How fusion power works and who is targeting it

For many years, people have been trying to harness the energy of the stars to generate electricity on Earth. And for a long time, achieving that goal always seemed like only ten years.

Now, many inventors are closer than ever and are rushing to develop fusion reactors that can power this group.

Fusion startups pulled in more than $10 billion, and more than a dozen are raising more than $100 million. Many large investments have closed in the past year, as investors have been attracted to the industry as demand for power from data centers rises and as mergers and acquisitions near completion.

At its core, fusion energy requires the use of energy released from the fusion of atoms to generate electricity. People have known how to fuse atoms for centuries, from the hydrogen bomb – an example of uncontrolled nuclear fusion – to every fusion weapon built in labs around the world. Nuclear fusion testing devices have been able to control nuclear fusion, and one has been able to generate more energy than is needed to start it.

But no one has been able to produce enough to make an electric machine.

To solve this problem, fusion developers are trying several different methods. Experts have different opinions on who has the best chance of success, although the industry is still in its infancy, so nothing is guaranteed.

Here is an overview of the main ways to create fusion energy.

Magnetic confinement

Magnetic confinement is one of the most widely used techniques, using magnetic forces to trap plasma, a soup of hot particles at the heart of a fusion device.

The magnet must be very strong. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), for example, is assembling a magnet that can produce 20 tesla magnets, which is about 13 times stronger than a conventional MRI machine. In order to use the required amount of electricity, magnets are made of superconductors that are very hot, which still need to be cooled down to -253˚ C (-423˚F) using liquid helium.

CFS is currently building a demonstration device called Sparc for the fastest time series in Massachusetts. The company hopes to break ground sometime in late 2026, and if all goes well, it will begin construction on the Arc, its power plant, in Virginia in 2027 or 2028.

There are two main types of fusion devices that use magnetic confinement: tokamaks and stellarators.

Tokamaks were first studied by Soviet scientists in the 1950s, and since then, they have been widely studied. Tokamaks come in two shapes – a D-shaped donut and a circle with a small hole in the middle. The Joint European Torus (JET) and ITER are two well-known tokamaks; JET operated in the UK between 1983 and 2023, while ITER is expected to start operating in France in the late 2030s.

From the UK The concept of the company Tokamak Energy it is working on a rotating tokamak. His ST40 test machine is also being repaired.

Stellarators are another major type of magnetic confinement device. They are similar to tokamaks in that they store the plasma inside in a donut-like shape. But unlike the geometric aspects of a tokamak, stars twist and turn. The instability of its shape is determined by modeling the behavior of the plasma and changing the magnetic field to work with its complexities rather than forcing it into a stable state.

Wendelstein 7-X, a massive star with a modular superconducting coil operated by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. has been operating in Germany since 2015. Several startups are also developing their own stellarators, including Proxima Fusion, Renaissance Fusion, Thea Energyand Type One Energy.

Inertial confinement

Another major fuse method is known as inertial confinement, which forces fuel pellets down to atoms within the fuse.

Most confinement systems use pulses of laser light to squeeze pellets of oil. Several lasers fire at the same time, and their light turns on the fuel pellet from all angles at the same time.

So far, incarceration is the only option it has he broke the rules it is called “science breakeven”, which is when the process produces more energy than it consumes. The experiments have been carried out at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In particular, the measurements for scientific fracture testing do not include factors such as the voltage required to produce the test force.

However, about a dozen startups see enough promise in the empty prisons that they are building reactors around it. Fixed Power, Inertia companies, Marvel Fusionand Xcimer are well-known examples using lasers.

There are two companies that don’t use lasers, though: First Light Fusion, which wants to use pistons, and Pacific Fusionwhich plans to use electromagnetic pulses instead of lasers.

More to come

These are two of the main methods of combining energy, although they are not the only ones. In the near future, we will add more information on other models including magnetized target fusion, magneto-electrostatic confinement, and muon-catalyzed fusion.