Fusion Attracting Capital, Meme Stock List, Trade War Over
Fusion Attracting Capital
The best way to get academic engineers to accelerate their research efforts is to take away their funding.
MIT’s tokomak was shut down in September 2016 because it lost federal funding. That caused something of a crisis within the physics department. For decades academics had been comfortably writing papers and congratulating one another but with no real world results.
Within months of the closedown the team released plans for the SPARC micro fusion reactor and said they could get it built within a decade for only a couple of hundred million dollars.
Their company Commonwealth Fusion Systems just raised funding from Google as well as an offtake agreement. That pretty much means they will have the funding to build prototypes without needing additional investors.
The SPARC announcement ignited a race to secure funding and bring the idea to fruition. Almost a decade later it is still about 8 years away. Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects to generate plasma next year and to demonstrate net positive energy gain by 2027.
The big difference today is that fusion has been proven to be realizable. Net positive energy gain was achieved for the first time in 2022 and the experiment was repeated successfully in 2023.
The challenge for Commonwealth Fusion Systems is that net positive experiment did not rely on a tokomak. Instead it used an array of concentrated lasers to compress a pellet to initiate the reaction.
The primary argument used by Commonwealth Fusion Systems is that the physics for their project has already been confirmed. The ITER project under construction in Provence, France is the realization of a long-term global effort to build a working prototype.
Since supercapacitor and high temperature superconductor technology has improved beyond recognition in the years since the ITER project was conceived, the SPARC project’s ambition is to build small scale replicas that can fit on the back of a truck.
This is a worthy moonshot. The sector has attracted $9 billion in the last decade which is a pittance relative to the cash AI is attracting. Moreover, that cash has been spread over a large number of startups.
There is a strong likelihood fusion will attract significantly more capital as significant milestones on the road to a commercial reactor are achieved.
Consider that the Hinkley 3 reactor in the UK just got the greenlight with a price tag of £35 billion. That’s expensive by global standards but it also highlights how much commercial opportunity exists for nuclear energy and particularly for solutions without the risk of proliferation.
The future of the electric vehicle rests heavily on the availability of abundant cheap electricity. The same is true of the AI boom and the evolution of the crypto sector. Solving that conundrum will be key to promoting productivity growth and solving the debt issues plaguing several countries.
