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Since a pivotal government experiment in 2022 demonstrated that fusion power is more attainable than previously believed, excitement among physicists, engineers, and investors has surged. They are increasingly optimistic about the technology's potential to fulfill its long-awaited promise of delivering nearly limitless, emission-free energy.
The latest sign of this growing enthusiasm comes from Type One Energy, which announced a substantial $53.5 million funding round. This follows their previous raise of $29 million in 2023, bringing their total funding to approximately $82.5 million. Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures leads this extension, joined by Australia's Foxglove Ventures and New Zealand's GD1.
CEO Christofer Mowry explains how Type One Energy aims to accelerate the commercialization of its fusion technology by leveraging solid partnerships. The ambitious target is to finalize their reactor design by the end of this decade, paving the way for a third party to begin construction.
"Given the rate at which we want to accelerate, we needed a larger quantum of capital," Mowry said. "We weren't going to get there with your prototypical $20 million, $30 million, $40 million seed round."
Mowry explained that the other objective of this funding round was to attract partners with extensive knowledge of Southeast Asia, home to a significant portion of the global population. "In the last five years, China built more coal plants than the total installed base of North American coal plants. If we don't find a way to decarbonize the region, we might as well fold up the tent and go home," he said
Type One Energy's reactor utilizes a design known as a stellarator, a variation of the more prevalent tokamak design. While a tokamak resembles a doughnut, a stellarator has been likened to a cronut—still circular but warped and bulging. The stellarator's unique shape is achieved through magnets that generate a specially configured field to confine the super-heated plasma needed for fusion reactions. Within this magnetic field, hydrogen atoms in the plasma collide, fuse, and release vast amounts of energy.
The concept behind the stellarator isn't new, but it requires immense computing power to fine-tune the design for practical use. The world's largest stellarator, currently in Germany, can operate for extended periods. Another stellarator is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the birthplace of Type One Energy.
Those projects convinced Mowry that the stellarator's time had come, and he joined Type One early in 2023. But there was still work to do. The German stellarator Wendelstein 7-X is a good start, "but to turn that into a power plant, you would have to make it uneconomically large, probably four times bigger than it is," Mowry said.
The Wendelstein 7-X, designed over 30 years ago, has seen computing power advance significantly since its inception. Type One now leverages Summit, an exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with which it has a partnership. The summit can perform 250 million times more calculations per second than the supercomputers of the early 1980s when Wendelstein 7-X was first designed.
Thanks to Summit, Mowry said, "We can sharpen the pencil on the design."
Type One employs a design licensed from MIT for the reactor magnets, the same one used by Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They have adapted the cables that constitute the magnets to navigate the stellarator's complex twists and turns.
Next year, the startup aims to finalize the core reactor design and build an Infinity One prototype reactor. This will occur alongside the design process for a pilot reactor. Once the pilot design is completed, which Type One anticipates by 2030, it plans to license the design to another company for construction.
"When Infinity One operates, and we test it, it's actually verifying the key design aspects of the pilot plant," Mowry said. The goal isn't just to prove that it works but also to validate the assembly and maintenance of the machine.
"If you build a fusion machine, whether it's a stellarator machine or any other kind, and it takes you two years to shut it down, maintain it, start it back up, you're gonna sell exactly none," he said.