The Star Builders

by Arthur Turrell

  Arguably, being exposed to market forces hands them all a big advantage. Whichever firms slip behind are probably going out of business, which must provide a sharp motivation to stay ahead. Without the bureaucracy of thousands of staff or public sector procurement rules, these start-ups are able to be much more agile than government laboratories. “I have no new physics for the world,” reality TV show Made in Chelsea’s Richard Dinan, CEO of Pulsar Fusion, has said. “My trick is that I can build technology quickly and cheaply.”10 If a line of inquiry doesn’t work, they can shut it down, fire the staff, and refocus their resources on more promising avenues. Nick Hawker told me that he was glad that they’d gone private, because, otherwise, they’d be tangled in endless arguments about where to build their gain-targeting star machine. Instead, he said, “We can put it wherever we like: we’re a private company.”

  They have other advantages too—start-ups pay higher wages than universities and government laboratories outside of the USA, so they can attract top talent. Two of my former colleagues at Imperial College left to work for a start-up because the pay and job security are better than in academia. “They had the money,” a scientist whose contract with the University of Oxford had run out told me.

  Some of the scientists leading this new entrepreneurial wave are undoubtedly as eccentric as those from fusion’s not-always-stellar history, but their fresh approaches are attracting eye-watering amounts of both private and public investment. Recognizing the benefits of competition and innovation in fusion, the US Department of Energy in 2020 released $61 million in funding.11 Zap Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems are among the beneficiaries. These private firms are proposing to use millions of dollars, and some crazy ideas, to do what billions of dollars, and decades of scientific investigation, have been unable to.

  Of course, everyone thinks that their firm is closest to net energy gain, that only they have a viable plan for fusion power, and that it’s the other star builders’ plans that won’t work out. When I tell Jonathan Carling this, he smiles. “There are lots of respected ventures out there, but we do believe that we’re the only business that’s got a commercially viable technology and an operational plan to get there.”

  When I press him on why his firm is the special one when everyone says that it’s their firm, he is a little more candid about the competition: “Someone’s going to do it a lot faster—we’re pretty convinced it’s going to be us because we’ve got a combination of agility, the right people, the right money, and we’re basing it on known tokamak science. We’re not trying to invent, you know, I’ve got a new thing with three hundred pistons and whatever, or I’ve got a shrimp, or all these other things…”

  No prizes for guessing which crustacean-inspired star builder he’s referring to. Jonathan’s mention of pistons appears to be a reference to General Fusion, a firm based in Canada that has been operating for almost twenty years. It was founded by Michel Laberge, who quit his job as a senior laser printing engineer to follow his fusion dream. In 2019, General Fusion announced that they’d raised a further $65 million, taking their total to at least $200 million. Microsoft, the Canadian government, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are all said to have put money in.12

  General Fusion plans to build a star by confining a ball of plasma with liquid metal walls that are themselves confined within a reactor chamber. The idea is that the liquid metal will be pushed by steam-driven pistons until it compresses the plasma to fusion conditions. The neutrons emitted will be captured by the liquid walls. It’s not clear (to me) how the pistons will act quickly enough or forcefully enough to take the plasma to the extreme conditions that fusion requires. As those working at NIF know all too well, a heavy fluid (liquid metal) pushing on a light one (plasma) is a nightmare for Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities that could mix the liquid metal through the plasma. At NIF, compression is provided by shock waves that are themselves a result of a laser pulse that, naturally, travels at the speed of light. In First Light Fusion’s machine, an electromagnetic rail gun accelerates an object to tens of kilometers per second. It’s hard to imagine steam producing the speed or strength of compression needed to hit stellar conditions. There’d also be a lot of heat energy leaking through the metal-plasma interface. It’s a steampunk fusion scheme that seems to defy all the usual wisdom on confining plasmas. Of course, much of the technology is secret, so no one outside the firm really knows how it works, or how it will work. None of this has put off the big name investors.13

  What I hear from a lot of star builders—and what Jonathan Carling’s critique of what some might describe as “wacky new schemes” is getting at—is that all fusion schemes have a tendency to go awry in unexpected ways. In new fusion schemes, problems are equally likely to manifest, it’s just that they haven’t yet been discovered. This is why Nick Hawker and First Light Fusion’s philosophy is to use off-the-shelf technology for everything except for their targets. It’s why Jonathan Carling and Tokamak Energy are putting their faith in spherical tokamaks, a variation on an existing technology. When start-ups pursue fusion schemes that are less well tested at large scales and promise that they can reach net energy gain in a few years, it does tend to raise eyebrows. But investors seem to have an appetite for even these schemes.

  In fact, the best funded of all the start-ups, TAE Technologies, is pursuing a very risky approach, albeit one with commensurately bigger rewards. “Start-up” hardly seems appropriate for a firm that has been in the business of fusion since the 1990s. TAE has a device that fires the plasmas produced by two pinches into each other to create a ring of plasma that is briefly bound in magnetic fields, like a smoke ring in air. It’s an unusual scheme but one that is also being pursued by Helion Energy, a firm backed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel.

