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‘Lost gospel’ claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children
New translation of a 1,500-year-old manuscript said to fill in ‘significant gaps’ about Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s life but Church of England dismisses it as "Pythonesque"
By Victoria Ward
12 November 2014 • 14:08 pm
Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene after rising from the tomb Credit: Photo: Alamy
Mary Magdalene was a "co-messiah", the wife of Jesus and the mother of his children, according to a translation of an ancient manuscript….
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One lucky borrower got 17 PPP loans: How the Trump administration lost millions in an effort to shore up small businesses
Alexander Nazaryan
March 20, 2021, 12:09 am
Former President Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP, Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Computer errors caused the government to hand out duplicate loans to thousands of borrowers under the Trump administration’s program to rescue businesses from the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic.
While the Paycheck Protection Program has been subject to fraud, the revelations contained in a new report by the inspector general of the Small Business Administration speak instead to a faulty — and costly — implementation.
Aging federal technology may have hampered the SBA’s inability to track and cross-reference loans. Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found that information systems across the federal government were badly outdated. Some computer hardware at the SBA was a decade old, that investigation found.
A series of malfunctions took place in the spring and summer of 2020, resulting in millions of taxpayer dollars being handed out inadvertently as duplicate loans. In all, SBA Inspector General Mike Ware found, banks authorized to issue PPP loans “made more than one PPP disbursement to 4,260 borrowers, which totaled about $692 million and involved 8,731 PPP loans.”
Getty Images
Businesses were allowed to apply for PPP loans with several banks; it was the SBA’s duty to make sure that if a borrower had an application before one bank, applications before any other banks were withdrawn. If the SBA did not alert a bank that one of its prospective borrowers had other outstanding applications, that borrower would have no barrier to securing several loans.
At least 104 borrowers received three or more loans. One borrower received 17 loans from the federal government, for a total of $1.3 million. It was not clear who that 17-loan recipient was or how the borrower managed to secure so many loans when other prospective borrowers struggled to win a single award through the business-rescue program.
An official with the SBA inspector general’s office declined to divulge information about that borrower, or whether the borrower was being investigated by the agency. That official did confirm to Yahoo News that the 17 loans were not separate franchises of a large corporate chain, in which case the loans would have adhered to the program’s guidelines.
The SBA has attempted to recoup some of the duplicate loans but could not tell its inspector general the extent to which it had managed to recover funds.
The SBA declined to elaborate on the inspector general’s findings. “We have nothing additional,” spokesperson Carol Wilkerson told Yahoo News in a text message.
The revelations about widespread problems with the initial round of PPP loans come as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris tour the nation to tout the just-passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which has a business-relief component of its own, including a new $28.6 billion fund to help restaurants.
Congress is also moving to extend the PPP for two more months, giving businesses more time to apply.
Vice President Kamala Harris gives her lunch order to Germaine Turnbow at Tacotarian in Las Vegas on Monday. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
The logistical challenges that appear to have frustrated the previous administration could plague the current one as well, even though the SBA said the problems highlighted by the inspector general have been fixed. The prospect of massive errors looms any time huge amounts of money are disbursed, no matter who is president. The Obama administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, intended to rescue the American economy after the financial crisis of 2007-08, faced similar scrutiny.
Critics of the Trump administration seized on the new report as evidence of how much damage the 45th president managed to inflict on the federal government before leaving office in January. “This money was meant for mom-and-pop small businesses struggling to keep the lights on, not big corporations, grifters and cheats,” said Kyle Herrig, head of the watchdog group Accountable.US. “But given the Trump administration’s insistence that banks and companies could self-regulate, it’s no surprise so much fraud and sloppiness slipped through the cracks.”
Defenders of Trump’s small business relief efforts say the goal was to move billions of dollars to thousands of businesses with unprecedented speed, in the middle of a pandemic. Errors were inevitable, those defenders say, and are evidence of neither abuse nor incompetence.
The duplicate loans in question were made between April and August 2020, when the Trump administration first implemented the PPP program, which was initially allotted $349 billion by Congress in the coronavirus relief bill.
Sometime on April 30, an SBA computer script meant to speedily process large numbers of loans malfunctioned. The malfunction prevented the system from checking when a business had applied with more than one bank for a loan. When the computer script functioned properly, each PPP applicant was left with a single loan for the 5,460 participating banks to consider.
Then-President Donald Trump after signing the coronavirus relief bill on April 24, 2020. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The error persisted for about 14 hours before SBA officials spotted and fixed the relevant code. Because the SBA was facing a massive backlog of applications, officials there decided not to go back and correct whatever duplicate loan applications were processed during that 14-hour period. That means thousands of applicants had an extra opportunity — or several extra opportunities in some cases, and 17 extra opportunities in one case — at funds that others did not have.
There was another error, this one related to an SBA computer program known as E-Tran. That program was supposed to eliminate any duplicate loan applications by comparing tax identification numbers and other information that businesses submitted. For thousands of applicants, E-Tran failed to spot that a business had submitted more than one application.
In all, the federal government has made 5.2 million PPP loans; the 8,731 duplicate loans represent an outlier. Yet the ease with which some borrowers saw their fortunes doubled stands in stark contrast to the experiences of many people of color who own businesses, who have said they were marginalized and not given the same access to credit as white business owners. Analysis of PPP loans has backed up such accusations.
