US Department of Energy reports first-ever achievement of fusion ignition

This year saw a number of firsts and the biggest of them may be the announcement by the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that it had achieved a breakthrough in the quest for commercial fusion power. On December 5, the agency's National Ignition Facility (NIF) used 192 lasers focused on a tiny sphere of hydrogen isotopes to produce a fusion reaction that generated more energy than was pumped into it.

Oxford spinoff demonstrates world-first hypersonic "projectile fusion"

n April, Oxford University spinoff First Light Fusion used a bit of lateral thinking to create a new process to achieve fusion. Instead of lasers and magnets, the startup uses projectiles flying at Mach 19 at embedded fuel pellets in tiny, falling cube targets to generate shock waves flying at Mach 204 to create fusion conditions.

US nuclear regulator greenlights its first small modular reactor