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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
J. Nadler, T. Hochberg, Y. Gu, O. Barnouin, G. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 850-857
Electrostatic Confined Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946948
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) is an alternative approach to fusion power that potentially offers the ability to burn advanced fuels like D-He3 in a non-Maxwellian, high density core. These aneutronic reactions are ideal for direct energy conversion; since the products energetic ions, they also offer high specific impulse for space propulsion.
The results presented here are the first potential well measurements of an IEC-type device via a collimated proton detector. They indicate that a ~15-kV virtual anode, at least one centimeter in radius, has formed in a spherical device with a cathode potential of 30 kV, and a current of 12 mA. Numerical analysis indicates D+ densities on the order of 109 cm-3, and D+2 densities on the order of 1010 cm-3.
Virtual well formation is very important to IEC devices because they are, in effect, 100% transparent electrodes that can create an electrostatic well to confine energetic ions. A brief description of the theory of IEC is given, followed by a greater description of the results.
