Lifeboat Foundation

New Chinese fusion approach, betting big on fusion and lots more fusion stories!

A summary of recent fusion energy news stories presented by Dr Leigh Ann Kesler, a fusion consultant specialising in science communication.

Continue reading “Friday 26th November 2021” »

And the prototype design is already completed.

China’s space program has completed a prototype design for a powerful nuclear reactor, a report from the South China Morning Post reveals.

The country’s space program is building the device to keep up with other space agencies that have also drawn plans to go nuclear, such as NASA, which recently made a call for private firms to develop a nuclear fission system to power missions on the Moon within 10 years.

Continue reading “China’s New Space Nuclear Reactor Might Be 100 Times More Powerful Than NASA’s” »

Barely a year after the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) broke one record for fusion, it’s smashed it again, this time holding onto a churning whirlpool of 100 million degree plasma for a whole 30 seconds.

Though it’s well short of the 101 seconds set by the Chinese Academy of Sciences earlier this year, it remains a significant milestone on the road to cleaner, near-limitless energy that could transform how we power our society.

Here’s why it’s so important.

We’re a step closer to limitless energy. The Korea Institute of Fusion Energy has set a new record by running at one million degrees and maintaining super-hot plasma for 30 seconds, beating its own previous record by 10 seconds, a report by New Atlas reveals.

The tokamak reactor used for the record run is the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), which is also known as South Korea’s artificial sun.

Scientists are exploring nuclear fusion technology through various experimental devices, and a popular design for this pursuit of clean, practically inexhaustible energy is known as the tokamak. An exciting example of these donut-shaped reactors can be found at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, where scientists have reportedly set a new record by maintaining super-hot plasma for 30 seconds.

The idea behind fusion power is to recreate the processes that take place inside the Sun. Huge gravitational forces combine with intense heat and pressure to produce a plasma, in which nuclei smash into each other at high velocity to form helium and release energy.

Tokamaks are designed to recreate this process here on Earth with a series of coils placed around a torus-shaped reactor, magnetically confining plasma heated to millions of degrees for long enough for the fusion of nuclei to occur. Many of these experimental devices are in operation around the world, and the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor is one making some promising strides.

And it could halve the transit time to Mars.

Pulsar Fusion Ltd., a nuclear fusion company based in the United Kingdom, has recently designed and successfully tested its first launch-capable, high-power chemical rocket engine.

Continue reading “A UK Rocket Company Wants to Put Nuclear Fusion Power in Orbit by 2027” »

The Moon awaits. After long decades in which no human being set foot on the lunar surface, we are heading back. And quite soon.

As part of the NASA-led Artemis program, astronauts are returning to the lunar environment as soon as 2024, with a view to ultimately establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon – a place we haven’t seen in person since 1972.

To live and work on the Moon, though, astronauts will need power and plenty of it, and there’s no power grid on the Moon.

Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. By the time they return to our cosmic neighbor by around 2025, the exploration landscape will be very different due to wide-ranging technological advances.

In a bid to further accelerate the technology that will power future lunar missions, NASA, alongside the Department of Energy (DOE) 0, has put out a press statement calling for companies to help it develop nuclear energy solutions.

Scientists have been experimenting with the creation of nuclear energy for decades and have used nuclear fission — the process of breaking atoms apart — to power everything from devasting atomic bombs to clean nuclear energy.

However, this kind of nuclear energy is different from cosmic inspired nuclear fusion in one significant way: it’s not self-sustaining. Creating enough energy on Earth to power this kind of reaction has been just out of reach for decades.

Continue reading “What a fusion breakthrough means for the future of clean energy” »