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.
…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.
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.
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For an alternative approach to hydrogen-boron fusion, check out the Australian company HB11 https://hb11.energy/
At least they don’t seem to be promising a commercial plant in 2026. I have no problem with research, but I’m skeptical of anyone who says proton boron is going to happen any day now.
Agreed. However, I believe the HB11 approach, which utilizes high-powered pulsed lasers for both confinement and initiation, shows promise.
Inertial confinement fusion with lasers or other energy sources has shown promise since the 1970s.
Creating a fusion reaction is a solved challenge, high school kids have built electrostatic confinement fusors. Getting that fusion reaction to produce enough energy to sustain itself without external energy topups is the great challenge. So my point about 5 billion degrees vs 80 million still applies, regardless of how the reaction is initiated.
Would I be right in thinking that technically stars don’t maintain fusion without the constant input of energy from the presence of the gravitational field caused by the stars mass?
The pressure in the star’s core remains stable for most of the star’s life, so the stellar gravitational field isn’t adding energy to the fusion process, any more than the steady force exerted by your fridge magnet adds energy to your fridge.
Hydrogen-boron fusion is only 10 years away.
Boron fusion may – probably? – be a bust, but lots of the money wasted on network wind and solar and hydrogen should indeed be thrown at R & D. That’s research and development in pilot plants, not wide-scale “research” where money is thrown at suboptimal technologies like network wind and solar to turn the whole joint into a giant petri dish.
Totally agree, the potential payoff from cracking fusion, including hydrogen boron fusion, is too great to ignore. But IMO claiming 2026 is the year it all happens simply isn’t credible – especially given that the technically much simpler challenge of self sustaining Deuterium Tritium fusion has not been solved.
“Research” like you outline is often wasted, I’ve seen it happen first hand, but if you look back on the great inventors in history a lot of the great thinkers would have been forgotten amongst daydreaming goobers if they hadn’t produced – who was paying the bills while:
“Thomas Edison didn’t make a specific number of light bulbs; rather, his team tested thousands of materials (some say over 6,000 or 10,000) to find the right filament for a practical, long-lasting bulb, eventually succeeding with a carbonized bamboo filament, leading to mass production of bulbs by his “Light Works,” creating a complete system, not just a single bulb.”
Also:
“Sir Isaac Newton became very wealthy through high-ranking government roles, especially as Master of the Royal Mint”
“Albert Einstein had a surprisingly comfortable “day job” as a patent clerk at the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern (1902-1909), which was well-paid and undemanding, giving him free time for his revolutionary physics work, even describing it as a “cobbler’s trade” that allowed him to think freely. This stable, yet leisurely, position, secured through a friend’s father, provided the financial stability and mental space for…”
“James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th-century physicist, wasn’t known for immense personal wealth but was a respected academic with an inheritance, noted for his generosity and integrity, often giving away money”
My point: there are smart people. If you give them all money, you get stuck with a string of wastrels that might contain your next all star physicist.
Why the same point does not apply to climate researchers: What problem were they trying to solve?
Edison: Lightbulb
Einstein: Atomic physics
Maxwell: Propagating waves
Mann: Fibs good for nobody
LPPFusion: Zero Emissions, Zero Nuclear Waste | Decentralized Fusion Energy
uses boron and has had some pretty promising results.
LPP are accusing Trump of a pump and dump on TAE. Interesting they’re so critical of rival’s claims of an imminent breakthrough.
They claim their current milestone is 0.25 joules, and they need 30,000 joules to make it self sustaining. To get that 30,000 joules they need 2^16 better precision with compressing the fuel pellet if my understanding of their numbers is correct. So probably not going to happen next year.
“To summarize LPPFusion:
a 3-fold increase in compression will give us a 75-fold increase in yield
a 2-fold increase in current will give us a 16-fold increase in yield
switching to pB11 fuel will give us a 100-fold increase in yield ¼ Jx75x16x100 = 30 kJ. This is how we can make a huge jump—in not too many steps.
