Part 1 of 2 Parts
     I have been posting a lot about nuclear fusion lately. Fusion has the potential of being a game changer for energy generation. Fusion research has been conducted since the 1950s. Although it has been a running joke for decades that nuclear fusion power generation is always forty years in the future, that prediction has been dropping and some companies are suggesting that they may have a prototype fusion reactor within ten years.
      Nuclear fusion reactors could provide all the cheap, clean energy needed to power the planet for thousands of years. With this great promise, why is it taking so long to develop commercial nuclear fusion plants? The technology necessary for nuclear fusion is extremely difficult to create, far more difficult than was expected. Currently, many startup companies are pouring time and money into the development of commercial fusion.
     None of these startups has excited investors as much as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachusetts. They have recently acquired almost two billion dollars in the biggest private investment for nuclear fusion to date. This money came from a variety of big-name investors, including Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, George Soros via his Soros Fund Management LLC and venture capitalist John Doerr.
     Just last month, on the 5th of November, Helion Energy of Redmond, Washington announced that it had raised five hundred million dollars in its latest fundraising round. This is the second largest-ever fundraising round for a private fusion company. Helion has the chance to beat Commonwealth Fusion Systems because its latest round of funding includes an additional one billion seven hundred million dollars which is contingent on reaching certain performance goals. Canada’s General Fusion announced this week that it closed a one hundred and thirty million fundraising round that was oversubscribed. This was revealed by Christofer Mowry who is the CEO of the company. General Fusion intends to launch a bigger fundraising effort in 2022.
      The latest wave of cash provided to fusion startups has already exceeded the one billion nine hundred million dollars that had previously been announced. This is according to data gathered by the Fusion Industry Association and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. Mowry said that this was a sign that the fusion industry was maturing.
     Various fusion companies are pursuing different designs for fusion reactors. Most of them are focusing on generating fusion processes in a hot plasma. In September, Commonwealth Fusion successfully tested the most powerful fusion magnet on Earth to hold and compress the plasma.
     Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to construct their fusion reactor. The team has a plan for a new fusion experiment that they call Sparc. This reactor is about 1/65th of the volume of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being constructed in France. The experimental Sparc reactor will generate about one hundred megawatts of heat energy in pulses of about ten second. These bursts are sufficient to power a small city. The researchers anticipate that the output will be twice the power used to heat the plasma. This will overcome the biggest technical hurdle which is deriving positive net energy from fusion. The Sparc team has a very ambition target to have the reactor running in about fifteen years.
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