Initiatives aim to speed fusion deployment

03 February 2022

Two newly announced North American initiatives aim to accelerate the deployment of fusion technologies for power generation. In Canada, Bruce Power, General Fusion, and the Nuclear Innovation Institute (NII) will work together to evaluate potential deployment of a fusion power plant in Ontario. Meanwhile, scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are teaming up with Renaissance Fusion America as part of a US programme to speed the development of fusion energy.

(Image: Bruce Power/General Fusion/NII)

Bruce Power, General Fusion and the NII yesterday announced that they have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on accelerating the delivery of clean fusion power in Canada. The partners said they will build on existing clean energy technologies, skills, and expertise in the so-called Clean Energy Frontier region of Ontario to develop a "go-forward strategy", and will also lead stakeholder and public outreach activities to raise awareness of the "transformative potential" of fusion energy for powering Canadian homes, businesses, and industry.

Vancouver-based General Fusion is a private company which aims to build a commercial fusion power plant based on Magnetised Target Fusion (MTF) technology, which involves injecting hydrogen plasma into a liquid metal sphere, where it is compressed and heated so that fusion occurs. A Fusion Demonstration Plant at the Culham Campus near Oxford in the UK is scheduled to be operational in 2025, and the company says it aims to bring clean fusion energy to the world's energy systems by the early 2030s.

General Fusion CEO Christofer Mowry described the MOU as a "landmark", providing a framework under which Canada's energy leaders can benefit from each other's technology innovations and expertise to lead the way in adopting fusion power in Ontario and across Canada. "We look forward to advancing this partnership to help meet Canada's climate targets and the increasing electricity needs of Canadians," he said.

Fostering innovation in new energy technologies including fusion is one of the five pillars in Bruce Power's NZ-2050 strategy to contribute to a net-zero Canada while growing the economy and supporting innovation. The MOU represents one way the company is looking to advance new clean energy technologies, the company said.
 
"In order to achieve a net-zero future here in Ontario, and Canada, we need to continue expanding the clean electricity production of our existing facilities and will need innovation as part of the future," said Mike Rencheck, President and CEO, Bruce Power. "Our partnership will explore these innovations and leverage the established capability in this region as a home to new technologies that will contribute to a carbon-free future."

PPPL collaboration

Grenoble, France-based Renaissance Fusion aims to put fusion energy from stellarator-based devices on the grid in the next 13 years. A newly announced public-private partnership between the company's US affiliate, Renaissance Fusion America, and three scientists at PPPL aims to further speed the development of the technology by generating an open-source dataset of stellarator configurations that scientists around the world can use to train their own models and advance artificial intelligence research in stellarators.

Stellarators, like tokamaks, are devices for the magnetic confinement of fusion plasmas. Unlike tokamaks, they have no toroidal plasma current, meaning that they offer increased plasma stability compared with tokamaks. Because the burning plasma can be more easily controlled and monitored, stellarators have an intrinsic potential for steady-state, continuous operation. This makes stellarators potentially easier to operate than tokamaks, but their greater complexity makes them more difficult and expensive to design and build.  

Developing machine-learning software to speed up predictions of the loss of alpha particles from fusion reactions should enable designers to quickly enhance the shape, or geometry, of stellarator magnetic fields to improve alpha particle confinement, PPPL said.

The year-long collaboration is sponsored by the US Department of Energy's Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) programme, launched in 2015 to accelerate fusion energy development in the private sector by reducing impediments to collaboration involving the expertise and unique resources available at DOE laboratories and universities.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

European industrial giants join nuclear fusion race

February 3, 2022
in Tech


European industrial giants have joined the race to create cleaner energy through nuclear fusion, a nascent industry pioneered primarily in the US.

Munich-based Marvel Fusion has signed partnerships with Dax-listed Siemens Energy, France’s Thales and the privately owned German mechanical engineering group Trumpf, while also raising €35mn in a funding round led by tech investor Earlybird.

Interest in nuclear fusion technology, a promising process that does not produce long-lasting radioactive waste and carries no risk of reactor meltdowns, has been hotting up in recent months.

Last year, the sector attracted more than €2.3bn in venture capital funding, predominantly for companies based in the US.

Unlike current nuclear power generation, which is based on fission, fusion could provide a virtually limitless energy supply with a very low environmental footprint. In theory, a fusion plant the size of a football field could even power a city as large as London.

