The firm has backed leading fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems, as well as others like Pacific Fusion. It raised a $250 million, fusion-geared fund in 2022. Fusion believers, who include a number of well-known climate VCs beyond Sacca (like Vinod Khosla), still hold faith that a breakthrough needed to make it commercially viable is just around the corner. And several advances are showing promise of delivering one.
In the meantime, building fusion reactors is expensive. Commonwealth raised $863 million earlier this year, after raising a $1.8 billion Series B four years ago. TechCrunch has documented a dozen fusion startups that have raised over $100 million.
Sacca didn’t say how big this second fund will be, but a source told Bloomberg that it’s intended to be bigger than the first.
Nuclear fusion may always be ten years away, but the technological breakthroughs aiming to get us there are already here—including an imaging technique that vividly shows why fusion is said to harness the energy of the stars.
A recent release from UK-based startup Tokamak Energy presents an unprecedentedly colorful image of a fusion reaction, captured using a high-speed color camera at 16,000 frames per second. The mesmerizing footage is a treat for the eyes, but the different colors each represent valuable information for fusion researchers investigating the efficacy of the reactor.
Plasma is better in colour! Watch one of our latest #plasma pulses in our ST40 tokamak, filmed using our new high-speed colour camera at an incredible 16,000 frames per second.
Each pulse lasts around a fifth of a second. What you’re seeing is mostly visible light from the… pic.twitter.com/jWKmcl0tEx
For example, the bright pink glow represents the edge of the hydrogen plasma. The green streaks come from lithium ions that trace the path of the plasma around the tokamak, a donut-shaped instrument that confines hot plasma for fusion reactions. The plasma’s core is “too hot to emit visible light,” the company explained, but the other color signals offer invaluable information on how different fusion ingredients interact with one another.
Decoding the colors of fusion
Simply, nuclear fusion combines two lightweight atoms—most often deuterium and tritium, two hydrogen isotopes—to generate massive amounts of energy. Unlike fission, which splits heavy atoms, fusion doesn’t leave behind harmful, radioactive waste.
Fusion would be the ideal alternative to fossil fuels—if we can get it to scale commercially, that is. Although the field has made significant strides over the years, the general understanding is that practical fusion energy is still years away.
Again, fusion’s goal is to replicate stellar energy on Earth, which means fusion experiments involve many extreme conditions that are notoriously difficult to investigate. As with any technology, researchers want to understand how and where things can go wrong—especially when dealing with volatile material like the super-hot plasma confined inside a reactor.
Inching toward better performance
Naturally, physicists have been hard at work finding a workaround. The new footage was part of an investigation into X-point radiator regimes, an approach that seeks to gain better control of plasma flow to “reduce wear without compromising performance,” according to Tokamak Energy.
“The color camera is especially helpful for experiments like these,” said Laura Zhang, a plasma physicist with Tokamak Energy, in the release. “It helps us immediately identify whether the gaseous impurities we’re introducing are radiating at the expected place and whether lithium powders are penetrating to the plasma core.”
“This work is advancing our understanding of plasma behavior as we scale up to energy-producing fusion devices,” added the researchers. “The addition of color imaging is already providing valuable insights into how materials interact within the plasma.”
A team of researchers at MIT think they may have lowered one of the major barriers to achieving large-scale nuclear fusion—taking us one step closer to making an abundant form of energy a reality.
By harnessing the same processes that power stars, we would have access to a clean, safe, and practically limitless energy source. Scientists have built reactors to try and tame fusion, with one of the most explored being the tokamak. Essentially a donut-shaped tube that uses strong magnets to confine the plasma needed to power fusion reactions, the tokamak has shown great potential. But to fully realize that, scientists must first navigate the potential pitfalls that such energy carries with it, including how to slow down a fusion reaction once it is in progress.
That’s where the new research comes in: Using a combination of physics and machine learning, the researchers predicted how the plasma inside a tokamak reactor would behave given a set of initial conditions—something that researchers have long puzzled over (it is hard to look inside a fusion reactor mid-run, after all). The paper was published Monday in Nature Communications.
“For fusion to be a useful energy source, it’s going to have to be reliable,” Allen Wang, study lead author and a graduate student at MIT, told MIT News. “To be reliable, we need to get good at managing our plasmas.”
With great power comes great risks
When a tokamak reactor is fully running, the plasma current inside can circulate at speeds of up to about 62 miles (100 kilometers) per second and at temperatures of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius). That is hotter than the Sun’s core.
If the reactor has to be shut down for any reason, operators initiate a process to “ramp down” the plasma current, slowly de-energizing it. But this process is tricky, and the plasma can cause “scrapes and scarring to the tokamak’s interior—minor damage that still requires considerable time and resources to repair,” the researchers explained.
