A $250 million funding raise has been announced for a nuclear fusion startup.
Nuclear fusion is often referred to as the "holy grail" of clean energy because it would be a way to generate nearly unlimited emission-free energy.
Conventional nuclear power plants split a larger atom into smaller ones in order to release energy. Nuclear fusion occurs when two larger atoms slam together to form a single larger atom. Despite decades of effort, fusion is hard to sustain in a controlled reaction on Earth.
The president of the energy company said thatTAE has the potential to be a source of no-carbon energy generation and a key enabler of grid stability.
The fusion startup has been provided with artificial intelligence and Computational power by the search giant. Tuesday is the first time that Google has invested in the company.
A roadmap of the TAE fusion machines.A Japanese investment company is helping to bring fusion technology to the Asian-Pacific region.
In October, the National Institute for Fusion Science in Japan was announced as a partner of theTAE. The majority of Japan's energy comes from coal, oil and natural gas. Its clean energy goals are difficult to achieve.
Japan does not have an abundance of renewable energy resources and its high population density, mountainous terrain, and steep shorelines are serious barriers to scaling up the ones it does have. Nuclear power is one of the sources that needs to be focused on by Japan.
The fusion reactor named Norman achieved temperatures greater than 75 million degrees Celsius. There is a photo essay about how Norman works.
The money that was announced Tuesday will be used to build the next generation fusion machine, which it says will be finished by the year 2025. The goal of the company is to have a commercial scale fusion reactor that can deliver energy to the grid in the early 20th century.
A rendering of TAE Technologies’ next generation fusion machine, called Copernicus.The most common machine being built to achieve fusion is a tokamak, which is a donut-shaped device and is the method being developed at ITER, the multi-national collaborative fusion project being constructed in France.
Installation of one of the giant 300-tonne magnets that will be used to confine the fusion reaction during the construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) on the Cadarache site on September 15, 2021.A beam-driven field-reversed configuration is whatTAE uses.
The most energetic state of matter, beyond gas, is generated at both ends of the fusion machine and then shot towards the middle, where the fusion reaction takes place.
The fuel it uses is one of the key differences between the two approaches. Deuterium and tritium are the most abundant elements in the universe and are used for fusion reactions. Tritium needs to be produced in order for Deuterium to be present. The Idaho National Lab is researching supply chains.
H2O is used as a fuel in the fusion process. The tritium processing supply chain does not count as a benefit. The challenge is that a hydrogen-boron fuel source needs higher temperatures than a deuterium-tritium fuel source.
Proton-boron11 fusion is more difficult than deuterium-tritium fusion because of a number of reasons, according to a professor. The cross-section for the pB11 fusion reaction is so small that it has to be confined longer for the fusion process to begin. The temperatures needed to reach the smaller cross section are much larger than the ones needed for the larger section. It takes a lot of energy to ignite the fusion reaction and hold it, and the same amount of energy to hold the reaction in place.
If anyone is going to solve this problem, theTAE team is well positioned to be the one to do it.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