  The big risk that TAE Technologies is taking is in the fusion reaction it’s trying to produce. While almost every other fusion firm is focusing on the easier deuterium and tritium reaction, TAE is trying to initiate reactions between the regular form of hydrogen (a proton) and a common isotope of boron. The advantage of this reaction is that it doesn’t produce neutrons, just helium nuclei and energy. Removing neutrons from fusion is very attractive: it means close to zero radioactivity, no need for thick shielding, no tritium breeding, and no degradation of the reactor chamber over time. It’s much more commercially appealing. There’s a catch though (there always is): the temperatures required for this neutron-free fusion reaction are at least ten times what is required for deuterium-tritium fusion. Even at that temperature, the number of fusion reactions is fifty times fewer.

  TAE is backed by Google, Goldman Sachs, and the Russian government (Microsoft’s cofounder Paul Allen was also an investor before he passed away), and has raised a whopping $700 million. Some star builders think that we won’t see a working proton-boron fusion reactor for decades, at the earliest. TAE has reported significant progress on its machine, but they need to improve its performance ten thousand times over just to reach the conditions needed for deuterium-tritium fusion—and proton-boron fusion is even further out of reach.

  With such backers, science may not be the only challenge. One fusion start-up insider I spoke to raised the possibility that the aggressive hiring of PhDs and other highly talented employees meant that TAE might divert their energies into other, more immediately profitable activities. The company has already spun out one firm, TAE Life Sciences, which produces physics-based cancer treatments. Yet TAE is making big fusion promises: in 2019, the CEO, Michl Binderbauer, claimed in an interview that his team would be producing “energy from fusion in two years.” Subsequently, he backtracked to “a small number of years.” Another comment from 2019 was even bolder: “We’re talking commercialization coming in the next five years for this technology.”14

  There’s one star-building firm that has even more money to draw on than TAE Technologies: Lockheed Martin, whose market capitalization is just over $100 billion. Its size and scale give it the ability to fund fusion even beyond most n
ations. Lockheed Martin’s fusion team is pursuing yet another approach, which combines magnetic mirrors—which can be used to bounce the plasma around—and a magnetic cusp, which creates a hollow in magnetic field lines that can trap charged particles. The company’s fusion program has been going on behind closed doors since 2010, and in 2014 they claimed that they could “design, build, and test the new compact fusion reactor in less than a year” and have a prototype truck-size power plant in five years. You may have missed the news about Lockheed’s solving the problem of controlled fusion in 2015: I certainly did.15

  Ian Chapman’s predecessor as CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Sir Steve Cowley, has expressed surprise “that a company like this would release something that doesn’t have much context. Normally, if someone says they’re doing well in fusion, they would quote some data,” which seems a polite way of saying that these claims are likely significantly exaggerated.

  Lockheed Martin isn’t the only firm to have over-promised and under-delivered on fusion. Steampunk fusion outfit General Fusion claimed in 2009 that they’d build a working power plant within a decade. They haven’t, not that it has slowed them down a jot. A decade on, although there’s no power plant, they do have a new CEO and a big machine. That new CEO, Christofer Mowry, is now aiming at 2023.16

  Another brimming-with-confidence fusion player is LPP Fusion, formerly Lawrenceville Plasma Physics. LPP’s CEO, Eric Lerner, is a controversial character.17 He has written a book detailing why he believes the Big Bang never happened, directly challenging the overwhelming scientific consensus. His firm is trying to do fusion using a dense plasma focus, a pulsed power device that has been around since the 1950s. It creates a pinch effect not in a line or ring, but in a blob of plasma above one end of a cylindrically shaped conductor. LPP’s device is very small, about one centimeter long. The small size, and therefore low cost, of dense plasma focuses makes them perfect sources of high-energy neutrons, which is what they’re usually used for.

  Star builders whom I spoke to pointed out that dense plasma focuses of the kind LPP is using almost exclusively produce beam-target fusion—useful in some contexts, but not for power production. Beam-target fusion is similar to what Rutherford, Oliphant, and Harteck did when they discovered nuclear fusion; it smashes a few particles together, and so produces neutrons, but it’s not scalable to a power plant. The difference is in the temperature: going back to my analogy of hot plasma being like children running around a playground and colliding, beam-target fusion is like one child briefly running through a playground of children pretending to be statues. You might get some fusion, as the moving child collides with a stationary one, but you won’t get significant energy that way. For this reason, fusion with hot temperatures—the kind that most star builders are doing—is called “thermonuclear” fusion as opposed to beam-target fusion. The difference between beam-target fusion and thermonuclear fusion is akin to the difference between fool’s gold and real gold. Getting the distinction wrong has been the downfall of many fusion schemes, even those run by scientists at the absolute top of their game. To make it more challenging LPP Fusion is, like TAE, going straight for the more tricky neutron-free fusion reaction between hydrogen and boron.18

  So what promises has LPP’s controversial CEO Eric Lerner made? In 2014, he claimed that LPP was closer to affordable, unlimited, and ultra-clean energy than any other fusion outfit in the world. At that time, LPP had already secured more than $3 million in funding. He told Fortune.com that, with the financing, he’d be licensing the mass production of small fusion machines by now. He isn’t.

