BOSTON – The Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has signed a new five-year agreement with Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS) to continue their collaboration on fusion energy research and education activities, an institutional press release said.
Backed by Bill Gates, the CFS is a technology spinout from MIT and announced last year that it had built a first-of-its-kind superconducting magnet to be used in a nuclear fusion reactor. This was the first instance of a nuclear fusion experiment delivering a net energy gain, paving the way for the use of fusion energy in the near future.
Nuclear fusion is the name given to the process when smaller atoms slam into each other to produce atoms with a heavier nucleus and release high amounts of energy as a byproduct. Used by our Sun quite effectively, scientists have been trying to replicate the process on Earth to generate energy in a carbon-free way.
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