“Uncontrolled plasma terminations, even during rampdown, can generate intense heat fluxes damaging the internal walls,” explained Wang. “Quite often, especially with the high-performance plasmas, rampdowns actually can push the plasma closer to some instability limits. So, it’s a delicate balance.
Indeed, any misstep in operating fusion reactors can be costly. In an ideal world, researchers would be able to run tests in working tokamaks, but because fusion is still not efficient, running one of these reactors is incredibly costly, and most facilities will only run them a few times a year.
Looking to the wisdom of physics
For their model, the team found a delightfully clever method to overcome the limitations in data collection—they simply went back to the fundamental rules of physics. They paired their model’s neural network with another model describing plasma dynamics, and then trained the model on data from the TCV, a small experimental fusion device in Switzerland. The dataset included information about variations in the plasma’s starting temperature and energy levels, as well as during, and at the end of each experimental run.
From there, the team used an algorithm to generate “trajectories” that laid out for the reactor operators how the plasma would likely behave as the reaction progressed. When they applied the algorithm to actual TCV runs, they found that following the model’s “trajectory” instructions were perfectly able to guide operators to ramp the device safely down.
“We did it a number of times,” Wang said. “And we did things much better across the board. So, we had statistical confidence that we made things better.”
“We’re trying to tackle the science questions to make fusion routinely useful,” he added. “What we’ve done here is the start of what is still a long journey. But I think we’ve made some nice progress.”
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has agreed to sell Italian energy company Eni more than $1 billion worth of power from its first fusion reactor.
The power plant will be built outside of Richmond, Virginia, close to some of the highest densities of data centers in the country. The 400-megawatt fusion reactor, called Arc, is expected to open in the early 2030s, CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The Eni agreement is the second such deal for Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). In June, Google said that it would buy half the reactor’s output. When asked, neither CFS nor Eni would say how much power the deal covers nor its timeline.
Mumgaard told reporters last week that CFS’s first power plant, the demonstration-scale Sparc reactor in Devens, Massachusetts, is 65% complete. The company has previously said it plans to turn on Sparc later in 2026, and Mumgaard confirmed that CFS is “on track to do that.”
“One of the reasons we built Sparc is so that we could actually get the experience of what it’s like to build a nearly full-scale system,” he said. “Arc will be the first of many that’s backed by a supply chain that is primed for scale.”
CFS is widely regarded as a leader in the fusion industry. It’s reactor design is based on the tokamak, a widely studied system in which D-shaped superconducting magnets confine and compress superheated plasma. In that plasma, particles collide, forming new atoms and releasing energy in the process. The company frequently updates scientists on its progress, and it has run extensive simulations to uncover any potential hurdles.
CFS expects that Sparc will prove be able to generate more power than is required to sustain the fusion reactions. But at the same time, the company won’t know for sure if it all works until Sparc is complete. That’s likely to exhaust a significant fraction of the nearly $3 billion it has raised to date, including an $863 million Series B2 round announced three weeks ago. That round included checks from a wide range of investors, including Nvidia, Google, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Eni.
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Which raises the question, what happens to CFS’s deals with Google and Eni if there’s a delay, or worse, if the reactors don’t work as planned?
The agreements are structured to “walk the line” between punitive and collaborative, Mumgaard said. The partners “understand these challenges that come from first of a kind,” he said. “No one in this situation is like, oh, you know, invent an entire new technology, an entire industry, and if it doesn’t work on this day, we’re just going to walk away.”
Google has hinted that it will use Arc’s electricity to power its data centers, but Eni, which is one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, doesn’t have operations in the U.S. that would demand that amount of energy.
“The power will be sent to the grid at the end of the day,” said Lorenzo Fiorillo, Eni’s director of technology, R&D, and digital.
In short, Eni will resell it.
But any electricity generated by Arc, a first-of-its-kind reactor, is going to be expensive. Eni is more likely to lose money trading that power on the grid than it is to profit.
Instead, this agreement is likely intended to help establish a price for fusion power and rustle up more money to build Arc.
Mumgaard admitted as much. The power purchase agreement, he said, “gives us the certainty of where the power is going to go, what the price is going to be, etc. And that allows us to then take that package to more financial investors in project finance and other areas and start having conversations about what it’s going to be like to actually finance this plant.”
Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines.
The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets.
The bullish wave buoying the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more powerful computer chips, more sophisticated AI, and powerful high-temperature superconducting magnets. Together, they have helped deliver more sophisticated reactor designs, better simulations, and more complex control schemes.
