Since government experiments in 2022 proved that nuclear fusion is not as unrealistic as once thought, physicists, engineers and investors have become increasingly optimistic that fusion technology has the ability to deliver on its long-held (and often postponed) promise of providing nearly unlimited, emissions-free electricity.
No company is more reflective of that enthusiasm than Type One Energy, which today announced a new round of funding of $53.5 million. The company had raised $29 million in 2023, and the extension brings its total to about $82.5 million. The extension was led by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with participation from Australia-based Foxglove Ventures and New Zealand-based GD1.
The company is betting that relying heavily on partners will allow it to bring fusion technology to market quickly, CEO Christopher Mowry told TechCrunch. The goal is to have the reactor design finalized by the end of the decade so that third parties can begin construction.
“Given the rate at which we wanted to accelerate, we needed more capital,” Mowry said. “A typical $20 million, $30 million, $40 million seed round wasn't going to get us there.”
Another goal of the funding round, Mowry said, was to attract partners familiar with Southeast Asia, where most of the world's population lives. “In the last five years, China has built more coal-fired power plants than the total number of coal-fired power plants in North America. If they can't figure out how to decarbonize this region, they might as well pack up their tents and go home,” he said.
Type 1 reactors are called stellarators, and they're a twist on the more common tokamak design. While a tokamak resembles a doughnut, a stellarator is sometimes called a cronut – it's circular, but distorted and bulging. The physical shape of a stellarator is determined by magnets that create a specially shaped magnetic field that confines the super-hot plasma needed for the fusion reaction. In the magnetic field, the hydrogen atoms of the plasma collide and fuse, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process.
Diagram of Type One Energy's stellarator design. Image courtesy of Type One Energy
The concept of a stellarator is not new, but tweaking the design to make it work requires a huge amount of computing power. Currently, the world's largest stellarator is in Germany and can run continuously for many minutes. Another operates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from which Type One was spun out.
These projects convinced Mowry that stellarators' time had come, and he joined Type One at the start of 2023. But there was still work to be done: A German stellarator known as Wendelstein 7-X was a good start, but “to make it into a power plant you would need to make it uneconomically large, probably four times as big as it is now,” Mowry said.
Fortunately, Wendelstein 7-X was designed over 30 years ago. Computing has come a long way since then. For example, Type One now has access to Summit, an exascale supercomputer with which the company is partnered, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Summit can perform 250 million times more calculations per second than supercomputers built in the early 1980s when Wendelstein 7-X was originally designed.
The summit “gives us more control over the design,” Mowry said.
For the reactor's magnets, Type One uses a design licensed from MIT, the same one used by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Inc. Type One has improved the cables that make up the magnets to accommodate the twists and bends of the stellarator.
Next year, the startup hopes to finalize its core reactor design. It will then begin construction of a prototype reactor, called Infinity One, in parallel with the pilot reactor design process. Once the pilot design is complete, which it hopes to have completed by 2030, it plans to license it to another company to build it.
“As Infinity One goes live and undergoes testing, it will really validate key design aspects of the pilot plant,” Mowry says. The goal is not just to prove it works, but to validate the assembly and maintenance of the machine.
“If you build a fusion device, whether it's a stellarator device or any other kind of device, and it takes two years to shut it down, maintain it and restart it, you just can't sell it,” he said.