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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Tri-Alpha Fusion spending $500 million to develop commercial fusion by 2027

• nextbigfuture.com

Tri Alpha is the largest of about a dozen startups trying to make it work.

Tri Alpha is taking a different approach than the International Tokomak. TriAlpha will not a huge structure. The idea is to fire two football-shaped plasma clouds at each other at supersonic speeds.

At the center of the chamber, they collide violently, fusing into a larger football. Additional particles are fired at right angles, making the plasma ball spin like a well-thrown pass.

They are testing constantly, sometimes 50 times a day. Each shot requires about 20 megawatts of electricity, enough to power all the lights and appliances in 5,000 homes, but for only a few-thousandths-of-a-second.

Gleaning data from a hot ball of nothing that lasts for much, much less than the blink of an eye requires a lot of clever testing tools.


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