It doesn’t hurt that, at the end of 2022, a U.S. Department of Energy lab announced that it had produced a controlled fusion reaction that produced more power than the lasers had imparted to the fuel pellet. The experiment had crossed what’s known as scientific breakeven, and while it’s still a long ways from commercial breakeven, where the reaction produces more than the entire facility consumes, it was a long-awaited step that proved the underlying science was sound.
Founders have built on that momentum in recent years, pushing the private fusion industry forward at a rapid pace.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has raised about a third of all private capital invested in fusion companies to date. Its latest round, which closed in August, added $863 million to its coffers, bringing its total raised near $3 billion.
CFS’s Series B2 came four years after its $1.8 billion Series B, which helped catapult the company into the pole position. Since then, the startup has been hard at work in Massachusetts building Sparc, its first-of-a-kind power plant intended to produce power at what it calls “commercially relevant” levels.
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Sparc’s reactor is a tokamak design, which resembles a doughnut. The D-shaped cross section is wound with high-temperature superconducting tape, which, when energized, generates a powerful magnetic field that will contain and compress the superheated plasma. Heat generated from the reaction is converted to steam to power a turbine. CFS designed its magnets in collaboration with MIT, where co-founder and CEO Bob Mumgaard worked as a researcher on fusion reactor designs and high-temperature superconductors.
The Massachusetts-based CFS expects to have Sparc operational in late 2026 or early 2027. Later this decade, the company says it will begin construction on Arc, its commercial power plant that will produce 400 megawatts of electricity. The facility will be built near Richmond, Virginia, and Google has agreed to buy half its output.
CFS is backed by a long list of investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, The Engine, Bill Gates, and others.
TAE
Founded in 1998, TAE Technologies (formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy) was spun out of the University of California, Irvine by Norman Rostoker. It uses a field-reversed configuration, but with a twist: after the two plasma shots collide in the middle of the reactor, the company bombards the plasma with particle beams to keep it spinning in a cigar shape. That improves the stability of the plasma, allowing more time for fusion to occur and for more heat to be extracted to spin a turbine.
The company raised $150 million in June from existing investors, including Google, Chevron, and New Enterprise. TAE has raised $1.79 billion in total, according to PitchBook.
Helion
Of all fusion startups, Helion has the most aggressive timeline. The company plans to produce electricity from its reactor in 2028. Its first customer? Microsoft.
Helion, based in Everett, Washington, uses a type of reactor called a field-reversed configuration, where magnets surround a reaction chamber that looks like an hourglass with a bulge at the point where the two sides come together. At each end of the hourglass, they spin the plasma into doughnut shapes that are shot toward each other at more than 1 million mph. When they collide in the middle, additional magnets help induce fusion. When fusion occurs, it boosts the plasma’s own magnetic field, which induces an electrical current inside the reactor’s magnetic coils. That electricity is then harvested directly from the machine.
The company raised $425 million in January 2025, around the same time that it turned on Polaris, a prototype reactor. Helion has raised $1.03 billion, according to PitchBook. Investors include Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, KKR, BlackRock, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management, and Capricorn Investment Group.
Pacific Fusion
Pacific Fusion burst out of the gate with a $900 million Series A, a whopping sum even among well-funded fusion startups. The company will use inertial confinement to achieve fusion, but instead of lasers compressing the fuel, it will use coordinated electromagnetic pulses. The trick is in the timing: All 156 impedance-matched Marx generators need to produce 2 terawatts for 100 nanoseconds, and those pulses need to simultaneously converge on the target.
The company is led by CEO Eric Lander, the scientist who led the Human Genome Project, and president Will Regan. Pacific Fusion’s funding might be massive, but the startup hasn’t gotten it all at once. Rather, its investors will pay out in tranches when the company achieves specified milestones, an approach that’s common in biotech.
Shine Technologies
Shine Technologies is taking a cautious — and possibly pragmatic — approach to generating fusion power. Selling electrons from a fusion power plant is years off, so instead, it’s starting by selling neutron testing and medical isotopes. More recently, it has been developing a way to recycle radioactive waste. Shine hasn’t picked an approach for a future fusion reactor, instead saying that it’s developing necessary skills for when that time comes.
The company has raised a total of $778 million, according to PitchBook. Investors include Energy Ventures Group, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Nucleation Capital, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
General Fusion
Now its third decade, General Fusion has raised $462.53 million, according to PitchBook. The Richmond, British Columbia-based company was founded in 2002 by physicist Michel Laberge, who wanted to prove a different approach to fusion known as magnetized target fusion (MTF). Investors include Jeff Bezos, Temasek, BDC Capital, and Chrysalix Venture Capital.
