MIT Proto Ventures | Fusion & Clean Energy

Commercial fusion opportunity map

13 min read

To Do

  • See 2024-03-14 Richard Pearson
  • Flesh out these opportunities:
    • (Ally) Which opportunities are fusion concept specific, and which ones are applicable to a broad range of fusion concepts?
    • (Michael Segal): Make a histogram of the number of commercial efforts announced in the various categories of the supply chain.
    • (Ally) Put these on a time axis. How does the need for each of these things evolve over time? Maybe show the roadmap of the fusion industry and on what time frame these various opportunities become relevant, needed, and chokepoints.
    • (Dennis) Estimate TAM for these opportunities (e.g. maybe it’s normalized per MW of generation capacity or MWh of energy)
    • Will any other markets also need this before fusion is ready?
    • Regroup these in a more business-oriented way, (e.g. the LSVV opportunity may be actually about vanadium components for a variety of industries)
    • Allude to the potential role of large incumbent corporations for some of these (e.g. as partners)
  • Reach out to US Fusion Energy and Fusion Industry Association and possibly the Fusion Investment Programme at UK AEA
  • Re-read Challenges to achieving economical fusion energy
  • Flesh out the list below
  • Talk to Stefano and/or Samuele about pumps, fuel cycle, etc.

Summary

We should build a landscape map of the Nuclear fusion energy industry, in order to help PSFC situate their work in the broader context of the global effort to develop fusion energy, and in order to help MIT Proto Ventures identify the biggest gaps in the current market landscape. We also maintaining a list of existing Picks & shovels companies for the fusion industry.

This project started in May 2023 in collaboration with Matthieu Bancel. Theodore (Theo) Mouratidis and Sara Ferry have been great thought partners as well.

Contributors

Top Opportunities in Fusion

Challenges probably best handled by power plant companies / integrators:

Opportunities for third-party companies:

Fusion materials

  • Plasma-facing materials for first wall and divertor that can withstand fusion conditions
  • High-temperature superconducting materials that maintain superconductivity under neutron radiation
  • Radiation shield materials that can stop high-energy neutrons to protect magnets
  • Membranes materials that selectively permeate hydrogen isotopes over helium and other impurities
  • Coatings that prevent tritium permeation
  • Selective membranes with high tritium permeability for tritium extraction from breeder material

Components & consumables

  • Durable tritium-compatible vacuum pumps for plasma exhaust (Stefano)
  • Technologies for isotope and element selectivity in pumping particle streams (Samuele)
  • Radiation-hard sensors and electronics (Myles) ⇒ Anna Erickson
  • Molten salt supply (Weiyue)
  • Enriched lithium supply (David)
  • Tritium production, storage, transportation, and global marketplace for power plant startup tritium inventory (Remi)
  • Transistor chips for solid-state plasma heating (Theo)

Subsystems

  • Tritium fuel cycle that achieves high tritium breeding ratio, short processing time, and high fueling efficiency (Samuele, or Stefano)
  • Integrated plasma heating solutions that can deliver tens of megawatts at high duty cycle for several years (Greg Wallace)
  • Heat exchangers that can operate at high temperatures without melting or corroding (Myles?? or Zach Cordero??)
  • Compact cryogenic systems that can keep magnets at 20 K under heavy thermal load (Benjamin Hamilton)
  • Integrated thermal energy storage systems (Charles Forsberg or Dan Stack?)
  • Lithium fire detection and mitigation systems (?? Mike not sure if necessary)

Software, services, and facilities

  • Materials testing in a deuterium-tritium fusion environment, including material irradiation and tritium testing as a service (Zach Hartwig)
  • Materials discovery and down-selection (Myles)
  • Easier to use, more integrated, commercial-grade simulation and design software (Ethan)
  • Irradiated vacuum vessel removal, de-tritiation, and disposal; and robotic tools for remote maintenance of fusion plants (???)
  • Liquid waste de-tritiation and disposal (Remi)
  • Component qualification and integrity testing (Mike Short)
  • High-precision engineering and component manufacturing (Andrew Seltzman)

Non-technical

  • Workforce training and recruiting (David)
  • Community engagement and communications (David)
  • Legal services for fusion developers (David)

