Fantasy Fusion

With the uncertainty around professional sports, here is a high-tech alternative.

Key Takeaways

• The mindset of fusion R&D programs is shifting from “will it work?” to “how can we make fusion power cheap?”
• Two oil and gas companies recently announced investments in fusion startups. Equinor invested in Commonwealth Fusion’s $84mm Series D round, and Chevron invested in Zap Energy’s Series A round.
• A new group of fusion startups is extending the playing field and working towards smaller, cheaper fusion reactors. These include fusion reactors using both magnets and lasers, or neither. The main fusion reactors use either Magnetic Confinement (magnets) and Inertial Confinement (lasers) to achieve fusion.

Before we fire up the grills, finish packing for that epic end-of-summer roadtrip, or just settle in front of the TV, I wanted to share some updates on fusion technologies from this past summer. A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining the investor panel at the kickoff workshop for the BETHE fusion program. [1] The BETHE program itself is a provides $32mm in funding for fusion research and development, under the US Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E).

Two things stood out from this workshop. The first was a feeling of growing excitement — two large oil and gas companies had recently announced investments in fusion companies, and there were a growing number and variety of stakeholders in attendance. The attendees represented a wide range of laboratories, engineering companies, and investors. There was a feeling that the field was gaining traction, and the emphasis had shifted from proving fusion was possible to engineering better materials and systems.

The second thing that stood out was the growing number of fusion companies with smaller and more scalable reactor designs. I think it is fair to say that the number of serious fusion companies has doubled in the past 3 years. Not only does this mean “more shots on goal” — a higher likelihood that one will be successful, but it creates healthy competition and raises the bar for investment.

It also leads to a fun thought experiment: if we were to draft fusion companies in “fantasy” sports league style, who would emerge as the strongest contenders? Who would get picked on the basis of their mascot, team color, or coolest sounding technology? I invite you to read on and perhaps choose your own favorite fusion company to follow!

Commentary from Investors

A sports league wouldn’t be complete without commentators. The workshop kicked off with commentary from a panel of current and potential investors in fusion technologies. [2] The organizers thoughtfully scheduled the investor panel first, allowing us to share our perspectives on investment criteria and broader energy space before the serious science started. Here are my takeaways and the comments that stood out from the panel:

1. The consensus (and my personal opinion) was that fusion is technically feasible. It is just a matter of time. The landscape around fusion science has changed — computing and materials science have advanced to allow technical breakthroughs.
2. There are multiple serious fusion companies who are able to attract private funding.
3. Investing in fusion technologies takes a very deliberate diligence process, with input from the scientific community.
4. For an aspiring fusion startup, being laser focused on the technology won’t cut it. Investors are looking for a great entrepreneur as well as a great tech. Bringing together the right team is incredibly important, as is good planning and the ability to communicate.
5. When assessing fusion and all early-stage technology companies: “plans are nothing, but planning is everything.” Similarly, “reality does not respect your Gantt chart!”
6. Good planning also includes defining clear milestones tied to funding levels, and having a fundraising plan with milestones and envisioned valuations up front. Consider the effects of dilution at each point.
7. Even though the costs of wind and solar are falling, the last 10–50% of energy generation (depending on which study you agree with) will be hard (expensive) to generate with renewables. There is room for fusion to play a major role in the global energy landscape.
8. As investors, if we wait until net energy gain is demonstrated, we will have missed the opportunity. “If we are reading about it in Greentech media, we are too late.”

Comment #7 — whether fusion plants will be economically relevant in future energy markets — was a key point of discussion. There is a disconnect between the high capital-cost, GWe-scale fusion facilities that have dominated popular science representations and modern energy markets. There has to be reason to believe the cost of fusion power will be competitive to justify the costs of technology development (we explored this topic in a previous post). ARPA-E asks companies to show a path to costs of $5 per watt of power ($5/W) at the 400 MW power plant scale to make sure that the technologies they fund will be cost competitive.

A U-shaped fusion power plant as depicted in SimCity 2000, my favorite computer game as a kid. These GW-scale fusion plants were expensive, but they powered a whole city! (Image Source: SimCity Retrospective)

The rest of the workshop was even more informative, and covered the fusion projects funded by ARPA-E through the BETHE program. Many of the slides and materials from the workshop are publicly available here.

