Nuclear Energy: Good News in Fusion

TriAlpha Energy, a company I’ve mentioned many times, is apparently out of its “stealth mode,” as one infers from its new website.

The way I understand this, there are various ways to provide the required energy to a certain feedstock, in this case hydrogen and boron (B11, the most common isotope) to produce a fusion reaction and non-radioactive products, in this case three helium atoms (He4 – thus the name “TriAlpha”).  These folks employ something called field reverse configuration or FRC, a plasma current that produces a toroidal force in a tiny area.

They still face a number of important hurdles, but according to my colleague Jim Boyden, they’ve made a huge amount of progress far faster than anyone (including they themselves) thought possible, and the competitive approaches to FRC will probably never work; Jim refers to them as “Rube Goldberg devices,” certainly not a complimentary term.