In General Fusion’s reactor, a liquid metal wall surrounds a chamber in which plasma is injected. Pistons surrounding the wall push it inward, compressing the plasma inside and sparking a fusion reaction. The resulting neutrons heat the liquid metal, which can be circulated through a heat exchanger to generate steam to spin a turbine.
General Fusion hit a rough patch in spring 2025. The company ran short of cash as it was building LM26, its latest device that it hoped would hit breakeven in 2026. Just days after hitting a key milestone, it laid off 25% of its staff. CEO Greg Twinney penned an open letter pleading for funding from investors.
In August, they delivered somewhat, injecting $22 million in an pay-to-play round that one investor called “the least amount of capital possible” to keep the General Fusion afloat.
Tokamak Energy
Tokamak Energy takes the usual tokamak design — the doughnut shape — and squeezes it, reducing its aspect ratio to the point where the outer bounds start resembling a sphere. Like many other tokamak-based startups, the company uses high-temperature superconducting magnets (of the rare earth barium copper oxide, or REBCO, variety). Since its design is more compact than a traditional tokamak, it requires less in the way of magnets, which should reduce costs.
The Oxfordshire, U.K.-based startup’s ST40 prototype, which looks like a large, steampunk Fabergé egg, generated an ultra-hot, 100 million degree C plasma in 2022. Its next generation, Demo 4, is currently under construction and is intended to test the company’s magnets in “fusion power plant-relevant scenarios.” Tokamak Energy raised $125 million in November 2024 to continue its reactor design efforts and expand its magnet business.
In total, the company has raised $336 million from investors including Future Planet Capital, In-Q-Tel, Midven, and Capri-Sun founder Hans-Peter Wild, according to PitchBook.
Zap Energy
Zap Energy isn’t using high-temperature superconducting magnets or super-powerful lasers to keep its plasma confined. Rather, it zaps the plasma (get it?) with an electric current, which then generates its own magnetic field. The magnetic field compresses the plasma about 1 millimeter, at which point ignition occurs. The neutrons released by the fusion reaction bombard a liquid metal blanket that surrounds the reactor, heating it up. The liquid metal is then cycled through a heat exchanger, where it produces steam to drive a turbine.
Like Helion, Zap Energy is based in Everett, Washington, and the company has raised $327 million, according to PitchBook. Backers include Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, DCVC, Lowercarbon, Energy Impact Partners, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Bill Gates as an angel.
Proxima Fusion
Most investors have favored large startups that are pursuing tokamak designs or some flavor of inertial confinement. But stellarators have shown great promise in scientific experiments, including the Wendelstein 7-X reactor in Germany.
Proxima Fusion is bucking the trend, though, having attracted a €130 million Series A that brings its total raised to more than €185 million. Investors include Balderton Capital and Cherry Ventures.
Stellarators are similar to tokamaks in that they confine plasma in a ring-like shape using powerful magnets. But they do it with a twist — literally. Rather than force plasma into a human-designed ring, stellarators twist and bulge to accommodate the plasma’s quirks. The result should be a plasma that remains stable for longer, increasing the chances of fusion reactions.
Marvel Fusion
Marvel Fusion follows the inertial confinement approach, the same basic technique that the National Ignition Facility used to prove that controlled nuclear fusion reactions could produce more power than was needed to kick them off. Marvel fires powerful lasers at a target embedded with silicon nanostructures that cascade under the bombardment, compressing the fuel to the point of ignition. Because the target is made using silicon, it should be relatively simple to manufacture, leaning on the semiconductor manufacturing industry’s decades of experience.
The inertial confinement fusion startup is building a demonstration facility in collaboration with Colorado State University, which it expects to have operational by 2027. Munich-based Marvel has raised a total of $161 million from investors including b2venture, Deutsche Telekom, Earlybird, HV Capital, and Taavet Hinrikus and Albert Wenger as angels.
First Light
First Light dropped its pursuit of fusion power in March 2025, pivoting instead to become a technology supplier to fusion startups and other companies. The startup had previously followed an approach known as inertial confinement, in which fusion fuel pellets are compressed until they ignite.
First Light, which is based in Oxfordshire, U.K., has raised $140 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Invesco, IP Group, and Tencent.
Xcimer
Though nothing about fusion can be described as simple, Xcimer takes a relatively straightforward approach: follow the basic science that’s behind the National Ignition Facility’s breakthrough net-positive experiment, and redesign the technology that underpins it from the ground up. The Colorado-based startup is aiming for a 10-megajoule laser system, five times more powerful than NIF’s setup that made history. Molten salt walls surround the reaction chamber, absorbing heat and protecting the first solid wall from damage.
