Microsoft signed a contract with a fusion start-up, Helion, in 2023, purportedly to produce fusion power at scale in 2028. Stick a pin in that.
Meanwhile, other start-ups beginning to attract serious investment as buzz grows around this forever-30-years-away technology.
UPDATE: Friday February 13.
Powermag:
Fusion research company Helion Energy said its Polaris prototype has set new industry benchmarks, becoming the first privately developed fusion energy machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion and achieve plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius.
The company on February 13 said the milestones “mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.”
Fusion energy startup Inertia Enterprises has raised $450 million to start developing a power plant that hinges on building the world’s most powerful lasers.
The Series A funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and includes Threshold Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and GV (formerly Google Ventures). The Livermore, California-based company expects to begin construction in 2030 on a commercial power plant. It also plans to build a facility to make the lasers and a production line to supply millions of tiny pellets made of special materials that they intend to blast to trigger fusion reactions.
The scale of the funding reflects the growing interest in fusion, which holds the promise of abundant clean energy but also comes with daunting engineering and physics challenges. The industry attracted more than $9.7 billion in backing through the middle of last year, according to a Fusion Industry Association report released in July.
Major deals have continued since then, led by an $863 millionfunding round announced by Commonwealth Fusion Systems in August. Dozens of companies are pursuing the technology, which involves replicating the conditions at the heart of stars, but none has yet demonstrated a viable commercial system.
There are two main approaches to fusion power plants. Commonwealth is one of the leaders seeking to use powerful magnets to control a super-heated cloud of plasma. Inertia is pursuing a different path, using powerful lasers to set off fusion reactions. That method was validated for the first time in a 2022 breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
That test used the world’s largest laser to blast a peppercorn-sized capsule. That triggered a fusion reaction with two hydrogen isotopes, releasing more energy than was needed to set it off. Inertia is developing a new laser that Inertia Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson said will be a million times more powerful, and the company’s roster includes co-founder Annie Kritcher, who was lead designer of Livermore’s fusion experiments. Inertia plans to use 1,000 lasers, firing 10 times a second at its proposed commercial power plant.
Most of the leading fusion companies are pursuing the magnet-based approach. But none has been able to demonstrate a reaction that delivers more energy than was needed to trigger it, the industry’s most important benchmark. Inertia’s approach and on-staff expertise give it an edge, said Bessemer Ventures partner Byron Deeter.
I’d love for fusion as electricity source come to fruition. I wrote a paper in school in the late 1970s about the different tokomak (magnetic confinement) designs and optimistic statements by some that it was “a few decades away”. But can they even turn that into “a couple decades” or “a decade”? Perhaps some of the startups might, perhaps multiple startups will produce faster data than the ITER project over in Europe which suffers mightily from being built intentionally on the extremely multinational committee approach, and includes fabrication of components by different contributors, expecting all things fit when matched up in the device. Startups can experiment inside the walls of their building, speeding the iterations. And advances in magnets, superconductors and simulation/design software – as well as more nuanced understanding of fusion – gives today’s work a big leg up on what’s a group of really hard problems.
As to the laser approach? Not sure. Livermore’s gadget is designed as a way to conduct atomic bomb-related tests without blowing up bombs, and to me the concept of having far more than the 196 (198?) lasers they use all staying on-target, and repowered for each shot, while creating a very energetic reaction every 1/10th of a second, for weeks or months at a time? I’m not the expert but plasma confinement with magnets feels less unlikely.
I wish them all luck in their endeavors. I hope everyone else continues going as fast as possible with electrifying, installing renewables and storage and better power electronics and transmission. If fusion catches up it would be grand. If not, we’d have lots less CO2 emitted during the interim.