Colloquium, "What's new? Isn't fusion energy always 30 years away?"

Presented by: Scott Parker, University of Colorado Boulder
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Host: Michael Litos
Abstract: Fusion energy is a promising technology for producing clean, limitless, zero-carbon energy. Recently, there has been a paradigm shift where today, privately funded research dominates over the historic government-funded fusion program. Private research and development paths to fusion have very short timelines, and some future milestones appear speculative. I will discuss plasma and nuclear physics constraints that experiments will face as they progress toward the fusion goal. I will start with an overview of fusion energy and briefly discuss the recent demonstration of a net gain in inertial confinement fusion at the National Ignition Facility. My focus will be magnetic confinement, the space where the most promising devices exist and where the most private equity is invested.