The Biden administration has pledged to fix racial and other inequities when it comes to small business outreach, but it will have to work with more or less the same technological infrastructure as Trump did. (The SBA has pledged not to use bulk processing programs again.)
Ware’s investigation was conducted at the behest of a congressional coronavirus subcommittee. That subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said the new report was “more evidence of the Trump administration’s poor implementation of PPP, which ignored the intent of Congress by failing to get vital assistance to the neediest small businesses.”
Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP, Getty Images
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How March 11, 2020, marked the start of the COVID era
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One year after Breonna Taylor’s death, her mother still wants ‘real justice’
Will voters reward Democrats for their stimulus bill?
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what brought me here,
And led my hand,
I never had to steer,
My trip was planned.
Life effects us all,
And we rise and fall,
But only until we catch our breath again.
Just part of the puzzle,
Just part of the plan
one touches another,
Hard to understand.
Still we walk together,
as far as we can,
And we have waited for this moment in time,
since the world began.
in the times gone by,
We ask how it began,
We’ll never know why we Try to understand the seasons change,
The reasons shall remain the same, night keeps us holding on
To see the sun again.
I alone, a man of stone,
Against the driving rain,
night has my number,
wind cries my name, i try to stay sane
I search for truth
i win i lose,
we’re all the same,
hope burns eternal,
We keep the flame.

5 Big Ideas for Making Fusion Power a Reality
..
Startups, universities, and major companies are vying to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor
..
Fusion Vortex: General Fusion’s magnetized target reactor injects pulses of plasma into a sphere filled with swirling molten lead and lithium.
The joke has been around almost as long as the dream: Nuclear fusion energy is 30 years away…and always will be. But now, more than 80 years after Australian physicist Mark Oliphant first observed deuterium atoms fusing and releasing dollops of energy, it may finally be time to update the punch line.
Over the past several years, more than two dozen research groups—impressively staffed and well-funded startups, university programs, and corporate projects—have achieved eye-opening advances in controlled nuclear fusion. They’re building fusion reactors based on radically different designs that challenge the two mainstream approaches, which use either a huge, doughnut-shaped magnetic vessel called a tokamak or enormously powerful lasers.
What’s more, some of these groups are predicting significant fusion milestones within the next five years, including reaching the breakeven point at which the energy produced surpasses the energy used to spark the reaction. That’s shockingly soon, considering that the mainstream projects pursuing the conventional tokamak and laser-based approaches have been laboring for decades and spent billions of dollars without achieving breakeven.

In Cambridge, Mass., MIT-affiliated researchers at Commonwealth Fusion Systems say their latest reactor design is on track to exceed breakeven by 2025. In the United Kingdom, a University of Oxford spin-off called First Light Fusion claims it will demonstrate breakeven in 2024. And in Southern California, the startup TAE Technologies has issued a breathtakingly ambitious five-year timeline for commercialization of its fusion reactor.
Irrational exuberance? Maybe. Fusion research is among the most costly of endeavors, depending on high inflows of cash just to pay a lab’s electricity bills. In the pursuit of funding, the temptation to overstate future achievements is strong. And past expectations of impending breakthroughs have repeatedly been dashed. What’s changed now is that advances in high-speed computing, materials science, and modeling and simulation are helping to topple once-recalcitrant technical hurdles, and significant amounts of money are flowing into the field.
Some of the new fusion projects are putting the newest generation of supercomputers to work to better understand and tweak the behavior of the ultrahigh-temperature plasma in which hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium. Others have reopened promising lines of inquiry that were shelved decades ago. Still others are exploiting new superconductors or hybridizing the mainstream concepts.
Despite their powerful tools and creative approaches, many of these new ventures will fail. But if just one succeeds in building a reactor capable of producing electricity economically, it could fundamentally transform the course of human civilization. In a fusion reaction, a single gram of the hydrogen isotopes that are most commonly used could theoretically yield the same energy as 11 metric tons of coal, with helium as the only lasting by-product.
As climate change accelerates and demand for electricity soars, nuclear fusion promises a zero-carbon, low-waste baseload source of power, one that is relatively clean and comes with no risk of meltdowns or weaponization. This tantalizing possibility has kept the fusion dream alive for decades. Could one of these scrappy startups finally succeed in making fusion a practical reality?
1. Magnetic-Confinement Fusion (MCF)
Illustration: Chris Philpot
The Big Idea: Powerful electromagnetic fields confine and heat plasma inside a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, a Russian acronym for “toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field.” Since the 1960s, more than 200 functional tokamaks have been built, and the plasma physics fundamentals are well established. The most ambitious of these is the US $25 billion ITER, now under construction in southern France.
Reality Check: Scientists are a long way from achieving a self-sustaining reaction, and from preventing neutron activation from destroying the reactor’s walls.
Projects to Watch: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Tokamak Energy
Not so long ago, the outlook for fusion power was pretty bleak, with two of the biggest projects seemingly stalled. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy admitted that its US $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) had failed to meet its goal of using lasers to “ignite” a self-sustaining fusion reaction. A DOE report suggested [PDF] that NIF’s research should shift from investigating laser-sparked ignition to determining whether such ignition is even possible.
The same year, the U.S. and several other governments began debating whether to pull their support from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). First proposed in 1985 and now under construction in southern France, ITER is the world’s biggest fusion experiment. It is a type of tokamak, which uses magnetic forces to confine and isolate the ferociously hot, energetic plasma needed to initiate and sustain fusion. But the project has been plagued by delays and cost overruns that have quintupled its original $5 billion price tag and pushed its projected completion date to 2035. (And even if it makes that date, it could be decades after that before commercial plants based on the design are in operation.) The setbacks and enormous expense of NIF and ITER had the effect of draining not just money but also enthusiasm from the field.