Founded in January 2022, Xcimer has already raised $109 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Hedosophia, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Emerson Collective, Gigascale Capital, and Lowercarbon Capital.
This story was originally published in September 2024 and will be continually updated.
Venture capitalists’ appetite for fusion startups has been up and down in the last few years. For instance, the Fusion Industry Association found that while nuclear fusion companies had attracted over $6 billion in investment in 2023, $1.4 billion more than in 2022, the 27% growth proved slower than in 2022, as investors battled external fears such as inflation.
However, numbers don’t tell the full story: Venture interest in the field has remained strong as startups begin to find novel ways to potentially capture the power of the sun to produce safe, limitless energy.
The field reached a significant milestone in 2022 when the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility managed to bring about a fusion reaction that produced more power than was required to spark a fuel pellet. And then in August last year, the team confirmed that their first test wasn’t just good fortune. The road to true fusion power remains long, but the kicker is that it’s no longer theoretical.
The latest company looking to make a name for itself in the space is Proxima Fusion, the first spin-out from the lauded Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Munich-based Proxima has raised €20 million ($21.7 million) in a seed round to begin building its first generation of fusion power plants.
The company bases its technology on “quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators” with high-temperature superconductors. In plain English, a stellarator is a doughnut-shaped ring of precisely positioned magnets that can contain the plasma from which fusion energy is born. However, stellarators are extremely hard to make, as they position the magnets in rather odd shapes, and require extremely precise engineering.
Proxima Fusion claims it came up with a way to address these issues using both engineering solutions and advanced computing in 2022, and as a spin-out, the company has now built on research from the Max Planck IPP, which built the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) experiment, the world’s largest stellarator.
The new approach to fusion is only possible because of the ability to use AI to simulate the behavior of the plasma, thus bringing the prospect of viable nuclear fusion nearer, Dr. Francesco Sciortino, co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, told TechCrunch over a call.
German startup Marvel Fusion, which has been funded by German VC Earlybird, uses laser containment to spark the reaction, and when I asked Sciortino why Proxima uses stellarators, he said, “With lasers, you take a small pellet and blast heat at it with many very powerful lasers. That releases energy via fusion, but you’re compressing something and letting it explode. Whereas what we are working on is that actual confinement. So it’s not an explosion, but in a steady state; it’s continuous in operation.”
Sciortino, who completed his PhD at MIT on tokamak nuclear projects, said Proxima will leverage what has been learned from the W7-X device, which has had more than €1 billion in public investment. He added the projected timeline to get to fusion energy is by the mid-2030s. “We’re looking at, give or take, 15 years. Building an intermediate device in Munich most likely by 2031 is our objective. If we manage to get to that then the middle of the 2030s is possible.”
The startup’s investors are equally convinced.
Ian Hogarth, a partner at one of Proxima’s investors, Plural, told me, “There are two big things that I think are really compelling about what Proxima are doing. First, their stellarator has benefited from two big, big trends in high-temperature superconductors and progress in computer-aided simulation of complex, multi-physics systems. And secondly, the world’s most advanced stellarator in the whole world is in North Germany.”
He thinks that Proxima being the first spin-out from that ambitious government project will give it the edge it needs to succeed: “It’s a classic example of the ‘entrepreneurial state,’ where a startup can build on top of this incredible public investment.”
That said, Proxima is not the only player in the race for fusion. Helion Energy raised a $500 million Series E two years ago, led by tech entrepreneur and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance. And there are at least 43 other companies developing nuclear fusion technologies.
Proxima’s seed round was led by Redalpine, with participation from the Bavarian government-backed Bayern Kapital, German government-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds and the Max Planck Foundation. Plural and existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, UVC Partners and the Tomorrow Fund of Visionaries Club also participated in the round.
BROOMFIELD, Colo., September 21, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Electric Fusion Systems (EFS) acknowledges the challenges faced in conveying the intricacies of our novel fusion approach to a skeptical fusion industry and intertwined subject matter experts. Recognizing the need for improved clarity, EFS has launched an AI Ambassador on its website designed to facilitate informed discussions about its technology.
Powered by ChatGPT-4 from OpenAI, this AI Ambassador is grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research, particularly focusing on the intricacies of EFS’s Light Element Electric Fusion (LEEF) technology. “Our database currently encompasses around 70 research papers, and we continuously enhance it, prioritizing the relevance and scientific rigor pertinent to our fusion technology,” said Ken E. Kopp, CTO.
