Secretive fusion company reveals some of its progress

Science : Tri Alpha Energy is one of several private companies attempting to achieve stable fusion through the use of nontraditional methods. Unlike many of those companies, Tri Alpha has not provided much information about itself or its work, but it does appear to have significant financial backing. Now the company has published two papers showing it has made major improvements in a technique previously demonstrated at several universities. Tri Alpha is working on field-reversed configuration (FRC) fusion, in which the movement of the charged particles in a plasma creates a magnetic field that holds the plasma in a ring shape. The Tri Alpha fusion device shoots two FRCs toward each other from opposite ends of a 23-m-long tube. Traveling at 250 km/s, the FRCs meet in the middle and merge, creating a high-temperature FRC. However, such configurations are very short-lived. The improvements that Tri Alpha has made to the system have increased the lifetime of the high-temperature FRC from 0.3 ms up to 5 ms. The 10-fold increase is a significant step forward, but to reach a point where the energy output is greater than the input, an FRC will have to last for at least one full second.