Billionaires pursue "SpaceX moment" for the holy grail of energy

Shortly before his death, technical visionary Paul Allen traveled to the south of France for a personal tour of a 35-nation quest to replicate the Sun's operation. The goal is to produce clean and almost unlimited energy one day by fusing atoms instead of separating them.

The co-founder of Microsoft said he wanted to closely observe the early stages of the international thermonuclear experimental reactor of Cadarache, to attend the preparations for "the birth of a star on Earth".

Allen was not just a spectator looking for the holy grail of nuclear energy. It was among a growing number of ultra-rich clean energy advocates who were unlocking money for startups who were hurrying to produce the first commercially viable fusion reactor well ahead of the $ 23 billion forecast of the ITER program.

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Peter Thiel are just three billionaires pursuing what the late physicist Stephen Hawking called the most promising technology of mankind. Scientists have known for a long time that the merger can revolutionize the energy sector, but development costs have been too high for almost all governments and investors. Recent advances in exotic materials, 3D printing, machine learning and data processing are changing that.

"This is the moment of the merger for SpaceX," said Christofer Mowry, who runs General Fusion Inc., which is supported by the Bezos, near Vancouver, British Columbia. He was referring to the maker of reusable rockets from Elon Musk. "If you care about climate change, you need to worry about the time scale and not just the ultimate solution – governments are not working with the urgency needed."

Allen's company, TAE Technologies, was unique when it was incorporated as Tri-Alpha Energy two decades ago. Today, there are at least two dozen rivals, most of them financed by investors with a history of disruption. As a result, there has been an explosion of discoveries that is driving the kind of competition needed for a transformational breakthrough, according to Mowry.

One of the clearest measures of progress on the ground was presented last week in Gandhinagar, India, where the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) held its biennial fusion. The conference highlighted a record number of 800 peer-reviewed research articles, 60% more than a decade ago.

The fusion itself is not the problem. The delicate part generates more energy than the one used in the process. These reactors only need to emulate the conditions encountered in deep space, a much more complex and costly enterprise than fission. Heating the plasma to temperatures above the stars and then containing the resulting reactions in cryogenic cooling vessels may require one million parts or more.

While the commercial merger is taking longer than expected, many of the innovations produced subsequently will prove lucrative on their own, according to IP Group, a London-based IP investor. Research companies are already making patents to protect their creations, from software simulating the burning of 150 million degrees Celsius plasma to a new type of magnet that applies to healthcare.

"There will always remain a significant residual value," said Robert Trezona, who oversees the IP group's investment in First Light Fusion, a company located near Oxford University, whose advisory board includes former US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. "It would have been inconceivable for a small company like First Light to advance the science of fusion 20 years ago."

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company founded last year by six professors at MIT, is one of the most ambitious companies. Supported by some of the biggest names in the industry, they are confident that they will be able to produce a prototype reactor called "net energy" by 2025.

The start-up raised $ 50 million in March from a group led by Italian Eni SpA, one of the oil producers preparing for a carbon-neutral world. And last month, he got an indefinite sum of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund created by Gates, Bezos and other magnates, including Richard Branson, Ray Dalio and Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, Bloomberg's parent company. News.

"The biggest danger is that no one will succeed than having everyone," said Bob Mumgaard, general manager of Commonwealth Fusion, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We need more intelligent people who drive very hard to solve this problem."

Nevertheless, ITER remains the best choice for breaking the code of cheap energy production on a large scale, according to Nawal Prinja, nuclear engineer for the John Wood Group, based in Aberdeen, and one of the guest speakers at the forum in India.

"They offer all kinds of new ideas to make the industry more efficient, but turning ideas into a commercial station is another story," Prinja said. Only ITER, in Latin "the way", has the resources to perfect the type of reactor capable of managing entire cities, he said.

If this is the case, many current merger investors may not live long enough to benefit from the deployment. It has already taken more than three decades for ITER to lay the foundations of a machine designed to prove the viability of its concept. And it does not expect to have a reactor capable of powering a few million US households by 2050 or so.

Tim Luce, chief scientist at ITER and Allen Allen's animator at the huge research center about 50 kilometers north of Marseille, dismissed criticisms regarding the time horizon. What the international effort is trying to accomplish, he said, is simply too ambitious for a private sector player.

"These other competitors have the vision of doing something smaller, but I have not seen any convincing physics showing that they can do it," Luce said. "It's the story of the turtle and the hare and we are the turtle."

And then there is Musk, a serial innovator who thinks that the whole mob crowd is barking the wrong tree. In a podcast against weeds and whiskey that went viral last month, the co-founder of Tesla and Solar City said it was best to spend money smartly to find more effective ways to capture the Sun's energy than to try to recreate it.

"We have a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky," said Musk. "It appears every day very reliably.If you can generate solar panels and store it with batteries, you can have it 24 hours a day."