Why Private Billions Are Flowing Into Fusion

Fusion power has a bit of a reputation, somewhat in the realm of the holy grail, but not in a good way. There is a famous joke about nuclear

fusion

that says it never comes true. You can Google it if you want. But really the moment we find ourselves in today with nuclear

fusion

is probably more exciting than ever. There is more activity than ever in the world of fusion, and not just in government research laboratories. There is also an emerging

private

merger industry that has attracted

billions

of dollars in capital in recent years. Both governments and

private

investors realize that we have to find a solution that allows us to achieve net zero targets.

This is one of the most difficult but most rewarding problems humanity could work on. In the end we all want the same thing. We want someone to put electricity from a fusion power plant into the grid as soon as possible. Frankly, the magnitude of the challenge is replacing 3,000 gigawatts of fossil fuel. There aren't many things that can do that. In fact, there may only be one merger that can actually do that. And while many in the scientific community predict that fusion energy will take decades, some in the private fusion space believe we'll get there in a few years, as early as the 2030s.

A lot of money is going into these companies. And it is very interesting and exciting. There are some that I really love and others that I would rather laugh at. The world is desperately searching for a substitute for fossil fuels. Now scientists and startups are betting that a commercial fusion reactor is finally in sight. We are looking at visible light coming from the plasma. The plasma has a temperature of 100,000 degrees, but what you really see is the coldest part. The hottest part isn't really seen because it's too hot to emit light in the visible, isn't it?

Yes. When I started, I was doing numerical models and then I realized that operating the machine was much more interesting and fun for me. My job is stressful. My job can be very demanding in terms of time. But this is still one of the most interesting places in the world. Here in Oxford, you will find possibly the most successful fusion experiment on Earth, JET, the Joint European Torus, torus being the technical term for donut, which is the shape of the reactor. JET has been operating since the early 1980s and it was only in 1997 that we were really ready to attempt a proper merger.

And at that time we produced 16 megawatts of fusion energy, which is like a few wind turbines. It is quite significant. And it shows that fusion is possible. The 1997 experiment set records, but the reactor could only operate for less than a second. The team spent the next two decades coming up with a new approach. And in 2021 they gave him another chance. We always knew we could do better. The last two days before Christmas were dedicated to these experiments, just to this parameter window where we could get more. And we did it. Three, two, one. JET more than doubled its previous record, producing more energy than any fusion experiment in history.

We couldn't hug each other. We couldn't high five, anything, because we have to be two meters apart. But, you know, it was obvious that this was a record. It was a success. You could see it was a success. It is a real step towards the ultimate promise of fusion, a cheap, emissions-free energy source with virtually unlimited fuel. But maybe don't break out the champagne just yet. So in the 1997 experiments we produced a lot of energy, but in a very transient way. Then it accelerated and then we lost control. Now we increase and hold for five seconds.

So what exactly makes fusion such a difficult problem that holding it for five seconds constitutes a world record? Nuclear fusion. Once perfected, fusion power will give us an unlimited supply of energy. So nuclear fusion is really what is happening inside the sun, where many, many hydrogen atoms are moving at immense speeds. And from time to time some of them fuse to form helium. Now, the process at the atomic level leads to a very small loss of mass. And that small amount of mass actually generates a lot of energy. And you do it millions and millions of times and you get the sun.

Well, look, we know fusion works. It's happening right now on our sun. But the reason this happens on the sun is because of the mass of the sun. It's so massive that it has a huge gravitational force that pushes those hydrogen isotopes close enough to fuse. Obviously we cannot recreate the mass of the sun here on Earth. So instead, we have to give that fuel even more energy. So we take a gas, we put a huge amount of energy into it and that turns it into the fourth state of matter, plasma. If we consider water, for example, it is ice, then you heat it and you get a fluid, and then you heat it further, you get steam.

And if you then increase the temperature even more, you will get plasma. Common plasmas include lightning, neon lights, and these things. We need temperatures 10 times higher than in the solar interior. So this is about 100, 200 million degrees. And only at those types of temperatures does fusion occur here on Earth. Heating something to 10 times the temperature of the sun is, to use the technical term, very difficult. Scientists have been working on it since the 1930s. The biggest breakthrough has been the first tokamak experiments in the 1960s in the former Soviet Union. They reached several million degrees and this was a real breakthrough.

Tokamaks remain one of the most popular ways to create fusion. That's what JET is, along with many other government-run reactors around the world. Using powerful magnets to contain the plasma, they have reached temperatures of 100 million degrees and much more. But there's still one big milestone we need to reach before fusion energy becomes a reality: net profit. Firstly, we need more energy than is used to heat the fuel. If we cannot generate more energy from fusion than we contribute, then everything will be a failure. Unfortunately, no one has ever done it, not even the brilliant minds at JET.