But although the technology has been around since Soviet scientists tried using it in the 1950s, to date none of the few dozen nuclear fusion companies worldwide have been able to achieve it while producing more electricity than the complex process consumes.

Marvel Fusion claims its method, which uses lasers to trigger atomic reactions rather than magnets and extreme heat, will make the process commercially viable in a few years’ time.

“It’s a theoretical model, which is essentially a very large computer simulation, and then step by step it is being validated in an experimental campaign that started last year,” Marvel Fusion chief executive Moritz von der Linden told the Financial Times, adding that the validation should be completed in two to three years. “If it works, it is the Holy Grail.”

The company, which was founded in 2019, said its technology was based on the breakthrough by 2018 Nobel Prize winners Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, who “succeeded in creating ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses without destroying the amplifying material”.

Most other nuclear fusion start-ups use a process called magnetic confinement and some have attracted large sums from investors.

In December, American start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems secured nearly $2bn from backers, including Tiger Global Management and Bill Gates, a few weeks after competitor Helion raised $500mn from Peter Thiel’s investment vehicle and Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, among others.

Marvel Fusion’s partners are among those hoping that Europe’s existing laser technology expertise could help companies on the continent catch up.

Europe “can probably have a breakthrough by doing this with lasers”, said Thales’ director of laser activities, Franck Leibreich. But he added: “Right now we are more in the feasibility stage. We need to demonstrate that the fusion is possible physically, not just on paper.”

Energy independence in Europe has also risen to the top of the political agenda in recent weeks, with fears mounting that gas supplies from Russia could be cut off or reduced in the event of conflict in Ukraine.

Germany, which is due to close down its last three nuclear plants in the next year, needs clean technologies to make up for the lost capacity.

Peter Leibinger, chief technology officer at Marvel Fusion’s new partner Trumpf, said the family-run company was “pleased to jointly develop this important technology” because “fusion is an essential component of the energy sovereignty of Europe and Germany”.

But von der Linden said Marvel Fusion, which is launching another funding round this year, would “need significantly more money” for laser developments and warned that a prototype power plant — that would cost billions of euros — would have to be backed by public investment too.

“Europe has to step up its game,” he added.

Source: Financial Times

Kyoto Fusioneering secures $11.7M to build out its fusion reactor technologies

Mike Butcher@mikebutcher •February 3, 2022

Image Credits: Kyoto Fusioneering

With startups getting into nuclear technology, it’s no surprise to see more fundraising happening. Now, Kyoto Fusioneering, a fusion energy startup based out of Japan but increasingly expanding abroad, has raised 1.33 billion yen ($11.7 million) in its latest round of funding. The company has now raised 1.67 billion yen ($14.7 million) to date.

In 2020 the U.K. government-backed STEP, a prototype reactor, aiming to have it operating by 2040, and Kyoto Fusioneering has been awarded several contracts to support its development. This is going to be key to KF’s future.

The Series B funding round was supported by existing investors, including Coral Capital Co. Also participating was Daiwa Corporate Investment, DBJ Capital, JAFCO Group, JGC MIRAI Innovation Fund and JIC Venture Growth Investments.

KF has also secured an 800 million yen ($7 million) debt financing from Bank of Kyoto, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and MUFG Bank.

The funds will be used to accelerate its research and expand the business, developing its plant engineering technologies for plasma heating (gyrotrons) and heat extraction (blankets). These technologies are needed in the development of fusion reactor projects.

At the moment a group of nations are supporting the international ITER project (the European Union, Japan, the United States, Russia, Korea, India, the UK and China), a technology test reactor which will be first operated later this decade.

Others, such as the U.S. and China, are pursuing their own domestic programs. The Japanese government also has a number of initiative sin the fusion space.

James Riney, founding partner and CEO of Coral Capital, said: “Climate change is an existential threat to humanity, and a fusion energy future, if achieved, could be the silver bullet that literally saves the world.. While many startups talk about how they want to change the world, this company is actually doing it.”

Nuclear fusion promises a lot, but to date has not delivered a great deal. But if someone gets it right, it has the potential to solve much of the world’s energy and environmental problems, given it would mean a virtual unlimited fuel resource, and clean energy with no carbon emissions.