Development of a fusion power plant that could be commercial viable doesn’t appear to be an easy task for scientists. It’s claimed that existing fuel processing for such plants are complex and were never designed for commercial operation.
Now, a company aims to streamline processing for a consolidated fuel cycle that’s robust, easier to manage, and primed for scaling.
Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based company, is set to design specific membranes to improve the efficiency of fuel recycling in fusion reactors.
Marathon Fusion will optimize the recycling of deuterium and tritium in fusion reactors
The company also received funding from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) under the INFUSE program. In collaboration with the Colorado School of Mines, the company in set to optimize the recycling of deuterium and tritium in fusion reactors.
The company claims that the superpermeable hydrogen pump greatly accelerates tritium processing using plasma technology and separation membranes. “Speed enables the efficient use of scarce isotopes critical to fusion’s viability.”
“The selections today showcase our continuing commitment to the fusion industry in the U.S. and our goal to share widely unique capabilities at national laboratories and U.S. universities,” said Jean Paul Allain, DOE Associate Director of Science for Fusion Energy Sciences.
“Partnering with businesses and working together is a win-win for our fusion industry, the DOE, and the nation.”
A new efficient fuel recycling method could help the United States, which has set a goal of enabling a fusion pilot plant, led by the private sector, on a decadal timescale as the country moves toward a net-zero economy by 2050.
The 17 projects were selected via a competitive peer review process managed by the INFUSE leadership team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
The program solicited proposals from the fusion industry and selected projects for one- or two-year awards, all with budgets ranging between $100,000 and $500,000 each.
The more than $6 billion of cumulative equity investments into private fusion companies, with 80% of these investments into United States fusion companies, is an indication of fusion’s potential upside as a future commercial energy technology. While the shift toward greater private-sector involvement in fusion R&D is seen most dramatically in the United States, it is a strongly growing global trend with equity investments in companies based in Canada, U.K., Japan, E.U., China, and others. Fusion has become a global race.
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ABOUT THE EDITOR
Prabhat Ranjan Mishra Prabhat, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, is a tech and defense journalist. While he enjoys writing on modern weapons and emerging tech, he has also reported on global politics and business. He has been previously associated with well-known media houses, including the International Business Times (Singapore Edition) and ANI.