A team of scientists has made a major breakthrough in the quest to create clean, limitless fusion energy.
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Type One Energy Group have developed a faster and more accurate way to fix a long-standing problem in fusion reactor design—one that has challenged scientists for nearly 70 years.
Fusion energy, often called the “holy grail” of clean power, works by fusing atoms together, much like what happens in the sun.
But to make fusion work on Earth, we need to trap super-hot plasma—an electrically charged gas—inside a reactor.
This is usually done using powerful magnetic fields in devices called stellarators, which look like twisted magnetic bottles.
The magnetic fields are supposed to keep high-energy particles trapped. But if particles escape, the plasma cools down and the reaction stops.
The challenge has been that designing a “leak-proof” magnetic field takes an enormous amount of computer power.
Engineers need to simulate thousands of magnetic coil designs to find one that works. The most accurate method, based on Newton’s laws of motion, takes too long to compute.
A quicker method called perturbation theory is much faster, but it isn’t very accurate and often leads to errors.
Now, the research team has developed a new shortcut using symmetry theory. This method is ten times faster than the gold standard approach and still keeps the accuracy needed to design effective fusion reactors.
According to lead researcher Josh Burby, this is the first time anyone has found a practical and reliable way to solve the “leaky particle” problem without relying on the slow, traditional method.
This breakthrough not only improves stellarator design but could also help with a similar issue in another type of fusion reactor called a tokamak. In tokamaks, runaway electrons can damage the reactor walls.
The new method may help scientists spot the weak points in the magnetic fields that let those electrons escape.
The work was published in Physical Review Letters and is already being seen as a game-changer for fusion energy.
The team’s innovation could speed up progress toward fusion-powered electricity—bringing us closer to a future of safe, clean, and virtually unlimited energy.
