This company wants to turn a Tennessee coal plant into a fusion reactor

Type One energy has announced its intention to use a retired TVA coal plant site, the Bull Run Fossil Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the site for a prototype fusion reactor with the hope to eventually commercialize fusion power – and maybe even find a neat way to use old EV batteries to help power the process.

The Bull Run Fossil Plant was a coal-powered generation facility first opened in 1967 and shut down on December 1, 2023 – just over two months ago. It was run by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public utility in the US, and sits just across the river from Oak Ridge, the site of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), one of America’s most important national science labs.

Despite only being shut down for two months, claims are already being made on the site. Due to its close location to ORNL, a lab that has studied fusion since the 1950s, it seems a natural choice for another fusion experiment – enter Type One energy, a company looking to work toward the commercialization of fusion power.

Type One Energy ambitiously gets its name from Type I on the Kardashev scale, a theoretical measurement intended to describe how advanced a civilization is. A Type I civilization is able to harness all of the energy available on a single planet – currently, humanity’s total energy production is about three orders of magnitude, or a thousand times, below this benchmark.

So, just starting with the name, Type One’s goals seem… optimistic, to say the least.

For a basic primer on what we’re talking about here, Nuclear Fusion differs significantly from Nuclear Fission. Fusion is the reaction that happens inside of stars like our Sun, whereas Fission is what powers current commercial nuclear reactors.

Fission, in current nuclear reactors, takes large, rare, radioactive atoms (like Uranium-235) and splits them apart, which releases energy when the bonds between neutrons in the nucleus of these atoms are broken. The major downside is that this reaction creates radioactive material, with nuclear waste still being an unsolved problem.

Fusion, however, works by taking smaller atoms and fusing them together. The most promising fusion reaction uses deuterium and tritium, two rare isotopes of hydrogen that have extra neutrons in their nuclei. Deuterium is rare, but still relatively easily found in normal seawater (about one in every 6,000 natural hydrogen atoms are deuterium), whereas tritium is almost nonexistent in nature and would be manufactured by splitting lithium atoms.

When the deuterium and tritium atoms are fused together it creates a normal helium atom and releases a free neutron, from which energy can be harvested.

The upside of fusion is that it does not produce long-lived radioactive waste, and that it is incredibly energetic, with the amount of deuterium in 1 gallon of ordinary seawater (about half a milliliter of deuterium) theoretically able to generate the amount of energy from combusting 300 gallons of oil. Fusion reactors are also considered to be inherently safer as there is no possibility of a meltdown.

The downside is that fusion requires extremely difficult conditions to occur, and those conditions cost a lot of energy to maintain. You can get a hint of this by looking at the location where fusion naturally happens – at the center of stars, at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees and pressures of trillions of pounds per square inch.

So it sounds like a science fiction concept, and ever since it was first envisioned in the 1950s, it has been. Humanity has never been able to achieve a fusion reaction that generated more energy than it took to create… until recently.

You may have heard the news last year that scientists had achieved “net energy gain” from a fusion reaction. This means that more energy was released by the fusion reaction than the amount of energy from the lasers used to produce the temperatures needed. This is denoted by the symbol Q, with Q numbers above 1 meaning net energy gain. The current record is Q = 1.54.

But that’s not everything, because not all of that energy can be effectively harnessed, so in order to reach the point where fusion actually becomes viable for electricity generation, the reaction must create enough energy to become self-sustaining – as long as more deuterium/tritium fuel is added, the reaction will continue, much like adding more logs to an already-burning fireplace.

The primary technology advancement needed for the Type One facility is high-temperature superconducting magnets, which have generally seen remarkable progress in recent years and are now the focus of multiple companies working to adapt the basic technology for fusion energy applications. Given what is known from a scientific development standpoint, ORNL considers the step envisioned by Type One as reasonable and achievable. While success is not guaranteed, we view the risk-to-reward profile of this facility as appropriate. If successful, the results from this facility would provide a solid basis for a second-generation facility focused on energy production.

