Knoxville nuclear company papers show ‘no scientific barriers’ to fusion power plant

• Type One Energy published peer-reviewed papers on its pilot nuclear fusion power plant design under development with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
• The company doesn’t need a “scientific breakthrough” to figure out how to build the world’s first fusion plant, its chief scientist told Knox News.
• It plans to begin construction on a prototype at the closed TVA Bull Run coal plant next year.
• Its stellarator machine includes plasma heated to several times the temperature of the sun’s core and magnets cooled to extreme lows.

Type One Energy, a Knoxville-based company with a mission to build the world’s first commercial nuclear fusion power plant, has published a collection of papers it says leave “no scientific barriers” in its path to bringing the power of the sun to Earth.

The six peer-reviewed scholarly papers and an editorial were published in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics, the company announced March 27.

The articles describe the science behind Type One Energy’s fusion power plant design, part of a class of technologies called stellarators, which use powerful magnetic fields to contain plasma heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius, or around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Unlike traditional nuclear power plants that split isotopes of uranium apart to create heat, fusion reactions crush isotopes of hydrogen together at extreme temperatures to create heat.

Scientists have worked to develop nuclear fusion power plants since the 1950s, but rapid advancements in supercomputing have sped up stellarator breakthroughs.

Type One Energy must overcome engineering challenges to achieve its goal of supplying clean energy through fusion, but it has solved the basic physics problems of the design by running more than 70,000 simulations on supercomputers like Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“We don’t need a scientific breakthrough to figure out how the heck we’re going to do this,” John Canik, chief science and engineering officer at Type One Energy, told Knox News. “There’s no fundamental technical unknown that we need to figure out.”

Type One Energy, founded in 2019 by energy business leaders and some of the world’s leading fusion experts, has not yet built a stellarator under the company name. It plans to begin constructing a prototype called Infinity One at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s closed Bull Run coal plant in 2026.

But its scientists have built and run experimental stellarators around the world, including the world’s largest and most powerful stellarator, the Wendelstein 7-X in Germany. For Type One Energy’s experts, nuclear fusion isn’t science fiction.

“We reach these temperatures pretty routinely in existing fusion facilities,” Canik said.

Why leading nuclear fusion company came to Knoxville

Type One Energy signed an agreement with TVA in February to develop a pilot fusion power plant called Infinity Two, which the federal utility may one day operate. The company has not selected a location for its first power plant.

“Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a potential fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design anchored in reality,” Type One Energy CEO Christofer Mowry said in a release. “We have an organization that understands this isn’t about designing a science project.”

The company finalized an $82.4 million fundraising round last year which included investment from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. It is preparing to raise $200 million this year to fund development of its technology, Axios reported.

Type One Energy established its headquarters in Hardin Valley last year to be near ORNL and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. It became the first recipient of Gov. Bill Lee’s nuclear fund, benefitting from Tennessee’s effort to become the national hub of new nuclear technologies.

The company plans to begin building its prototype in the turbine hall of the Bull Run plant next year, and to complete it by early 2029 to prove key functions of the machine. It announced the symbolic transition for the closed coal plant last year alongside a $223 million investment that would create around 300 high-paying jobs.

Type One Energy now has close to 160 employees, and around 60 people are based out of its headquarters at 2410 Cherahala Blvd.

How does Type One Energy’s fusion tech work?

Stellarators are just one fusion technology among many, though Canik and his colleagues believe their design has the best shot at commercial success.

The other main design that uses magnetic confinement is called a tokamak, made famous by ITER, a giant multinational science project based in France. Other technologies use lasers to ignite a fusion reaction by rapidly heating a small pellet of fuel.

“The stellarator has the advantage that you can predict its performance pretty accurately with modern supercomputers and the most advanced physics codes we have,” Canik said. “As it turns out, that performance is basically determined by the shape of the plasma.”

The stellarator is a complex system shaped like a twisted doughnut. At its extreme internal temperatures, matter only exists as plasma – there are no solids, liquids or gases. One of the central challenges of nuclear fusion is containing the hot, diffuse plasma.

“People have likened it to holding Jello with rubber bands,” Canik said. “Plasmas are very squirrely.”

The Type One Energy design keeps the plasma’s heat from escaping using precisely shaped coils of copper magnets that form powerful magnetic fields.

It uses helium to chill the magnets to extremely low temperatures to achieve a state called superconductivity, a similar technology used in medical MRI machines. The magnets will operate at around four Kelvin, or minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Fusion is interesting because you have one of the hottest places in the universe right next to one of the coldest places,” Canik said.

The main fuels for the machine are deuterium, an isotope of helium abundant in seawater, and lithium. Fusion scientists say there is enough deuterium in a bathtub of seawater and enough lithium in two laptop batteries to create all the electricity a person needs in a lifetime through nuclear fusion.

A meter-thick metal “blanket” surrounds the plasma to absorb heat, produce tritium through a breeder reaction and protect the rest of the system. Helium flows through the metal wall to carry heat to the electrical side of the plant, which functions much like a traditional nuclear plant.

If Type One Energy succeeds in building a fusion power plant that produces electricity, its “ash” waste product would be helium, too. And its mind-bogglingly hot and cold insides would be so contained, Canik said, that you could walk up and touch the machine’s outer shell and it would feel room temperature.

Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Email: daniel.dassow@knoxnews.com. Signal: @danieldassow.24.

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