countryboy (01-10-2019)
Physics Today has an article where it discusses a private company funding its fusion research with spin-off applications- and it is getting funding from major donors.
A California startup has a multipronged approach to help pay for its decade-long quest to demonstrate fusion at a commercial scale. The approach includes a novel concept to become a part-time scientific user facility funded by the Department of Energy. TAE Technologies also is soliciting tax breaks and other financial inducements from state and local governments as it decides on a site for a new $500 million test reactor. The company is reporting initial success in commercializing several technologies it has developed as it has built its experimental devices.
Based in Orange County, the 160-employee TAE is the largest of a handful of privately held startups that are pursuing alternative approaches to controlled fusion. Others include General Fusion in British Columbia, Canada; Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Tokamak Energy, near Oxford, UK.
TAE remains focused on demonstrating commercially viable grid-scale fusion by the late 2020s, says CEO Michl Binderbauer. In the meantime, it is looking for revenue sources to offset some of the company’s $50 million annual operating expenses and attract additional investors. Spin-off technologies, in particular, “create the opportunity for investors to feel we are more than a one-trick pony, that there are hedging opportunities that can happen independent of the cadence in fusion.”
To date, TAE has attracted more than $600 million in equity from investors, including financiers Arthur Samberg, who chairs its board; Charles Schwab; and former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. It has backing from venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates and Venrock, the UK’s Wellcome Trust, and several sovereign funds. Shareholder Google also is a technical partner, says Binderbauer.
Departing from the mainstream
Rather than bottling a plasma in magnetic fields in a toroidal-shaped reactor—the mainstream tokamak approach that’s being pursued at ITER in France, DOE’s DIII-D device in California, and the Joint European Torus in the UK, among others—TAE’s linear device uses a magnetic framework, known as a field-reversed configuration, to confine plasmas (see Physics Today, October 2015, page 25). Plasmas formed at opposite ends of the machine are accelerated magnetically to collide at the center and create a larger, more energetic plasma that is sustained by particle-beam injectors.
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