Technology

(I feel the need to point out that it's been 30 years since people started saying this...)

Oh man though this one is cool - I have a dear dear friend working on this project, and it's absolutely wild. Nothing they're doing is new, exactly but modern magnet designs have enabled SPARC to simultaneously hit a bunch of metrics that were previously entirely reliant on purpose-built machines.

Excerpt from them when I asked them about this yesterday:

While no existing tokamak has reached the same parameters that SPARC will simultaneously, there is empirical evidence in part for all of the major parameters it seeks to reach. the purple dot is ARC, the power plant design, and the red X is ITER, the gigantic international tokamak being built which doesn't take advantage of newer and more powerful magnets (which is what allowed SPARC/ARC to have much smaller volume)

so like yeah, we've built a ton of reactors that could do all this individually and then CFS have managed a system that has combined those results into a single machine and that has been the big goal for years (beyond stopping the plasma from fizzling out). There's still challenges to solve, but this system has cleared all the previous hurdles (barring some of the noncritical ones). It's so damn cool. It's not fusion happening now, the headline is sensationalist, but it's the biggest step forward we've had probably since research into plasma fusion started.