Fusion startup NT-Tao raises 22 million

Fusion fever is on the rise. Israel-based merger startup NT-Tao has raised 22 million euros from venture capitalists after reaching extremely high density.

Why is there still no nuclear fusion?

In nuclear fusion, two positively charged atomic nuclei fuse together. It is a battle between two forces of nature: the repulsive electromagnetic force here, and the attractive strong nuclear force that acts at very short distances.

Nuclear fusion can be compared to trying to get sticky billiard balls that repel each other to stick together. Is the speed even 0.5 percent too slow, or too high, or are the balls not hitting each other at exactly the right angle? Then they bounce off. This is very difficult to achieve. That’s a good thing, otherwise the sun would explode.

What is NT-Tao’s strategy?

In order for nuclear fusion to take place, the atomic nuclei must hit each other at exactly the right speed. This is very tricky, so the most successful fusion reactors use an extremely hot plasma.

In this soup of atomic nuclei and electrons, so many atomic nuclei collide that more energy is released per second than is lost and the fusion reaction is maintained. To date, nowhere has this been achieved for more than a fraction of a second, such as in a hydrogen bomb or in the huge laser of the NIF in California. NT-Tao has also built a kind of tokamak, but with a plasma that is (according to them) 1000 times as dense.

1000 times denser plasma in NT-Tao

In theory, that would result in 1,000,000 times as many successful collisions, making it much easier to reach the point where more energy is released than is put in. Their experimental reactor has a much smaller scale than ITER, a monstrously large and expensive thing that is now being built, for example in Cadarache in France.

Compact and inexpensive design

So if their claims are true, and they do manage to get this reactor working, that would be spectacular news. We could then produce abundant energy cheaply anywhere in the world in a small, compact reactor. Then we no longer need to bother with solar farms and wind turbines, but we will have abundant clean energy on demand.

Few technical details known

Unfortunately, the inventors say little about the exact technology, other than that it “combines the best elements of the stellarator and the tokamak”. And since large claims often occur in the merger world, it is wise not to put put options on oil and gas shares for the time being. Although it is encouraging that many startups, including Helion, are now working on nuclear fusion.