Private investors are in the game as well, helping fund smaller-scale projects. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is an investor in Tri Alpha Energy, a California developer of plasma fusion technologies that reported a major breakthrough in its research in May, according to Science magazine. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, has invested in General Fusion, a Burnaby, British Columbia, fusion technology company that recently received $21 million for its research in a new funding round.
In addition, a nuclear fusion start-up, Helion Energy in Redmond, Wash., received $10.6 million in a funding round earlier this year, The Seattle Times reported. Helion’s investors reportedly include Mithril Capital, the venture-capital firm of Peter Thiel, PayPal’s cofounder, and Joe Montana, the San Francisco 49ers’ former quarterback and National Football League Hall of Famer, who is now an angel investor.
“I believe the reason for the interest is that governments the world over have committed to ITER, and the ambition and consequent cost of that project has caused the neglect of small, high-risk innovative approaches,” says François Waelbroeck, director of the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas.
The Investment
EMC2 is seeking private investment for a three-year, $30 million commercial research program to prove the polywell can work as a nuclear fusion power generator. “We have had a 20-year involvement by the Navy, and it has been a very productive relationship,” says Park. “We were able to address a lot of basic scientific questions.” He understands that at this point, the company has to give up its government subsidy and seek private funding. “The Navy’s view is that they will provide transitional funds, but it’s time for us to go out on our own,” he says. “In their view, we’re becoming an adult.”
Park hopes to appeal to deep-pocket individual investors, as well as family offices and foundations that are committed to solving the energy problem—“people who look at this as their responsibility and their destiny,” he says. “It’s our generation’s job to solve the energy problem. Whenever we created energy in the past, we created pollution and created problems about sustainability, and we’ve done that for more than 200 years.”
An investment in the program is not for the fainthearted, Park freely admits. “People ask whether there are any applications in the middle [before building a reactor], and there aren’t many,” he says. “So it’s a very high-risk and high-return proposition.”
Investors will have full access to the energy production potential of fusion technology, where the biggest impact of the fusion is expected to be. EMC2 owns 100% of the intellectual property from its research. The Navy has licensing rights for specific applications it orders. EMC2 will keep confidential a small segment of the technology that is unique and critical to the Navy.
Fusion: Are We There Yet?
September 9, 2015
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