  LPP went on to use crowdfunding platform IndieGoGo to convince the public to pledge bits of cash to help it build a working device. Unusually for a crowdfunding campaign, even if the targeted amount of $216,000 wasn’t reached, any pledged money went to LPP Fusion anyway, and the target was “flexible” so that it could move during the campaign. The company raised more than $190,000. An article published at the time claimed that LPP would have a working device by 2020, and yet, if it has one, the world’s media have been oddly quiet about it. As of 2020, LPP Fusion had raised another $600,000 through equity crowdfunding site Wefunder. The accompanying video claims LPP is second only to JET in the race to net energy gain, but publicly released data suggest it’s getting at least one hundred times less “energy out for energy in” than Lawrence Livermore’s NIF. To its credit, LPP is at least publishing data on the progress it’s making—something that can’t be said of all fusion start-ups.19

  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Although almost all fusion start-ups have in common smart-looking home pages with animated videos of what their first-generation power plant will look like, the worry is that techno-futuristic pablum and a flashy website may be all that some fusion start-ups have to offer. For critics of some of the claims being made, there’s plenty of grist for the mill.

  A good number of the start-ups are sending their scientists to conferences to present their work and also publishing research results in peer-reviewed academic journals (though they don’t publish all of their secrets, of course). There’s a degree of transparency and openness about what they’re doing. From others, very few details have emerged, so it’s hard to judge their ambitious claims of how quickly they’ll achieve net energy gain or the more ambitious goal of commercialization. Investors and scientists alike need transparency to judge just how far firms are toward net energy gain.

  The risk seems great that one or more of the start-ups will blow up due to overly optimistic or, even worse, downright misleading claims. I spoke to one individual, heavily involved in the fusion industry, who was frank about a small number of fusion firms’ schemes being bunkum, but they attributed much of it to an inability to give up on a dream rather than intentional manipulation of investors. Fusion is complex, and there’s a risk of investors or even just ordinary people being hoodwinked. After all, fusion scientists themselves have got it wrong many times—the British scientific establishment, led by early star builder John Cockcroft, was humiliated when its “ZETA” machine was found to be doing beam-target, rather than thermonuclear, fusion in 1958. This was an unintentional but preventable mistake—the Soviets and the Americans never really believed the results. A more serious incident, due to blatantly bad science, occurred in the 1980s when the fusion community was briefly fooled by so-called “cold fusion.” Instead of using high temperatures and plasma, cold fusion attempted to combine deuterium and tritium at room temperature using a catalyst. Initially, the results seemed so promising that Edward Teller even called up the discoverers to congratulate them. But cold fusion was bunkum. Apart from professional investors and members of the public losing their money, big promises that aren’t delivered on can poison the well for both government laboratories and legitimate private sector fusion start-ups.

  I wondered whether scientists pursuing more conventional fusion machines, who tend not to make such bold promises, would be troubled by some of the wilder claims. To my surprise, many of the scientists pursuing more accepted approaches were approving of their edgier competitors—or so it initially seemed.

  “Fusion needs innovation, it needs new ideas. I’m not going to discourage anyone. Nothing would make me happier than if we could do fusion today,” Dr. Mark Herrmann, NIF’s director, told me. Ian Chapman, who leads the UK Atomic Energy Authority, felt the same: “The simple answer is that the more investment, public or private, in fusion, and the more smart people working on fusion, the quicker we’ll get a solution.” He paused for a moment before adding, more positively, “It’s a good sign that the market is showing appetite for fusion.”

  Dr. Louisa Pickworth, the leader of a group of NIF diagnosticians, also began on a positive note. “Personally, I think the more the merrier,” she told me, “there are probably many ways to cut this.”

  I pressed further, and Louisa admitted that she does worry about what will happen if investors in fusion start-ups don’t receive a return and i
t puts people off in the long run. And although Ian Chapman welcomes the competition, he doesn’t actually think they’ve got what it takes: “My view is that the biggest private sector fusion company in the world is two hundred people, and they are no way capable of designing a full integrated system, and that is the biggest challenge of fusion.”

  Ian Chapman is also firmly of the view that it will take billions to scale fusion into a bona fide power source, and that the private sector just won’t be willing to take that risk. Eventually, he admitted that the potential for broken promises from the private sector could be a problem.

  “Yeah, look, fusion has really suffered for fifty or sixty years now from ZETA and from overpromising… Private companies hyping and over-exaggerating does run the risk of another false promise, another non-delivery from the fusion community,” he told me, adding that the public sector had probably been too conservative about its own successes.

  “I never want to discount that someone might come up with a smart idea,” NIF’s in-house astronaut Dr. Jeff Wisoff told me, “but people have been thinking about this for many years, and I’m fairly skeptical about a garage-size machine.”

  Even Professor Sibylle Günter, normally apt to give a balanced view, had strong words. She has no truck with start-ups that promise shareholders a quick return. “Some of them hide details of the scientific concept and results from the community behind a claim of commercial secrets, and thereby escape any competent criticism which could probably damage their standing with the shareholders.” And, she added, scathingly, that the “promised timescales [are] totally unrealistic.”