However, that's all part of the plan because JET isn't actually designed to solve the merger on its own. It is simply set up for a much larger project called ITER. Uh, no, no. ITER. We are building this experimental machine in the south of France, ITER, which is going to be big. And it is the first that will actually produce more energy than it consumes. ITER is a massive international collaboration between 35 different countries. And everyone involved seems pretty confident they'll make a net profit for the first time. So the merger is just around the corner, right? Well...

With the ITER project, the first plasma is supposed to be created in 2025, but a full fusion reaction is not expected until 2035. So if ITER was the only bet we made on fusion, then it would be an option safe. I'd bet that nuclear fusion will take decades, and that's too long for the climate fight. Even the most optimistic scientists think that fusion energy may not be developed for another 50 years, if ever. Some think we can get there much faster. There are more than 30 private fusion companies worldwide. And it seems like every month or two another private company pops up somewhere with another great idea about how to do this.

The amount of financing allocated to the merger has also been increasing. More private funding goes into fusion each year than federal government funding in the United States. The private fusion space is still small in terms of budget and staff compared to the mainstream sector. But if you look at the pace of progress, I would say it's much, much faster. And I think it will be the private side that produces the first vital technology. Canadian fusion company General Fusion is moving away from traditional tokamak design. If you've followed fusion in recent years, you may have come across this steampunk octopus, an earlier prototype of its reactor.

It is very analogous to a fusion version of a diesel engine. Basically, you have this very large cavity that opens up inside the liquid metal. And into that liquid metal we inject a high-temperature hydrogen plasma. Now we can do this compression to heat that plasma in the same way you think of a piston compressing and heating fuel in a diesel engine. This is a vapor-driven compression process that uses a variety of controllers. It compresses and heats this magnetized plasma to fusion conditions. General Fusion's reactor would create short bursts of fusion energy, an approach they hope to achieve a net gain more easily than a tokamak.

Founded in 2002 and backed by investors including Jeff Bezos, it is one of the most advanced companies in the field of fusion startups with plans to build a demonstration plant by 2026 in Oxford on the same scientific campus as JET. This won't actually put megawatts on the grid, but it will demonstrate that our approach to fusion in a power plant-relevant environment can really make fusion happen. Aiming to begin construction in a matter of months, the company is working flat out to resolve all issues before the show. This is about 2/3 of the full scale we will need in our fusion demonstration plant.

So at this point, it's mainly a matter of understanding the properties of plasma and the physics of plasma, to be sure that that will increase as we build the larger version. The alarms that you hear when we start charging alert you to the fact that we are starting to charge this machine. You hear a ping when the plasma interacts with the wall of the machine. You see, the moment you heard that bang, was when the machine created the plasma. It's really exciting to see what's happening in the private merger industry. Of course, I came to General Fusion because I like General Fusion technology.

That's one man's opinion. I think so, my point of view is the first really good shot on goal. But what really feels good is that there will be a lot of shots on goal, right? And I am very confident that we will get the victory we need. Not far from General Fusion's headquarters, another fusion company can be found. Helion Energy, one of the most talked-about fusion companies in the world, is based in some former Boeing hangars outside Seattle. What we've tried to do at Helion is approach fusion from a different direction than a lot of other people.

We looked at the state of the art of what was being built in fusion and thought there really had to be a better way to get to commercial fusion faster. It may seem like an exaggeration, but there really is something radically different about Helion's reactor. Almost every idea behind a nuclear fusion startup or company is to rely on the heat that is generated through fusion. And then convert that heat into steam, which is then used to spin turbines to generate electricity. Now, Helion says you don't have to go through that phase of heating up and spinning a turbine.

So we do something called direct energy conversion, where we take the magnetic energy of the fusion system, the energy of the charged particles in the fuel, and extract it directly to convert it into electricity. We inject our fuel. We magnetically compress that fusion fuel. The fusion begins. Push that magnetic field. So a good analogy is your car's regenerative braking. Then, regeneratively, we directly recover the electricity from that fusion expansion and convert it into electricity. By eliminating the steam path for fusion, we can radically increase the overall engineering efficiency of the system. We are now aiming for a system that can be much smaller, that requires much less complexity and challenges and, really, from my point of view, much less time.

That pitch was good enough to attract Silicon Valley giants Sam Altman and Peter Thiel as investors. The company's $500 million Series E round makes it one of the best-funded merger companies in the world. They are also making one of the most ambitious predictions in the industry. The goal is to have it built by 2024, up and running and generating net electricity from fusion for the first time. The timeline is the driver. He is always the driver. So if it's a matter of, well, it might be a little bit better, but take one more year, we say, no, we're going to make it a little bit worse, but we'll do it a year sooner.