Central to EFS’s innovation is our unique Rydberg matter bulk fusion fuel condensate made from lithium ammonia and noble gases through a special proprietary process. This innovation notably reduces the traditional fusion thresholds (in temperature, time, and density) for proton-lithium aneutronic (radiation free) fusion reactions, introducing the potential for small-scale portable and low-cost fusion energy.
“When we discuss our technology with fusion subject matter experts at the Department of Energy (DOE) or Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e), they ask questions like, what is Rydberg matter? Or, what are coulomb explosions? This is both encouraging and very sad. In the sense that no one seems to be aware of this potential Rydberg matter-based proton-lithium fusion pathway and, at the same time, frustrating at scientific skepticism and incredulity that dismisses our hopes of funding,” said Ryan S. Wood, CEO. This situation is a driving force in developing the AI Ambassador, aiming to facilitate comprehension of EFS’s technology from a scientific lens.
Existing fusion energy designs require a massive investment with an estimated $4,500 per kilowatt-hour installed cost and operating costs of $50 per megawatt-hour or higher. These fusion plants are on par with current light water fission nuclear power plants in terms of size and are still years or decades away from practical implementation.
EFS’s patent-pending fusion technology and direct-to-electricity apparatus have the potential to drastically reduce these costs by a factor of 5-20 times. We are targeting $5 per megawatt-hour, potentially cannibalizing renewable energy, hydrocarbons and creating civilizational change.
EFS’s venture into clean fusion energy holds promising implications for the energy domain. The success of our technology will ultimately depend on validation by experts and third-party replications confirming more power out than in.
In December 2022, California scientists achieved a major breakthrough — a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was used to create it. Scientists have done it again and this time their results produced even more energy. Professor Peter Hosemann, chair of nuclear and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, joins CBS News to discuss the implications of this accomplishment.
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On December 5th, scientists at the National Ignition Facility reached a breakthrough in nuclear fusion by producing a reaction with an energy gain. It could be a step toward a world in the distant future where fusion is a source of power.
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Last month, the nearest star to the Earth was in California. In a laboratory, for the first time, the world’s largest lasers forced atoms of hydrogen to fuse together in the same kind of energy producing reaction that fires the sun. It lasted less than a billionth of a second. But, after six decades of toil and failure, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proved it could be done. If fusion becomes commercial power one day, it would be endless and carbon free. In other words, it would change human destiny. As you’ll see, there’s far to go. But after December’s breakthrough, we were invited to tour the lab and meet the team that brought star power down to Earth.
Uncontrolled fusion is easy–mastered so long ago the films are in black and white. Fusion is what a hydrogen bomb does, releasing energy by forcing atoms of hydrogen to fuse together. What’s been impossible is harnessing the fires of Armageddon into something useful.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helps maintain nuclear weapons and experiments with high-energy physics. An hour east of San Francisco, we met Livermore’s director, Kim Budil, in the lab that made history, the National Ignition Facility.
Kim Budil: The National Ignition Facility is the world’s largest, most energetic laser. It was built starting in the 1990s, to create conditions in the laboratory that had previously only been accessible in the most extreme objects in the universe, like the center of giant planets, or the sun, or in operating nuclear weapons. And the goal was to really be able to study that kind of very high-energy, high-density condition in a lot of detail.
Kim Budil
The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, was built for $3.5 billion to ignite self-sustaining fusion. They tried nearly 200 times over 13 years. But like a car with a weak battery, the atomic ‘engine’ would never turn over.
Scott Pelley: NIF drew some nicknames.
Kim Budil: It did. For many years the “Not Ignition Facility”, the “Never Ignition Facility.” More recently the “Nearly Ignition Facility.” So, this recent event has really put the Ignition in the NIF.
Ignition means igniting a fusion reaction that puts out more energy than the lasers put in.
Kim Budil: So if you can get it hot enough, dense enough, fast enough, and hold it together long enough, the fusion reactions start to self-sustain. And that’s really what happened here on December 5th.
The control room at the National Ignition Facility
Last month, the laser shot fired from this control room put two units of energy into the experiment, atoms began fusing, and about three units of energy came out. Tammy Ma, who leads the lab’s laser fusion research initiatives, got the call while waiting for a plane.
Tammy Ma: And I burst into tears. It was just tears of joy. And I actually physically started shaking and– and jumping up and down in, you know, at the gate before everybody boards. Everybody was, like, “What is that crazy woman doin’?”
Tammy Ma is crazy about engineering.
The tubes that deliver energy to the lasers
She showed us why the problem of fusion would bring anyone to tears. First, there’s the energy required which is delivered by lasers in these tubes that are longer than a football field.
