Fusion is Alive and Well in Germany
Apparently, the demand for new fusion power plants is increasing. Shortly after the announcement by Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS) of their plans to build their first ARC fusion power plant in Virginia, Focused Energy announced their intention to build a fusion power plant in Biblis, Germany at the site of a decommissioned nuclear power plant. The agreement, in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), was signed between the state government of Hesse Germany, Focused Energy, the Technical University of Darmstadt, the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, RWE (a multinational power provider), and several other major industrial companies. The goal of the agreement is to enable the building of a fusion power plant on the site by 1935.
Focused Energy, which was founded in 2021, is working on the development of a laser inertial confinement fusion (ICF) design to produce energy by fusing deuterium and tritium (“D-T fusion”). The company, steered by Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Scott Mercer, President Thomas Forner, and Chief Science Officer (CSO) Marcus Roth, is a joint German-American company with its primary headquarters in the San Francisco Bay area and a facility in Darmstadt, Germany. The company has received $175M in total grants including public and private capital. Its private investors include Prime Movers Lab, Tony Florence, VCP Capital, Climate Capital, and Amplitude Laser, have put in roughly $82M in funds. The company is building a $65M laser fusion facility at their Bay Area headquarters, and drew several of their key team members from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
“The fusion revolution will enable us to build a future that unlocks a new era of economic growth while also putting us on a realistic path toward decarbonization,” said Scott Mercer, CEO of Focused Energy. “If humanity’s first foray into energy was the discovery of fire, harnessing fusion will be its culmination. We have the power to harness the universe’s own source of energy within the next decade. And we will all be far better for it.”
Focused Energy’s Fusion Innovations
Focused Energy’s fusion machine, known as “Lighthouse”, is illustrated in the graphic above. The two key areas that Focused Energy is innovating in are building low-cost fusion targets, and lasers capable of high repetition rate operation.
Target Design: One of the greatest issues plaguing ICF to date has been the relatively high cost of the fusion targets. It is believed that the targets utilized by the LLNL National Ignition Facility (NIF), which are not currently mass-produced, have a cost of roughly $10,000 (the target is the small bobbin-shaped device in the picture below).
Even if these targets were mass-produced, it is expected that they would still have a cost of roughly $2,500 apiece. Most independent analysts believe that for laser ICF to be viable for commercial power operation, the cost for fusion targets needs to be around $1 apiece, since a commercial reactor might consume 100,000 targets per day at a pulse repetition rate of roughly 1 pellet per second. This is where Focused Energy is working to get to by utilizing direct-drive fusion ignition, which significantly simplifies the target design versus an indirect-drive ignition approach. These efforts are being led by Dr. Debbie Callahan, who is also a NIF alumni (see The Fusion Report interview of Dr. Callahan here).
Laser Design: Last week, The Fusion Report published an article called “The History of Inertial Confinement Fusion – A Trip Down Memory Lane”. Unsurprisingly, one of the big focus areas of this article was on the challenges of building high-power lasers that are also efficient. One of the greatest challenges is the need to move the laser beam spectrum from infrared (the most powerful lasers today) to ultraviolet (which has the best coupling with the liner of indirect-drive laser targets) to x-rays (which ultimately drive the heating and compression of the fusion fuel). One area that Focused Energy is focusing on (yes, pun intended) is a two-stage approach to achieving ignition which is known as proton fast ignition (PFI). Rather than having all the lasers do heating, compression, and ignition, the Focused Energy approach uses lower-power lasers to heat and compress the fuel, at which time they shoot in a high-energy proton beam to achieve ignition.
The proton beam, which also originates from the bombardment of a target with a high-energy laser short-pulse as shown above, pushes the heat of the compressed fuel to ignition and (hopefully) requires less power than the NIF indirect drive approach. This effort is being led by Doug Hammond, VP of Laser Engineering at Focused Energy.
Putting It All Together To Produce Electricity
As with most fusion machines, the overall goal is to produce heat that is then turned into electricity through steam turbines and generators, after which it is put onto the grid. The siting of the Focused Energy Fusion power plant at Biblis offers some advantages over a “greenfield” (completely newly developed) site. The site was the home to two (2) nuclear reactors which operated from 1974 to 2013 when the German Government shut down their nuclear power plants following the Fukushima nuclear accident.
However, the presence of these decommissioned plants does have its advantages. Biblis already has connections to the power grid (the previous two nuclear reactors had a combined power output of 2.5 GW of energy), which eliminates the need to run new power lines to the plant. There are also cooling towers and water available for cooling (the Rhine River), and a robust security cordon around the plant. Finally, there is also significant infrastructure including office buildings, turbines, and generators. How much of this infrastructure will be used remains to be seen, but it opens up a lot of possibilities to reduce overall plant cost.
However, the presence of these decommissioned plants does have its advantages. Biblis already has connections to the power grid (the previous two nuclear reactors had a combined power output of 2.5 GW of energy), which eliminates the need to run new power lines to the plant. There are also cooling towers and water available for cooling (the Rhine River), and a robust security cordon around the plant. Finally, there is also significant infrastructure including office buildings, turbines, and generators. How much of this infrastructure will be used remains to be seen, but it opens up a lot of possibilities to reduce overall plant cost.