Oxford spinoff demonstrates world

Oxford spinoff First Light Fusion says its novel "projectile" approach offers "the fastest, simplest and cheapest route to commercial fusion power." The company is now celebrating a significant breakthrough with its first confirmed fusion reaction.

The nuclear fusion space is heating up, if you'll pardon the pun, as the world orients itself toward a clean energy future. Where current nuclear power plants release energy by splitting atoms in fission reactions, fusion reactors will release energy in the same way the Sun does – by smashing atoms together so hard and so fast that they fuse into heavier elements.

Most of the big tokamak and stellarator-based fusion projects in progress now intend to create monstrously high temperatures, higher than in the core of the Sun, in magnetically confined plasma, hoping to get those atoms moving fast enough to overcome the powerful repulsion between two nuclei.

But there are other approaches, including that of Australia's HB11, which takes a more targeted approach by using ultra-powerful lasers to accelerate hydrogen atoms into boron fuel pellets at tremendous speed, yielding positively-charged helium atoms, which can be directly harvested for electrical power.

First Light Fusion says it's got another approach altogether, that doesn't require expensive, powerful lasers or magnets to get the job done. Like the HB11 approach, First Light requires tremendous speed. Hypersonic speed, in fact, in the form of a projectile being fired from a railgun at a falling target, which is specifically designed to generate finely tuned, collapsing shockwaves that create momentary pressure levels nearly a billion times higher than atmospheric air pressure at sea level. Pressure levels high enough to cause small embedded deuterium fuel pellets to implode upon themselves at high enough speeds to overcome nuclear repulsion and start fusion reactions.

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