Scott Pelley: And how many are there altogether?
Tammy Ma: 192 total lasers.
Scott Pelley: Each one of these lasers is one of the most energetic in the world and you have 192 of them.
Tammy Ma: That’s pretty cool right?
Well, pretty hot actually, millions of degrees, which is why they use keys to lock up the lasers.
The beams strike with a power 1,000 times greater than the entire national power grid. Your lights don’t go out at home when they take a shot because capacitors store the electricity. In the tubes, the laser beams amplify by racing back and forth and the flash is a fraction of a second.
Tammy Ma: We have to get to these incredible conditions; hotter, denser than the center of the sun and so we need all of that laser energy to get to these very high energy densities.
All that wallop vaporizes a target nearly too small to see.
The lasers’ target
Scott Pelley: Can I hold this thing?
Michael Stadermann: Absolutely
Scott Pelley: Unbelievable. Absolutely amazing.
Michael Stadermann’s team builds the hollow target shells that are loaded with hydrogen at 430 degrees below zero.
Michael Stadermann: The precision that we need for making these shells is extreme. The shells are almost perfectly round. They have a roughness that is a hundred times better than a mirror.
Michael Stadermann
If it wasn’t smoother than a mirror, imperfections would make the implosion of atoms uneven causing a fusion fizzle.
Scott Pelley: So these need to be as close to perfect as humanly possible.
Michael Stadermann: That’s right. That’s right, and we do think they are among the most perfect items that we have on Earth.
Stadermann’s lab pursues perfection by vaporizing carbon and forming the shell out of diamond. They build 1,500 a year to make 150 nearly perfect.
Michael Stadermann: All the components are brought together under the microscope itself. And then the assembler uses electromechanical stages to put the parts where they’re supposed to go– move them together, and then we apply glue using a hair.
Scott Pelley: A hair?
Michael Stadermann: Yeah. Usually something like an eyelash or is similar, or a cat whisker.
Scott Pelley: You apply glue with a cat whisker?
Michael Stadermann: That’s right.
Scott Pelley: Why does it have to be so small?
Michael Stadermann: The laser gives us only a finite amount of energy, and to drive a bigger capsule we would need more energy. So it’s a constraint of the facility that you’ve seen that is very large. And despite its big size, this is about what we can drive with it.
Scott Pelley: The target could be larger, but then the laser would have to be larger.
Michael Stadermann: That’s right.
On December 5th, they used a thicker target so it would hold its shape longer and they figured out how to boost the power of the laser shot without damaging the lasers.
Tammy Ma: So this is an example of a target before the shot…
An intact target assembly
Tammy Ma showed us an intact target assembly. That diamond shell you saw is inside that silver-colored cylinder.
The vacuum chamber
This assembly goes into a blue vacuum chamber, three stories tall. It’s hard to see here because it’s bristling with lasers and instruments.
Dante
This instrument they call Dante because, they told us, it measures the fires of hell. One physicist said, “You should see the target we blasted December 5th.”
Which made us ask, “Could we?”
Scott Pelley: Have you seen this before?
Tammy Ma: This is the first time I’m seeing it.
The target that was blasted December 5th
For Tammy Ma, and for the world, this is the first look at what’s left of the target assembly that changed history—an artifact like Bell’s first phone or Edison’s light bulb.
Scott Pelley: This thing is going to end up in the Smithsonian.
The target cylinder was blasted to oblivion, the copper support that held it was peeled backward.
Scott Pelley: The explosion on the end of this was hotter than the sun.
Tammy Ma: It was hotter than the center of the sun. We were able to achieve temperatures that were the hottest in the entire solar system.
Which would make an astronomical change in electric power. Unlike today’s nuclear plants, which split atoms apart, fusing them is many times more powerful, with little long-term radiation. And it’s easy to turn off, so no meltdowns. But getting from the first ignition to a powerplant will be hard.
Scott Pelley: How many shots do you take in a day?
Tammy Ma: We take, on average, a little more than one shot per day.
Scott Pelley: If this was theoretically a commercial power plant, how many shots a day would be required?
Tammy Ma: Approximately ten shots per second would be required. And the other big challenge, of course, is not just increasing the repetition rate, but also getting the gain out of the targets to go up to about a factor of 100.
Tammy Ma
Not only would the reactions have to produce 100 times more energy, but a power plant would need 900,000 perfect diamond shells a day. Also, the lasers would have to be much more efficient. Remember, December’s breakthrough put two units of energy in and got three out? Well, it took 300 units of power to fire the lasers. By that standard, it was 300 in, three out. That detail was not front and center at the Department of Energy’s December news conference which fused the advance with an unlikely timeline.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm at Department of Energy news conference: Today’s announcement is a huge step forward to the president’s goal of achieving commercial fusion within a decade.
