Flash back to four summers ago, when aspiring fusion pioneers Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan were stuck designing rockets at Blue Origin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ aerospace and space tourism company. More specifically, they were ruminating on how their engine’s large size was preventing the team from iterating quickly.
“If your rocket engine is 12 feet tall, there’s like, three places in the country where you can get castings,” Langtry told me. One simple design change could mean another eight to nine months before the redesigned part came in. Smaller designs, they hypothesized, would lead to faster development cycles.
They decided to quit their jobs in June of 2021 and put their thesis to the test with what would become Avalanche Energy, a fusion startup aiming to commercialize tabletop-sized reactors via magneto-electrostatic fusion, a nascent technology that’s far less well-understood than even still-experimental large-scale fusion machines like tokamaks and stellarators. Today, though, Washington State is giving this emergent tech a big vote of confidence by announcing one of the largest government-led fusion investments to date: A $10 million grant for Avalanche to build out a commercial-scale test facility for fusion technologies.
This facility, called FusionWERX, is where Avalanche will test its own prototypes with the goal of achieving scientific breakeven — the point at which a fusion reaction produces more energy than the energy used to initiate the reaction. But as Langtry, the company’s CEO, explained to me, it will also be a hub where other fusion companies, universities, and national labs can come test their own proprietary technologies while keeping their intellectual property intact.
“It’s almost like a commercial wind tunnel test facility, but for fusion,” Langtry told me. For example, Avalanche’s early-stage reactors will produce neutrons that researchers can use to test novel materials and ensure they can withstand the extreme conditions found inside fusion reactors. Organizations can also test their own neutron capture methods, often referred to as "neutron blankets,” which are critical for producing the tritium fuel that’s needed for a sustained fusion reaction.
Thus, Avalanche will earn revenue from the groups using the FusionWERX facility well before it makes any money from commercial energy production. The startup also plans to bring in additional income by making and selling radioisotopes — atoms that emit radiation as they decay — for medical and energy applications such as diagnostic imaging, radiation therapy, and nuclear batteries that can generate electricity in space or remote areas like the deep ocean.
Langtry told me these additional opportunities make Avalanche attractive to a wider variety of investors than simply climate tech venture capitalists interested in fusion’s potential for utility-scale power generation. “There’s much bigger sources of capital if you can build a true business that commercializes this technology and generates revenue and scales it,” Langtry told me. “That’s really what we’re about.”
Prior to the $10 million grant, Avalanche had raised a total of $50 million from investors such as Lowercarbon Capital, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Toyota Ventures. And while the startup’s lineup of near-term use cases sets it apart, Avalanche too is ultimately aiming to produce commercially-relevant energy, with an eye towards replacing diesel generators for data center backup power or for use in remote communities or military outposts.
Avalanche’s chosen method, magneto-electrostatic fusion, uses ions that are injected into the reactor’s chamber and confined with extremely high voltage. This strong electric field accelerates the ions towards the center of the reactor, where they collide to produce a fusion reaction. Magnets surrounding the chamber also work to trap electrons alongside the ions, increasing the density of the plasma to achieve high fusion rates.
Avalanche announced today that it has successfully operated its machine at 300 kilovolts for multiple hours. When adjusted for size, this equates to 6 megavolts per meter, twice the voltage density of lightning. To reach breakeven, the company will need to operate its machine at about 700 kilovolts, which Langtry told me can be done by doubling the size of the reactor’s radius from 6 centimeters to 12 centimeters. Avalanche said in a follow up email that the company is waiting to gain operational experience at its current scale before raising the capital it will take to build a larger reactor.
The magneto-electrostatic method is well-suited to micro reactors as it doesn’t rely on giant magnets or lasers to create the fusion reaction. Ultimately, Avalanche plans to produce modular reactors from 5 kilowatts to 1 megawatt in size — enough to power just a couple homes at the least, and about 1,000 homes at the most.
But powering homes isn’t what Avalanche will actually do. Before energy dominance was even in vogue, the company was already focused on military applications for its tech. It received a contract from the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit in 2022 to develop technology for a nuclear-powered spacecraft by 2027. Avalanche did not elaborate on what its initial prototype might look like or be used for, only writing in a follow-up email that it’s “in active discussions about next steps for maturing this technology with DOD.”
“We were sort of contrarian, in that we always thought our path to commercial operations was through DOD and space, whereas most of the fusion companies were raising on climate and clean energy and building massive clean energy power plants,” Langtry told me. He cited support from Thiel, perhaps Silicon Valley’s most influential conservative voice, as helping influence the company’s direction.
At this moment, Langtry told me, there’s excitement around using Avalanche’s tech to make President Trump’s vision of a so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system a reality. This would involve using satellites — theoretically powered by Avalanche — that could track and shoot down ballistic missiles fired at the U.S. “Right now, with solar, [satellites] could probably only take one shot during an engagement. But if you had 100 kilowatts or a megawatt, you could shoot continuously, and that system would be a lot more capable,” Langtry explained to me.
Depending on your feelings about nuclear war, this vision may bring more anxiety than comfort. It’s also a far cry from the more typical — and endlessly more idyllic — narrative of limitless clean energy and unprecedented prosperity that I’m used to hearing fusion enthusiasts promote. But such is the moment. And if the path to commercial fusion ends up running through a satellite-powered missile defense system, it probably won’t be the weirdest clean energy story of the Trump era.
Solar capacity keeps growing. GoodPower
