President Trump Invests in a Nuclear Fusion Startup

Essay by Eric Worrall

TAE Technologies wants to start building a commercial hydrogen boron fusion reactor in 2026.

Trump Media announces merger with fusion firm TAE Technologies

Friday, 19 December 2025

Trump Media & Technology Group – the social media firm majority-owned by US President Donald Trump – and US private fusion energy company TAE Technologies have announced an agreement to merge in a transaction valued at more than USD6 billion.

Under the terms of the merger agreement, TAE and Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) shareholders will each own about 50% of the combined company – which will be one of the world’s first publicly traded fusion companies – at closing. As part of the transaction, TMTG has agreed to provide up to USD200 million of cash to TAE at signing and an additional USD100 million is available upon initial filing of the Form S-4 registration statement. The transaction, which was approved by the boards of directors of both companies, is expected to close in mid-2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including shareholder and regulatory approvals.

In 2026, the combined company plans to site and begin construction of the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 MWe), subject to required approvals. Additional fusion power plants are planned and expected to be 350–500 MWe.

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TAE’s approach to fusion combines advanced accelerator and plasma physics, and uses abundant, non-radioactive hydrogen-boron (p-B11) as a fuel source. The proprietary magnetic beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC) technology injects high-energy hydrogen atoms into the plasma to make the system more stable and better confined. This solution is compact and energy efficient, California-based TAE says.

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Read more: https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/trump-media-announces-merger-with-fusion-firm-tae-technologies

My problem with TAE’s approach is they are focusing on Hydrogen Boron fusion, which requires ignition temperatures at least 500x hotter than the Deuterium Tritium reaction which mainstream fusion research projects like ITER intend to use in their proof of concept.

The big outstanding problem with nuclear fusion is keeping the plasma hot, without expending more energy than the plasma produces through nuclear fusion. An eighty million degree Deuterium Tritium plasma really wants to shed its heat, so preventing the heat from escaping long enough so the plasma produces substantially more energy than it took to warm the plasma up is the biggest unsolved problem. For a practical fusion generator, you would need to either retain enough heat in the plasma to keep the plasma burning, or extract enough energy to power the next cycle if your reactor operates as a series of small explosions.

If keeping an eighty million degree Deuterium Tritium plasma hot enough to fuse is an unsolved problem, how do you describe the problem of keeping a Boron Hydrogen plasma at a temperature in excess of 5 BILLION degrees, for long enough to produce useful fusion energy?

I accept that commercialisation of Deuterium Tritium fusion would be difficult. Tritium is rare, rare enough that there is probably only 50kg of Tritium in the entire world. Producing that Tritium in sufficient quantities for a significant fusion economy is an unsolved problem. Deuterium Tritium also produces a blizzard of fast neutrons, which causes everything in the vicinity of the plasma to become radioactive, as well as physically damaging the reactor containment vessel. But demonstrating a viable self sustaining fusion reaction using Deuterium Tritium, regardless of the obstacles to commercial viability, would provide valuable insights, and would also prove you were on the right track. It would make pursuit of more technically challenging fusion reactions like boron hydrogen more credible.

I’m not a fusion physicist, nor am I a billionaire, so maybe President Trump has seen something I haven’t. I would love to be wrong about this. But I simply don’t believe in startups which claim they are ready to jump straight to commercialisation of insanely difficult exotic fusion technologies like Proton (Hydrogen) Boron fusion, when nobody has yet cracked the technically much simpler problem of creating an energy producing Deuterium Tritium fusion reactor.

Show me a self sustaining 80 million degree plasma Deuterium Tritium proof of concept reactor, and I’ll take your 5 BILLION degree commercial Boron Hydrogen plasma ambitions seriously.

Note I use Proton and Hydrogen interchangeably in this article. A proton is an electrically charged hydrogen atom.