Even as the government-backed megaprojects foundered, alternative fusion-energy research began to gain momentum. The hope of those pursuing these new efforts is that their novel and smaller-scale approaches can accelerate past the decades-long incremental slog. Investors are finally taking notice and pouring money into the field. Over the past five years, private capitalists have injected about $1.5 billion into small-scale fusion-energy companies. Among those who have made significant bets on fusion are Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. A few major corporations, including Lockheed Martin, have launched their own small-fusion projects.
Jesse Treu, a Ph.D. physicist who spent much of his career investing in biotech and med-tech startups, says he realized in 2016 that “wonderful things were starting to happen in fusion energy, but funding wasn’t catching up. It’s clear that private equity and venture capital are part of the solution to develop this technology, which is clearly the best energy answer for the planet.” He cofounded the Stellar Energy Foundation to connect fusion researchers with funding sources and to provide support and advocacy.
And public money has started to follow private: U.S. Department of Energy grant makers, who for decades funneled most nondefense fusion allocations to ITER, are now channeling some funding to projects at the fringes of mainstream research. The federal budget includes a $107 million increase for fusion projects in fiscal year 2020, including a research partnership program that allows small companies to conduct major experiments at the DOE’s national laboratories.
The U.S. government’s renewed interest stems in part from a perceived need to keep up with China, which recently restarted its fusion-energy program after a three-year moratorium. The Chinese government plans to switch on a new fusion reactor in Sichuan province this year. Meanwhile, the Chinese energy company ENN Energy Holdings has been investing in research programs abroad and is building a duplicate of Princeton Fusion Systems’ compact reactor in central China, with help from top U.S. scientists.
“Now that it’s looking like China will gobble up every idea the U.S. has failed to fund,” says Matthew J. Moynihan, a nuclear engineer and fusion consultant to investors, “that’s serving as a wake-up for the U.S. government.”
2. Inertial-Confinement Fusion (ICF)
Illustration: Chris Philpot
The Big Idea: Powerful pulsed laser or ion beams (or other methods) compress a small fuel pellet to extremely high densities, and the resulting shock wave heats the plasma before it has time to dissipate.
Reality Check: Forces exerted on the fuel pellet result in laser-plasma instabilities that produce high-energy electrons, which heat and scatter much of the fuel before it can fuse. In addition, the high cost and complexity of the laser drivers may make traditional approaches to ICF unsuitable for energy production.
Projects to Watch: First Light Fusion, General Atomics
For all this activity and investment, fusion power remains as tough a problem as ever.
Unlike nuclear fission, in which a large, unstable nucleus is split into smaller elements, a fusion reaction occurs when the nuclei of a lightweight element, typically hydrogen, collide with enough force to fuse and form a heavier element. In the process, some of the mass is released and converted into energy, as laid out in Albert Einstein’s famous formula: E = mc2.
There’s an abundance of fusion energy in our universe—the sun and other stable stars are powered by thermonuclear fusion—but the task of triggering and controlling a self-sustaining fusion reaction and harnessing its power is arguably the most difficult engineering challenge humans have ever attempted.
To fuse hydrogen nuclei, earthbound reactor designers need to find ways to overcome the positively charged ions’ mutual repulsion—the Coulomb force—and get them close enough to bind via what’s known as the strong nuclear force. Most methods involve temperatures that are so high—several orders of magnitude hotter than the sun’s core temperature of 15 million °C—that matter can exist only in the plasma state, in which electrons break free of their atomic nuclei and circulate freely in gaslike clouds.
But a high-energy-density plasma is notoriously unstable and difficult to control. It wriggles and writhes and attempts to break free, migrating to the edges of the field that contains it, where it quickly cools and dissipates. Most of the challenges surrounding fusion energy center around plasma: how to heat it, how to contain it, how to shape it and control it. The two mainstream approaches are magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Magnetic-confinement reactors such as ITER attempt to hold the plasma steady within a tokamak, by means of powerful magnetic fields. Inertial-confinement approaches, such as NIF’s, generally use lasers to compress and implode the plasma so quickly that it’s held in place long enough for the reaction to get going.
Key Fusion Energy Milestones
1920 British astronomer Arthur Eddington theorizes that the sun and other stars are powered by the fusion of hydrogen atoms.
1934 Australian physicist Mark Oliphant observes atoms fusing and emitting energy in his University of Cambridge laboratory.
1958 Los Alamos researchers demonstrate the first controlled thermonuclear fusion.
1958 The first tokamak, the Soviet Union’s T-1, begins operation.
1974 KMS Fusion, a private-sector company, fires an array of lasers at a deuterium-tritium pellet, achieving the first successful laser-induced fusion.
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan agree to a joint collaboration on fusion research, which leads to the ITER experiment.
1995 Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s tokamak achieves a record plasma temperature of 510 million °C.
1997 The Joint European Torus (JET) reactor in England outputs 16 megawatts of fusion power, still the world record.
2013 Construction begins on ITER, in southern France.
2013 National Ignition Facility (NIF) implosion yields more energy than the energy absorbed by the fuel.
2019 Construction of ITER is two-thirds complete. It is expected to produce 10 times the input energy.
Scientists have long thought that bigger is better when it comes to creating stable and energy-dense plasma fields. But with recent advances in supercomputing and complex modeling, researchers are unraveling more of the mysteries underlying plasma behavior and developing new tricks for handling it without huge, complex machinery.
