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OnlinePoker

(6,095 posts)
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 07:21 PM Tuesday

Canada has just broken a world record in nuclear fusion...

...and the number of neutrons has put the entire energy industry on alert

Canada has quietly set a new mark in the global race for fusion power. General Fusion says its latest compression experiments produced about 600 million fusion neutrons every second at peak, a record for its magnetized target fusion approach and a clear step toward controlled nuclear fusion.

In simple terms, the company has shown that it can squeeze a ball of super-hot gas hard enough and cleanly enough for fusion reactions to light up in a predictable way. The results come from the long-running Plasma Compression Science experiment series, whose data have been reviewed by independent scientists and published in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

In fusion research, neutron output is one of the main scoreboards, since neutrons carry much of the reaction energy and prove that true fusion is happening. In these experiments, the team achieved a peak rate near 600 million fusion neutrons per second in a single compression shot, a figure that Canadian Nuclear Society leaders describe as a record for magnetized target fusion and an important validation of the concept.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/canada-has-just-broken-a-world-record-in-nuclear-fusion-and-the-number-of-neutrons-has-put-the-entire-energy-industry-on-alert/25285/

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OAITW r.2.0

(31,501 posts)
1. Canada seems to be eating our lunch. Automotive, serospace, aluminum, hi-tech....
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 07:26 PM
Tuesday

They may be the real winners of this Trump administration.

OnlinePoker

(6,095 posts)
2. To be fair, General Fusion has been working on this for years
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 07:28 PM
Tuesday

They're finally seeing proof of concept results.

llmart

(17,320 posts)
14. I saw a report on CBC News this morning...
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 10:28 PM
Tuesday

about how Canada has brokered a deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE to allow their airline companies to expand Canada's air agreements causing Canadian airlines to do better to compete with them. It's like they're thumbing their nose at the U.S. and going elsewhere for business.

Bev54

(13,200 posts)
13. Canada and Japan have also recently signed a Memorandum of Cooperation
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 10:04 PM
Tuesday

to work together in several areas including new innovations.

chouchou

(2,807 posts)
3. Well, Well. The oil monsters will not like that!
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 07:38 PM
Tuesday

Looks like our OrangeJerk will have to mess with Canada and Greenland.

lastlib

(27,551 posts)
4. Watch him try to invade Canada to get control of their neutrons .......
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 07:53 PM
Tuesday

Canada should invade US to get control of our MORONS.

erronis

(22,663 posts)
6. Last thing the Canadians want are US morons.
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 09:06 PM
Tuesday

I understand there are some aggregations of them in Alberta, Manitoba. More than enough to fuel the slow reactors.

OAITW r.2.0

(31,501 posts)
11. I give credit to Trump destroying the Concervative movement in Canada.
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 09:37 PM
Tuesday

They may be Conservative....but they ain't stupid.

BWdem4life

(2,927 posts)
7. "squeeze a ball of super-hot gas"
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 09:07 PM
Tuesday

I don’t wanna brag, but I have already been doing that several times a day for many years!

NNadir

(37,303 posts)
10. As a dose of reality, even in these cute nominally positive energy output experiments, the fusion people have no clue...
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 09:24 PM
Tuesday

...about how to extract exergy from the heat. Without that, it's a parlor trick.

I don't like to bad mouth fusion too much, since I have been attending the winter lecture series "Science on Saturday" at PPPL for well over 10 years. This said, I've lived through 50 years of "fusion power is just 10 years away."

I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

This said, for the record, there is not enough tritium on the planet to run the ITER for six months, but...!!!!!....

Almost all of this tritium, about 50 kilos, is in Canada, an outgrowth of their use of deuterated water in their CANDU reactors, the best thermal spectrum reactors in the world in my opinion.

(There is additional tritium, small amounts in dilute concentrations, in used nuclear fission fuel from ternary fission, but it is generally not recovered during reprocessing.)

There is no evidence, none, that fusion reactors will ever be as reliable, as cheap, or as clean as fission reactors. They have a huge materials science problem, given the 14 MeV neutrons. Tungsten has a lot of issues, including embrittlement, although alloying with rare rhenium (or its congener, the fission product technetium) can ameliorate this to some extent.

It also isn't going to be simple to maintain superconducting magnets for long periods a meter away from million degree plasmas, either in Tokamaks nor in Stellators, and it's not clear there will be enough helium left on the planet to sustain those magnets on a vast scale. (Helium is not a renewable resource.) The laser based approaches are pulsed, and it's very difficult to imagine them offering a clean clear way of extracting exergy from these.

I have spent my entire adult life being less and less impressed with "fusion breakthroughs."

The Madcap

(1,750 posts)
12. I'm genuinely impressed that Canada has research science.
Tue Jan 6, 2026, 09:48 PM
Tuesday

Here in murikkka, we'll just burn all the coal and then the trees instead.

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