MICKEY WADE, ASSOCIATE LAB DIRECTOR OF FUSION AND FISSION ENERGY AND SCIENCE, ORNL

For a self-sustaining reaction, a ratio of about Q = 5 is thought to be necessary to reach the level of viability for electricity production. But once that milestone is reached, Q increases arbitrarily, because the self-sustaining nature of the reaction means that little to no energy will be needed to be spent externally to maintain the reaction.

Type One thinks it can reach this milestone, though probably not for years still – it sets the target at about a decade from now. As of now, it wants to build a prototype reactor it’s calling Infinity One at the Bull Run site, with the intent of “retiring risks” before building a future pilot power plant.

There are a number of other fusion reactors in the world, but most of them are from public institutions run by academic, governmental, or intergovernmental sources. There are a few other fusion startups, but Type One thinks that it will be the first private company to build a functional stellerator prototype. Fusion reactors come in two types: stellerators and tokamaks, with each having their advantages but tokamaks being more common.

Stellerators have a “funky” shape because it helps keep the plasma more stable, but they are harder to construct. Tokamaks just look like a donut.

Many of the company’s personnel have already been part of stellerator projects in other settings, so there is plenty of expertise associated – including CTO Dr. Thomas Sunn Pederson, who we spoke to for this story, who previously worked on the record-setting W7X stellerator in Germany.

The plan has been enough to get the company noticed by some government entities, with the Department of Energy choosing it as one of eight companies to receive part of $46 million in funding. Here’s the full list of those companies, six of which ORNL is also partnering with:

Type One is also the first company to receive grants via a new Tennessee program to encourage innovation and investment in nuclear energy, and closed an investment seed round of $29 million last year.

As for involvement from TVA and ORNL, both entities are “collaborating” with Type One, but are a little more measured in their expectations than the company itself is.

TVA is a clean energy leader. With the retirement of Bull Run plant, TVA is in the unique position to partner with Type One and ORNL to explore the repurposing of a portion of the facility toward the advancement of fusion energy research. As TVA works to be net-zero by 2050, we must work together to identify potential clean energy technologies of the future. Being able to further the advancement of fusion energy research provides a win-win proposition for TVA and the people of the valley.

-TVA SPOKESPERSON Despite Type One’s announcement today of its selection to pursue the use of TVA’s Bull Run site, TVA issues a reminder that the project is contingent on proper completion of necessary environmental reviews, permits, operating licenses and so on. While TVA has signed a memorandum of understanding with the company and with ORNL, it hasn’t yet formally agreed to lease part of the property to Type One. But it does see the unique opportunity to use a former coal for research into the future of energy, especially in a spot that’s so close to one of the centers of American fusion research at Oak Ridge labs.

Construction on the pilot research project could start as early as 2025, and be completed as early as 2028.

This story interested me primarily due to the angle of turning a site that used to generate the dirtiest possible electricity into one that generates what would likely become the cleanest form of electricity, which is quite poetic.

And fusion energy, in particular, has incredible promise if it’s ever achieved. It could solve a tremendous amount of our societal problems – but like everything else, this only works if the benefits are properly distributed, and our current sociopolitical systems aren’t all that great at doing that.

But it could, at least, help to solve climate change, by offering a highly energetic energy source that also releases zero emissions, and has even fewer auxiliary impacts than other current clean energy sources (e.g. habitat disruption, panel/turbine recycling, and so on). And, relevant to Electrek, if lithium is needed to make tritium, then that gives us something we could use recycled EV batteries for, which is pretty cool.

But we also shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves here, because it sounds like this project is in very early stages. Today’s press release is a pretty minor step – Type One is just announcing the site that it wants to use, which hasn’t even been secured yet. And while we had a great conversation with Type One, the responses we got from TVA and ORNL were much more noncommittal. So there was an excitement disconnect there, which is to be expected between a company and a government entity, but it still reminded us that all of this is still some ways off.