Is it the Silicon Valley mentality of how to build as fast as possible? Yes, help me with the gas pressure. Everything is isolated. You have gas pressure. Fire. Shooting. Nice. Good shot. That was easy. Back in Oxford, First Light Fusion is taking what might be the most original approach of any fusion company, borrowing from a branch of fusion called inertial confinement. The idea behind inertial confinement ismaintain plasma for a very short time in a very small space. So an example of inertial confinement is when you use lasers, very high-power lasers, to heat a very small amount of hydrogen for nanoseconds, that is, billionths of a second.

This has been done before, most famously at the National Ignition Facility in California. But First Light has come up with a new approach. We call it projectile fusion. We have a high velocity projectile. Fly and hit what we call a target. And the target has to concentrate the projectile's energy into the fusion fuel. This is one of our objectives. This is the key technology for our approach to fusion. This is then completely converted to plasma by the force of the impact and the energy released. In a power station, one of these targets would release enough energy to power the average UK home for more than two years.

That sound. That is the projectile that is fired from this gas gun at about 15,000 miles per hour. To generate energy you have to do it at a repetition rate. You have to do a certain number and it is the energy you release each time for the frequency and that is the power. So in our power plant design we would do this about once every 30 seconds. So we recently showed fusion in our lab with a projectile-powered approach for the first time. Just experimentally it's a great proof of concept that it can really work. If we look at the actual amount of fusion we produced, that number alone was 50 neutrons.

And we don't hide it. It's not very impressive. But the thing is, that's exactly what the simulations predicted. And that's what gives us the very quick path forward, we hope, to improve that number. I hope we're not talking about 50 neutrons by the end of the year. There are these disruptive technologies that are coming into our space, which is great. We want new ideas. We want people to come and tackle the big challenges we face. There are many startups. Some of them will fail. Some of them will go to the wall. Some of them will be very successful.

That's just healthy. Some on the scientific research side of the merger are more critical of the startup phenomenon. Few private fusion companies have shown results beyond fusing a few atoms. And many scientists worry that these new companies are too promising. In my opinion, the disadvantages are the promises of companies that have a concept that we, for good reason, have left aside and knew why it will not work, or completely new concepts. Some change them every two years. And then they still promise fusion energy by 2030 or something like that. And I don't like that too much because I'm afraid that if there are so many promises that are not kept, this would not be positive for fusion energy in general.

If you look at the time frames that governments work on in research, they are completely different than the time frames that private corporate industry works on. Not that there's a problem with the government, but, you know, there's a different set of metrics. They are largely research-driven organizations. You need look no further than commercial access to space. SpaceX. They have created what people thought would never be possible: reusable rockets. NASA was never able to achieve that because they weren't motivated by the same things. And so when it comes to the last mile of commercialization, that's where you really need to pass the baton from government to private industry.

From what I know, some of the private sector is very serious and is providing significant capital and significant engineering advances. You need to promise things at the right time and on a realistic schedule. So, not next year. And the period of about 20 years is realistic. It remains to be seen whether Silicon Valley's VC-like approach will actually get us to business mergers faster. However, one thing is certain: progress is being made, however slow and incremental. And if we want to reach a fusion-driven future, we'll probably need both careful research and risky new ideas. I think the pace of progress is really driven by imperative.

And to be honest, I mean, let's be honest as a society, for the last 20 or 30 years we've gotten pretty comfortable with burning fossil fuels. The fact that we have to stop it now drives the imperative. This is the most important question for humanity because, I mean, electricity or energy is needed for everything. We have many developing countries, and if these countries want to reach our living standards, there is no other way than to provide them with cheap and, better yet, CO2-neutral energy. Otherwise, we will have a climate crisis. Each fusion technology has a slightly different flavor in terms of its ultimate value proposition.

That's why I think we'll see a portfolio of technologies commercialized in the coming decades that target different parts of the market. And the market is huge and diverse. The total market that the merger can address is on the order of $1 trillion a year. It may be decades before fusion becomes a reality, but it's the kind of cheap, unlimited power you'd like to give a civilization so it can do all the things it wants. Imagine if you could produce a huge amount of rocket fuel to create an entire fleet of asteroid-mining rockets because, you know, at some point we'll run out of metals.

Or it could remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it deep underground. That process requires a ton of energy, but if you were able to create nuclear fusion, you could imagine restoring Earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. And these are the types of applications that really cheap, clean energy can enable humanity to realize. I want my children to have a future with the possibilities that I have had. So I hope we get a merger, and I think private and public should come together because this is worth it.