To reach one of the worlds most secretive nuclear-fusion companies, visitors must wind their way through a suburban office park at the foot of the Santa Ana Mountains, just east of Irvine, California, until they pull up outside the large but unmarked headquarters of Tri Alpha Energy.This is as close as any outsider can get without signing a non-disclosure agreement; Tri Alpha protects its trade secrets so tightly that it does not even have a website. But the fragments of information that have filtered out make it clear that the building houses one of the largest fusion experiments now operating in the United States. It is also one of the most unconventional. Instead of using the doughnut-shaped 'tokamak' reactor that has dominated fusion-energy research for more than 40 years, Tri Alpha is testing a linear reactor that it claims will be smaller, simpler and cheaper-and will lead to commercial fusion power in little more than a decade, far ahead of the 30 to 50 years often quoted for tokamaks.
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机译：为了到达世界上最秘密的核聚变公司之一，访客必须绕过位于加利福尼亚州欧文市以东的圣安娜山脚下的郊区办公公园，直到他们停靠在大型但未标记的总部外面Tri Alpha Energy。这与任何外部人士在不签署保密协议的情况下都能获得的接近。 Tri Alpha如此严格地保护其商业机密，甚至没有网站。但是，已经过滤掉的信息碎片清楚地表明，这座大楼是美国目前最大的融合实验之一。它也是最非常规的之一。 Tri Alpha并未使用在聚变能研究中占据主导地位的甜甜圈形“托卡马克”反应堆，而是在试验一种线性反应堆，该反应堆将变得更小，更简单，更便宜，并且将在核聚变中获得商业应用。仅仅十多年，远远超过了托卡马克人通常提到的30至50年。
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