Bill Gates and other investors pump $29 million into a 'twisty' nuclear reactor

Type One and its scientific collaborators @MIT-PSFC, @UWMadison & @CFS_energy built the world’s first high-temp superconducting cable for stellarator magnets. The new design stayed superconducting despite the complex geometry. A complete HTS stellarator magnet is now being built. pic.twitter.com/TWpGYEPQwh

— Type One Energy (@typeoneenergy) June 28, 2021

Christofer Mowry, the former CEO of General Fusion and senior adviser on fusion at BEV, will join Type One Energy as CEO. “Type One Energy represents a special opportunity. This team’s knowledge and credibility give Type One the unique ability to integrate recent global advances in stellarator-relevant technology and to deliver a fusion power plant without another costly, large-scale science validation machine.”

Stellarator fusion devices are stable and work steadily, making it easier to use them in a real-world fusion power plant. The billion-dollar Wendelstein 7-X reactor, which began operation in Germany in 2015, is currently the world’s largest experimental fusion device of the stellarator type.

Carmichael Roberts, who co-leads BEV’s investment committee, said that Type One’s Advances in stellarator science, including Type One Energy’s ability to execute a stellarator development project, provide the basis for a very exciting and promising path to practical fusion on the grid in the coming decades.”

The money will be used to build a "Risk Reduction Platform" for the stellarator over the next few years. This platform will be low-cost but have a high level of performance. It will be used to test several engineering design choices made by FFP and confirm the accuracy of its stellarator plasma physics models and simulations. The company has not specified a target date for commercialization other than to say that its FusionDirect timeline for developing a viable Fusion Power Plant, or FPP, will unfold over the coming decade.