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Scientists have researched fusion since the 1950s. The Energy Department is expected to announce Tuesday that scientists have reached a breakthrough in nuclear fusion in their quest to produce a technology to provide clean, unlimited and affordable power. Scientists have researched fusion since the 1950s, and the Biden administration is likely to affirm the massive, decades-long investment, according to the Washington Post reported. "To most of us, this was only a matter of time," a senior fusion scientist told the newspaper. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to make the announcement Tuesday at a media event her department is promoting...

The “Holy Grail” of virtually limitless clean energy from nuclear fusion reactors is within reach after a major breakthrough, scientists believe. An “artificial sun” burning at 150million degrees smashed the world record, helping the UK-based research team retake the lead in a global race that also involves China, the US and tycoons such as Jeff Bezos. More than 4,800 scientists from the UK and across Europe are busy working on the Joint European Torus, or JET, an experimental reactor in Abingdon near Oxford. Today they announced the intense ring of fire it contains – superheated to ten times hotter than...

          Derek Sutherland / University of WashingtonOct 10 Cheaper Than Coal? Fusion Concept Aims to Bridge Energy Gap By Alan Boyle   Researchers say they've developed a concept for a fusion reactor that could be built for less money than an equivalent coal-fired plant — but they acknowledge that they still have some questions to answer. For example, will the concept really work?The design concept, known as the "dynomak," is the subject of a detailed economic analysis as well as a presentation to be made next week in Russia at the International Atomic Energy Agency's 25th Fusion...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

When the Fermi team did the calculations, using the most conservative estimates for how astrophysics plays into this, they determined that the mass scale must be at least 1.2 times the Planck mass, and by using reasonable but less conservative assumptions, they derived lower limits on the mass scale of up to 100 times the Planck mass. One way to interpret this is to say that there is no variation of the speed of light coming from any quantum gravity effects at less than 1.2 times the Planck mass. And given that some quantum gravity frameworks predict that effects should...

Re-Analysis of the Marinov Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment Reginald T. Cahill School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au The anisotropy of the speed of light at 1 part in 10^3 has been detected by Michelson and Morley (1887), Miller (1925/26), Illingworth (1927), Joos (1930), Jaseja et al. (1964), Torr and Kolen (1984), DeWitte (1991) and Cahill (2006) using a variety of experimental techniques, from gas-mode Michelson interferometers (with the relativistic theory for these only determined in 2002) to one-way RF coaxial cable propagation timing. All agree on the speed, right ascension and declination of...

There are a lot of fusion experiments going on in the world that don't get much publicity. Among these is Polywell Fusion. All you see in the papers is the billions spent on ITER or the billions spent on Laser Fusion. Small projects like Polywell where the spending is in millions and where the prospects for viability are near near term (years vs decades) don't seem to attract much attention from the giants of the media. I have been studying the Polywell Fusion Reactor intensively since November of 2006 when I first saw a video of Robert Bussard, the inventor...

The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics "Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the...

PHYSICS ARTICLES DISCUSSION FORUM Fusion and the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) Gravitonics article found HERE. Located near Geneva, close to the border between Switzerland and France, the Large Hadron Collider is the largest particle accelerator in the world at a cost of about 9 billion dollars. It is strange how we love to put all of our eggs in one basket. At the same time 9 billion was spent on the LHC, Dr Bussard could not find a few million for his fusion reactor. Don't get me wrong, the Physicists working at CERN are some of the best in the...

International partners are likely to scale back the first version of the ITER reactor.Corrected online: 28 May 2009 A 180-hectare stretch of land has already been cleared for ITER.ITER St Paul-lez-Durance, France ITER — a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source — will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped, Nature has learned.Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first. The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the...