Our process gives us a lot of leverage to convert small gains in compression to large gains in yield.
Our device produces a tiny ball of ultra-hot plasma called a “plasmoid”. We have already gotten this plasmoid to the more than 2 BILLION degrees temperature we need. But we have to make it denser. Fortunately for every factor of two we improve the compression, and thus decrease the plasmoid radius, we get a factor of four increase in density. For every factor of four increase in density, we get a factor of 16 increase in fusion yield. In mathematical terms, yield goes up as the compression ratio to the fourth power.
None of this affects my fundamental point. If they are on the verge of making it work with Boron Hydrogen, it should already work with technically much easier Deuterium Tritium. Show me an operational Deuterium Tritium reactor and I’ll take their Boron Hydrogen aspirations seriously.
So Why Don’t You ask them?
Well, after all, it was YOU that provided the “details” of LPPFusion’s approach in your post above.
Was that just a cut-and-paste job made without any understanding on your part?
No, DT is not “easier” than pB11. It’s harder. Of course DT burns faster and at a lower temperature than pB11. But DT has two big disadvantages. First, it produces almost all its energy in the form of a powerful 14 MeV neutron. That transmutes elements in the device structure, making it radioactive. That alone rules it out for small labs like ours. We can’t maintain or upgrade a radioactive machine. It takes sophisticated remote-control robots to do that.
The neutrons also weaken the structure of the device, so must be spread out. That means DT devices have to be a lot bigger and more expensive for the same power output than pB11 devices. We’re taking the cheapest, fastest route.
Second, the tritium fuel is radioactive and does not occur in nature—it has to be bred in the device. Existing tritium is produced only in fission reactors. It’s quite expensive and you need elaborate licensing to use it.
On top of all that, for our device, physics calculations indicate that compression will be better with PB11 than with DT, leading to much higher densities and thus faster burn.
We’ve laid out these arguments in technical terms in a peer-reviewed paper https://lppfusion.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/What-are-the-fastest-routes-to-fusion-energy.pdf and will be presenting them in popular terms in a video series we’ve just started. https://youtu.be/PT805H6DQ_0
Tritium is produced, in trace amounts but continuously, by cosmic rays interacting with gaseous species in Earth’s atmosphere.
Tritium is also produced in nuclear fission bomb detonations, as discovered in the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test.
So what? Insignificant.
Jimmy Walter, please see the question I’ve posted below concerning what the expected timelines for commercial deployment of your Boron Hydrogen fusion technology would be if a Manhattan Project level of funding became available to support it.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/25/president-trump-invests-in-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/#comment-4146638
Then please apply that same logic to your (that is, LPPFusion’s) demonstration to date of “pB11 device” operation.
Peer-reviewed papers and popular video presentations (i.e., sales marketing) just don’t give true scientists and engineers the credibility that you may think.
BTW, for you edification,
“In nature, about seventy quadrillion (7 × 1016) Bq of tritium is produced annually by cosmic rays, etc. on earth . . . the annual amount of tritium released from nuclear power stations around the world is 2 × 1016 Bq . . . The total amount of tritium existing in nature is estimated to be 1 to 1.3 × 1018 Bq.”
— https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/2021/02-05-18.html
So, nature creates about 3.5 times as much tritium annually as do all of the world’s nuclear fission reactors.
Insignificant you say?
I agree with the technical aspects of the article and would also try a different recipe BUT: imagine if the UN, the EU and the Climate Industrial Complex had spent the same amount of time and money working on something like TAE’s plan. A lot of really brilliant science minds wasted the last few decades writing sky-is-falling doom literature instead of solving complicated problems like TAE’s. Maybe just ONE of those minds would have thought a big thought.
For sure, we can’t discount the possibility there is a clever hack out there just waiting to be discovered. But I’d want to see serious evidence that hack exists before I take claims of imminent commercial viability seriously.
Want in one hand, piss in the other. See which fills up first.
