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Investors Have Now Spent $5 Billion Pursuing The "Holy Grail Of Energy"

https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/about-fusion-industry
https://tracxn.com/d/trending-themes/Startups-in-Nuclear-Fusion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIRdKDMhGUQ

What do The Dark Knight Rises, Back to the Future, Oblivion, and
Interstellar all have in common? They are sci-fi blockbusters that
showcase a technology that scientists consider to be the Holy Grail of
Energy: Nuclear fusion. Theoretically, two lone nuclear reactors
running on small pellets could power the entire planet, safely and
cleanly. That’s the promise of nuclear fusion. So, why are we still
relying on fossil fuels? What’s stopping us from building these
reactors everywhere?

After all, scientists have been working on nuclear fusion technology
since the 1950s and have always been optimistic that the final
breakthrough is not far away. Yet, milestones have fallen time and
again and now the running joke is that a practical nuclear fusion
power plant could still be decades away.

Well, the past few years have witnessed a resurgence in the field with
a handful of startups setting up shop to make nuclear fusion an
everyday reality. Interestingly, the vast majority of the sector’s
funding has come from the private sector rather than public
investments.

According to the second global fusion industry report published by the
Fusion Industry Association (FIA), private investment in fusion
technology hit $4.7 billion in total, dwarfing the $117 million of
public investment. Also, the current year is proving to be a watershed
moment for fusion technology, with the amount of funding in 2022 more
than doubling the industry's entire historic investment to the tune of
$2.83 billion.
Fusion Startups

To date, Commonwealth Fusion Systems has bagged the largest amount of
funding for a fusion startup. Back in December, the
Massachusetts-based fusion startup snagged more than $1.8 billion in
the largest private investment for nuclear fusion yet from a plethora
of big-name investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates,
George Soros via his Soros Fund Management LLC, and venture capitalist
John Doerr.

Commonwealth Fusion System is in good company.

On Nov. 5, Helion Energy announced that it had raised $500 million in
its latest fundraising round, making it the second-largest-ever single
fundraising round for a private fusion firm. Helion has a chance to
surpass Commonwealth Fusion System since its latest round of funding
includes an additional $1.7 billion tied to certain performance
milestones. Meanwhile, Canada’s General Fusion has closed a $130
million fundraising round that was oversubscribed. General Fusion
plans to launch an even bigger fundraising effort soon.

Google and Chevron participated in a $250-million funding raise for
TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion startup with an unconventional
strategy, back in June. Since then, TAE has raised a total of $1.2
billion.

“It’s a sign of the industry growing up," General Fusion Chief
Executive Christofer Mowry has told the Wall Street Journal.

Various fusion companies are pursuing different designs for fusion
reactors, though the majority rely on fusion that takes place in
plasma. Commonwealth Fusion has successfully tested the most powerful
fusion magnet of its kind on Earth that would hold and compress the
plasma.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their
fusion reactor. The team has planned a fusion experiment they have
dubbed Sparc which is about 1/65th the volume of the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The experimental reactor
will generate about 100MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds
- bursts big enough to power a small city. The team anticipates that
the output will be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma
thus overcoming the biggest technical hurdle in the field: positive
net energy from fusion. The Sparc team has set an ambitious target to
have the reactor running in about 15 years.

But why have scientists so far failed at replicating a natural process
that powers the stars in our universe?
Extreme Challenge

Turns out that the conditions necessary for nuclear fusion to take
place present an extreme challenge for us earthlings.

Fusion works on the basic concept of forging lighter elements into
heavier ones. When two hydrogen atoms are smashed together hard
enough, they fuse to form helium. The new atom is less massive than
the sum of its parts, with the balance converted to energy in the
E=MC2 mass-energy equivalence.

Ok, that’s a bit simplistic since hydrogen atoms do not fuse together
directly but rather in a multi-step reaction. Anyway, the long and
short of it is that nuclear fusion produces net energy only at extreme
temperatures - in the order of hundreds of millions of degrees
celsius. That’s hotter than the sun’s core and far too hot for any
known material on earth to withstand.

To get around this quagmire, scientists use powerful magnetic fields
to contain the hot plasma and prevent it from coming into contact with
the walls of the nuclear reactor. That consumes insane amounts of
energy.

Stars have it easy in this regard thanks to their immense masses and
powerful gravitational fields that hold everything together. For
instance, the sun is 333,000 times the mass of the Earth with a
gravity ~27.9 times that of Earth.

Unfortunately, every fusion experiment so far has been energy
negative, taking in more energy than it generates thus making it
useless as a form of electricity generation.

Getting the initial fusion reaction is not a problem - keeping it
going is, not to mention that building nuclear reactors takes some
extremely sophisticated feats of engineering.
International Megaproject

But now scientists are confident that they are close to building a
nuclear reactor that will produce more energy than it consumes.

The Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France-based upcoming International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the world’s largest
fusion reaction facility that aims to develop commercially viable
fusion reactors.

Funded by six nations including the US, Russia, China, Japan, South
Korea, and India, ITER plans to build the world’s largest tokamak
fusion device, a donut-shaped cage that will produce 500 ME of thermal
fusion energy.

The device will cost ~$24 billion with a delivery date set at 2035.
The giant machine - the biggest fusion machine ever built - will weigh
in at an impressive 23,000 tonnes and will be housed in a building 60
meters high.

So, what’s different this time around?

Scientists have successfully developed a new superconducting material
- essentially a steel tape coated with yttrium-barium-copper oxide, or
YBCO, which allows them to build smaller and more powerful magnets.
This lowers the energy required to get the fusion reaction off the
ground.

According to Fusion for Energy - the EU’s joint undertaking for ITER -
18 niobium-tin superconducting magnets aka toroidal field coils will
be used to contain the 150 million degrees celsius plasma. The
powerful magnets will generate a powerful magnetic field equal to 11.8
tesla, or a million times stronger than the earth's magnetic field.
Europe will manufacture 10 of the toroidal field coils with Japan
manufacturing nine.

However, it will be another decade before a full-scale demonstration
power plant will be built using lessons learned from ITER. The
industrial fusion power plants will thereafter be connected to the
grid.

The ITER site construction is nearly 80% complete.

With all that said… it seems nuclear fusion remains (but hopefully not
forever) over a decade away.