NEW YORK. – While tokamaks are seen by many (including the U.S. Department of Energy) as the leading concept of commercial fusion, stellarators are a bit of an underdog. But they have a few benefits over their popular competitor. Now, stellarators are entering the commercial realm as fusion company Type One Energy—which combines expertise from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and MIT—received $29 million to bring its stellarator technology out of the lab and into reality.
“Fusion is the ultimate energy source, and its successful commercialization will be a huge leap towards achieving clean and abundant energy for everyone,” Carmichael Roberts, from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, says in a press release. “Advances in stellarator science, including Type One Energy’s ability to execute a stellarator development project, provide the basis for a very exciting and promising path to practical fusion on the grid in the coming decades.”
Stellarators can be described as cousins of tokamaks, with one key difference. Tokamaks—like the upcoming ITER, for example—use superconducting coils and a central solenoid, while also running an electric current through the plasma itself. Stellarators, on the other hand, do away with a plasma-based current, and instead use a series of twisting superconducting magnets to control the plasma.
Because this twisting configuration is so complicated to build, there are six times more tokamak reactors than stellarators. However, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stellarators like the Wendelstein 7-X in Germany are better at containing plasma, whereas tokamaks excel at keeping plasma hot.
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