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One fusion startup is betting that a 70-year-old idea can help it leapfrog the competition, so much so that it’s planning to skip the experimental phase and hook its prototype reactor up to the grid.
The decades-old concept, known as a stellarator, is deceptively simple: design a fusion reactor around the quirks of plasma, the superheated particles that fuse and generate power, rather than force the plasma into an artificial box. Easier said than done, of course. Plasma can be fickle, and designing “box” around the fourth state of matter is fiendishly complex.
That’s probably why stellarators spent years in the fusion-equivalent of the desert while the simpler doughnut-shaped tokamak ate everyone’s lunch, and nearly all of their research funding.
But not all of it. Type One Energy is the brainchild of a handful of physicists steeped in the stellarator world. One built the HSX stellarator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two more performed experiments on it, and a fourth worked on the Wendelstein 7-X reactor, the world’s largest stellarator.
Together, they founded Type One in 2019 and nudged forward their approach to fusion at a steady pace. The company wasn’t in stealth — TechCrunch+ identified it as a promising fusion startup last year — but it was operating on a slim budget.
Fusion startup Type One Energy gets $29M seed round to fast-track its reactor designs by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
After more than half a century of dependence on Russian oil and gas, the war in Ukraine has forced German officials to reconsider their reliance on fossil fuels entirely.
Enlarge / In Texas, solar facilities compete for space with a whole lot of nothing.
Earlier this week, the US' Energy Information Agency (EIA) gave a preview of the changes the nation's electrical grid is likely to see over the coming year. The data is based on information submitted to the Department of Energy by utilities and power plant owners, who are asked to estimate when generating facilities that are planned or under construction will come online. Using that information, the EIA estimates the total new capacity expected to be activated over the coming year.
Obviously, not everything will go as planned, and the capacity estimates represent the production that would result if a plant ran non-stop at full power—something no form of power is able to do. Still, the data tends to indicate what utilities are spending their money on and helps highlight trends in energy economics. And this year, those trends are looking very sunny.
Last year, the equivalent report highlighted that solar power would provide nearly half of the 46 gigawatts of new capacity added to the US grid. This year, the grid will add more power (just under 55 GW), and solar will be over half of it, at 54 percent. In most areas of the country, solar is now the cheapest way to generate power, and the grid additions reflect that. The EIA also indicates that at least some of these are projects that were delayed due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions.
Meet Renaissance Fusion, a Grenoble-based startup that has been working on nuclear fusion for the past couple of years. The company recently raised $16.4 million (€15 million) in funding in a seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital.
Several European investors also participated in the round, such as HCVC, Positron Ventures and Norrsken VC. Unruly Capital led the company’s pre-seed round.
“We are proud to support Francesco Volpe and his team in the emergence and industrialization in France and in Europe of a disruptive solution in energy production and distribution technologies. Grenoble is a highly strategic location that allows them to benefit from a favorable environment for the development of nuclear energy, a strong ecosystem such as the CEA and an unrivaled pool of talent,” Alexis Houssou, founder and managing partner at HCVC, said in a statement.
Unlike most nuclear fusion experiments that are based on tokamaks, Renaissance Fusion is working on a stellarator reactor. The company is well aware that there is a long and windy road ahead as it expects to be able to ship a small nuclear fusion reactor with a 1 GW capacity in the 2030s. It wouldn’t operate power plants directly. Instead, the company would sell its reactors to plant constructors and operators.
“We have a technology that is pretty unique,” Renaissance Fusion founder Francesco Volpe told me. Instead of designing complicated three-dimensional coils to generate a magnetic field, Renaissance Fusion greatly simplifies this process by drawing tracks on a cylinder.
After some calculation based on the magnetic field that you want to generate, the team can determine the shape of the coils that you need. The cylinder rotates around an axis while a device moves left and right to engrave tracks with a laser on the surface of the cylinder.
Image Credits: Renaissance Fusion
Cylinder blocks are then combined together to form a reactor. This modularity should help when it comes to shipment and logistics. As for the neutrons emitted by the nuclear reaction inside the cylinder, Renaissance Fusion wants to use liquid Lithium to create thick walls that separate plasma from the outside world.
“We inject a layer of liquid metal. It flows around the inside of the cylinder and then it’s extracted at the bottom. It’s thick enough to absorb the majority of the neutrons,” Volpe said.
This liquid metal is also used to extract heat from the stellarator, which can be used to create steam, which can be used to propel turbines, which can be used generate electricity.
Image Credits: Renaissance Fusion
According to the startup’s founder, Renaissance Fusion is quite innovative with its use of liquid metal. “We are the only one in commercial magnetic fusion where the liquid lithium faces the plasma,” Volpe said.
Right now, the company can create liquid Lithium-based walls that are 1-centimeter thick. It will require a lot of iterations before it can be used in nuclear fusion as Renaissance Fusion estimates that it would require a thickness of 30 to 40 centimeters.
The company is already thinking about commercial applications that could be released before the 2030s. For instance, Volpe believes that Renaissance Fusion’s coil patterning technology could be used for MRI and energy storage: “whenever you need a strong magnetic field, a large volume and high precision,” he said.
With today’s funding round, Renaissance Fusion plans to triple the size of its team to 60 people by the end of 2023. In many ways, this is still the early days of Renaissance Fusion. So let’s see how it pans out in the coming years.
Renaissance Fusion raises $16.4 million to build nuclear fusion technology in Europe by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Enlarge / Artist concept of Demonstration for Rocket to Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) spacecraft. (credit: DARPA)
Nearly three years ago, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced its intent to develop a flyable nuclear thermal propulsion system. The goal was to develop more responsive control of spacecraft in Earth orbit, lunar orbit, and everywhere in between, giving the military greater operational freedom in these domains.
The military agency called this program a Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO for short. The program consists of the development of two things: a nuclear fission reactor and a spacecraft to fly it. In 2021, DARPA awarded $22 million to General Atomics for the reactor and gave small grants of $2.9 million to Lockheed Martin and $2.5 million to Blue Origin for the spacecraft system.
At the same time, NASA was coming to realize that if it were really serious about sending humans to Mars one day, it would be good to have a faster and more fuel-efficient means of getting there. An influential report published in 2021 concluded that the space agency's only realistic path to putting humans on Mars in the coming decades was using nuclear propulsion.
The President of the American Nuclear Society explains why the Nelson Memo may cause trepidation but bring opportunity.
The post Guest Post — “We are ready to move forward”: A Professional Society’s Route to Open Access appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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