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Department of Energy Announces $30 Million for Fusion Energy R&D November 7, 2019 The U.S. Department of Energy today announced up to $30 million in funding for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, Breakthroughs Enabling THermonuclear-fusion Energy (BETHE). BETHE pro...

It's nice to see that ARPA-E plans to continue fusion funding:
https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/#FoaIdca442cde-8c6e-4cd8-a0c7-7d3e2b53efb7

Michel Laberge gave a presentation at the Schulich Leader Scholarships event and the talk is available on Youtube. Most of the video is actually introduction and questions at the end. Laberge mentions in his very popular and general presentation that they are still working on raising the funding for...

TAE Technologies has published a new paper: Formation of Hot, Stable, Long-Lived Field-Reversed Configuration Plasmas on the C-2W Device https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub48250.pdf , Nucl. Fusion 59 (2019) 112009 (16pp). They have also published two new patent applications: Systems and methods for ...

The abstracts for the 61st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, taking place on October 21–25, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida are available at: http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP19/Content/3779 .

General Fusion has been rather quiet lately, but here is a 1/10 scale model of their full sized reactor:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEIvQWOXoAU6euR.jpg

Tokamak Energy exceeds target of 20 tesla with HTS Magnets The last 12 months have seen very rapid developments in magnet technology at Tokamak Energy. The HTS programme of developing tokamak magnets from high temperature superconducting (HTS) materials runs alongside our ST40 programme and is an i...

Enabling Timely and Commercially Viable Fusion Energy August 13, 2019 to August 14, 2019 Building on the ARPA-E ALPHA program and synergies with the Fusion Industry Association and the National Academies recommendation, ARPA-E is exploring opportunities for a potential new fusion program that is br...

Here is a news article from Forbes by Gemma Milne on the First Light Fusion status: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gemmamilne/2019/08/29/how-this-unconventional-oxford-startup-plans-to-win-the-fusion-energy-race/#3424721129f8.

In July there was a meeting called the Roadmap to the Fusion Energy Economy in New York. The agenda for this meeting is listed here:
https://indico.flatironinstitute.org/event/96/timetable/?view=standard. Unfortunately there are no slides published from that meeting.

There is a new initiative on spherical tokamaks in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/next-step-in-fusion.

NSTX-U will be repaired with tighter tolerances to improve the performance:
https://www.pppl.gov/news/2019/08/improving-magnetic-bottle-controls-fusion-power-earth

TAE Technology has been granted also for 2019 computer time through the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) programme: The Department of Energy (DOE) has fueled TAE Technologies' quest in with awards of computer time through the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Co...

General Fusion describes their latest activities here: https://generalfusion.com/2019/06/slic-forming-plasmas-inside-molten-lithium/.

This is the General Atomics press release: http://ga.publishpath.com/recent-breakthrough-on-diii-d-enables-major-step-toward-economical-fusion-energy and this is their corresponding (paywalled) paper in Nuclear Fusion: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ab235b . This looks indeed a...