Energy

Fusion energy companies unite to accelerate commercial power

Fusion energy companies unite to accelerate commercial power
Interior of a fusion reactor under construction
Interior of a fusion reactor under construction
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Melanie Windridge (left), Kazuki Matsuo (center), and Dan Gengenbach (right)
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Melanie Windridge (left), Kazuki Matsuo (center), and Dan Gengenbach (right)
Cutaway view of a tokamak reactor
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Cutaway view of a tokamak reactor
Interior of a fusion reactor under construction
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Interior of a fusion reactor under construction
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A recent ITER workshop bringing together almost 50 CEOs and senior scientists from private fusion startups suggests that combining the technologies from magnetic and laser fusion experiments could accelerate the development of practical fusion power.

Though the field of fusion energy research is dominated by a few major efforts, there are today about 50 privately funded fusion startups in 12 countries that have garnered over US$5.6 billion in investments. Most of them claim that they will be able to achieve commercial fusion power by 2030.

Given the track record of fusion over the past 75 years, that must be taken with a grain of salt. Even the international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject ITER recently suffered a four-year timetable setback when the delivery of a 6,000-tonne magnet and other components was delayed.

Most fusion projects are based on fusing two heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, while others are looking at what is known as aneutronic fusion using proton-boron or helium-3 fusion. Having such a variety of approaches increases the chances of success, but it can also produce unproductive rivalries not seen since fusion research was regarded as a national security issue by the US, UK, and USSR in the 1950s and '60s.

Cutaway view of a tokamak reactor
Cutaway view of a tokamak reactor

The biggest example is the two main approaches to fusion – magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement.

Though they both aim at fusing hydrogen isotopes, they take completely different paths. Magnetic confinement uses a toroidal magnetic field that traps and compresses a plasma as it's heated to temperatures many times greater than that at the core of the Sun. Meanwhile, laser inertial confinement works by concentrating a battery of high-energy lasers on a single spot where there's a cryogenic pellet of deuterium and tritium, creating a shockwave as the pellet implodes and fuses the atoms.

Since these are such different approaches, for the past half century, scientists and engineers tended to ignore the work in the other camp and would even disparage their rivals by claiming that lasers couldn't be scaled to a practical form or that toroidal magnets were too complex and hard to control.

Recently, ITER played host to the first ITER Private Sector Fusion Workshop convened to break down some of these barriers by allowing various startups and ITER to share information and seek areas for collaboration. This is more than just a matter of sci/tech good neighborliness. There have been major breakthroughs at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States and Joint European Torus (JET) in Britain.

Naturally, private companies are keen to build on these milestones.

Melanie Windridge (left), Kazuki Matsuo (center), and Dan Gengenbach (right)
Melanie Windridge (left), Kazuki Matsuo (center), and Dan Gengenbach (right)

A significant example of this is a panel debate at the workshop on inertial confinement fusion hosted by the CEO of Fusion Energy Insights Melanie Windridge, Ex-Fusion CEO Kazuki Matsuo, and Marvel Fusion CEO Dan Gengenbach. In discussing the two major approaches, the panel said that recent progress has opened up new opportunities for collaboration. According to Matsuo, there are a number of areas where laser and magnet camps can help one another, including with the blanket systems used to convert fusion energy into usable power that work well for either approach.

Other places of cooperation could be in materials used to build fusion plants, taking advantage of clearing regulatory hurdles by one or the other side, software, and development of safety regulations. In this way, the development of commercial fusion power could be significantly accelerated.

It's early days, but it does recall another episode in the history of fusion research. In 1956, Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov gave a talk at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Britain. Leapfrogging the Iron Curtain, it gave both sides in the Cold War a guarded insight into what the other was doing, providing a degree of scientific confidence that sparked over a decade of rapid progress in fusion.

Perhaps such a renaissance may be in the offing in our time.

Source: ITER

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6 comments
6 comments
veryken
I've seen up close many similar situations where rival teams do a surprising turn and try to collaborate instead of disparage each other in competition. The weak teams will naturally benefit. The strongest have the most to contribute, yet the least to gain. It takes some outstanding leadership and vision to even get started. The stakes and rewards are just too high. For example, will Helion share much? Will NASA capitulate and admit to wasting billions in taxpayer dollars? Or will they all just keep fighting to advocate their own unique ideas?
TechGazer
So, will combining efforts make commercial fusion only 10 years in the future for the next hundred years, or 40 years in the future for the next 100 years?

Also, there are other techniques that are possible contenders, so will this ganging-up of two contenders mean less support for alternatives? I don't have a lot of confidence in either tokamaks or laser fusion.
windykites
Don't worry. Fusion will work within the next 50 years, and then Fusion will work within the next 50 years, and so on. More research money please.
dcris
By the end of 2025 the entire planetary energy production will be on an entirely different path. AND it will be totally free of charge to The People.... And completely decentralized from corporate geeks who think energy production is somehow their domain to dispense whenever they wish. Let them explore all they want....But Planet Earth is about to get a massive make-over... and energy companies will be a quaint footnote that never had the best interest of people....ever, in mind or heart.
Jose Gros-Aymerich
ITER is an scam, never concluded, always in need of higher amounts of money.
Why so other Fusion Energy technicians seat along Wirth delinquents?
German Stellarator prototypes worked, valuable Info came from their Experiments.
The Stellarator Management and Engineers should be in command of ITER
CrossoverManiac
To anyone making the nuclear fusion will always be fifty years away. The first photovoltaic cells were made in 1839 Edmond Becquerel. Photovoltaics would not produce utility-scale power in the United States until 1982 when the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) in Hesperia, California created the first solar power plant. And no telling how many centuries that we had been extracting power from wind to do work (excluding the thousands of years using it to move watercraft) before someone finally hooked an electric generator to a windmill.

By comparison, nuclear fusion research has been going on for only eight decades. In fact, the only source of energy that really had a rapid development was nuclear fission.

Nuclear fission was discovered in December 1938. The first fission power plant was online in in 1954 in Obninsk, Soviet Union. That's only 16 years! It took solar cells 143 years to go from proof of concept to contributing to the electric grid. And despise a 99-year head start, fission was generating utility scale power for 38 years before solar panels. The year 1954 was also the year Bell Labs developed the first "practical" solar cells that had a whopping 4% efficiency, which was up from the 1% efficiency of solar panels made by Charles Fritts and installed on some NYC rooftops in 1883.

Despite the slow development of solar and wind power, these same people will berate nuclear fusion research for not producing results in a shorter time than wind and solar. It's not too much for fusion companies to ask for the same 140 year development time that solar power received if not the time duration for the development of wind power.