TAE Technologies Delivers Fusion Breakthrough that Dramatically Reduces Cost of a Future Power Plant

­TAE Technologies, a private fusion energy company developing the cleanest and safest approach to commercial fusion power, has achieved a first-of-its-kind breakthrough that fundamentally advances the performance, practicality and reactor-readiness of the company's proprietary fusion technology.

Experimental results prove TAE has invented a streamlined approach to form and optimize plasma that increases efficiency, significantly reduces complexity and cost, and accelerates the company's path to net energy and commercial fusion power.

Delivering commercial fusion hinges on the ability to generate a plasma (the superheated fourth state of matter) at extraordinarily high temperatures and then confine the energy for extended periods of time. One way to do this is with the Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC), a magnetic confinement technique that forms the basis of TAE's fusion technology.

Fundamental advantages of the FRC:

• An FRC plasma self-organizes and creates its own magnetic field inside the machine. This critically reduces the amount of external magnets required for confinement, while also making the device substantially more power efficient to operate.
• An FRC-based machine can achieve up to 100x more fusion power output as a typical tokamak of the same magnetic field strength and plasma volume.
• In addition to the FRC's self-confining properties, this approach lends itself to a simpler, linear fusion machine that is much less complicated to construct, less costly to build and run, and easier to maintain.
• An FRC's low interior magnetic field increases the viability of hydrogen-boron (p-B11) fuel, which is TAE's preferred fuel source for commercial fusion because it is the cleanest, safest and most sustainable option for the planet.

Despite those benefits, the FRC has been historically difficult to scale for commercial purposes because of plasma instabilities and complex and costly plasma formation. TAE has designed, built and deployed technologies that directly solve these FRC challenges, resulting in an advanced, beam-driven evolution of the FRC that unlocks the known but previously unrealized potential of this reactor topology. 

TAE's advanced particle accelerator technology, together with proprietary power supplies and real-time active feedback controls, suppresses FRC plasma instabilities to produce stable, fusion-relevant plasmas in steady-state operations – a set of milestones first achieved in prior prototypes. 

Now TAE has unveiled a machine reconfiguration that further leverages its advanced particle accelerator technology and neutral particle beams to streamline traditional FRC plasma formation. As described in Nature Communications, TAE's new machine uses only neutral beam injection (NBI) to produce a hot, stable FRC plasma – reducing the machine's size, complexity and cost by up to 50% and optimizing for economic competitiveness and commercial viability.

Where an FRC machine once needed intricate plasma formation sections (lengthy quartz tubes on either end of the device) and supersonic collisions to produce an FRC plasma, TAE's innovative NBI-only breakthrough creates, heats and stabilizes an FRC plasma directly in the center of the machine.

This machine, called Norm, in a nod to its significantly shorter length compared to its predecessor, Norman, routinely achieves TAE's highest steady-state plasma performance, and has validated operating modes and components to be used on the company's next-generation reactor prototype, Copernicus. Copernicus is expected to demonstrate the viability of net energy generation using TAE's advanced beam-driven FRC approach before the end of the decade, followed by Da Vinci, TAE's first prototype power plant, in the early 2030s.

"The NBI-only approach was previously attempted in many experiments going back decades, but it was unsuccessful. It is TAE's critical innovations in neutral beams, power supplies and real-time active feedback control that have paved the way for this breakthrough," says TAE Chief Science Officer Toshiki Tajima. "We have now demonstrated that NBI-only FRC formation not only reduces system complexity and cost but also improves plasma stability and overall machine performance."

"With Norm, we have mastered the remaining complexities of the FRC, and through its successful operation, TAE has materially de-risked Copernicus," says TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer. "The NBI-only achievement is an inflection point for TAE's fusion R&D, charting a path for streamlined devices that directly addresses the commercially critical metrics of cost, efficiency and reliability. This milestone significantly accelerates TAE's path to commercial hydrogen-boron fusion that will deliver a safe, clean and virtually limitless energy source for generations to come."