Another fusion R&D firm has just reported a significant advance, and it is an experimental design involving both international collaboration of fusion projects, and the reversed-field magnetic pinch configuration developed by the late fusion pioneer Dr. Norman Rostoker and foreseen by ideas of Drs. Winston Bostick and Daniel Wells, collaborators of the Fusion Energy Foundation of Lyndon LaRouche.
The TAE Technologies company of California, founded in 1998 by students of Rostoker, and Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), for the first time were able to measure fusion reactions in a fuel mixture of boron (Atomic Number 11) and hydrogen—known as proton-boron fusion and requiring plasma temperature at least in the range of 500-600 million degrees Kelvin. Fusion of these elements is completely aneutronic and produces only alpha particles (double protons) and large amounts of energy. The fusions measured (which were nowhere near breakeven levels) took place in the NIFS Large Helical Device in Japan (a stellarator design) but are targeted for the next iteration of TAE’s reversed field magnetic configuration, which should be capable of generating 100 times more power, according to an article published by both teams in Nature Feb. 28.
