A New Zealand-based company just took one step closer to creating a working nuclear fusion reactor, Interesting Engineering reported.
OpenStar Technologies, based in Wellington, said it is building a levitated dipole reactor using high-temperature superconductors along with a levitating electromagnet.
"Our current milestone includes confining a plasma with a magnet charged by a flux pump. So far we have designed, built, and tested such a magnet in less than two years, a feat in and of itself," OpenStar said.
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If all of that information sounds pretty dense and jargony, don't worry: You don't have to understand the science to eventually benefit from it. The important takeaway is that, if successful, a nuclear fusion reactor could be used to create virtually limitless clean, renewable energy.
For that reason, nuclear fusion has been called the "holy grail of clean energy."
While there are nuclear power plants currently in operation, those plants rely on a process called nuclear fission, where energy is derived from atoms being split apart. Nuclear fusion, conversely, is when atoms are slammed together, mimicking the process that powers the sun.
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Nuclear fusion has the potential to be far more efficient than nuclear fission and crucially safer as well. Unlike fission, which produces large amounts of radioactive waste (which is definitely not very planet-friendly) as a by-product, fusion produces only helium, an inert gas.
That's why scientists all around the world — from Japan to New Zealand to the United States — are hard at work figuring out how to make nuclear fusion reactors effective and commercially viable.
For OpenStar Technologies, its next step is to complete and test its prototype reactor, named Junior, to "test the integration of HTS power supplies in a levitated dipole magnet," per the company. If the technology works, OpenStar will then attempt to apply it to "power plant-level fusion."
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