Five Aneutronic Fusion Companies

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Over 43 startups companies are working on nuclear fusion and they have received over $6 billion in funding. This does not include the international and national Tokomak fusion programs.

The IEEE Spectrum reviewed five of the nuclear fusion companies that are working on Aneutronic fusion.

1. TAE (TriAlpha Energy) is working towards Proton-Boron fusion.
2. Helion Energy is developing Helium 3 fusion. They plan to breed Helium 3 in their reactors.
3. HB11 Energy is developing laser proton boron fusion.
4. Marvel Energy is developing proton boron fusion
5. Princeton Fusion Systems

TAE Technologies, (TriAlpha Energy), has the most funding for its aneutronic fusion program. The company started 1998 and has received US $1.25 billion, according to CEO Michl Binderbauer. TAE’s is reacting hydrogen and boron, a mix also known as proton-B11 (PB11). When fused, hydrogen-boron releases three positively charged helium-4 nuclei, known as alpha particles. TAE design confines plasma—fuel so hot that electrons are stripped away from the atoms, forming an ionized gas—via a technique called a field-reversed configuration (FRC).

Pb11 fusion needs 3 billion degrees Celsius—20 or 30 times as high as the temperatures required for a deuterium-tritium reaction. Many scientists believed the electrons would radiate a lot and cool the plasma faster than it can be heated. TAE Technologies’ research papers show the electron cooling is not as bad as feared.

Helion Energy has made some Helium 3. They will use patented high-efficiency closed-fuel cycle to increase helium-3 output.

Helion Energy Kulcinski says D-helium-3 (Deuterium-Helium3 ) could be the stopgap step between deuterium-tritium and p-B11. The reaction requires a temperature of several hundred million degrees, in between deuterium-tritium and pB11.

The D-helium-3 reactions aren’t completely aneutronic. They release 5% of their energy in the form of fast neutrons.

HB11 Energy
Australia-based HB11’s reactor concept uses high-powered ultrafast lasers combined with magnetic confinement to fuse hydrogen and boron. The approach makes use of ultrashort pulses of chirped-pulse-amplification lasers to rapidly accelerate hydrogen through a boron fuel within a trapping magnetic field.

Marvel Fusion
Germany-based Marvel Fusion is pursuing laser-initiated inertial-confinement fusion using a high-energy laser and pB11 fuel in nanostructured targets. The company recently formed a partnership with Colorado State University to build one of the most powerful laser facilities in the world, in Fort Collins, Colo.

Princeton Fusion Systems
Princeton Fusion Systems’ FRC approach makes use of deuterium and helium-3 and uses RF heating for both FRC formation and plasma heating. Using superconducting magnet technology, the company is focusing on niche applications such as compact systems to produce mobile and portable power and fusion propulsion for spacecraft.

27 thoughts on “Five Aneutronic Fusion Companies”

  1. Obligatory reminder that fusion will need to be cost competitive with fission, coal, methane and subsidized renewables.

    • Helion says they’ll be at 1 cent/kWh, which is similar to other aneutronic fusion estimates I’ve seen. They want to build a factory churning out twenty 50MW reactors per day, so mass production kicks in just like it does for renewables.

      And not that it’s necessary but I don’t see why aneutronic fusion shouldn’t get subsidies similar to renewables.

    • Sadly there was a review which showed they weren’t seeing the electrostatic potential they were hoping for. There has been some other work since on IEC systems.

  3. The Wright Brothers analogy is great as it took many decades to evolve aeronautical technology, and fusion electricity seems much more challenging physics problems to overcome. Unless modern society and technology can speed that up, it could take hundreds of years. Also consider that fusion does not have nearly as much engineering and science human hours devoted to it as aeronautical technology did through many wars of massive investment. But computational technology enabling AI could change this limitation.

  4. Developing a process where electricity a direct output seems to make more sense than building a star to boil water.

    • Sounds really good, Matt.

      Umm… how exactly might one do this? No, not a ray-traced fully realistic render and a vetted engineering model, but you know … the bones of it?

      So far, the BEST that anyone has conjured is to use the charged alpha particles themselves to effect direct conversion of their rather prodigious kinetic-energy-of-formation to DC electricity. Idea is, they’re ⊕2 positively charged, and carry MeV of KE. Flying out 360° in all directions. Impacting a spongy carbon ‘aerogel’ surface which is perhaps ⊕1,000,000 volts charged, even if momentarily, they stick and re-capture 2 electrons. This raises the million volt plate by more positive charge.

      Bled away — at 1,000,000 volts — and of course very small current (depending on the rate of fusion and the efficiency of collecting the impacting alpha particles), you get DC energy.

