A team of UW-Madison physicists and engineers is looking to the past to power the future.
Their $20 million contraption, tucked inside their underground Stoughton lab, features a series of stainless steel cylinders joined end to end, dotted with scrawled calculations and hooked up to a choreographed jumble of tubes, wires and machinery.
It has little in common, visually, with the circular behemoths that have come to dominate the field of nuclear fusion since research began in earnest in the 1950s. But the UW-Madison researchers believe their comparatively simple project could be the key to making an elusive midcentury dream a modern reality.
Read more here: https://madison.com/news/local/education/university/uw-madison-nuclear-fusion-wham/article_197120c8-4b87-11ef-bff4-27f80ffdafe7.html