This year Accent has been focussing on becoming a more environmentally friendly company and a collective of people trying to reduce our carbon footprint.

With an eye to the future, an area I’m personally interested in is Nuclear Fusion, of course, the idea of fusion instead of fission (atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles instead of the splitting of a large atomic nucleus into smaller nuclei) has been around for longer than I have been alive.

Unfortunately, it has always been ‘around 30 years away, that is until very recently with the advent of the MIT based SPARC design research programme. They have recently made a breakthrough in creating a small-sized yet large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet.

The most common form of these magnetic fields to use is in a Tokamak device, which is easiest thought of as a doughnut shape. While ITER inFrance uses giant electromagnets to achieve this, recently, the SPARC team managed the same magnetic forces with their new design of magnets,which are much smaller.

Compared to ITER, SPARC’s whole reactor design is four times smaller at 3 meters across compared to 12 meters. The difference in the new type ofsuperconducting electromagnetic materials is that they are made from flat, ribbon-like tape.

This unique design allows for the new conductors equalling the performance achieved in an apparatus 40 times larger in volume using conventionallow-temperature superconducting magnets.