However, the future is unpredictable, so who knows?
After visiting TAE’s web page, I am extremely skeptical of the company. They don’t seem to have even a prototype. Their marketing videos concentrate on creating and sustaining plasma. Let’s say they get a sustained fusion reaction – how do they convert that energy into electricity? There is no place in their diagrams for creating power. How is that energy created? In high energy particles, including X-rays?
If you pump enough energy in you can create a sustained reaction, that is a solved problem. For example desktop size electrostatic confinement fusors can generate nuclear fusion conditions, so much so that commercial fusors which emit nuclear fusion neutrons are available as industrial neutron sources.
What nobody has figured out how to do is create a fusion reaction which can emit enough energy to sustain itself without continuously adding energy from outside – with the exception of nuclear fusion bombs, which are probably too vigorous a fusion reaction for most nuclear reactor concepts.
So they need a regulator that works at those conditions and is impossibly fast. How will they measure the state of the plasma and react in time to control a chain reaction?
Fusion is not a chain reaction. Fission is.
Not so in all cases.
“The primary source of solar energy, and that of similar size stars, is the fusion of hydrogen to form helium (the proton–proton chain reaction), which occurs at a solar-core temperature of 14 million kelvin. . . . In heavier stars, the CNO cycle and other processes are more important.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion (my bold emphasis added)
Hint: dilithium crystals.
But first we have to find a source and then mine them here on Earth.
And I’ll just add this to clarify the term “vigorous”: the fission-fusion reactions that take place in the detonation of a thermonuclear bomb last on the order of a microsecond. All that energy is released, and the bomb destroys itself in the process, stopping the reaction.
One would need a means to temporarily capture and store that released fusion energy so as to meter it out over a longer time interval . . . and to also afford to set off thermonuclear bombs at a rate of perhaps once every second to be able to provide meaningful steady state energy to a grid.
I believe the energy is extracted inductively.
I hate to say this because it may be true 🙂 I bet they told him if/when they produce a viable product they’d name it after him and he would go down in history as the inventor of fusion 🙂
It will be a “Trump-class” fusion reactor. 🙂
Ahhhh . . . but will there be an associated DOFE to monitor the efficiency of its net output?
I maintain that containment (control, regulation) can not be achieved on Earth. Not enough mass for gravity to do what it does for stars, which is containment the fusion process.
Better that we improve the thorium-fueled breeder fission process that was demonstrated continuously for years at Clinch River decades ago. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium and can be handled in the ore/ fuel stage without radiation concerns. Thorium reactors are inherently safe – no “runaway” possibility. And no need for high-pressure containment.
That’s where India and China are going
You’re referring to ORNL’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. One problem with the design is that the “primary coolant” is the molten salt carrying the fuel with said salt intensely radioactive. To put it simply, there is no inherent containment of fission products that exists with the solid fuel in conventional reactors.
Whenever I see Clinch River, my first thought is of the proposed Clinch River breeder reactor.
I’m very undecided about molten salt.
On one hand I share your concern about highly radioactive mobile radioactive salt. On the other hand the molten salt concept uses that mobility as a safety feature.
I guess the Chinese and Indian experience will show us one way or another. India especially will embrace thorium tech. They have heaps of Thorium deposits in India, but very little Uranium.
Are either of these outfits using public funds? If they aren’t using public funds and it won’t cost me in any other way I don’t care what they do so long as it is legal. I know nothing about producing energy by way of fusion or fission, I do know that fission works. Let’s do the things we know work and insure clean, safe, affordable and plentiful power.
Fusion is the most expensive, and therefore the stupidest, way to generate electricity ever proposed.
It’s a scam, Ponzi-style. Investors go broke when the scammers steal the funds and go Chapter 11. I really hate to see Trump involved in this crap. Or Bitcoin. Or Gaza resort hotels. Especially when the Lunatic Left has been waging war on American farms, ranches, forests, energy, water, and minerals for 30+ years. Let’s DEFEAT THE ENEMY and restore our economy before running off wildly in pursuit of sci-fi fantasy fixes to what should be non-problems.
