Nuclear fusion: Nobel Prize in Physics founds start-ups to achieve laser fusion
A new US startup led by a Nobel Prize-winning electrical engineer aims to build a nuclear fusion reactor around 2030, making it the latest company looking to harness the power of the stars.
Shuji Nakamura , a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was one of three winners of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the blue light-emitting diode.
Now, Nakamura aims to use powerful beams of light to fuse atoms to produce energy. The Japanese-born American engineer founded his third company, Blue Laser Fusion, in November and serves as the CEO.
Hiroaki Ohta, former president of Tokyo-based drone maker ACSL, is co-founder and head of technology.
Using proprietary technology, Blue Laser Fusion is working on machinery that can continuously emit high-power laser light in an effort to solve one of nuclear fusion's major challenges: sustaining the fusion reaction continuously.
To ignite nuclear fusion, the fuel must be heated to more than 100 million C to reach a plasma state. The search for fusion energy has taken two main paths: the laser method and magnetic confinement.
Blue Laser Fusion has raised $25 million from venture capital firm JAFCO Group and the Mirai Creation Fund, which is backed by Toyota Motor and other investors and managed by the SPARX Group. It aims to secure additional funding from US investors.
Blue Laser Fusion filed more than a dozen patent applications in the United States and other countries in the first six months of its existence.
Nakamura said he has dreamed of working on nuclear fusion since he was a student.
“Our goal is to commercialize fusion energy with a highly safe method that can be tested repeatedly, using our knowledge of semiconductor lasers,” Nakamura told Nikkei. “We want to help solve the world's energy problems.”
His company will work with Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions, a supplier of turbines for nuclear power plants, and YUKI Holdings, a Tokyo-based precision metalworking company.
The goal is to have a reactor capable of generating 1 gigawatt of electricity, roughly equivalent to an atomic splitting reactor, operating in Japan or the United States by 2030. The partners will seek to build a small-scale experimental facility in Japan by the end of 2024.
Blue Laser Fusion declined to reveal details of its technology because it has a pending patent, but Nakamura said it was theoretically possible to build powerful, rapidly firing lasers. It also appears that the company wants to devote itself to fusion without neutron emissions. As it turns out the interest would be on the reaction with boron, in which a proton hits a boron atom obtaining three helium atoms.
According to a July report from the US-based Fusion Industry Association, 43 companies worldwide are working on fusion energy, up 10 from a year earlier. Total fundraising related to the merger exceeded $6 billion.
In the field of magnetic confinement, Japan's Kyoto Fusioneering said in May it raised 10.5 billion yen ($74 million) from investors including Japanese trading house Mitsubishi Corp. in its latest fundraising round. EX-Fusion, an Osaka University company experimenting with the laser method, announced in July that it had raised 1.8 billion yen.
Of the two main fusion methods, magnetic confinement was seen as the more promising and involves more companies.
The problem with the laser method is that large equipment is not capable of firing beams continuously, and therefore of proceeding with a prolonged fusion that can sustain an energetically and economically viable process. Nakamura really wants to overcome this limit, after the Livermore lab has achieved a laser fusion.
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The article Nuclear fusion: Nobel Prize in Physics founds start-ups to achieve laser fusion comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/fusione-nucleare-premio-nobel-per-la-fisica-fonda-start-up-per-ottenere-la-fusione-tramite-laser/ on Sun, 23 Jul 2023 10:44:04 +0000.