Inside what’s called the amplifier bay of the Texas Petawatt Laser, where the energy of a laser pulse is boosted. The green light are the pump lasers that amplify or boost the energy of the main laser.
Photo courtesy Todd Ditmire
As the effects of climate change become more obvious, the promise of nuclear fusion — a virtually unlimited source of carbon-free energy — is getting a new wave of attention. The field has drawn almost $5 billion in funding, with recent interest off the charts.
One of the newest efforts to commercialize fusion comes from startup Focused Energy, founded by a pair of physics professors with expertise in extremely high-powered lasers. The startup launched last summer and has collected a strong bench of veterans, including Prav Patel, who spent 23 years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and two other scientists who also worked there, Todd Ditmire and Markus Roth.
Now the startup has scored $15 million in early-stage funding from the venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab, plus Marc Lore (who sold e-commerce companies Diapers.com and Jet.com to Amazon and Walmart respectively), tech investor Tony Florence, and the former Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez.
Unlike nuclear fission, which powers all the commercial nuclear reactors in the world today, fusion does not generate long-lasting nuclear waste. But it requires a sustained reaction at extremely high temperatures, and despite decades of effort, nobody has yet figured out how to turn into a commercially viable energy source.
There are two religions in the race to commercialize fusion: magnetic confinement fusion, which uses ultra strong magnets and a round device called a tokamak, and inertial confinement energy, which typically uses lasers. Prime Movers Lab has invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Boston-based fusion company spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as its best bet for magnetic confinement fusion. Focused Energy is its top pick for the “breakout” laser driven approach, according to partner Carly Anderson.
Prav Patel (L) and Todd Ditmire, two of the leading scientists at Focused Energy.
Photo courtesy Focused Energy
Even so, attempting to contain the same energy source that powers the sun will require a lot of research and effort.
“Focused Energy is capitalizing on over 70 years of government research into fusion,” Matthew Moynihan, a nuclear fusion consultant, told CNBC. “They have a credible team and a good plan, but they have hard challenges ahead.”
Insanely powerful lasers
Ditmire worked at Livermore for three years, where he worked on the very first ultra-powerful petawatt laser and met Roth. In 2000, Ditmire joined University of Texas in where he built the Texas Petawatt Laser. Its power is hard to conceptualize.
“The U.S. electrical grid produces about a half a trillion watts of power. So that’s a half a terawatt,” Dimitre explained in a conversation in June. “A petawatt is 1,000 trillion watts. So a petawatt laser has the same power…
Read More: Fusion industry veterans bet on insanely strong lasers