Atlas City Project

Peering inside an artificial sun

A tiny chamber made of gold, called a hohlraum, is used to contain the pellet of heavy hydrogen fuel at the center of a fusion reaction at the National Ignition Facility. Laser beams enter through the two open ends of the hohlraum and are reflected in toward the fuel, heating it up to produce the fusion reaction. Image: National Ignition Facility

(PhysOrg.com) -- After more than five decades of research, a major milestone toward the harnessing of fusion power is expected within the next year or two. This milestone, known as "fusion ignition," should take place at an experimental facility built for that purpose in California. Known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, it started initial experiments last fall.

Levitating magnet may yield new approach to clean energy

The Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) reactor is housed inside a 16-foot-diameter steel structure in a building on the MIT campus that also houses MIT’s other fusion reactor, a tokamak called Alcator C-mod.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion -- the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy.

This is so cool! Another huge step in power technology =)

Polywell fusion appears to me the most promising for a while now:

www.strout.net/info/science/polywell/index.html

wow these are very interesting pages. they seem like something from spiderman! but i am glad to see humanity is advancing technology in this direction

One of the videos brought up that this form of power plant can take the waste of other power plants and break it down. If I understood that correctly, not only could we help the environment by safely burning by-products that usually take several thousand years to naturally break down, we could charge the other plants for this waste removal.

I wish I understood more about nuclear fusion. Reading through some of those documents just made my head spin.

I have frequent occasions to tell people that the challenge with fusion of fission is to work it down to the point where there is no hard radiation bi product. It used to be that people would tell me I was nuts.

Its nice to see things moving along. However, Fusion is still a future technology and exorbitantly expensive compared to solar and geothermal, which are the two technologies which i do think we should actually implement for ATLAS.

Fission will in the long run prove to be much better than fusion,.. btw..