Beneath Building 7 at the Nereid complex, past humming centrifuges and through security doors, three dozen engineers are reinventing nuclear power. They speak about thorium cycles with the certainty their grandparents once reserved for color television.
Chrome, Concrete & the New Nucleonics
Polaris Fusion opened their Cascade Ridge lab in late 2023. I visited on a January morning — nineteen degrees outside, a precise sixty-eight within. The lead engineer showed me a washing-machine-sized device that produces plasma at one hundred million degrees. The chrome casing was cool to the touch.
We stopped dreaming in atoms around 1975. Everything since has been a footnote to a century that lost its nerve.
— Dr. Margot Kessler, Pacific Nucleonics Institute