- With the promise of fusion on full display after a U.S. lab achieved “ignition” late last year, fusion companies are raising capital to bring this next-gen green energy to life.
- Magnetic confinement reactors, such as tokamaks and stellarators, are the leading fusion concept, and are designed to contain super-hot plasma long enough to sustain fusion reactions.
- Although tokamaks are more abundant and easier to build, the company Type One Fusion just received millions to bring its stellarator reactor to market.
Fusion reactors come in all shapes and sizes, but can mostly be separated into three groups, defined by how they contain the super-hot plasma needed to combine lighter nuclei into heavier ones.
The first is gravitational reactors (a.k.a. stars), which are impossible to recreate on Earth. The second group is inertial reactors, which essentially fire a bunch of lasers at a small pellet and contain the resulting fusion reaction by sheer inertia for only 100 trillionths of a second. This is the concept that finally achieved ignition last December. But it’s the third group—magnetic reactors—that’s arguably the most promising.
Magnetic confinement fusion uses superconducting magnets to contain hot plasma long enough for a fusion reaction to take place. These magnets are absolutely critical, as they keep the plasma from touching any of the other materials in the reactor, and no known material can withstand the over-100-million-degrees-Celsius temperatures required for fusion. But even this kind of fusion divides into a further two camps: tokamaks and stellarators. READ MORE...
