Realta Fusion
Fusion power is often said to harness the power of the sun, so why are we just trying to make electricity with it?
That’s essentially what the co-founders at Realta Fusion were thinking when they formed the company to transform an experimental reactor design into a power source that wouldn’t just provide electricity, but also heat. Industrial heat alone represents nearly 10% of carbon pollution in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy.
Fusion, unlike some other decarbonized power sources, works best when it’s run 24-7, a set that jibes with many users of industrial-strength heat like chemical refining or metal smelting. “They’re not going to be saying, ‘Yeah, sure, shut our plant down whenever we don’t have power,’” Realta co-founder and CEO Kieran Furlong told TechCrunch+.
While there aren’t many solutions yet, those same industries are under pressure from investors and customers to remove carbon from their operations. While commercial fusion power is probably a decade away at best, its timeline isn’t too different from other candidates like hydrogen that are looking to replace fossil fuels as sources of industrial heat.
Realta is looking to ignite the plasma in its industrial-scale demo plant in the early 2030s, but to get there, it first has to design a smaller prototype plant that builds on work done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To realize those plans, the startup has raised a $9 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures alongside a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, both of which were announced Wednesday.
The company’s reactor design will be based on the Wisconsin High-field Axisymmetric Mirror, which confines plasma into a cylindrical shape using two magnetic “mirrors” at either end. The basic design was proposed in the 1950s, but research on the concept stalled as government funding dried up in the Reagan era, Furlong said. Faced with limited budgets, fusion researchers focused their efforts on tokamak designs, which corral plasma into a doughnut shape.
In recent years, though, there has been an explosion in interest around non-tokamak designs. Part of that is due to increases in computing power, which have allowed plasma physicists to more accurately predict how plasma will behave under a wider variety of conditions. Another driver has been the advent of mass manufacturing of high-temperature superconducting materials, which more efficiently produce the powerful magnetic fields required to confine the plasma.
Proliferation of Fusion Companies
Realta is sourcing its magnets from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts-based startup that has raised $2 billion in funding. CFS is pursuing a tokamak design for its reactor prototype, but magnets are its key technology. In the nascent world of fusion startups, it has become a key supplier, selling to another UW-Madison spinout, Type One Energy.
The proliferation of fusion startups reflects not just growing investor sentiment, but also increasing confidence on the part of plasma physicists and other fusion researchers. As they’ve grown more comfortable modeling the behavior of different designs, they’re seeing new avenues to commercialization. In fact, Realta’s announcement isn’t the only one this week. On Tuesday, another startup, Proxima Fusion, announced a €7 million seed round led by Plural Platform and UVC Partners to commercialize the stellarator technology developed at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics for its Wendelstein 7-X reactor.
Always-on, baseload power is fusion power’s default market, but as the landscape begins to mature, startups are now chasing more specialized niches that still have significant scale. Realta estimates that industrial heat demand in the chemical refining sector alone is worth $76 billion.
Fusion power is the sort of high-risk, high-reward bet that was once the stock-and-trade for venture capital firms. Fusion might be a risky source of power, but as Realta is showing, it’s also flexible, providing not just electricity but also heat and neutrons, which are widely used to produce isotopes for medical use. In many ways, fusion power is starting to resemble the fossil fuel market over a century ago, when people discovered that they could use the combustible liquids and gasses to do more than light their lamps. Fusion power may still be a decade or more away, but the possibilities are starting to open up.