AFAIK nuclear fusion has NEVER been used to “generate electricity” in a commercial sense available to mankind.
Yeah, thermonuclear bombs (“H bombs”) have generated EMPs, but not usable electricity.
Success is inevitable because the world needs this now and the tech bro’s are rapidly lining up behind it. An era of super abundance beckons.
I’ll be more confident of this view when the tech bro’s start saying things about fusion technology which make sense.
Even if it was working today it would take decades to build them to even have a small impact. Granted they are economically viable.
No one of us will live long enough to see that.
What we see is the rise of mass produced renewables. That will lead to far more independence and abundance for most countries instead of these pie in the sky dreams.
The only losers are countries whose economies depend heavily on fossil fuel exports.
But I absolutly support financing research – the results are just a long time away and may not be used on Earth.
Perhaps we could do research into renewables in order to find one that is sufficiently energy dense to be of more use to civilisation than a wet paper bag?
Perhaps a demonstration that a renewable energy source (PV or WTG) produces enough energy to fabricate (soup to nuts) a full self-replacement.
At this point, the data leads to a conclusion that it takes more energy to build and deploy those systems than they produce in their operational lifespan.
That ignores, too, maintenance energy costs.
There is zero data supporting any of your claims. Wishing something to be true is not data.
Really?
Seems your wishful thinking is again blinding you to reality.
So still nothing to back up your claim. Because, as expected, you can’t.
Lawfare against other forms of Energy. Invests in those his administration pushes. Explain how there is no conflict of interest?
But like all his other ventures he will bancrupt this too anyways.
The TDS is strong in this one.
TAE might just succeed, but in 2036 earliest not 2026. It’s an innovative interesting addition to the field.
Oh, well- if the fusion thing doesn’t work in the near term, we always have a zillion tons of coal in the ground just waiting for us to dig it up.
And that does not take 2 billion degrees.
It’s good to see the broader attention to the competition between fusion reactors based on Hydrogen-Boron vs. Deuterium-Lithium reactions. (The latter is frequently discussed under the misnomer ‘D-T fusion’.*). In my experience, engineering students nowadays are keen to have this debate.
The original discoveries (1933) of the relevant energy-releasing reactions / fuels, have been confirmed & extended many times over the past century:
Oliphant, M. L. E. & Rutherford, E. Experiments on the transmutation of elements by protons. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 141, 259-281 (1933). [That’s right, 1933 precedes the Hahn-Meitner discovery of uranium (U) fission by slow neutrons.]
The Tri-Alpha Energy reactor, under discussion now, is its latest in a series of engineering projects (dating to 1998, TAE‘s founding). It’s not the science, dating (per the above) to 1933.
The discussion of ‘Ignition Temperature’ is interesting but may mislead, because it is limited to a comparison of Deuterium-Tritium (DT) to (proton-)Hydrogen-Boron (pB) reactions:
(i) Tritium is not a fuel resource but rather a reactor-bred intermediate* in the Deuterium-Lithium reactors;
(ii) Ignition itself is not the main obstacle — witness thermonuclear weapons (since ~ 1950); the NIF laser-fusion successes since 2022; or even the recent TAE devices that have already well surpassed the DT ignition temperature.
Anyway, the news of the merger of TAE with Trump Media Technologies, scheduled to close in mid-’26, is to provide financing for the next generation of reactor; no one should concern themselves with commercial generation within the the next couple decades.
*Compare the overall (or net) processes:
H (160 keV) + B —> 3 He (three alpha) + energy ~ 8,700 keV
— vs. —
D + Li —> 2 He (two alpha particles) + energy (~ 22,400 keV)
as the sum of these primary reactions
D + T —> He + n
n + Li —> He + T
[Note: in these (2) primary processes, that the tritium (T) and neutron (n) are canceled out in the overall process. Separately, the (n + Li) process is the tritium is produced industrially on earth, and is tightly controlled on security grounds.]
