A privately-owned tokamak in the United Kingdom has reportedly achieved ignition temperature for nuclear fusion, meaning the reactor has reached the threshold for commercial energy production.
Tokamak Energy, an amusingly hard-to-Google company based in Oxford in the south of England, has been working ontokamak reactors since 2009. Even before that, the group was founded as part of England’s national Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, with decades of history as part of the world’s nuclear fusion research efforts. (Private companies like Tokamak Energy, which spin off of research facilities housed at universities or as part of government programs, are surprisingly common. One battery researcher tells Popular Mechanics that the reason is simple: students and public funds should be doing new research, not slogging through the long road of research and development on an emerging commercial product.)
To read more, click here.