Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 4d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
And the shortcuts to create something approximating one create a world of engineering challenges.
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This is why, since the first fusion reactor patent was granted in 1946, fusion has always seemed just out of reach.
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Each solution comes with a new set of problems.
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But not all hope is lost.
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In recent years, things do seem to be changing, with some hugely significant science breakthroughs.
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In December 2022, for the first time ever, more energy was obtained from a fusion reaction than was required to initiate it.
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a challenge that had eluded researchers for decades.
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At the National Ignition Facility, a research-scale ICF reactor in the US, 3.15 megajoules of energy was obtained from a tiny pellet of DT fuel, using an energy input of 2.05 megajoules.
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Then in late 2023,
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The experimental jet reactor in the UK, the Tokamak, generated a world-record 69 MJ of energy from just 0.2 mg of DT fuel.
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And while international behemoths like ITER inch closer to operation,
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A flurry of private investment has also entered the field, exploring alternative fusion technologies.
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One is the Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, backed by Google, Nvidia and Bill Gates.
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It proposes using high-temperature superconducting magnets to produce a more compact tokamak.
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CFS claims it will have a commercial plant online by the early 2030s.
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Another outfit based out of Washington state, Helion, believes it is going to get there even earlier.
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Backed by the likes of Sam Altman, this company has taken a completely new approach to reactor design.
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It fires two rings of plasma together at a million kilometers per hour to generate fusion conditions, a sort of halfway house between magnetic and inertial confinement.
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This approach allows them to react deuterium not with tritium, but a reactive isotope of helium, helium-3, doing away with the problematic tritium entirely.
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The use of helium-3 is key to helium's approach, because instead of producing an alpha particle and a neutron, these reactants generate an alpha particle and a proton.
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Showing 1881–1900 of 29,301 · page 95 of 1466
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