Among the researchers at the forefront of this work is physicist C. Wendell Horton Jr. of the University of Texas Institute of Fusion Studies. He uses the university’s Stampede supercomputer to build simulations of plasma flow and turbulence inside magnetic-confinement reactors. “We’re making calculations that were impossible just a few years ago and modeling data about plasma in three dimensions and in time,” Horton says. “Now we can see what’s happening with much more nuance and detail than we would get with analytic theories and even the most advanced probes and diagnostic measurements. That’s giving us a more holistic picture of what’s needed to improve reactor design.”
Horton’s findings have informed the design of large-scale experiments such as ITER, as well as small-scale projects. “The problem with ITER is that no matter how well they get the plasma to behave, they haven’t figured out how to get the reaction to self-sustain,” he says. “It’s still going to burn out in a matter of minutes, and that’s obviously not solving the energy problem.” He and other researchers believe that some of the small-scale efforts are much closer to achieving a steady-state reaction that could generate baseload electricity.
Among the most mature of the fusion startups is California-based TAE Technologies (formerly Tri Alpha Energy), which launched in 1998.
The TAE reactor is designed to make use of what’s called a field-reversed configuration (FRC) to create a swirling ring of plasma that contains itself in its own magnetic field. (Princeton Fusion Systems’ design is also an FRC.) Instead of using deuterium and tritium—the hydrogen-isotope blend that fuels most fusion reactors—the TAE reactor injects beams of high-energy neutral hydrogen particles into hydrogen-boron fuel, forcing a reaction that produces alpha particles (ionized helium nuclei). Heat generated in the containment vessel caused by the deposit of soft X-ray energy will be converted into electricity using a conventional thermal conversion system, which heats water into steam to drive a turbine.
Hydrogen-boron fusion is aneutronic, meaning that the primary reaction does not produce damaging neutron radiation. The drawback is that burning the fuel requires extraordinary temperatures, as high as 3 billion °C. “When you’re that hot, the electrons are radiating like crazy,” says William Dorland, a physics professor at the University of Maryland. “They’re going to cool off the plasma faster than you can heat it.” Although FRC machines seem to be less prone to plasma instabilities than some other magnetic-confinement methods, no one has yet demonstrated an FRC reactor that can create a stable plasma.
TAE cofounder and CEO Michl Binderbauer says the company’s latest machine, dubbed Norman (in honor of company cofounder Norman Rostoker), is achieving “significant improvements in plasma containment and stability over the previous-generation machine.” What’s driving the improvements are advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, enabled by a cutting-edge algorithm developed by Google called Optometrist. TAE adapted the algorithm in partnership with Google to analyze the plasma-behavior data and home in on the combination of variables that will create the most ideal conditions for fusion. The researchers described it in a Nature paper published in 2017.
“We’re doing things we could have never done 10 years ago, and that’s driving faster and faster cycles of learning,” says Binderbauer.
3. Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF)
Illustration: Chris Philpot
The Big Idea: Sometimes called magneto-inertial fusion (MIF), this hybrid approach uses magnetic fields to confine a lower-density plasma (as in magnetic-confinement fusion), which is then heated and compressed using an inertial-confinement method such as lasers or pistons (as in inertial-confinement fusion).
Reality Check: Scientists have yet to increase the plasma density to a working level and keep it there long enough for a significant fraction of the fuel mass to fuse.
Projects to Watch: General Fusion, HyperJet Fusion, Magneto-Inertial Fusion Technologies
Advanced computing is also breathing new life into promising lines of inquiry that were abandoned years ago due to budget cuts or technical roadblocks. General Fusion, based near Vancouver, was founded by Canadian plasma physicist Michel Laberge. He quit a lucrative job developing laser printers to pursue an approach called magnetized target fusion (MTF). The company has attracted more than $200 million, including investments from Jeff Bezos and the governments of Canada and Malaysia.
General Fusion’s design combines features of magnetic-confinement and inertial-confinement fusion. It injects pulses of magnetically confined plasma fuel into a sphere filled with a vortex of molten lead and lithium. Pistons surrounding the reactor drive shock waves toward the center, compressing the fuel and forcing the particles into a fusion reaction. The resulting heat is absorbed in the liquid metal and used to produce steam to spin a turbine and generate electricity.
“You can think of it in some ways as the opposite of a tokamak,” says Laberge. “Tokamaks work with a big plasma field that’s [relatively] low density. We’re trying to make a mini-size plasma that’s extremely high density, by squashing it in with the shock waves. Because the field is so dense and small, we only need to keep it together for a millisecond for it to react.”
In the 1970s, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory experimented with a piston system to trigger nuclear fusion. Those experiments failed, due in large part to an inability to precisely control the timing of the shock waves. Laberge’s team has developed advanced algorithms and highly precise control systems to fine-tune the speed and timing of the shock waves and compression.
“In those experiments in the 1970s, the problem was symmetry,” says Laberge. “We’ve now achieved the accuracy and force we need, so that part’s solved.”
4. Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC)
Illustration: Chris Philpot
The Big Idea: An FRC reactor contains plasma in its own magnetic field by inducing a toroidal electric current inside a cylindrical plasma. Compared to the direction of an externally applied magnetic field, the axial field inside the reactor is reversed by eddy currents in the plasma. TAE Technologies’ reactor [pictured] uses plasma guns to accelerate two plasmas into each other and then heats them with particle beams.
Reality Check: Although FRC machines are less prone to instabilities than are some other magnetic-confinement methods, no lab has yet demonstrated a working FRC reactor that can create a sufficiently dense and stable plasma.
Projects to Watch: Helion Energy, Princeton Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies
Using liquid metal could solve another of fusion energy’s primary challenges: Neutron radiation erodes a reactor’s walls, which must be replaced frequently and disposed of as low-level radioactive waste. The liquid metal protects the solid outer wall from damage. There’s some irradiation of the liquid metal, but there’s no need to regularly replace it, and so the reactor doesn’t produce a steady stream of low-level waste.
General Fusion’s newest reactor, which generated plasma for the first time in late 2018, is the centerpiece of a facility that Laberge says will demonstrate an end-to-end capability to produce electricity from nuclear fusion. “Now that we’ve successfully created a stable, long-lived plasma, we can see that we have a viable path toward having the plasma generate more energy than it consumes,” he says. “In terms of commercialization, our timeline is now a matter of years, not decades.”
Virginia-based HyperJet Fusion Corp. has an approach similar to General Fusion’s, but instead of pistons, some 600 plasma guns fire jets of plasma into the reactor. The merging of the jets forms a plasma shell, or liner, which then implodes and ignites a magnetized target plasma. The system doesn’t need a heating system to bring the fuel to fusion temperatures, says HyperJet CEO and chief scientist F. Douglas Witherspoon. “The imploding plasma liner contains the target plasma and provides the energy to elevate the temperature to fusion conditions. And because we’re using a much higher-density plasma than a magnetic-confinement system would, it reduces the size of the fusing plasma from meter scale to centimeter scale.”
Witherspoon says the advantage of the HyperJet approach over tokamaks is that it doesn’t require expensive superconducting magnets to generate the enormous magnetic fields needed to confine the fusion-burning plasma.
Tokamaks themselves are also getting a reboot, thanks to the use of different superconducting materials that could make magnetic confinement more viable. MIT spin-off Commonwealth Fusion Systems is employing yttrium-barium-copper oxide (YBCO), a high-temperature superconductor, in the magnets on its Sparc reactor.
Commonwealth cofounder Martin Greenwald, who is also the deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, calculates that the Sparc reactor’s YBCO magnets will be able to generate a field of about 21 teslas at their surface and 12 T at the center of the plasma, roughly doubling the field strength of tokamak magnets made of niobium-tin. Stronger magnetic fields produce a stronger confining force on the charged particles in the plasma, improving insulation and enabling a much smaller, cheaper, and potentially better performing fusion device.
“If you can double the magnetic field and cut the size of the device in half, with identical performance, that will be a game changer,” Greenwald says.
Indeed, one advantage of the newer, small-scale fusion projects is that they can concentrate on the novel aspects of their designs, while taking advantage of decades of hard-won knowledge about the fundamentals of fusion science. As Greenwald puts it, “We think we can get to commercial deployment of fusion power plants faster by accepting the conventional physics basis developed around the ITER experiment and focusing on our collaborations between physicists and magnet engineers who have been setting records for decades.”
5. Stellarator
Illustration: Chris Philpot
The Big Idea: The stellarator’s spiraling ribbon shape produces high-density plasma that’s symmetrical and more stable than a tokamak’s, allowing the reactor to run for long periods of time.
Reality Check: The stellarator’s challenging geometry makes it complicated to build and extremely sensitive to imperfect conditions.
Project to Watch: Wendelstein 7-X at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics
Some promising startups, though, aren’t content to accept the conventional wisdom, and they’re tackling the underlying physics of fusion in new ways. One of the more radical approaches is that of First Light Fusion. The British company intends to produce fusion using an inertial-confinement reactor design inspired by a very noisy crustacean.
The pistol shrimp’s defining feature is its oversize pistol-like claw, which it uses to stun prey. After drawing back the “hammer” part of its claw, the shrimp snaps it against the opposite side of the claw, creating a rapid pressure change that produces vapor-filled voids in the water called cavitation bubbles. As these bubbles collapse, shock waves pulse through the water at 25 meters per second, enough to take out small marine animals.
“The shrimp just wants to use the pressure wave to stun its prey,” says Nicholas Hawker, First Light’s cofounder and CEO. “It doesn’t care that as the cavity implodes, the vapor inside is compressed so forcefully that it causes plasma to form—or that it has created the Earth’s only example of inertial-confinement fusion.” The plasma reaches temperatures of over 4,700 °C, and it creates a 218-decibel bang.
Hawker focused on the pistol shrimp’s extraordinary claw in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, and he began studying whether it might be possible to mimic and scale up the shrimp’s physiology to spark a fusion reaction that could produce electricity.
After raising £25 million (about $33 million) and teaming up with international engineering group Mott MacDonald, First Light is building an ICF reactor in which the “claw” consists of a metal disk-shaped projectile and a cube with a cavity filled with deuterium-tritium fuel. The projectile’s impact creates shock waves, which produce cavitation bubbles in the fuel. As the bubbles collapse, the fuel within them is compressed long enough and forcefully enough to fuse.
