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More than 30 groups are now pursuing the development of fusion energy around the world, and approaches vary widely—from style of reactor configuration to the type of fuel the future reactors will rely on. Since TAE’s founding in 1998, the company has built five National Laboratory-scale devices and has successfully generated and confined fusion plasma more than 140,000 times.

TAE is currently building and designing two more machines, Copernicus and Da Vinci, which will be able to demonstrate net energy and deliver power to the grid, respectively.

Inventing fusion reactors that produce net energy is one thing, delivering it as a reliable, grid-ready source of electricity is another. By choosing to pursue hydrogen-boron as a fuel cycle, TAE has anticipated the true demands of commercial, daily use of fusion energy. Most fusion efforts around the world are focused on combining hydrogen isotopes deuterium-tritium (D-T) to use as fuel, and the donut-shaped tokamak machines commonly used in fusion concepts are limited to D-T fuel.

Unlike those efforts, TAE’s compact linear design uses an advanced accelerator beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC) that is versatile, and can accommodate all available fusion fuel cycles, including p-B¹¹, D-T and deuterium-helium-3 (D-He³ or D³He). This benefit will uniquely enable TAE to license its technology on the way to its ultimate goal of connecting the first hydrogen-boron fusion power plant to the grid in the 2030s.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2023-02-hydrogen-boron-fusion-magnetically-confined-plasma.html