Washington-based Agni Energy, spearheaded by 25-year-old Demitri Hopkins, says its ‘beam-target’ blueprint will focus and control the elements required to achieve nuclear fusion more efficiently than previous designs – with a company spokesman hailing it as “a paradigm shift in power”.
The Sun, like other stars, is a natural fusion reactor, and efforts to replicate the processes which drive it have been ongoing for decades, with nuclear fusion long regarded as the “Holy Grail of energy production”.
Such reactors would involve the fusing together of two lighter atomic nuclei to form a heavier nucleus, releasing energy in the process.
Unlike nuclear fission, which is the method by which energy is generated by conventional nuclear power stations, fusion produces little nuclear waste, and releases three to four times more energy.
Agni’s plans attempt to incorporate the best elements from previous ideasbyutilising a method by which a beam of ions is focused on to a solid fuel target using both electric fields and magnetic fields.
The design means that the ion beam has a short path to its target and does not need to be controlled for long before fusion happens.
The energy released can then be used to generate electrical power.