Hawker says First Light hopes to initiate its first fusion reaction this year and to demonstrate net energy gain by 2024. But he acknowledges that those achievements won’t be enough. “Fusion energy doesn’t just need to be scientifically feasible,” he says. “It needs to be commercially viable.”
No one believes it will be easy, but the extraordinary challenge of fusion energy—not to mention the pressing need—is part of the attraction for the many scientists and engineers who’ve recently been drawn to the field. And increasingly, they have the resources to finance their work.
“This notion that you hear about fusion being another 30 or 40 or 50 years away is wrong,” says TAE’s Binderbauer, whose company has raised more than $600 million. “We’re going to see commercialization of this technology in time frames of a half decade.”
Veteran fusion researchers such as Dorland and Horton tend to have a more tempered outlook. They worry that grand promises that fall short may undercut public and investor support, as has happened in the past. Any claims of commercialization within the decade “are just not true,” says Dorland. “We’re still a lot more than one breakthrough away from having a pathway to fusion power.”
What few will argue with, though, is the dire need for nuclear fusion in the near future.
“I think it’s not going too far to say that fusion is having its Kitty Hawk moment,” says MIT’s Greenwald. “We don’t have a 747 jet, but we’re flying.”
This article appears in the February 2020 print issue as “5 Big Ideas for Fusion Power.”
About the Author
Tom Clynes is a freelance writer and photojournalist who covers science and environmental issues. His 2015 book The Boy Who Played With Fusion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) tells the unlikely tale of a 14-year-old who became the youngest person to build a working fusion reactor.
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The Best Alternators to Keep Your Car Running Smoothly
Production cars began using alternators in the 1960s. As part of the electrical system, alternators made it possible for cars to use higher voltage, and led the way to the modern car charging system. The road to progress has not been without its speed bumps and potholes, however. The alternator must be considered as a possible cause whenever electrical problems arise in a car. The device is not particularly complex or fragile, but it does seem to be a frequent candidate for failure and replacement far ahead of other components under the hood.
If you need to replace your alternator, you may not believe that you’ve got much of a choice. But in fact, there are different alternators to choose from. As you can imagine however, alternators are not universal products and many of them are vehicle specific. So when you check out our recommendations, make sure to find the correct one for your vehicle.
For more information on the best alternators, refer to our table of contents.
Table of contents
1. Editor’s Pick: Powermaster Alternators
2. Rare Electrical Alternators
3. Eagle Alternators
4. A-Team Performance Alternators
5. DB Electrical Alternators
What is an alternator, and what does it do?
Can I fix my alternator if it’s broken, instead of replacing it?
Why did my alternator stop doing its job?
How can I tell that my alternator is failing?
1. Editor’s Pick: Powermaster Alternators
If you’re thinking about adding any electrical accessories to your vehicle, you are going to want to consider upgrading your alternator from stock to a high-amp unit. There are plenty of places online to find a calculator to help you figure out your system’s draw, and it’s smart to have more amperage than you need—the system will draw only what it needs, so there’s no such thing as too much capacity.
This Powermaster high-amp alternator is good for 220 amps of output, and is designed to fit GM truck engines—you’ll need to figure out if it’s a match for your application. If not, make sure to browse through all of Powermaster’s offerings, as there’s a good chance the manufacturer has something that fits your vehicle. The company specializes in performance alternators for a wide range of vehicles, so if you’re looking for a high-amp alternator, start here.
This particular alternator offers superior output at idle and dual internals fans for better cooling. Users report solid build quality and impressive performance, especially when used with high power aftermarket audio systems and supplementary lighting setups with large current draws.
Pros/High quality, high-amp output, made in the U.S, new replacement part, not refurbished
Cons/Substantially more expensive than stock, may be a tight fit in some applications
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2. Rare Electrical Alternators
Rare Electrical specializes in building replacement parts for popular models, and adding value with high build quality and boosted output. In addition to providing alternators, the company also manufactures and distributes starters, electric motors, water pumps, and even turbochargers and door mirrors. This 180-amp alternator is a perfect example of one of the brand’s offerings, designed to work with the 2005 to 2007 Ford F-Series 6.0-liter diesel engines, a very popular fitment in the Super Duty lineup. So again, if this isn’t your particular vehicle, take a look at other alternators Rare Electrical offers to find one made for your car.
The stock Bosch alternator that came with the Super Duty was an anemic 110-amp unit, scarcely powerful enough for a work truck. This alternative high-amp alternator helps to maintain a battery charge in trucks fitted with high-draw accessories, like air compressors, accessory lighting, and other work systems. The company performs computer testing on its alternators to assure quality and reliability, and includes a one-year warranty on all new alternators.
Pros/More amperage than stock, high build quality, one-year warranty, affordable price
Cons/Internal regulator is non-replaceable, for single alternator setups only
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3. Eagle Alternators
If you need a really beefy alternator for your GM pickup, this 253-amp option should be on your list. A substantial upgrade over stock, this recommendation makes all kinds of electrical accessorizing to your vehicle possible, from adding work truck elements to help make your day more productive, to adding amplification to make your evening commute home louder, to adding under-chassis lights to make your night on the town cooler.
This particular alternator from Eagle High comes with a four-pin voltage regulator and a high-speed pulley for maximum output. You’ll find that the unit is a bit larger than stock, but can still be squeezed in on most GM trucks and SUVs. If you decide to go with this high-amp alternator, the company recommends upgrading battery charge cables to 4- or 2-gauge wire to handle the substantial current that will be passing through. One nice thing about Eagle High’s offering is that it comes with a test sheet, so you know you’re getting the performance you paid for.
