The fusion world is flush in cash and hype, as the dream of near-limitless clean energy inches closer to reality. A recent report from the Fusion Industry Association found that in the last two years, companies in the industry have brought in over $2.3 billion, nearly a third of all fusion funding since 1992.
Today, one of those companies, Type One Energy, announced a giant, $82.5 million seed funding round, which CEO Chris Mowry told me is “one of the largest, if not the largest ever, seed financings in the history of energy.” This funding represents the total from the company’s first close in March of last year, which brought in $29 million, plus the recent close of its extension round, which brought in an additional $53.5 million. The extension was co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, New Zealand-based venture capital firm GD1, and Centaurus Capital.
Mowry said the follow-on funding is necessary for the company to achieve its target of commercializing fusion by the mid-2030s. “To do this, we need to ramp this company up pretty quickly and have some pretty ambitious milestones in terms of development of the actual pilot power plant. And that takes a lot of capital,” he told me.
Type One uses a reactor design known as a stellarator. The concept is similar to the more familiar doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors, used by the deep-pocketed MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the intergovernmental fusion megaproject ITER. Both stellarators and tokamaks use high-powered magnets to confine superheated plasma, in which the fusion reaction takes place. But unlike the symmetrical magnetic field created by a tokamak, a stellarator creates a twisted magnetic field that is more adept at keeping the plasma stabilized, though historically at the expense of keeping it maximally hot.
Recent progress in the stellarator universe has Mowry excited, as the world’s largest stellarator, developed at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, has demonstrated high heating power as well as the ability to maintain a fusion plasma for a prolonged period of time. Thus, he told me this tech has “no fundamental science or engineering barriers to commercialization,” and that if the German stellarator were simply scaled up, it could likely provide sustained fusion energy for a power plant, albeit at a price point that would be totally unfeasible. Commercialization is therefore now simply an “engineering optimization challenge.”
The Type One team is composed of some of the world’s foremost experts on stellarator fusion, coming from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which Mowry said “built the world’s first modern stellarator;” Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and the Institute for Plasma Physics. The company plans to use the additional funding to jumpstart its FusionDirect program, which involves building a prototype reactor in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility. The timeline is aggressive — Type One is aiming to complete the prototype by the end of 2028. And while this machine will not generate fusion energy, its purpose is to validate the design concept for the company’s pilot plant, which will ideally begin putting fusion electrons on the grid by the mid-2030s.
Mowry’s goal is to enter into a public-private partnership by the end of the decade that will help get the company’s first-of-its-kind stellarator pilot off the ground. The government has an integral role to play in helping fusion energy reach scale, he argued, but said that as of now, it’s not doing nearly enough. Federal funding for fusion, he told me, is “on the order of a billion dollars a year.” While that might seem like a hefty sum, Mowry said only a minuscule portion is allotted to commercialization initiatives as opposed to basic research and development, a breakdown “aligned with where fusion was in the 20th century,” he told me, not where it is today.
If Type One’s pilot plant works as hoped, “then you’re talking about deploying the first wave of full-scale, truly commercial fusion power plants in the second half of the 2030s.” Which, when it comes to preventing catastrophic climate change, is “maybe just in time.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
