Tri Alpha Energy, a Southern California fusion startup, just raised nearly $500,000 to try to make fusion power a reality. Funded by heavyweights like Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen, the company thinks it might have a prototype reactor ready at some point in the 2020s.
Fusion is as elusive as it is expensive. CERNs Large Hadron Collider is famous for its work as a high-energy particle accelerator, but fusion as a practical, commercially viable form of energy it still tantalizingly out of reach. Magnetic confinement fusion is advancing but still beyond us. Cold fusion is regarded as a bogeyman and a joke by the majority of the scientific community, though it maintains a faithful core of supporters.
An ambitious class of startups, though, is attempting various lower-budget reactor designs in an effort to make fusion — and with it, the potential for limitless clean energy — a reality. And an affordable one, at that.
As the MIT Technology Review reported in its sneak peak of the company, Tri Alpha Energy already claims to have kept high-energy plasma stable in its locomotive-size” generator for a full 11.5 milliseconds, which relatively speaking is a long time.
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