Pros/High-amperage output, big upgrade from stock, reasonable price, included high-speed pulley allows for maximum output
Cons/Fitment may be tight depending on application, does not include cable upgrades, which are recommended
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4. A-Team Performance Alternators
When you open your hood to show off your engine bay, your alternator is one of the first things that your friends will see, as it is mounted right at the front. If you’re like me, you hate plastic engine shrouds that conceal a beautiful, clean engine installation, but you don’t want to mess with a lot of flashy chrome, either. This A-Team Performance alternator is not only a high-amp option with an output of 220 amps, it is also really cool-looking in anodized black, and a great match for a stealth LS engine in a GM truck or SUV.
It is designed to be plug-and-play with the OEM connection (4-pin connector), and is perfect for vehicles with a lot of accessories. You may find that the pulley on this alternator is slightly larger than stock, which could make reinstalling your serpentine belt a bit of a struggle, but manageable. And if you’re not a fan of the black finish and prefer shiny chrome to match the rest of your engine bay, there’s an option for that finish as well. As Mr. T of the A-Team might have said, “I pity the fool that don’t use a high-amp alternator.”
Pros/Looks great in black finish, high amp output, wide range of fitment, reasonable price, also available in chrome
Cons/Large pulley may make installation tougher
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5. DB Electrical Alternators
DB Electrical makes high-quality, aftermarket replacement alternators that meet or beat OEM specs. This recommendation is a great example, because it is designed to work with the 2002 to 2005 Ford F-150 with the 5.4-liter Vortec V8 engine—not coincidentally the most popular engine choice on the top-selling vehicle in the United States during those years.
It’s a 110-amp alternator that weighs under 13 pounds and measures 5.71 inches by 4.91 inches by 5.05 inches, a direct swap for stock. If features a six-groove serpentine pulley for minimal slip, and an internal regulator. It uses high-temperature epoxy and grease for superior heat resistance, and top-quality bearings and heavy-duty rectifiers to extend service life. It comes with a one-year warranty, and DB Electrical’s guarantee of perfect fitment, along with final test results and performance curves if available. So if you don’t need a high-amp alternator and prefer a direct OEM replacement, this company’s alternators are the way to go.
Pros/Affordable alternative to OEM unit, new, not refurbished, good warranty
Cons/Amp output matches stock, not a high-amp option
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What is an alternator, and what does it do?
Photo credit: BirdShutterB / Shutterstock.com
An alternator is an engine component that is part of the electrical system. It produces alternating current (AC) power by the process of electromagnetism, which is generated by the relationship of the stator and rotor inside its housing. The electricity is sent to the battery, where it is used to run the electrical systems on the car. The alternator is generally mounted to the front of the engine. Its internal components are rotated by a shaft attached to a drive pulley that turns thanks to a belt connected to the engine’s crankshaft.
Can I fix my alternator if it’s broken, instead of replacing it?
In general, it’s easier to replace an alternator than to attempt to repair it. That said, there are alternator repair kits available for $30 and under. If you’re handy enough to replace your own alternator, you might be handy enough to effect a repair. Since a new alternator can run from $100 to $500, depending on make and model, it might be worth a try.
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Why did my alternator stop doing its job?
The main cause of alternator trouble is bearing failure. When the needle bearings that let the rotor spin freely break down, the rotor no longer spins efficiently, and may even freeze up. Once this happens, your alternator is pretty much toast, and needs to be replaced.
How can I tell that my alternator is failing?
Your car will give you a hint, with dimming dashboard lights and hard starting. If you have a voltage meter on your instrument panel (some cars still do), low voltage (below 14 volts) can be an indicator of impending doom. Your car may be difficult to start, and if you drive with a failing alternator, you might put yourself in a bad, unsafe situation on the road. Your electrical system will slow down and stop functioning, and the battery will soon go dead. Without a working alternator, your car cannot run for long. Before jumping to the conclusion that you’ve got a bad alternator, have your battery tested and check out the belts and wires under your hood to make sure that everything is in good repair.
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CAR ALTERNATORS MAKE GREAT ELECTRIC MOTORS; HERE’S HOW
The humble automotive alternator hides an interesting secret. Known as the part that converts power from internal combustion into the electricity needed to run everything else, they can also themselves be used as an electric motor.
The schematic of a simple automotive alternator, from US patent 3329841A filed in 1963 for Robert Bosch GmbH.
These devices almost always take the form of a 3-phase alternator with the magnetic component supplied by an electromagnet on the rotor, and come with a rectifier and regulator pack to convert the higher AC voltage to 12V for the car electrical systems. Internally they have three connections to the stator coils which appear to be universally wired in a delta configuration, and a pair of connections to a set of brushes supplying the rotor coils through a set of slip rings. They have a surprisingly high capacity, and estimates put their capabilities as motors in the several horsepower. Best of all they are readily available second-hand and also surprisingly cheap, the Ford Focus unit shown here came from an eBay car breaker and cost only £15 (about $20).
We already hear you shouting “Why?!” at your magical internet device as you read this. Let’s jump into that.
THESE PEOPLE THINK BUILDING THEIR OWN ELECTRIC VEHICLES IS FUN!
