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IMAGE: Physicist C.S. Chang with figure showing turbulence eddies in an ITER plasma edge (green) with the heat-load footprint on the material wall carried by escaping hot plasma particles. Model simulated. view more
Credit: Photo by Elle Starkman/PPPL Office of Communications. Simulation and image from Robert Hager and Seung-Hoe Ku.
Efforts to duplicate on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars for unlimited energy must contend with extreme heat-load density that can damage the doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called tokamaks, the most widely used laboratory facilities that house fusion reactions, and shut them down. These loads flow against the walls of what are called divertor plates that extract waste heat from the tokamaks.
First Light Fusion s reactors could produce energy much more cheaply than other renewables
An Oxford start-up developing nuclear fusion technology has raised $25m (£19m) in fresh cash as it plots a first-of-its-kind plant to be ready well ahead of government targets.
First Light Fusion, which was spun out of Oxford University, said the latest funds would allow it to almost double its team of scientists and engineers to more than 60 staff, and upgrade its equipment to speed up development of the fusion plant, where energy is produced by fusing together atoms in a safe, non-polluting process.
It believes its technology, which uses a projectile process to spark the reaction, accelerates the pathway to a commercial grid-ready reactor , potentially bringing forward government targets which currently aim for a plant to be operating as soon as 2040.
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