the long-sought creation of practical, inexpensive, carbon-free power plants that could make a major contribution to limiting the effects of global climate change.
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