“It’s a question I don’t get often,” said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies, when asked about the economics of his company’s design. Rather, people are wondering how he plans to get plasma into his reactor heated to 1 billion degrees Celsius, compared to the 75 million the company has demonstrated so far. But the questions are intertwined, he says.
That extreme temperature is necessary because TAE uses boron as a fuel, in addition to hydrogen, which Binderbauer says will ultimately simplify the fusion reactor and result in a power plant that is cheaper to build. He puts the cost somewhere between nuclear fission and renewable energy — about where the Princeton modelers say it should be. He points out that while fusion power plants will be expensive to build, the fuel will be extremely cheap. In addition, a lower risk of accidents and less high-level radioactive waste should mean a reprieve from costly regulations that have driven up costs for fission power plants.
Bob Mumgaard, the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff, says he was happy modeling Princeton because he thinks their tokamak can break through those cost constraints. That claim rests primarily on a superpowered magnet that the company hopes can make tokamaks — and therefore power plants — work on a smaller scale, saving money. CFS is building a scaled-down prototype of its Massachusetts fusion design that will include most of the components needed for a working plant. “You can actually go and see it and touch it and look at the machines,” he says.
Nicholas Hawker, CEO of First Light Fusion, an inertial fusion company, published his own economic analysis for fusion power in 2020 and was surprised to find that the biggest cost drivers were not in the fusion chamber and unusual materials, but in the capacitors and turbines that every power plant needs.
Still, Hawker expects a slower run-up than some of his colleagues. “The first factories are constantly breaking down,” he says, and the industry will need significant government support, just as the solar energy industry has done for the past two decades. That’s why he thinks it’s a good thing that many governments and companies are trying different approaches: it increases the chance that some technologies will survive.
Schwartz agrees. “It would be weird if the universe only allowed one form of fusion energy,” he says. That diversity is important, he says, because otherwise the industry risks figuring out the science and pushing itself back into an uneconomical corner. Both nuclear fission and solar panels have gone through similar periods of experimentation earlier in their technological trajectory. Over time, both converged into one design – photovoltaic cells and huge pressurized water reactors that can be seen all over the world – which were built all over the world.
For fusion, however, first: the science. It may not work quickly. Maybe it will take another 30 years. But Ward, despite his caution about the limits of fusion on the grid, still thinks the research is already paying for itself and generating new advances in basic science and in the creation of new materials. “I still think it’s totally worth it,” he says.
Updated 11/4/2023, 1:10 PM EDT: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to TAE’s reactor design as a tokamak.
