U.S. energy agency jumps into fusion funding

Science Insider: ARPA-E, the U.S. government agency for funding innovative energy technologies, is preparing to launch a program to support alternative approaches to fusion energy that have the potential to steal a march on existing mainstream projects. The news will come as a relief to some fusion researchers at government labs, who had their funding cut completely in this fiscal year because of the ballooning cost of the U.S. contribution to the international ITER fusion reactor project in France. And it will offer an opportunity to a small number of privately funded fusion efforts that are proposing alternatives to traditional tokamaks and laser fusion approaches.

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