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Fusiontech is the name we could give to all public and private activities aimed at developing technologies for the realization of nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of research, it is the potential solution to energy problems and environmental protection, it is the principle on which our sun is based and which, if reproduced, could generate virtually infinite energy without the production of waste: neither in the form of emissions, nor in the form of waste as happens with nuclear fission. As was the case with spacetech where technologies, innovation, startups and even large companies have all contributed to the creation and development of an entire industrial sector that has kicked off a new phase in space exploration, opening the doors to industries, universities, large and small organizations and a new strand of innovation, Fusiontech also promises to develop in this regard. It is therefore a new opportunity that is starting to show interest not only from large organizations supported by governments and supra-governmental entities, but also from entrepreneurs, private investors, research centers. Let’s start with the more ‘institutional’ projects and let’s start with the Italian project DTT, an acronym that stands for Divertor Tokamak Test, which is an experimental site under construction in Frascati at the ENEA research center, in which the following are participating: ENEA, CREATE, Eni, RFX, INFN, University of Tuscia, University of Milan Bicocca, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Polytechnic University of Turin, University of Tuscia, University of Milan Bicocca, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Polytechnic University of Turin, University of Turin, University of CNR, CETMA. The other major project supported by governments and research institutions is ITER, the installation that in the plans must lead us to demonstrate that it is possible to produce energy with nuclear fusion in an optimal way and therefore in a greater quantity than the energy needed to operate the plant. ITER is under construction in the French town of Saint Paul-lez-Durance (about seventy kilometers north of Marseille) and the countries of the European Union, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, India and the United States participate in its realization, it is therefore a global project of such great importance on which not even the current geopolitical scenarios have had great effects in terms of progress and collaboration process. In the case of ITER , as well as the DTT project, a tokamak is also under construction.
Startups
Here it is worth adding a mention of the tokamak which then allows us to start introducing the startups involved in fusiontech as well. The tokamak, a term of Russian origin, is one of the systems that allows to contain the high temperatures that the plasma reaches, in practice to contain the small artificial sun, which can only be done using very powerful magnetic fields. the other is the stellarator we wrote about when talking about the startup Proxima Fusion. It is an initiative born as a spin-out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, is based in Munich and is led by the Italian Francesco Sciortino. The startup also announced in November that it had extended its investment round that was initially announced the previous May. Another relevant startup that is developing a platform for the production of nuclear fusion energy, which in this case is called SPARC , is Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) which, also in this case, was born from a research laboratory that is the Plasma Science and Fusion Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We mentioned CFS as early as October 2021 because the startup had recently announced that it had developed an innovative and very effective semiconductor for the realization of magnetic fields while reducing energy consumption. As we have seen, the relationship between the energy needed by the system and its ability to produce energy is the pivotal point around which the success or failure of the project revolves, it is easy to understand that if it is necessary to consume more energy than is produced, the project is not sustainable and therefore it is necessary to develop a technology that allows this relationship to be reversed and, over time, make it more and more positive in favor of the energy produced. Numerous startups deal with fusiontech innovation, among them we can also mention the American Helion and the Italian Deutelio . The first is working on a device called Polaris and among its investors there is also Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the second is based in Gavirate (Varese) and is working on a system known as Polomac configuration. Last July Sifted had also made a photograph of European startups engaged in the development of nuclear fusion where in addition to Deutelio and Proxima Fusion he mentions the British First Light Fusion, Tokamak Energy, Crossfield Fusion, the French Reinassance Fusion, the German Marvel Fusion, Focused Energy, Gauss Fusion, and the Swedish Novatron Fusion. In June 2023, Dealroom also carried out an analysis of the scenario of startups engaged in fusiontech, counting 33 globally (in this article, startups and companies working on nuclear fusion are mentioned, so those engaged in the new generation of nuclear fission reactors such as the Italian-British Newcleo or the US TerraPower are excluded).
Investments
However, it is the Fusion Industry Association, the international association founded in 2018 based in Washington DC that represents companies in the nuclear fusion industry, to offer the most complete picture of the scenario with its report entitled The global fusion industry in 2023 in which it analyzes the companies and investors active in this particular sector that has raised total investments of $6.2 billion of which most, $5.9 billion, is privately sourced and only just over $270 million is publicly sourced, with a growth of $1.4 billion compared to the funds already raised at the end of 2022. The year also saw the advent of 13 new companies that raised funds and three mergers between companies in the sector. CFS is the company that has raised the most funds to date with a total of over $2 billion, followed by TAE Technologies, ENN, General Fusion, Helion, Tokamak Energy, Shine Technologies and Zap Energy. Geographically, the majority of companies are based in the USA (25) followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan with three each, China with two, and one each in Canada, Sweden, France, Italy, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. Most of these companies work to develop systems capable of providing electricity but there are also those engaged in the development of systems for space propulsion, marine propulsion, medical devices, industrial heating. However, all these companies seem to agree that the first nuclear fusion plants capable of producing energy that can be made available to everyone for consumption will not be active before the period between 2030 and 2035, few are more optimistic talking about 2025-2030, while some believe that more time is needed, at least until 2040. (Photo by Braňo on Unsplash)
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