Asmundsson is <GO> editor of Bloomberg Markets and Wade
covers energy for Bloomberg News in New York.and easy. And yeah, it’s activated. But in the future we can put in
stuff that lasts longer.” One potential solution would be using spe-
cialized alloys that are more resistant to becoming radioactive,
though the industry is still working to develop such materials.
The radioactive material from fusion reactors is drastically
different from fission waste, Mumgaard adds. “It’s basically not
stuff that’s biologically active,” he says, unlike the volatile gases
that can escape in a fission accident. “So it’s like a completely
different category. Whether or not we can explain that well to
the public, you know, is one of the challenges that we have to
figure out in fusion.”
Still, Mumgaard is upbeat. “Fusion is a big endeavor, and
there’s a lot of excitement around it,” he says, adding that enthusiasm
is coming from energy people, investors, and academics. “We’re
trying to birth an industry here. And it’s a fun place to be.”
GENERAL FUSION, OUTSIDE VANCOUVER, is taking a different approach
to building a reactor. Founded in 2002 by plasma physicist Michel
Laberge, the company dusted off a 1970s design by the U.S. Naval
Research Laboratory. Called Linus, the design included features
that inspired General Fusion’s concept. “It’s basically the fusion
equivalent of a diesel engine,” Mowry says. General Fusion’s machine
addresses the first-wall problem by facing the plasma with swirling
molten lead and lithium, which absorbs the neutrons. “We inject
the plasma into a spherical cavity made out of liquid metal, and then
we have basically an array of lots of pistons that are synchronized
to collapse that cavity down very quickly around the plasma, heating
it up until it burns—just like the analogy of a diesel engine,” he says.
Today’s high-speed electronic controls made it possible to
synchronize the pistons with a precision that was impossible in the
1970s, according to Mowry. “That’s an example of what we call
enabling technologies,” he says. The company is getting ready to
build a scale model demonstration that it aims to complete in 2025.
“Fusion’s time is really coming now,” Mowry says. Before
joining General Fusion, he worked in the energy industry for
30 years, including founding a company that designed so-called
small modular reactors for fission energy. Now, he says, fusion is
becoming competitive with fission. “When you look at the realistic
time frames for commercializing advanced gen-four fission tech-
nologies, it’s no shorter than that time frame to commercialize
fusion these days,” he says.TAE TECHNOLOGIES, started in 1998, is the oldest company in the
field. The late plasma physicist Norman Rostoker, who co-founded
the company, took a long view, CEO Binderbauer says. Early on,
Rostoker asked what fuel would be most likely to enable a viable
fusion power plant—instead of what would be the easiest. He chose
hydrogen and an isotope of boron, known as boron-11, because they
produce no radiation during fusion and are readily available.
The catch? You have to cook the boron-11 fuel at tempera-
tures of billions of degrees. So that’s the path TAE is taking. Such
temperatures have already been achieved in particle physics
experiments, according to Binderbauer. “When we talk about
temperature, what it really is, it’s sort of how fast and with what
energy are these particles zipping around and colliding with each
other,” he says. Consider the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva
and convert the experiments there into temperature units, Bin-
derbauer says. “CERN actually has created trillions-of-degrees
situations where an operator will control it, put these particles
into these storage rings, and they run around there,” he says.
TAE’s current machine, which accelerates two plasmas into
each other in a confinement vessel and heats them with particle
beams, is called Norman. It operates in the neighborhood of
35 million C. The company’s next device, called Copernicus, is
aiming for 100 million C.LIKE OTHER MOONSHOTS, the effort to harness fusion has been both
inspiring and frustrating. The finish line may still be years away, but
breakthroughs along the way have been sufficient to keep attracting
scientists—and, more recently, investors.
And fusion could have an important place in the future energy
mix. “The statistics will tell you in the next 25 years we’re going to
double the amount of electrical demand and consumption,” Bind-
erbauer says. “To me, finding baseload power that is decoupled
from having to burn fossil fuels is very, very critical.”
The potential market is enormous, requiring an investment
of $10 trillion or more in generating equipment by 2050. “You can
build multiple very-high-value companies in a market like that,”
he says. “And we will never even step on each other’s toes.”Company Snapshots
These three companies are aiming to commercialize fusionGeneral Fusion
Burnaby,
B.C.TAE
Technologies Inc.
Foothill Ranch, Calif.TECHNOLOGY
Developing high-
temperature
superconducting
magnets to
confine plasma in
a small tokamak
called Sparc.FUNDING
$115 million
INVESTORS
ENI, Breakthrough
Energy Ventures*,
Future Ventures,
Khosla Ventures,
and othersTECHNOLOGY
Developing
magnetized-target
fusion machine in
which plasma is
injected into a cavity
surrounded by swirling
molten metal and
then compressed by
synchronized pistons
to create fusion.TECHNOLOGY
Developing beam-
driven field-reversed
configuration machine,
which fires two
plasmas into each
other in a confinement
vessel so that their
magnetic field holds
them while heated by
particle beams.
FUNDING
More than $600 million
INVESTORS
Goldman Sachs
Group, Vulcan Capital,
Venrock, and othersFUNDING
More than $100 million
INVESTORS
Bezos Expeditions,
Chrysalix Venture
Capital, Khazanah
Nasional, and othersCommonwealth
Fusion Systems
Cambridge, Mass.VOLUME 28 / ISSUE 5 75