As part of the merger announcement, TAE announced plans to begin in 2026 construction on a fusion power plant that will actually produce electricity for the grid by 2031. Is this possible? For context, TAE has now become the fourth fusion company to claim that they have begun construction on an operating power plant—so have CMS, Helion and Helical Fusion in Japan.
In our view, none of these claims are at all credible. The problem is not the near-term goal of getting electricity by 2031. Lots of fusion companies, including ours, are aiming for similar goals. The problem is that none of these four companies have completed the scientific research needed to design a fusion generator. So, none of them can start construction of something they have not and can’t design right now.
How do we know they have not completed scientific research? The universally-acknowledged goal of the research phase of fusion energy is to achieve net energy in the laboratory—more energy out of a device than is put into it. That shows that electricity production is possible in a commercial generator designed on the basis of the net energy lab experiments. None of the four companies have reached net energy, none are close to reaching it and, in fact, none are anywhere near as close as LPPFusion is.
Let’s take TAE. We can’t compare how much fusion they’ve produced with energy input because they are using pure hydrogen, not any fusion fuels, so they are not getting any fusion at all. Also, they don’t release how much energy they put into their machine. (From their papers, the input energy must be more than 10 times as much as the input into LPPFusion’s FF-2B device) However, comparisons can still be made since we all agree that net energy requires a combination of high temperature, high density and adequate confinement time. TAE has released those figures.
Compared with our best results, TAE’s are comparable for the product of density and confinement time, called nt. They have 60 billion seconds x particle/cm3 and we have 90 billion seconds x particle/cm3. But they achieved that with a temperature of 1 keV (11 million K) and we got 250 KeV (2.8 billion K), or 250 times better.
To get to net energy we both have to increase nt to around 2 quadrillion seconds x particle/cm3, so for TAE that’s a factor of 3,000 on top of the 250 times increase in temperature. That’s not even close. To put it another way, TAE’s Norm machine, their latest, uses a current of 300kA to confine the plasma. For a net energy machine, they would need abut 3,000 times more or 1GA–a billion amps.
It’s not possible to expect extrapolation over so many orders of magnitude to be accurate. Far more experiments and improvements are needed before any confident prediction of breakeven.
And that’s what TAE had planned. They were going to build another bigger experimental device called Copernicus before they designed and built a power generator, which they called DaVinci in the plans. But with the merger announcement, all of a sudden Copernicus has disappeared and they are starting to build DaVinci right away.
On top of that, they are substantially altering the design of the machine—the one they call Norm is the first and only one of the new design that they’ve built.
So if, as is now planned, they are going to start building a power generator, the chance that they will make major mistakes in design is practically 100%. Instead of speeding the path to fusion, they’ll slow their progress by wasting money and time on engineering dead ends. It’s sort of as if some company in 1900 had said, ”Never mind about the control of heavier-than-air craft. We know the science and we are building a jetliner that will take 200 people across the Atlantic.”
To be fair, this is not exactly the first time that fusion management (and, more rarely, fusion scientists) have said that ”the science is done”. That was said 50 years ago, too, when the decision was made to focus on the tokamak and DT fuel. The motivation was the same—to reassure potential funders. But it was not true then and is not true now. We’ll know the science is done when some group demonstrates net energy. Then the design of a power generator can start.
In the meantime, if you want to invest in a “pure fusion” play, if you want to invest in the company that is leading in peer-reviewed published lab results—well, you’ve come to the right place!
Part of the energy storage for TAE’s Norm device. Despite having at least ten times the energy input as LPPFusion’s FF-2B device, TAE’s achieves 100 times lower temperature.