      Direct conversion.

      Pretty impressive efficiencies are possible, too. 15% to 20% I read somewhere.

      And that’s the best I have encountered so far.

      It still requires head-slappingly enormous thermal plasma fusion energies, it still has endless problems with Bremsstrahlung cyclotron radiation, plasma containment instabilities, reaction chamber continuous wall cleaning, helium scavenging (all those pesky neutral alphas).

      We — humanity, scientists, power companies, industry advocates, Green proponents, NextBigFuture readers — we definitely WANT any kind of practical, potent, clean, sustainable, and limitless fuel availability FUSION to work! Yet and still, for as long as I’ve been alive, it goes through these predictable yin-yang cycles of Rah! Rah! Rah! the Future is Coming! Invest Early! Make a Fortune! — to — Ah… Errr… Ummm… Ahem… Well, there are these odd instabilities … but we’ve got a simple plan to tame the wiggles … Ahem … errr … we really could use more money … Ah… Grumble… We’re getting closer! Mo’ Mun please! and so on, Yin-and-Yang with a decadal cycle. Been doing so since the early 1970s.

      I KNOW DAMNED WELL that that sounds really cynical. It actually saddens me to write it down.

      Yet and still, for as long as I’ve been alive, that’s been The Story. Over, and over, and over again.

      Do we really have some reason to believe some FUNDAMENTAL technological thing has come into being ‘this time around’ that’ll radically change the outcome? What would that radical thing be, hmmm? Computing? The Germans and their endlessly twisted Stellarators haven’t wiggled out a compelling book of results yet.

      The field-reversed bunch have lots of good renders, lots of inscrutible graphs, lots of fine plans and plenty of venture capital infusion at the present.

      Are they making copious alphas? No? WHY NOT? Ah… more money.

      Money, time, luck and luck. And luck.

      How about the absurdly large laser-and-hohlraum fusor bunch? Ooohhh… Lawrence Livermore dutifully beat their marketing department to make Big Waves about their most recent marvelous shots.

      How close are they to really making it happen commercially? Oh… if we’re not too pessimistic, at least 40 years off.

      The ITER people have become the old-age home for geriatric European fusion program scientists.

      They revel is spending money like cold champagne, and cranking out scientific papers like toilet paper. No commercial reactor likelihood there. The Japanese have given up on JET, basically, without having the character to just shoot it in the head.

      And there we are.

      ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
      ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

      • I’m going to enjoy pointing to this comment if Helion actually does it as planned in 2024, using the system they already tested in Trenta.

      • LLP is expecting to produce a beam, and run it through a transformer with the beam acting as a single winding. So they’re expecting considerably better than 20% conversion on the alphas.

        I would think that, if you had something like a magnetic mirror containment on a linear reactor, and the alphas have much higher than the plasma energy, they would go right through the magnetic mirror, and amount to a beam.

        • Hmmm… with what I know of electrons, ‘windings’ are all about total ring current. When one has lots of volts, and very little amperage, many many turns of wire multiply the loop current. When amps are big and volts not-so-big, then very few turns do the job.

          However, and it is a big however, all the physics background I have isn’t informing me as to how the magnetics of a charged particle beam works out. Seriously! One could (and I suspect, naïvely) assume it works ‘like a wire full of electrons’ more or less. OK, but then the Physicist pokes her head up and asks, “so what’s the beam current expected to be?” Everyone looks around and gives the universal shoulder-shrug “dunno” gesture.

          Not a good answer. The claim of high efficiency charged-particle “transformer” coupling depends a WHOLE lot on that beam current projection. Or, … many, many turns. But wait, it is claimed to be a single turn! Well, the beam current needs to be REALLY big. Many kiloamps, even if pulsed. Many.

          Then another, older Physicist clears his throat and points out, “well, if the beam current is of an unconstrained plasma of charged nucleons, as they make ”the loop“ (one might presume in a high DC bias torus, to keep the orbit circular-ish), they’re going to lose kinetic energy, spiraling into or toward the constraining walls. That could get nasty. Hard on the materials. Sputtering is a real thing, for everything from beryllium to diamonds, to tungsten to platinum.”

          Everyone again shrugs.

          I like the electrostatic approach, although its more-obvious efficiency is not great, largely because it turns “a bug into a feature”, the fast, very fast moving particles have millions of electron volts of kinetic energy, and are very, very efficiently decelerated by a DC bias collector field. Which also doubles as the collector-of-positive charges. Might not be 90% like a transformer, but it also is better physics on the face of it.

          Dunno. Time will tell. I’ll be happy to “buy the beer” for the army of NextBigFuture peoples who think I’m a hopeless cynical goat, full of beans. Bring it on! There are NO losers if I’m wrong!!!

          ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
          ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

      • Sigh, you are probably in about the same age-group, and with about the same cynicism, I mean of course disappointment and desillusion, as I. After all, you and I have been around here on this excellent website NBF for quite a while. And we have seen the fusion promises (breakeven within the next 5 years!) come and go. Some years ago there was Polywell, was it called that?
        But I am still hopefull that one day fusion will succeed, and even before FTL travel.

        • Yes, we most likely are. I continue to HOPE for a stunning, who-thought-of-that? kind of solution to the Fusion problem that makes it cheap, powerful, sustainable and largely worry-free. But don’t we all?

          ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
          ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

      • I’ve seen 80+% ion beam conversion. Google “Demonstration of direct energy recovery of full energy ions” and look at WL Stirling’s Oak Ridge paper.

        Of course not every p-B fusion device is compatible with easy beam harvesting.

      • “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp” – Robert Browning

        That’s true, because sometimes life can be like a rear-view mirror, and things are closer than they appear.

  6. Here are a couple of others:
    Blue Laser Fusion – https://bluelaserfusion.com/
    Lawrenceville plasma physics – https://www.lppfusion.com/

    While pB11 fusion generates 4 helium ions potentially creating direct electricity conversion, most of the energy from pb11 fusion is released as Bremsstrahlung Xrays. It would therefore seem important to have an effective way to collect and convert that X ray radiation say with a solar cell, yet the recorded efficiencies, as far as I can tell are fractions of a percent. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5287084/

    From https://nickhawker.com/
    For DT the maximum ratio of fusion power to bremsstrahlung loss is 33, fusion is 33 times more powerful, and this occurs at a temperature of 39 keV, not much more than the table states for the other two fuels. For DHe3 the maximum is 6.5 and for DD it is 2.9, both occurring at extreme temperatures. I really don’t like the idea of a margin less than 10, and less than 3, it isn’t going to work. And for what it’s worth, the maximum ratio for pB is 0.43.

    • I guess I can understand the desire to get away from neutrons; Naively, you’d think that this would cause the regulators to give you a break, and maybe result in the Greens not trying to destroy you. Naively.

      But it seems sort of like the Wright Brothers insisting on going straight to building an SR-71. Aneutronic fusion is insanely more difficult than regular fusion, and we can’t do regular fusion yet!

        • D-He3 fusion isn’t terribly aneutronic, either, due to D-D fusion going on at the same time. It’s more like “moderately neutronic”.

          I’d also point out that D-T fusion has a quarter the ignition temperature, and about 55 times the reaction cross section of D-He3 fusion.

          It is true that if you push the energy up high enough, D-He3 should predominate, but, yeah, I’d call that ‘especially harder”.

          • About 5% of Helion’s energy output will be neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T. At 80% you need a turbine, and at 5% you don’t. Also, D-T neutrons will activate your reactor materials, while D-D neutrons are below the activation energy of many reactor materials.

            Regarding difficulty, there are more factors than that. What density can you achieve? What are your energy losses? In a high-beta equilibrium plasma, the optimal temperature is 20-30keV, admittedly higher but not that hard to achieve if your energy losses are low (which they are with high beta). In a nonequlibrium plasma like Helion is using, they say breakeven is possible down to 10keV.

            The key part of the video I linked starts 15 minutes in.

            • Practically speaking all aneutronic fusion devices (yes, even LPP of which I am an investor) will need to remove significant quantities of waste heat produced by x-rays and slowed alphas to they might as well capture the heat and spin a turbine.

              I’d prefer a setup like the Natrium reactors where the waste heat from multiple reactors is accumulated in a salt pool which is used to spin a turbine to meet peak power demand.

              • Whether it’s worthwhile to add the turbine depends on how much the turbine adds to capital cost, compared to how much extra energy you get.

                • It is entirely possible that adding a turbine would be the only way to produce net energy. Direct energy conversion might not be enough to produce net power and you would need to harvest the waste heat.

                  Instead of being 10x cheaper than coal you would be 3x cheaper than coal. Still quite the win but not quite as impressive.

                  Regardless there will need to be some mechanism to remove waste heat from any aneutronic nuclear reactor.

      • I’m not sure that anything is “insanely more difficult” than D-T Tokamaks. In some ways these startups are simpler than the mainstream fusion efforts because they aren’t pursuing steady state fusion. Pulsed fusion is simpler than steady state and to keep with the aircraft analogy the V1 came before the ME-262 because its pulsed engine was much simpler. If anything we see that fusion startups are moving towards a variant on some kind of pulsed, non-steady state fusion device.

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