The desire to obtain fusion energy, the clean and potentially unlimited source that could put an end to energy problems of humanitybegan to grow in response to an old question that we have been asking ourselves since we first raised our heads to the sky.
In the middle of the 19th century, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection had convulsed our concepts about humanity itself and about our world. But the theory had a problem.
How was it possible that the Sun had been shining for so long? asked the physicist Lord Kelvin. Shouldn’t you have used up your fuel a lot before the human race evolved as Darwin proposed?
Neither scientist lived to learn the surprising answer: that inside our Sun the lightest elements merge constantly interact with each other and give rise to heavier ones, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process.
“The deposit would be almost inexhaustible. If only it could be put to good use,” astronomer Arthur Eddington wrote in 1920.
A century later, a handful of startups (startups) ensures that we are closer than ever to satisfy that desire.
In the coming years, they maintain, Your fusion machines will produce more energy than they need to operate. Shortly after, they will begin generating electricity for factories, data centers, steel plants and more, helping humanity take a decisive step towards move away from fossil fuelsglobal warming and environmental pollution.
Big-name investors, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman, have bet hundreds of millions of dollars on this potential merger moment, proving that the limits of the technological domain of our species have been catapulted forward once again.
Las startups They are moving faster than government laboratories ever could. What degree of difficulty do they face? Create a working star on Earth It might seem downright unattainable if scientists had not already gone so far to achieve it.
First, a jet of gas must be heated to unimaginable temperatures, exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius. This causes the gas to increase its heat so much that electrons break away from their atoms. In this way, it transcends its condition as a gas and enters another state of matter: that of plasma.
With enough heat, the atoms begin to fuse, which they are not very willing to do. However, if the plasma can retain heat for the necessary time, it will high enough pressureyou will get more energy than what was used to heat it.
Once you’ve created some plasma, what’s next? The material twists and wriggles like a super hot jelly snakeso it must be held steady or else it could shoot off and melt the equipment being used.
Or it could simply be undone, since however impetuous it may be, plasma is also fragile: It could be blown out. Inside the Sun, the force of gravity holds it together. On Earth, super strong magnets and laser instruments are used in both cases.
By now, you may have already achieved your goal: atoms are fusing and high-energy particles are coming out of the plasma. Now Your machine has to survive the beating. But you also have to put the energy to work, produce electricity and keep the reaction going, all without altering the plasmawhich is as precarious as a toy top spinning on the tip of a finger.
For decades after World War II, government laboratories around the world came closer to solving this challenge.
But to keep moving forward new machines are required. And new machines require money in stratospheric amounts. They might also require new technology, even new materials.
Race towards 2030
If you enter the huge new building of Commonwealth Fusion Systems located in a field in the state of Massachusetts, It might seem like a construction site. like any other: empty gray floors, plastic sheets held together with duct tape, spiders in the corners.
But keep walking until you reach the 2.5-metre-deep concrete wall that envelops the building’s inner sanctum, shielding the outside world from what lies within.
There, in a large and grand room like a temple, a colossal machine will soon be placed on the altar. In a circle, 18 giant magnets will be placed around its coreeach powerful enough to hoist an aircraft carrier. When the machine turns on, the internal magnetic forces will be equivalent to those of 10 heavy rockets taking off from Earth.
The machine that Commonwealth being built in Massachusetts is the SPARC, a demonstration device. The company aims for SPARC to produce net energy in 2027 in a way it calls commercially relevant.
Its next machine, ARC, is the one the company says will generate electricity for paying customers in the early 2030s.
Commonwealth is devoting most of his creative energy to ARC, the machine he wants to build next.
More “shots on goal”
The company’s scientists and engineers are still figuring out how to make ARC plasma less likely to spill and how to prevent some parts of the machine from overheating. They are also examining to what extent the materials they are using can withstand the buffeting of high-energy particles passing through them and whether they will need to be supplemented with materials that have not yet been invented.
The downside to these machines is that they are difficult to build. A punishment in terms of disassembling and maintaining. And they’re expensive: SPARC will end up costing around $1.2 billion to build.
The largest one being put together on Earth, a multinational project based in France and called ITER, is on its way to having a cost of tens of billions of dollars and will not be ready for experiments until the mid-2030s.
That’s where the flip side of the private merger boom comes into play. Mostly the startups believe that they can achieve fusion more economically and easily using other types of machineseven if the designs vary greatly in how scientists have made them work best.
Las startups Type One Energy y Thea Energy They are working on stellarators, which are like a donut imagined by Salvador Dalí. Reality Fusion is building a reactor that company co-founder Cary Forest describes as a cylinder with magnets located at both ends.
In an office park near the city of Seattle, Zap Energy is manufacturing fusion devices in which the plasma filaments are, yes, charged with electrical energy.
Just over a kilometer away, Helion Energy is working on a fusion machine that fires two plasma rings against each other. The firm announced that in 2028 it will begin using its technology to generate electricity for Microsoft.
In Vancouver, Canada, a company called General Fusion seeks to crush plasma, not with fancy magnets, lasers or other exotic parts, but with pistons somewhat similar to those found in a car engine. The company hopes to demonstrate the viability of its new machine in 2026.
“It’s kind of a Wild West right now,” said Richard Magee, vice president of physics research at the fusion startup. TAE Technologieswhile showing off the bus-sized test reactor his company produces in Southern California. “It’s going to be really interesting to see who’s still around in 10 years,” he says.
When it comes to the great objective of bringing humanity to an era fusion drivenmore companies could mean more “shots on the bow,” as Jean Paul Allain, head of the US Department of Energy’s fusion science program, puts it. When someone scores a goal, everyone benefits.
What worries researchers is the extent to which some new merger companies and in what period. Even if their pilot plants are successful, there is still a long way to go before they are ready to meet a significant portion of the world’s electricity needs, says Steven Cowley, director of Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory.
“There has been a tremendously exaggerated stir,” says Cowley. “Worry about the consequences when people don’t comply,” he warns.
David Gates worked in US government laboratories for three decades before helping to found Thea Energy in 2022. “If you had asked me 10 years ago if I should start a fusion company, I would have said no, it was crazy” , said. “The private sector was not in the least interested in the merger,” he clarifies. Thea is working on a machine called Eos. Thea, in Spanish, is Thea, the Greek goddess of vision and light; His daughter is Eos, the goddess of dawn.
And when will the dawn of fusion arrive? The plan for Eos, at least for now, is to have it up and running by 2030.
Translation: Román García Azcárate.