A California-based fusion company thinks it’s cracked one of energy’s toughest problems: how to make fusion efficient, powerful, and not absurdly expensive.
TAE Technologies, along with researchers from the University of California, says its reconfigured prototype—cheekily named Norm—could deliver 100 times the power of other fusion devices while running at half the cost of older designs.
The team’s research, published in Nature Communications, focuses on improving something called a field-reversed configuration (FRC)—a setup that holds piping hot plasma in place without relying on the gigantic magnets seen in traditional fusion designs like tokamaks. According to a TAE release published this month, FRC-based machines can achieve 100 times the fusion output of typical tokamaks with similar magnetic field strengths and plasma volumes.
Plasma—the stuff stars are made of—has to be heated to millions of degrees for fusion to occur. At those temperatures, you can’t just stick it in a metal box. You need magnetic fields to confine it, and that usually means wrapping the device in a complex web of superconducting coils that consume loads of power. FRCs flip that script by getting the plasma to generate its own magnetic field, which also allows the fusion device to be smaller and simpler than conventional tokamaks.
But earlier FRC designs were unstable and no one could get them to sustain a reaction long enough to be useful. But TAE’s team says they’ve solved that with a more stable design, and claim Norm can outperform other designs by orders of magnitude, while being more cost-efficient.
“This desired yet unexpected breakthrough discovery made during the operational campaign of Norman has vastly simplified the start-up requirements and operational complexities for FRC based fusion reactor designs,” the team wrote in its paper, noting that it also has advanced the goal of power generation through a specific kind of plasma—”arguably the most magnetically efficient topology for an economic fusion reactor.”
Norm is a variant of the company’s fifth-generation reactor, dubbed Norman. Norm reduces the machine’s size, complexity, and cost by up to 50%, according to a TAE release, and exclusively produces its plasma using neutral beam injection. Norm validates the operating components that will be used in the company’s sixth-generation reactor, Copernicus.
According to a 2022 TAE release, Copernicus will be “designed to demonstrate the viability of achieving net energy generation,” noting that the demonstration is “the penultimate step on TAE’s path to commercialize clean fusion power.”
The key word there is penultimate. We never seem to quite get to commercially viable clean fusion, do we? At least not yet, despite many companies and federal entities working on the futuristic technology. TAE posits that its first prototype power plant, called Da Vinci, will be operational by the early 2030s.
“Global electricity demand is growing exponentially, and we have a moral obligation to do our utmost to develop a baseload power solution that is safe, carbon-free, and economically viable,” said Michl Binderbauer, TAE Technologies’ CEO, in the release.
All three of those hurdles have proven insurmountable to date. First, scientists have to develop a fusion reaction that not only produces more energy than it takes to power the reaction, but they then have to find a way to make the reaction produce more energy than it takes to run the entire fusion operation—the “wall power,” if you will.
The researchers also say their design could pave the way for hydrogen-boron fusion, which produces no radioactive waste and could be safer than the tritium or deuterium used in other experiments.
If the claims hold up, this could be a major leap toward commercial fusion power, something that’s remained perpetually “30 years away” for, well, more decades than that. But it’s still early days—Norm is a prototype, not a power plant, though the terms are not mutually exclusive if Da Vinci has anything to say about it in 2030.
Nevertheless, probing new ways of inducing fusion reactions—and streamlining those processes to make them more efficient—is a positive step toward commercial fusion energy. But it’s hard to be enthralled by those steps when you consider how many times the fusion timeline has slipped—and will probably keep slipping.
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