Energy News

Energy News and Updates

As a major energy research and development firm, General Atomics’ energy businesses are often the subject of media coverage. We also engage in a variety of outreach efforts to the scientific and academic communities to educate the public on the future of energy. Media professionals seeking more information on these activities should contact Senior Director of Strategic Development Zabrina Johal.

 

Press Releases

News Articles

  • Scientists working on clean energy by recreating the sun in a San Diego lab

    Machine can create heat that’s 10 times hotter than the core of the sun.

  • DIII-D, San Diego’s Nuclear Fusion Lab, is Back Online After Nearly a Year

    The improvements to the laboratory, which is located at the General Atomics campus, bring the world a little closer to fulfilling the decades-long promise of fusion technology, which would offer nearly limitless clean energy resources.

  • Upgrades in place, San Diego’s nuclear fusion facility is back up and running

    The improvements are one small step in a much larger effort by researchers, scientists and engineers working on projects around the world to achieve the elusive goal of someday building nuclear fusion power plants capable of generating an almost limitless amount of clean electricity to energy consumers.

  • Upgraded DIII-D fusion facility set to restart operations

    The DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics in San Diego is starting up after undergoing eight months of upgrades that included new and improved plasma control and diagnostic systems. The DIII-D National Fusion Facility is an Office of Science scientific user facility, operated by General Atomics for the US Department of Energy.

  • Energy Switch: Nuclear Fusion

    If we could harness fusion, it would transform our world, producing limitless energy, safely and without emissions -- the holy grail of energy.

  • Exclusive: Fusion reactor promises limitless energy

    Yahoo Finance went inside the country’s largest magnetic fusion facility for an exclusive look, to explore the challenges of bringing this technology to commercial use for the latest episode of NEXT.

  • UT’s Casali, students involved in groundbreaking global collaboration on fusion

    Although her daughter was only two months old at the time, Casali knew she had to make the trip to the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego to lead the first-ever experiments at high radiation in the new revolutionary negative triangularity tokamak configuration.

  • Study shows inverting fusion plasmas improves performance

    Through extensive analysis of data from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility program, the researchers showed that this shaping was inherently free of instabilities across various plasma conditions.

  • Plasmas with Negative Triangularity Show Reduced Gradients

    Experiments carried out using the DIII-D National Fusion Facility tokamak investigated the use of negative triangularity shaping to restrict the formation of highly unstable and energetic ELM.

  • Engineers use AI to wrangle fusion power for the grid

    In experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, the researchers demonstrated their model, trained only on past experimental data, could forecast potential plasma instabilities known as tearing mode instabilities up to 300 milliseconds in advance.

  • AI to forecast real-time plasma instabilities in nuclear fusion reactor

    At the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, scientists showed that their AI model, trained using old data, could predict tearing mode instabilities up to 300 milliseconds beforehand.

  • Islands That Move Together, Disrupt Together

    Experiments performed with the DIII-D tokamak demonstrate that magnetic islands exchange energy, or couple, to each other when they rotate at similar speeds.

  • Fusion Research Advances: New Views on Energetic Ion Flow

    New observations at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility offer vital insights into energetic ions in fusion plasmas, key for fusion power development and space plasma understanding, with implications for satellite technology.

  • Smooth operation of future nuclear fusion facilities is a matter of control

    Schuster, who directs the Lehigh University Plasma Control Group, recently received a $1.6 million grant from the DOE to conduct experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego that will ultimately serve to improve the operation of ITER, FPP, and future reactors through the development of advanced controls and the application of machine learning.

  • Researchers Visualize Energetic Ion Flow in Fusion Devices

    Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a Department of Energy user facility, have used the first measurements from a new diagnostic system, the Imaging Neutral Particle Analyzer (INPA), to observe the flow of energetic ions in a tokamak.

  • GA Has New Role in Race for Fusion

    TECHNOLOGY: DOE taps company expertise

  • Opening the Magnetic Bottle of a Tokamak Causes Particles to Rush Inward

    In experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, researchers provided the first demonstration of applying magnetic perturbations and experiencing increased plasma density across the pedestal. In this new regime, magnetic perturbations caused the pedestal confinement to improve.

  • DOE to fund $42M inertial fusion hub program

    The hubs will be led by researchers at Colorado State University, the University of Rochester, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where last year a team successfully achieved fusion ignition for the first time, proving that creating energy from fusion is possible.

