No man is an island, and the same goes for commercial fusion developers. Turns out there’s no need to go it alone.
This week, Type One Energy, an Oak Ridge, TN-based stellarator developer, announced that it secured an exclusive license from leading tokamak fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). Type One will use the latter’s high-temperature superconducting magnet cable technology, VIPER, in its plant design.
“We are immensely confident that our approach using tokamaks will be the first one to actually show a device and to show net energy gain and build our first power plant,” Rick Needham, chief commercial officer at CFS, told Ignition. “But there are a lot of other approaches, and we like to think that if we can help some of those other shots on goal, then we have the unique capability to do that.”
Twist and shout: CFS has made strides in developing and manufacturing high-temperature superconducting magnets for SPARC, its first tokamak project, currently under construction in Massachusetts. But those powerful magnets could also be used elsewhere.
Stellarators, like the one Type One Energy is developing, are a type of magnetic confinement with a twisted shape that inherently reduces plasma instabilities but presents additional manufacturing challenges. Each magnet needs to be shaped a little differently.
“Right now we’re taking cables and we’re basically putting them in coils and then stacking those together. Those are the form of our central solenoid magnet and our poloidal field magnet,” Needham said. “Here is just a matter of, okay, we’ll take those cables and we’ll kind of bend and twist them into different shapes in order to meet the geometrical requirements of the magnets that Type One Energy might use. So it is different, but…the underlying component is still the same.”
Type One Energy will incorporate the cable tech into its stellarator design and do the modeling for how each magnet needs to be shaped and formed in-house. Then, CFS will take the reins on manufacturing and delivering those wonky-shaped magnets.
- CFS already has much of the manufacturing infrastructure for building those cables, per Needham, but other machinery may be needed to finish the job of individually shaping each magnet.
- The question of who might foot the bill for infrastructure additions is still TBD.
One on one: Under the deal with Type One Energy, CFS has agreed not to sell its VIPER tech for use in other stellarators, but that doesn’t mean the market is closed.
- The company delivered a magnet to the University of Wisconsin last year.
- Needham said there’s “ample opportunity” to work with other areas of the fusion sector and beyond, potentially generating revenue for the company in the years leading up to SPARC.
“Some of the capabilities that we’ve developed with respect to designing, manufacturing, building, testing these very strong magnets can be quite relevant, not just for other fusion applications, but also other applications as well,” Needham said.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
