On January 12th Oxfordshire County Council, in England, gave the go-ahead for a new building near the village of Culham. Un peu d’histoire The idea of harnessing the process that powers the sun goes back almost as far as the discovery, in the 1920s and 1930s, of what that process is—namely the fusion of protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, …
Listen to this story. Un peu d’histoire The idea of harnessing the process that powers the sun goes back almost as far as the discovery, in the 1920s and 1930s, of what that process is—namely the fusion of protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, to form helium nuclei, also known as alpha particles. The usual approach—that taken by General Fusion, …
It's often described as the 'holy grail' of power production, and now scientists have come up with a new technique to achieve nuclear fusion. First Light Fusion, a spin-out from the University of Oxford, has used a technique called projectile fusion to accelerate fuel at 200 times the speed of sound. In First Light's case, a large two-stage hyper-velocity gas …
