alt Hacker NewsHow are the fusion startups coming along? There are at least 21 of them.[1]
The top 3, by funding. These all have more than a billion dollars.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The MIT people. This is a tokamak with better magnets. The magnet insight is that if you put a superconductor and a regular conductor in parallel, all the current flows through the superconductor. So you can plate a superconducting material on stainless steel tape, using stainless steel as an insulator. Winding a magnet out of stainless steel tape works fine. They demoed that back in 2021. But no fusion yet. Well funded, big operation, around 1000 people.
Helion Energy. This is a strange magneto-inertial fusion system. It's vaguely like a free-piston internal combustion engine generator, except that the piston is a plasma. After seven rounds of increasingly large prototypes, they can get D-T fusion, but it's not self-sustaining, nor do they get power out. Prototypes have thus far underperformed claims. Around 500 people.
TAE. Recently merged with Trump Media. Really.
There are quite a few others. Many are working on some kind of pulsed fusion, like the Livermore National Ignition Facility. This is known to create fusion, but is hard to turn into a useful power source. They can get to a non-useful fusion demo by pumping a lot of energy into a small space, so it looks like progress.
On the continuous fusion front, several startups are trying to revive 1950s Stellarator technology. For a few years back then, fusion energy looked close.
Anyone have expertise in this area? Are any of these going to work? Or is the product the stock?
Helion most likely would not work. Even their own optimistic modeling gives very thin margins and even they completely ignore radiation damage to equipment.
Commonwealth and other tokamak designs are too optimistic as well. We do not know how instability in plasma will behave in production volumes.
Stellarator-based designs at least do not have big ifs, but they are way further and even they assume that radiation damage from neutrons will be manageable.
And all of this is ignoring costs. Outside of niche applications it is very hard to sea how fusion even if it works can compete with solar plus storage.