Nuke Fusion Startup Vows To Produce Power Using Cell The Size Of A Fire Extinguisher

Venture capitalists, billionaires, and celebrities had become smitten with nuclear fusion energy and were spending money like drunken fusion scientists on an energy source that still exists only in science-fiction novels.

Photo Insert: Avalanche Energy co-founders' CEO Robin Langtry and Chief Operating Officer Brian Riordan hard at work

The trend has accelerated and more than $4 billion in private capital has flowed into fusion research in the last few years, Eric Wessof reported for Canary Media.

One of the beneficiaries of this bonanza, Avalanche Energy, is hoping to succeed where others have failed with a capital-efficient, downsized approach to generating electricity from fusion. The Seattle-based fusion energy startup plans to use an unconventional electrostatic technique to scale its modular fusion cell down to the size of a fire extinguisher.

To achieve fusion, hydrogen must be converted into plasma, a transformation that requires million-degree temperatures, much hotter than even the core of the sun. In the medium of the plasma, negatively charged electrons separate from positively charged atomic nuclei.

Fusion machines compress and confine the plasma in order to push the freed-up nuclei so close together that they overcome repellant electrostatic forces and ultimately fuse. This process releases neutrons, and it’s this energy that scientists dream of harvesting to do things like drive a conventional turbine.

The problem is that more energy is required to catalyze fusion than results from the process — a lot more. The holy grail everyone is seeking is a process that creates more energy than is needed to power it, also called net energy or positive output.

A lot of the fusion teams making a run at this most difficult of physics problems work on a grand scale that requires giant lasers or massive magnets made of exotic materials, not to mention sky-high stacks of cash and plenty of personnel.

Magnetic confinement devices such as tokamaks require major real estate — Europe’s International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project takes up nearly 450 acres. In sharp contrast, Avalanche’s small-scale modular approach is more akin to Tesla’s electric-vehicle battery design, co-founder and CEO Robin Langtry told Canary Media in an interview. ​

“It’s hundreds of little cells that we can mass-produce in a giga-fusion factory. You might need a few of them for a car, a dozen for a bus, maybe 100 for an airplane.”

Langtry and Avalanche’s other co-founder, Chief Operating Officer Brian Riordan, both worked at Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company Blue Origin for years.

As Langtry put it, they were ​“working on some of the early architecture stuff for Mr. Bezos,” then decided to focus on ​“something a little closer to Earth.” (Although it’s notable that Avalanche did just receive a grant from the Defense Innovation Unit for a prototype of a fusion engine to be used for space propulsion.)

“What we love about ​‘new space’ — it’s really fast to test,” said Riordan, who wants to apply that fast-to-test design principle to the development of nuclear fusion. The small size, modular nature, and somewhat less exotic architecture of Avalanche’s prototype lend themselves to this process.

“Historically, a fusion experiment took years, if not decades, and billions of dollars to set up, but Avalanche can run real-world experiments a few times per week on single-digit millions” of dollars, according to Clay Dumas, general partner at Lowercarbon Capital and an investor in Avalanche.

Instead of relying on massive superconducting magnets, Avalanche Energy’s prototype employs electrostatic fields to trap fusion ions, while also employing a magnetron electron confinement technique to reach higher ion densities. The resulting fusion reaction produces neutrons that can be transformed into heat.

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