TAE has produced a stable plasma at 50,000,000°C within a compact reactor and repeated this over hundreds of testing cycles. They have had over 25,000 fully integrated fusion reactor core experiments. The experiments were optimized with machine learning from a collaboration with Google. The current goal is a commercial fusion power plant by 2030.
They recently raised an additional $280 million investment. Total funding is over $880 million.
A larger-scale new reactor called ‘Copernicus’will operate at over 100,000,000°C to simulate net energy production from the conventional deuterium-tritium fuel cycle.
Copernicus will provide opportunities to license its technology for D-T fusion, while scaling to the ultimate goal of using p-B11. They expect commercialization of p-B11 fusion power plants beginning by the late 2020s.
The approximate cost of the Copernicus reactor is $200 million. TAE started construction and test runs start in 2023.
The Da Vinci device is a proposed successor device to Copernicus. It is a prototype commercially scalable fusion energy reactor designed to bridge between D-T and a p-11B fuel. Conditional on the success of Copernicus, it will be developed in the second half of the 2020s and will be designed to achieve a plasma of 3 billion°C, keep a proton-boron fuel stable and produce fusion energy.
Norman reactor is about 100 feet long. Copernicus is about 200 feet long and will have criss-cross like an asterisk (*). TAE has had schedule slippage but this is expected for ambitious new technology that has to solve many science problems and raise a lot of funding.
There are several companies working towards commercializing nuclear fusion. TAE Technologies is the best-funded of the non-government projects.
SOURCES – TAE, Engineering and technology
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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