Older List

Miscellaneous notes

Industry needs

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

According to Bob Mumgaard, the big areas that CFS isn’t actively focusing on and where they’d love somebody else to offer goods & services: - Tritium fuel cycle - Balance of plant - Power supply - Heat exchangers - Materials development, testing, and selection

According to Ally Yost, top needs at CFS include:

Fusion Industry Association

According to the Fusion Industry Association, the demands currently deemed most critical by fusion companies are:

DemandCritical/Important
Vacuum pumps24
Precision engineering and manufacturing services24
Control Software21
Power semiconductors20
Deuterium, tritium, or other gaseous fusion fuels19
Recruitment19
Specialized metals, e.g. high-grade steel17
Common metals, e.g. nickel, copper16
Engineering, Procurement and Construction Firms16
Heat management technologies14
Natural Lithium14
First wall materials14
Legal services14
Cryogenic devices13
Magnets12
RF heating10
Lithium (enriched)10
High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) Tape9
Lasers (assembled)6
Rare earth metals6
Laser components, e.g. diodes, laser glass5

What isn’t clear from this FIA report is: what is the challenge with each of these areas?

Industry shape (see Commercial fusion opportunity map)

How Bob Mumgaard pictures the fusion industry shaping up: - “Full stack” companies like CFS will act as architecture-specific integrators. They will sell to the same entities that buy power plants today, i.e. energy companies. These reactor companies will also handle the development and construction. Analogies: Boeing, First Solar, BrightSource Energy - The reactor companies will buy components and services from third-party providers. This will include: - Engineering software. For example, CFS purchases neutronics simulation software from Silver Fir Software. - Test equipment (e.g. test rigs for High-temperature superconducting magnets) - Radiation testing of materials and components (“Will this survive 20 years in a fusion reactor?“) - etc. - Industries to look at for inspiration: - The aerospace industry. The airplane industry is also structured as a two-tier system, with a small number of major manufacturers at the top and a large number of smaller suppliers at the bottom. The major manufacturers, such as Boeing and Airbus, design and build the airplanes, while the suppliers, such as GE Aviation and Pratt & Whitney, provide the engines, avionics, and other components. - The drilling rig industry. The major manufacturers, such as National Oilwell Varco (NOV) and Halliburton, design and build the drilling rigs. Meanwhile, the service providers, such as Weatherford International and Schlumberger, provide the drilling fluids, mud pumps, and other equipment and services needed to operate the rigs. - Note: the Nuclear fission industry is a bit different in the sense that integrators like Areva and Westinghouse don’t do project development.

According to Sam Wurzel at ARPA-e, fusion industry provider companies can be categorized into:

  • fuel cycle and breeder blankets
  • Durable goods (REBCO superconducting material tapes, laser glass, electronics, Gyrotrons, cryogenics…)
  • Software (integrated design tools, simulation tools…)
  • Consumables (fuel isotopes, gasses, electrodes…)
  • Services (recycling, waste disposal, maintenance and operations, training…)

Sam Wurzel and Malcom Handley point out that it’s difficult to predict the future shape of the fusion industry because the fusion plant companies don’t necessarily aim to operate like Boeing (i.e. just an integrator); many of them may aim to be more like SpaceX (i.e. completely vertically integrated).

One approach might be to list the main parts of the value chain, for example:

  • R&D
  • Materials
  • Components and software
  • Integrators
  • Financing, professional services
  • EPC
  • Operation
  • Maintenance, safety, and decommissioning

We could also make a list of major unsolved needs for a A Fusion Pilot Plant (FPP) by 2035, such as (in no particular order):

