A crushed tube the size of a thread spool has brought the United
States one step closer to harnessing nuclear fusion as a clean,
almost limitless, power source. The experiment at Sandia
National Laboratories in New Mexico tested how well a tiny
cylinder could withstand the crushing magnetic force from the
lab's "Z machine" — a pulsed-power accelerator that zapped the
cylinder with 25 million amperes of electric current. The
"liner" cylinder collapsed on itself, as would be expected, but
remained intact enough to theoretically squeeze together
deuterium or tritium fuel, triggering nuclear fusion. "Our
experiments were designed to test a sweet spot predicted by the
simulations where a sufficiently robust liner could implode with
a sufficiently high velocity," said Ryan McBride, a researcher
at the laboratories in Albuquerque. Such careful balance is
needed to crush the beryllium cylinder in the right way to
achieve sustainable fusion someday. A thicker cylinder would
make the crushing implosion less efficient,