DailyDirt: Still No Mr. Fusion Generators in 2015...

Marty McFly visited us in the year 2015 in the Back To The Future franchise... but we still don't have flying cars or Mr. Fusion generators. There are some pretty cool DeLoreans out there that people have modified, but no "flux capacitor"-level upgrades, unfortunately. Fusion is making some slow progress, though. Check out a few of these baby steps towards a fusion generator. Just another 30 years or so....

• There are a bunch of different ways that could potentially lead to an energy-generating controlled fusion reaction, and sonofusion (aka bubble fusion) is one approach that might be making a comeback. Still, there's no peer-reviewed evidence that points to sonofusion actually working in a way that could be harnessed in a practical way, but it's not a totally crazy idea, either. [url]
• Physicists in Switzerland are working on their own fusion reactor to try to produce 500 megawatts of electricity from 50 megawatts of input power. The TCV tokamak is really just studying how to confine super-hot plasmas, but what is learned might help other fusion researchers design more advanced fusion containment structures. [url]
• Fusion reactor designs might hinge on the behavior of "plasmoids" in a new kind of tokamak. Donut-shapped tokamak reactors currently require complex magnetic fields created by solenoids, but if plasmoids can be controlled without solenoids, future fusion reactors could look unexpectedly different from the prototypes of today (and, you know, actually work). [url]

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