A team of researchers at MIT think they may have lowered one of the major barriers to achieving large-scale nuclear fusion—taking us one step closer to making an abundant form of energy a reality. By harnessing the same processes that power stars, we would have access to a clean, safe, and practically limitless energy source. […]
Scientists Pitch Bold Plan to Turn Nuclear Waste Into Nuclear Fuel
Nuclear fusion has seen some exciting advances, and the promise of clean, efficient energy does seem to be creeping closer to reality. But skeptics point to practical issues we may not be trying hard enough to solve—issues that will inevitably weigh down our reactors when they finally arrive. A new proposal by Terence Tarnowsky, a […]
Scientists Taught AI to Predict Nuclear Fusion Success—and It’s Actually Working
AI is giving a huge efficiency boost to one of the biggest nuclear fusion facilities in the world—but perhaps not in the way you think. In research published today in Science, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report how its newly developed deep learning model accurately predicted the results of a 2022 fusion experiment at […]
Legendary U.S. Particle Collider Is About to Perform Its Final Smash
After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots—erm, superconducting magnets. The collider’s final run—its 25th—kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded—in fact, transformed into—Brookhaven Lab’s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). […]