Welcome to Fusion City, USA
In Everett, WA, nuclear fusion is no longer 10 years away—although profitability might be
今日の英語の習慣化の題材は...
主体はFusion(融合)...
次世代Energy(エネルギー) Nuclear Fusion(核融合)の開発に今最先端の技術が開発されています。
この記事では、Boeing Everettでのその一端を紹介した時事です。
The future of carbon-free energy smells like teriyaki and sounds like a low-flying 737. A sleepy strip mall beside Boeing’s sprawling campus in Everett, WA isn’t necessarily where you’d expect to find technology promising to harness the power of the sun, release humanity from the grip of fossil fuels, and unlock an estimated US $40 trillion market.
But here, and in an even more anonymous office park nearby, startup Zap Energy is trialing a prototype reactor that is already producing high-energy neutrons from nuclear fusion—if not yet enough to send power back into the grid.
The unglamorous location is no accident, says Derek Sutherland, Zap’s senior research scientist. “If you squint hard enough, building a fusion system is not that different from building an airplane,” he tells Spectrum on a visit in June. “It requires a little bit of retooling and retraining but you can transfer a lot of those skills.”
Zap isn’t the only fusion company fishing in aviation’s talent pool. Less than two miles away, Helion Energy has its own facility, purchased from a Boeing contractor and housing its own operational fusion prototype built in part by aerospace veterans. The two startups represent a unique concentration of fusion expertise and funding, and epitomize a new confidence that fusion power is now a solvable engineering challenge rather than an eternally elusive scientific puzzle.