In this case it appears that Trump is putting his money where his mouth is.
How about this quick math from the the world-nuclear-news.org quoted excerpts stated in the above article:
“. . . an agreement to merge in a transaction valued at more than USD6 billion . . . TAE and Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) shareholders will each own about 50% of the combined company . . . 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.”
So, if I work out the numbers correctly, TMTG pays out up to USD300 million to get 50% ownership of a company not yet formed but stated to be worth USD6,000 million in “transaction value”. WOW . . . a 10:1 return on investment in a tad over six months! Really?
Now, that’s a deal that’s only available to a certain POTUS, and for obvious reasons.
The odds of TAE’s hydrogen-boron fusion approach actually working economically—for the technical reasons clearly stated by Eric in the above article—are somewhere between zero and zilch. But humanity can indeed benefit from this being demonstrated.
Old proverb: “A fool and his money are soon parted.”
Well, Debbie Downer, I mostly agree, but TAE seems to be mostly focused on beams. They are working on their fusion effort by maintaining a boron plasma and injecting neutral hydrogen. (They accelerate protons and run them through electrons one way or another, and then the neutral hydrogen easily enters the magnetically confined boron plasma.) The entering hydrogen is intended to provide the necessary heating and sufficient energy and density. Supposedly, small-scale trials have worked, but at very low efficiency, and scaling will introduce problems.
The idea isn’t to keep the plasma hot enough, but to pulse it up once per second, and draw the electricity off directly with the charged alpha particles (He++). I’m not convinced it will work, and it does have to be B11, and natural boron is 20% B10, which causes problems.
I see room for hope, but it isn’t something I’d sink my own money in.
AFAIK, it is extremely difficult to have protons moving at high (relativistic?) velocity pass through a cloud of electrons with the protons actually capturing any of those electrons in the process.
“. . . hydrogen is present almost entirely in the form of neutral hydrogen (H I) for temperatures below about 7000 K, but above that temperature there is a rapid transition so that above about 10,000 K the hydrogen is present almost completely as ionized hydrogen (H II)”
— http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/OJTA2dev/ojta/c2c/ordinary_stars/harvard/ionization_tl.html
For reference, 7,000 K is about 0.7 eV and 10,000 K is about 1 eV. Even at 1 eV, the injected hydrogen beam would provide an almost insignificant amount of energy to further heat a plasma of already ionized boron atoms.
A question for Jimmy Walter:
If the claims of fusion technologists are honest and accurate concerning just how close power generation sourced from commercial nuclear fusion is to deployment, the fallout is that further pursuit of nuclear fission reactors makes no sense.
Here is my question:
Suppose for purposes of argument that funding became available to develop LPPFusion’s Boron Hydrogen fusion technology on a Manhattan Project scale of effort.
If that level of funding became available, what would be your expected timeline for deployment of the following total volumes of power generation capacity installed worldwide using your Boron Hydrogen fusion technology:
By the Year 20?? — 0.1 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 1 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 10 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 100 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 1,000 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 10,000 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 100,000 total megawatts
By the Year 20?? — 1,000,000 total megawatts
We don’t need A Manhattan Project level of funding to get this to a working prototype. We estimate we need $2 million to get to net energy out of the device in a laboratory. We have never had that at one time, and $600,000 a year for three years does not get you as far as $2 million all at once. To go from there to a prototype ready to roll down an assembly line will take about $200 million. We can still do it by 2030 if we get the money soon.
After that we intend to sell licenses to huge organizations, like the Chinese Electrical Authority, who have the capacity to scale up rapidly. Since we estimate the capital cost to be about 10 cents per installed watt of electric power that’s $100,000 per megawatt. Judging from China’s recent accomplishments, they alone could probably start within a year at an annual output of $1billion or 10 GW. Hard to say the growth rate but I don’t think 100% per year worldwide would be impossible. So maybe 300 GW by 2035, 10 TW by 2040 and 60 TW, replacing oil and gas entirely, by 2045 (and bringing the whole world up to West European living standards). Total cost maybe 6 trillion dollars over 15 years, compared with 5-10 trillion per year for oil and gas right now.
