FUSION'S BIG SOLUTION

NUCLEAR FUSION is a complicated and expensive process. The US Government alone sets aside R15 billion a year for nuclear and fusion energy research, resulting in very few critical breakthroughs. But last year, without any of that money, a privately funded California company called Tri Alpha Energy overcame a major obstacle. It figured out how to keep fusion plasma stable.

Nuclear fusion works like this: when two very light atoms bond together, they make an atom that has less total mass than the two that formed it. The missing mass is given off as energy, which can then be captured and used. There are several problems with this. The first is that two atomic nuclei don’t want to fuse. They’re both positively charged, so they repel each other. We solved this already: if you heat the atoms until they become plasma, they lose electrons, becoming fusible. The bigger problem? The temperature required to make fusible plasma is hotter than the core of the Sun. Oh, and it requires immense pressure to force those atoms together. Even if scientists can overcome both of these obstacles, keeping the atoms in the appropriate state long enough for fusion to occur can cost more energy than it creates.

This year, however, Tri Alpha held a plasma stable for five milliseconds; ten times longer than ever before and much longer than you need to achieve fusion. The plasma wasn’t quite at the core-of-theSun temperature, but CTO Michl Binderbauer is confident it can be done: the temperature barrier is generally considered to be an easier challenge than stability. Binderbauer projects that Tri Alpha will be able to solve the problem in the next three or four years. Seven to ten years after that, it hopes to have a facility that can send electrons to the grid.