Google, Chevron invest in unified startup TAE Technologies

Google and Chevron as part of a $250 million funding round announced Tuesday for TAE technologya nuclear fusion startup with a unique strategy.

Nuclear fusion is often referred to as the “holy grail” of clean energy because it would be a way to generate virtually unlimited non-radiative energy, without creating the long-term radioactive waste that the process would otherwise require. produced by nuclear fission.

Nuclear fission is the way conventional nuclear power plants generate energy and involves splitting a larger atom into two smaller atoms, thereby releasing energy. Nuclear fusion is the reverse process, when two larger atoms collide to form a larger atom, thereby releasing energy. Fusion is the elemental process that powers stars and the sun, but has proven very difficult to sustain in a controlled reaction on Earth, despite decades of effort.

Jim Gable, president of Chevron Technology Joint Ventureventure capital arm of the energy company, in a announced the announcement of the funding round on Tuesday.

Google, the search giant owned by parent company Alphabet, has cooperated with TAE since 2014, which provides the startup with a fusion of artificial intelligence and computing power. But Tuesday marks Google’s first cash investment in TAE.

A Japanese investment company, Sumitomo Corporation of Americaalso participated in this round and will help TAE bring its fusion technology to the Asia-Pacific region.

The investment follows an announcement in October that TAE partnered with Japan’s National Institute of Integrative Sciences. Japan currently uses most of its energy from coal, oil and natural gas, according to International Energy Association. Its geographical location makes its clean energy goals particularly difficult.

“Unlike many other countries, Japan does not have abundant renewable energy resources, and its high population density, mountainous terrain and steep coastline are serious barriers to capital expansion. yes, especially since much of its flat land is already very heavy covered with solar panels,” Fatih Birol, executive director at international industry organization, International Energy Agencywrote about the country’s energy landscape in 2021. That means Japan needs to focus on energy efficiency and nuclear power, among other sources, Birol said.

Also on Tuesday, TAE announced a technical milestone: It achieved temperatures greater than 75 million degrees Celsius with its current fusion reactor machine, nicknamed Norman. (A photo essay on how Norman works can be found.) here.)

The money TAE announced Tuesday will go towards building the next-generation fusion machine, which it will call Copernicus and it says will be completed by 2025. TAE was founded in 1998 and aims to The goal is to have a commercial-scale fusion reactor powering the grid by the early 2030s.

The most popular machine being built to achieve fusion on earth is the tokamak, which is a donut-shaped device and a method being developed at ITERA multi-national cooperation project is being built in France and pictured below:

TAE instead uses a linear machine, a long thin structure known as a beam-directed field inversion configuration.

Plasma – the most energetic state of matter, other than gas – is generated at both ends of the TAE fusion machine and then fired towards the middle, where the plasmas collide and trigger a fusion reaction.

Another key differentiator of TAE’s fusion method is the fuel it uses. The most common fuel sources for fusion are with deuterium and tritium, both of which are hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Deuterium occurs naturally but must be made of tritium. (A team at the Idaho National Laboratory is working on tritium supply chain.)

But TAE’s fusion process uses hydrogen-boron (also known as proton-bo or p-B11) as fuel. Hydro-bo does not need to have a tritium processing supply chain, TAE counts as a benefit. However, the challenge is that the source of hydrogen-boron fuel requires much higher temperature than a deuterium-tritium fuel source.

“Proton-boron11 fusion is actually much harder than deuterium-tritium fusion for a number of reasons” Nat Fischa professor of astrophysics science at Princeton University, told CNBC. Because the fuel is so small, it must be restrained longer for fusion to begin. “At the same time, the temperature required to reach this smaller cross section is much larger,” Fisch told CNBC. This means it takes a lot of energy to ignite the fusion reaction and keep it, and the plasma where the reaction is happening, in place without contaminating the reaction.

“To sum it up, this is a really, really hard problem – and it requires a very new method of learning. But the TAE team is really smart and moves really fast, so if anyone is going to solve it In this regard, the TAE team would be very good, says Fisch.