Combining the benefits of two large-scale fusion paradigms, magnetic confinement and inertial confinement, Los Alamos and industry partner HyperV Technologies Corp. are pursuing a relatively small-scale exploratory experiment of “magneto-inertial fusion.” Electromagnetic plasma guns, designed and built by HyperV and mounted all around a spherical vacuum chamber, will simultaneously fire supersonic jets of plasma. The jets converge at the center of the chamber for the purpose of compressing another plasma of laser-magnetized nuclear fuel, injected moments earlier. In theory, that could be sufficient to achieve the all-important—and maddeningly elusive—condition of getting significantly more power out than what is put in.

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