内容摘要：We've spoken to this California company before about its impressive progress and ambitious plans in

We've spoken to this California company before about its impressive progress and ambitious plans in the fusion power space. With more than US$1.2 billion in investments behind it, TAE has come in ahead of schedule with results from its fifth-generation fusion device, called Norman, which was designed to sustain plasma at 30 million °C (54 million °F), but which has already broken through 75 million °C (135 million °F).

Check out our TAE interview story from 2022 for lots of background on why the company is going with hydrogen-boron, how the process will differ from tritium-based designs, the design, advantages and evolution of TAE's prototype capped-cylinder fusion reactors, and to learn exactly why hundred-million-degree temperatures aren't going to cut the mustard in a hydrogen-boron reactor – TAE is targeting billion-degrees-plus plasma confinement by the early 2030s, many times hotter than what tritium reactors will require.

Today, TAE is celebrating the publishing of a peer-reviewed paper in the well-respected journal Nature Communications, documenting the world's first measurement of hydrogen-boron fusion in magnetically confined plasma. That's highly specific for a reason; the authors note that H-B fusion has already been measured in laser-produced plasmas, and in particle accelerators through beam-target fusion. But these environments can't tell TAE much about how H-B fusion and its products will behave and proliferate in a magnetically-confined plasma like the ones they'll use in their reactors.