Can this new nuclear fusion generator make unlimited clean electricity?
• https://brilliant.org/ElectricFuture first 200 people get 20% off annual premium subscription.
• https://youtu.be/sEt0nIBPL24 Deeper dive into Helion’s materials, methods, and fusion approach. (unlisted bonus content)

• Organizations all across the world are racing to achieve a fusion power breakthrough. Many critics say nuclear fusion is impossible, but Helion Energy believes they’ve cracked the code…

If you could design the perfect energy source, it would have an inexhaustible supply of fuel, be environmentally friendly, not take up much space, and have a high degree of safety.

The fuels considered for fusion power have traditionally all been isotopes of hydrogen, but there are better fusion reactions using elements like helium-3. Nuclear Fusion 3.

What is nuclear fusion? Nuclear fusion explained: an experimental form of power generation that harnesses the energy released when two atoms combine.

How does nuclear fusion work? Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons. The nucleus is made up of protons, and neutrons. A fusion reactor heats fusion fuels into plasma and fuses light elements into heavier elements.

A mechanism for preventing destructive instabilities in magnetically confined plasmas provides a new way for scientists to operate future nuclear-fusion reactors.

All magnetically confined plasmas naturally develop instabilities, regions where small perturbations grow rapidly [1]. Scientists have been looking for ways to prevent instabilities in a tokamak—a leading candidate for a fusion reactor—because the instabilities can cause substantial damage to the tokamak’s walls. Now Georg Harrer at the Vienna University of Technology and his colleagues have shown how these destructive instabilities can be avoided by adjusting the properties of the plasma and its confining magnetic field [2]. The researchers’ findings offer a fresh approach to running future fusion reactors.

A tokamak uses a powerful magnetic field to confine fusion fuel in the form of a plasma (a highly ionized gas) that is shaped like a ring donut. Instabilities that originate at the plasma edge (the “glaze” of the donut) are called edge-localized modes (ELMs) [3]. ELMs transport heat and particles along magnetic-field lines, moving them from the well-confined plasma core (the “filling” of the donut) to the divertor—a region of the tokamak’s walls. ELMs come in various sizes and frequencies (repetition rates). Their size, expressed as a percentage of the energy stored in the plasma core, strongly influences how much heat and how many particles will be deposited by each ELM in the divertor.