Scott Pelley: When you heard that President Biden’s goal was commercial fusion power in a decade, you thought what?
Charles Seife: I thought it was nonsense.
Charles Seife is a trained mathematician, science author and professor at New York University who wrote a 2008 book on the hyping of fusion power.
Charles Seife
Charles Seife: I don’t wanna diminish the fact that this is a real achievement. Ignition is a milestone that people have been trying for– to do for years. I’m afraid that there’re so many technical hurdles, even after this great achievement– that ten years is a pipe dream.
Those hurdles, Seife says, include scaling up Livermore’s achievement. The December shot generated about enough excess power to boil two pots of coffee. The hurdles might be overcome, Seife says, but not soon.
Charles Seife: I have a running bet going that we’re not going to have it by 2050.
Still, betting against Charles Seife’s prophesy, are more than 30 private companies designing various approaches to fusion power—including using magnets, not lasers. $3 billion in private money flowed into those companies in the last 13 months—including bets by Bill Gates and Google. Amid all this speculation, Lawrence Livermore’s director, Kim Budil, is certain of one thing.
Scott Pelley: Can you do it again?
Kim Budil: Absolutely.
They’re going to try again next month. Budil agrees the obstacles are enormous. But she told us commercial fusion power could be demonstrated in 20 years or so, with enough funding and dedication. We likened the first ignition to the first Wright Brothers flight which covered only 120 feet.
Kim Budil: It’s one thing to believe– that the science is possible– that the conditions can be created, it’s another to see it in action. And it really is a remarkable feeling after working for 60 years to get to this point to have first– taken that first flight.
It was 44 years from a puddle jump to supersonic flight. Whether fusion power is 10 or 50 years away is now mainly an engineering problem. Lawrence Livermore has proven—that from a machine—a star is born.
Produced by Andy Court. Associate producer, Annabelle Hanflig. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by Jorge J. García.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, after decades of disappointing experiments, has achieved a nuclear fusion reaction that produces more power than it consumes. The breakthrough could be the answer to the world’s energy crisis.
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Scientists have successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a major breakthrough in a decades-long quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels. What do you think?
“It’ll take some pretty big fundraising dinners to stop this.”
Debora Emel, Prank Adviser
“If clean energy is so great, why haven’t we invaded anyone for it yet?”
Spencer West, Chief Filer
“I thought we all agreed Earth was more of a run-out-the-clock scenario.”
The U.S. Department of Energy is expected to announce a major milestone in nuclear fusion research. Sources say scientists for the firts time have been able to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain to develop a limitless and clean source of power that would end reliance on fossil fuels. Lilia Luciano reports.
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AUSTIN, Texas, March 15, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– The United States is falling behind in the race for fusion energy. Kronos Fusion Energy has the ambitious goal of creating commercial and defense applications that will make the United States a world leader in fusion energy generation. Decades of research and development and recent technological breakthroughs have brought us to an inflection point in fusion power. Using advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, Kronos Fusion Energy will use proprietary algorithms in simulations that will greatly accelerate the design of an optimized fusion energy generator. Find out how Kronos Fusion Energy is contributing to the future of fusion energy here.
There is great potential for many military applications for fusion energy across all domains: land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace. On land, clean power with a spectacular reduction in logistics requirements will greatly enhance both the readiness and force protection of U.S. military service members. At sea, there is potential to create fusion power generators for submarines and ships that will be faster, safer, and more powerful with reduced operational costs. In air and space, direct fusion drive technology is emerging that will extend ranges and performance of U.S. military aircraft while also dramatically reducing payload and travel time in the exploration of the universe. In cyberspace, compact and reliable power generation greatly enhances the performance of critical cyber warfare systems.
From algorithms to simulation to commercialization, Kronos Fusion Energy plans to build viable fusion energy generators for use at military installations and deployed locations by 2036 and seeks opportunities to incorporate fusion energy across all domains of possible warfare.
Kronos Fusion Energy Defense Systems plans to get fusion energy out of the laboratory and on any potential battlefields by aggressively synchronizing a unity of efforts. Brig. Gen. (ret.) Paul E. Owen, Founding Partner and CEO of Kronos Fusion Energy Defense Systems, advised in congruence, “KFEDS recognizes the criticality of the commercialization of emerging technologies and are already grabbing the bull by the horns, building a team that incorporates leadership from across the three pillars of academia, government and industry. This unified effort will allow us to deliver clean, limitless fusion energy to the American people.”
