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So far, Norman has produced vortices with temperatures of 3.5m°C that last around ten milliseconds, rather than the microseconds of a conventional frc. TAE hopes, by the end of this year, to have increased that temperature to around 30m°C, and tripled the plasma’s lifetime. All of which is clever. But what makes the firm’s approach special is that it plans to eschew deuterium and tritium in favour of normal hydrogen (the nucleus of which is a lone proton) and boron.

Last year, a panel of advisers to the US Department of Energy published a list of game-changers that could “dramatically increase the rate of progress towards a fusion power plant.” The list included advanced algorithms, like artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s a strategy that TAE Technologies is banking on: the 20-year-old startup began collaborating with Google a few years ago to develop machine learning tools that it hopes will finally bring fusion within reach.

TAE Technologies congratulates Chief Science Officer Dr. Toshiki Tajima on winning the 2018 S. Chandraskhar Prize of Plasma Physics from the Association of the Asia-Pacific Physical Societies, Division of Plasma Physics, which honors pioneering scientists. Among his many contributions to plasma physics and other fields, Tajima is well-known as the father of laser-driven acceleration.

As it pursues energy’s Holy Grail, TAE Technologies seeks to market decades of R&D.