Of course a rapid transition will take a lot of political and economic changes, since the fall in oil and gas prices from the introduction of fusion will bankrupt the entire financial system.
Very good, Jimmy. You have more than covered the ground I wanted to be covered in looking more closely at your plans.
However, ardent skeptic of nuclear fusion that I am, I believe that the process of moving from lab demonstration to a factory-manufactured fusion power generator is fraught with exceptional technical risk, financial risk, and project execution risk.
But, taking a phrase from Donald J. Trump, “We will see what happens.”
As for the future of energy production in general, the role of electricity as a central means of conveying a useful form of energy from where it is produced to where it is consumed will grow at a rapid pace over the next one-hundred years.
That said, the role of liquid carbon fuels, especially diesel, in powering cars, light trucks, and large pieces of mobile equipment such as 18-wheelers and farm equipment of various kinds will remain as important in a hundred years time as it is today.
A hundred years from now, maybe 150 years at the outside, it is more than reasonable to believe that synthetic liquid carbon fuels will be manufactured from huge quantities of CO2 extracted from seawater, using nuclear fission from a mix of uranium, thorium, and plutonium fuels as the base energy source.
Hah!
Here are just a few things that cannot be replaced by electricity generated from nuclear power plants, be they fission-based or fusion-based:
—- significant air transportation of cargo and people
—- the petrochemical-based processes for manufacturing of:
– many industrial feed-stock gases and chemicals
– pharmaceuticals
– fertilizers
– pesticides
– asphalt
– synthetic fibers
– plastics
– elastomers
– epoxy resins
– adhesives
– carbon fibers and nanoparticles
– dyes
– paints and clear coatings
– soaps and detergents
– cosmetics
– explosives.
Could future massive implementation of fusion power plants (now “only 20 years away”, /sarc) lower the future cost of electricity? . . . almost assuredly if they becomes economically competitive with fossil fuel-based power generation.
Will future fusion power plants bankrupt the numerous industries built around the use of fossil “fuels”? . . . ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT!
Private money is invested in both fusion and fission these days.
TAE has as investors Google, Chevron and Charles Schwab. Not Trump Media and Tech. Take a look at TAE’S board of directors. Some heavy hitters.
I we worked on DIIID for 5 years and always thought the program would advance faster if engineers were in charge. Physicist just want to experiment. Engineers want to make it work. Btw, siting starts in 2026. That could take 6 months to a year just figuring out where to build the thing.
Wrt how the e edgy is extracted, I believe it uses induction of some kind.
Hmmmm . . . from that statement, I conclude that nuclear fusion engineers proceed along a serial path, never considering “parallel processing”.
That is, why haven’t the “engineers” (as well as their management) already figured out where to site a demo plant . . . given the engineering considerations of cheap land with readily available water cooling and need for proximity to an existing power plant and grid interface while at the same time being remote from major towns/cities where a new power plant would face NIMBY protests.
Bottom line IMHO: TAE investors are being taken for a ride.
Old adage: “Just because one is rich, it doesn’t mean he/she is smart.”
if they all work, I can’t see how Zap or TAE could compete with Helion economically in the long run, but at least they’d be much closer than ARC
of course any of them may not work 🙂
steady-state magnetic fields are far harder and more expensive to maintain… you need both superconductors and cryo
and that’s the easy part, relative to keeping an FRC stable for commercially relevant time periods
neutral-beam injection is not free either
direct energy recovery in this scheme is going to be very different because there’s no decompression phase
I appreciate Trump’s newfound enthusiasm for FRCs, but this is why I say Helion is probably going to win this race before anyone else even gets off the line… assuming they can get it to work