The Frontrunners In the Trillion-Dollar Race for Limitless Fusion Power

Slashdot reader tedlistens writes that "Nuclear is booming again. And with a serious pile of private and public funding behind them-and physics (see the recent breakthrough at Livermore National Lab) - these companies say they're getting closer to fusion." The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled "The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power."Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. ... The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.... And you'd be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs. Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry's leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities - and hard problems - in fusion.... Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. "You'll push a button," CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That's about 200 million degrees - you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them - and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go." With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few - they raised $1.8 billion last year alone - CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025.... One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet - a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils - and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC's tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels. Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article: Southern California-based TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron. (Since its founding in 1998 TAE has raised $1.2 billion, with $250 million in its latest round led by Google and Chevron's venture capital arm). TAE "says it plans to start delivering power to grids by 2030, followed by 'broader commercialization' during the next decade."General Atomics, of San Diego, California, which built eight of the magnet modules for the ground-breaking IITER facility, "including its wild Central Solenoid - the world's most powerful magnet."Canada-based General Fusion (backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy), which hopes to generate the data need to build a commercial pilot plant.Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generate a plasma formation in a magnetic bottle - holding the record for the longest time such a reaction has been stably held.UK-based Tokamak Energy has reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion, the first to do so with a spherical, privately-funded device. Helicity Space, based in Pasadena, California, has 10 employees and over $4 million in funding to pursue its goal of "enabling humanity's access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment."Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, of Tustin, California.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.