  • San Diego’s General Atomics Praises U.S. Plan to Speed Commercialization of Nuclear Fusion

    San Diego-based General Atomics applauded a White House plan unveiled Tuesday to encourage global commercialization of nuclear fusion to produce clean electricity.

  • SCS Researchers To Receive $1.2M for Continued DOE Nuclear Fusion Research

    The projects focus on advancing innovative fusion technology and collaborative research on both small-scale experiments and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, the largest tokamak operating in the United States. CMU will receive about $1.2 million over three years.

  • Fueling the future of fusion energy

    Staff Scientist Xiangdong Wei will lead Jefferson Lab’s segment of the effort, which includes researchers from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville; Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; University of California, Irvine; and General Atomics’ DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego.

  • 9 Projects Selected to Experiment on DOE’s DIII-D Fusion Facility

    The Department of Energy has selected nine projects to receive $16 million in funding to conduct small-scale research experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, an Office of Science scientific user facility operated by General Atomics.

  • Nuclear fusion milestone repeated; San Diego’s General Atomics with the assist

    San Diego-based General Atomics assisted in the experiment by making the target capsule and its assemblies.

  • A step closer to making nuclear fusion a reality? San Diego’s General Atomics partners with UK company

    General Atomics and Tokamak Energy to collaborate on advancing powerful magnet technology; GA will also assist Bay Area company on laser research

  • Brits and Yanks join forces to make fusion magnets cool again

    UK nuclear fusion outfit Tokamak Energy is teaming up with General Atomics in the US to work on high temperature superconducting magnets for fusion reactors and other potential industry applications.

  • Clean Energy Future: Mayor Gloria Tours Nuclear Fusion Laboratories at General Atomics

    Mayor Todd Gloria took time off from local politics this week to tour two San Diego laboratories where a limitless source of clean energy is being developed.

  • What Will a Fusion Power Plant Look Like?

    General Atomics (GA), a San Diego, California–based developer of advanced technology solutions for government and commercial applications, is a leader in the quest to harness fusion energy. To better understand what this achievement means, what a fusion power plant might look like, and what still needs to be done to bring fusion power online, I spoke with Wayne Solomon, vice president for Magnetic Fusion Energy with GA’s Energy Group, and Brian Grierson, GA’s Fusion Pilot Plant hub director. Both men were extremely excited about the announcement.

  • Researchers Present Vision for HPC Fusion Data Gateway

    Fusion energy is having a moment – an increasingly fruitful one – but as radio astronomers and particle physicists know, bigger and better experiments and simulations mean data deluges that quickly become difficult to manage. In a paper for the 22nd Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference – hosted virtually last year – researchers from General Atomics, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Virginia outlined their vision for a science gateway to help manage and share fusion data that the authors expect to “substantially balloon in the near future.”

  • Cold, Powerful Magnet Will Help Control Hot Plasma In Fusion Reactor

    A magnet so powerful it could lift an aircraft carrier six feet into the air was designed in a project managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It will be used in an international experimental reactor in southern France to produce energy using fusion, the same process used by the sun and other stars to create heat and light. Six modules for the reactor’s central superconducting magnet, plus a spare, are being made by General Atomics in Poway, California.

  • Fusion breakthrough will lead to investments, but its use won't come overnight

    The dramatic and historic breakthrough on fusion energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is expected to bring an injection of cash into the clean energy source — even though it’s still many years away from becoming a mainstream power source.

  • After breakthrough, DOE eyes fusion power plant

    The Department of Energy on Tuesday celebrated a major fusion energy milestone, outlining how scientists for the first time were able to produce more energy from a reaction than was consumed. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer” to having zero-carbon fusion energy “powering our society,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a DOE ceremony celebrating the results of an experiment by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  • National Lab Unlocks Nuclear Fusion - True Breakthrough, Novelty Act, Or Both?

    Nuclear fusion has long been the Holy Grail of truly clean energy. The smashing together of hydrogen atoms promises limitless electricity with zero carbon emissions, a minimum of radioactive waste and zero chance of catastrophic meltdown. But for a half-century fusion scientists have been limited by the power of their lasers and the strength of their magnetic fields — never before figuring out how to milk more energy out of their atom smashing than they put in. Until now.