One of the interesting facets of watching the UK Hacky Racer series grow from a bunch of friends making silly electric vehicles to something approaching a formal race series has been seeing the evolution of the art of building a Hacky Racer. As the slightly grubbier cousin of the US Power Racing series it has benefited somewhat from inheriting some of their evolutionary experience, but that hasn’t stopped the Hacky Racers coming up with their own vehicle developments. They’ve moved from salvaged mobility and golf buggy motors to Chinese electric bicycle and tricycle motors, and now the more adventurous constructors are starting to look further afield for motive power. One promising source for an inexpensive decently-powered motor comes in the form of the car alternator.
Our Ford Focus alternator
Searching for car alternator conversions reveals a variety of pages, HOWTOs, and guides, many of which can be extremely confusing and overcomplex. In particular there are suggestions concerning the three stator connections, with advice to break out the individual windings and apply special wiring configurations to them. Based upon the experience of converting quite a few alternators this appears surprising, as all the various models we’ve converted have had the same ready-to-go delta configuration that needed no rewiring at all. Perhaps it’s time to present a Hackaday guide with a real alternator, and explode any remaining myths while we’re at it.
So, fired up by the prospect of a cheap brushless motor by the passage above, you’ve got a Ford Focus alternator on the bench before you. How does one go about converting it?
WANTON DESTRUCTION OF AN INNOCENT CAR PART
Removing the regulator/brush assembly
On the back of a modern alternator is universally a plastic dust cover secured by a set of bolts. These devices are designed to be refurbished so (perhaps surprisingly for a modern automotive component) they are usually very easy indeed to dismantle. If you take off the dust cover you’ll see the regulator, rectifiers, and brushes, sometimes integrated into a single unit, but more usually as in the case of the Focus alternator with the regulator and brushes as a separate assembly to the rectifier.
There is often a copious quantity of silicone sealant which needs to be cut away, but any nuts or bolts that secure the regulator should be able to be undone, and with care not to damage the brushes themselves it can be lifted clear in one piece. Then the rectifier unit can be removed, a process in which it is sometimes simpler to attack it with side cutters rather than try to remove it in one piece.
The rear plate of the alternator with the regulator and rectifier removed, showing the stator winding connections.
You should be able to identify the three bundles of thick enameled copper wires coming from the stator coils, and detach the rectifier straps from them. In some alternators they’re soldered, but some other particularly annoying designs they’re spot-welded. At the end of the dismantling process you should have a bare alternator with three sets of stator wires protruding and a bare shaft with two slip rings, whatever remains of the rectifier pack, and the regulator/brush pack.
The next step is to remove the regulator circuitry while preserving the shape of the regulator/brush assembly, and to locate and preserve the brush connections where they meet the regulator. Yet again there will be copious quantities of silicone potting compound to hack away, but eventually the regulator should be exposed. These are universally some form of hybrid circuit on a ceramic or metal substrate, with connections emerging from the moulded plastic surrounding them being soldered to pads on their edges. It should be relatively straightforward to identify the pair of connections for the brushes, carefully unsolder them, and push out the regulator circuit.
The completed motor.
Finally, you should have a bare alternator, a brush pack with a missing regulator circuit, and the plastic dust cover. Simply solder three suitably large-gauge wires to the three sets of stator wires and cover them in heat-shrink, solder a pair of lighter wires to the brush connections, and reassemble the brush pack to the alternator. You may need to put some form of strain relief on the wires to the brushes. The rectifier pack doesn’t need reassembling, so on some models you may need to make a spacer to replace it in supporting one side of the brush pack.
Holes can be made in the dust cover for all the various wires, and the dust cover fitted with all the wires poking through. At this point you’ve converted your alternator, and all that remains is to drive it with something. Fortunately that is a surprisingly simple process with off-the-shelf parts.
DRIVING YOUR NEW MOTOR
Motor and controller, on the bench.
A so-called brushless DC motor is simply an AC motor with a bundle of electronics that turns a DC supply into an AC one to run it. They have the advantage over brushed DC motors in reliability, efficiency, and ease of speed control, but at the expense of more complexity.
The good news for people converting automotive alternators into electric motors is that a whole range of brushless motor controllers can be had for not a lot of money, in the form of electronic speed controllers (ESC) intended for those Chinese electric bicycles and tricycles. They take a battery DC supply and produce a three-phase AC suitable to drive a delta-connected motor, and they work well with converted alternators.
ESCs have two modes, one for motors with Hall-effect feedback sensors, and one for motors without such as our alternator. Usually a wire link needs to be made to enable this, consult the instructions for your controller. We’ve found that an alternator drives well as a motor from a 36V or a 48V supply, and as long as a controller with enough power is used then they do so reliably. A quick AliExpress search for “brushless motor controller 1500W” turns up plenty of choice.
Given a controller, there is one more requirement for our alternator to become a motor, it must have a DC supply to its rotor winding. It needs to have about 2 or 3A flowing through it, for which a current-limited PSU module performs the task admirably. Having to use that power makes the motor a bit less efficient than a permanent magnet one, but the cost of a scrap alternator is hard to beat.
The motor featured in our pictures is destined to be one of a pair providing traction in a new car for an assault on this year’s races. Personal experience with SMIDSY the Robot Wars robot would lead me to give them forced-air cooling, but unlike the electric tricycle motors these do seem to cope well with getting hot. An alternator motor might not be the one-stop solution to whatever your small-scale traction needs could be, but even so it’s worth being aware that they are an option without unexpected wiring rituals. If you convert one for a project, please make sure to write it up and send it to our tips line
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