  1. First wall materials that can withstand a fusion environment
  2. A way of removing all the tritium from solid (e.g. structural materials) and liquid (e.g. water) waste prior to disposal
  3. A way to finance fusion plants
  4. Easier to use, more integrated, commercial-grade simulation and design software
  5. Energy-efficient RF sources for plasma heating (concept dependent)
  6. Vacuum pumps that can… (what’s the problem with today’s vacuum pumps exactly? Tritium compatibility?)
  7. Coatings that prevent tritium diffusion out of the blanket
  8. A way to perform perform maintenance in the heart of the system
  9. A way to test performance and stability of materials in fusion-representative environments
  10. Ways to selectively remove helium and other contaminants from the heart of the fusion system
  11. Workforce training and recruiting
  12. Ways to shield magnets from neutrons (concept dependent)
  13. A way to continuously extract all the tritium from the blanket (concept dependent)
  14. A way to prevent plasma disruptions and optimize plasma performance
  15. Sensors that can withstand a fusion environment
  16. And so forth… For each of these unsolved needs, we could list a set of opportunities (e.g. need: maintenance; opportunity: robots), and the type of actor that seems best positioned to address this particular need (e.g. fusion plant companies, established industrial corporations, startups, nonprofit researchers).

Who will develop, own, build, operate, and decommission fusion plants?

According to Tim Bestwick, the way things will work in the UK for the first pilot plant is that a special purpose company, UK Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd, with the UK Atomic Energy Authority as the fusion partner, a construction partner, an engineering partner, and system partners (e.g. magnet providers).

Theo shared some good suggestions here: 2023-07-18 Theo Mouratidis

Resources

Tools

  • This tool to build market maps: https://www.marlamap.com/
  • Mike Short says that PSFC and CFS started a fusion workforce study, in partnership with Constellation Energy to figure out how many workers of what type are needed for a fission plant, an oil plant, and a gas plant, and then we’ll map out what we think a fusion plant will need. See Rachel Schulman, Jaydeep Deshpand, Sajan Saini, Elizabeth Moore.

Inspiration

Miscellaneous thoughts

Vladimir Bulovic: In the aviation industry, Boeing has lots of vendor choices, so that no individual vendor has that much power. Whereas here a single vendor could completely hold the fusion industry by the balls. What are the fundamental technologies that have the potential to do that?

Brad Smith said: What if we had an interactive microsite that lets you explore the different parts of a fusion plant and the technological / commercial opportunities in each?

People who might have good feedback

UK Atomic Energy Authority Fusion Industry Program awardees

(source) Contracts have been awarded to start-ups, small-medium enterprises, established companies, and academia, with six of the 18 organisations receiving funding through FIP for the first time. They fall into two groups. The first group involves “driving up fusion power plant performance with innovative heating and cooling systems”. Organisations in this category include:

  • CAL GAVIN Ltd – critical heat flux shifter device
  • TWI Ltd – CoreFlow for simplifying fusion reactor thermal management
  • IDOM (UK) Ltd – Jet impingement technology transfer
  • University of Manchester – development of tungsten diamond composites for nuclear fusion applications.

The second group involves “Improving fusion power plant availability with novel fusion materials, technology, and manufacture”. Organisations include:

  • University of Birmingham – FATHOM (Fabrication of Tungsten using hot isostatic pressing and additive manufacturing)
  • Full Matrix Ltd – In-situ health monitoring of nuclear fusion supply pipes
  • Alloyed Ltd – AMRSAF (additively manufactured RAFM steels for applications in fusion)
  • QDOT Technology Ltd – AM+ COOL (Indirect additive manufacture for complex high-performance, cooling devices)
  • Astral Neutronics Ltd – tritium breeding materials testing capability with a novel compact fusion neutron source
  • Laser Additive Solutions Ltd – AM4F (additive manufacturing for non-coolant components of fusion reactors)
  • Archer Technicoat Ltd – BROCCOLi (barrier-layers of rare-earth oxide coatings to corrosion in liquid-lithium)
  • Oxford Sigma – liquid lithium corrosion resistant materials for breeder blankets
  • 3-SCI Ltd – ultra high temperature electrical distributed sensing
  • Fraser-Nash Consultancy Ltd – plasma drift-orbit separation for Li enrichment
  • Castings Technology International Ltd – TITAN (opTimised castIng of reduced activation Alloys for fusioN)
  • Duality Quantum Photonics Ltd – TRONN: tokamak-robust optical neural networks
  • Swansea University – RADIANT (Rapid Alloy Development for Nuclear Technologies)
  • TWI Ltd – cold spray additive of oxide dispersion strengthened alloys
  • Jacobs UK Ltd – liquid lithium testing facility

Potential designers

Graph View

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