Fantasy Fusion Teams

The updates from teams working on new early-stage fusion reactor concepts were the most exciting part of the workshop. In earlier posts on fusion, we introduced the two main strategies to achieving fusion: Magnetic Confinement Fusion (fusion with magnets) and Inertial Confinement Fusion (fusion with lasers). This is a simplification. In reality, there are a spectrum of “Other” possible fusion reactors between just-magnets and just-lasers, and a few that don’t fit easily into either bucket. [3]

Here are some exciting early-stage fusion reactor designs from the workshop that fall into the “Other” category:

• Zap Energy’s fusion reactor shoots a cylinder of plasma directly into a molten salt bath. Their reactor uses high electric fields rather than magnets to contain the plasma at fusion temperatures. Zap’s concept is much smaller than ITER and many other reactor designs, so it will cost less to show it works. They recently announced a Series A round from Chevron and other investors.
• Hyperjet Fusion and Los Alamos National Lab are collaborating on a fusion reactor that shoots a target from all sides with plasma guns. The target material implodes (explodes inwards) to create enough pressure to ignite fusion.
• Two laboratories are working on Mirror Machine projects: the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. A Mirror Machine uses strong magnetic fields at each end of a tube to reflect the plasma back to the center. This concept is promising but hasn’t produced a company yet.
• Another team is working towards muon-catalyzed fusion to allow fusion at lower temperatures, reducing the need for magnets or lasers to contain it. However, it requires muons, which are made in a particle accelerator and quickly fall apart.

Of course, the fusion fantasy league also includes established Magnetic Confinement Fusion (MCF) powerhouses and some upstarts:

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems would be the Patriots, except everybody likes them. This team was initially spun out of MIT and is located in Boston. Their reactor is a “tokamak” (donut) design that is smaller, more compact and less expensive due to new high-field magnet technologies they developed. They recently announced another $84mm in funding from Equinor and other investors.
• UK-based Tokamak Energy has been developing spherical tokamak (“Spheromak”) reactors for over a decade. They hope to reach the plasma temperatures needed for fusion, 100 million degrees C, with their ST40 demonstration reactor. The ST40 device reached 15 million degrees C in 2018, hotter than the sun’s core.
• CTFusion is developing an even smaller, cheaper and more circular MCF reactor by using electrical currents to control the plasma more efficiently. Their design is also a Spheromak.

Building on the legacy of plasma research for national defense, Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) companies are generally newer teams with less public information. This area is exciting given recent advances in lasers and other supporting technologies, coupled with the learnings from several decades of research at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and other labs around the world.

• Marvel Fusion is laser-focused on building large fusion power plants (1–5GW) that leverage advances in high-energy laser technologies. They are able to decrease the energy needed to achieve ignition vs NIF through a two-step laser pulse scheme. [4]
• HB11 intends to overcome an even-bigger energy barrier and demonstrate fusion with aneutronic fuels (protons and boron, B11). This fusion reaction doesn’t need tritium and produces fewer neutrons, which would simplify many aspects of the fusion power plant. The key to this is their laser-driven plasma-block ignition approach (papers explaining the physics behind this are linked on their website).
• Innoven Energy is also doing cool and possibly classified things with lasers. Much of our knowledge of the plasma physics needed for inertial confinement fusion came from defense research.

While this list is not exhaustive, it illustrates just how many diverse fusion technologies are in development. Other companies who are publicly working towards commercial fusion reactors can be found in industry reports and through the Fusion Industry Association.

I am excited to follow the progress of these companies and for more announcements of milestones achieved. Whoever you are rooting for, best wishes for a wonderful labor day weekend.

Photo by Karl Magnuson on Unsplash

Notes

1. The name of the program, BETHE (pronounced “beta”) is an acronym for “Breakthroughs Enabling THermonuclear-Fusion Energy”. It is also a nod to Hans Bethe, a German-American nuclear physicist (and Cornell professor — Go Big Red!) who played a major role in developing the atomic and hydrogen bombs. After the war, he campaigned with Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race, resulting in the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (SALT I).
2. The “investor panel” included groups who have invested in fusion companies, investors who had decided not to invest, and others (including Prime Movers Lab) who are interested but have not yet invested in a fusion company. Equinor recently announced an investment in Commonwealth Fusion. BP, Prime Impact Fund, and Lowercarbon Capital also participated in the panel but have not made an investment in fusion.
3. The previous ARPA-E program, “ALPHA” specifically funded fusion designs in this intermediate space, called Magneto-Inertial Fusion, and Z-pinch fusion reactor designs. Z-pinch fusion reactors use electric fields rather than magnetic fields or lasers to contain the plasma long enough to achieve fusion.
4. This is based on an early blog post in Medium.

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