So there’s a lot of steps between here and fusion energy, and frankly, I think that the biggest breakthroughs in fusion are not likely to come from a private company but from academic or governmental research, at least for the time being.

We will eventually need companies to come in and figure out commercial viability, so getting started on that earlier than later is all well and good, but we’re still going to be waiting for a while before that viability happens – and unfortunately, we don’t have time to wait to solve climate change. So, while fusion might help, we still need to get to work now on emissions reductions immediately.

Yeah, I think the molten salt reactors are a good bet too—but I don’t think that they will deliver the profound price reduction that the fusion reactors promise.

The huge thing that the fusion reactors promise to do is convert electrons directly into electricity—unlike the fission reactors which convert the energetic electrons into heat.

But much of the driver in the USA for fusion reactors—is now coming from private money.

But the smell of success is in the air. So governments all over the world are investing big money into fusion.

If the fusion company in Washington state abides by their contract with microsoft—they will have a working fusion reactor delivering electricity to microsoft in 2028.

There’s a good chance you’ll still be around by then.

America is an invention machine. That’s our bread butter. That’s what makes america work from one generation to the next.

There are three parts the invention machine.

The first part is basic research. That’s almost all federal dollars. That creates the foundations of knowledge from which to work.

The second part is applied research. In this stage, there is a combination of federal and private money.

The third stage is entrepreneurial invention which brings things to market. This is all private money at work.

Fusion R&D is currently at the second stage listed above—that is of applied research—or a mix of public and private money. But it has spent decades in the realm of basic research.

Agree there is a point where federal dollars are no longer necessary. I’m not wise enough to know where that point is.

Therefor, since the best money that the feds spend is on basic and applied research—I would prefer to err on the side of spending the money. Especially, as the dollar sums we are talking about.. are —in federal terms—marginal.

Will the .fedgov have a proprietary interest in what the money for this fusion project creates? (If it creates anything?)

Sorry, but I’ve seen too much of these subsidy farmers to trust ‘em any farther than I can throw a Buick. Prohibit them from holding stock in the company and see how they squeal. It’s romantic to believe in the power of American innovation, but when public money comes into it the grim reality is that the only innovation is in the accounting department.

I don’t disagree with your general point that there is a lot of waste fraud and abuse.

I have read about whole companies dedicated to feeding off federal research dollars— whose primary competency is their ability fill out the complicated applications for federal dollars...but whose actual output...is nothing to speak of.

I’ve read too that the best professors in the best universities spend much of their time applying for grants—so much so — that its usually their staff that does the actual work.

I don’t think that the fusion research and their researchers fall into any of these categories.

Its like that in any field. You have the real players, the up and coming, the wanna bes, the once weres, the never weres, the never will bes and the imposters.

imho the fusion researcher are the real players. You’re free to say only that only the thorium researchers are the real players. I think thorium researchers are real players too. If so, we probably agree that the light water reactors and the people who support them have gone past their sell by date. Its a shame most federal federal nuclear research dollars go to light water reactors. The light water smr’s set to come out after 2030 will be DOE dinasaurs in my opinion.

I don’t think that the current operating US big reactors should be shut down. That was a stupid move by the Germans. It would be a stupid move for the US.

I don’t disagree with your general point that there is a lot of waste fraud and abuse.

I’ve read too that the best professors in the best universities spend much of their time applying for grants—so much so — that its usually their staff that does the actual work.

I don’t think that the fusion research and their researchers fall into any of these categories.

Its like that in any field. You have the real players, the up and coming, the wanna bes, the once weres, the never weres, the never will bes and the imposters.

I don’t think that the current operating US big reactors should be shut down. That was a stupid move by the Germans. It would be a stupid move for the US.

Not religion.

I find that the people who advocate for it are more persuasive than you are. they have more to lose than you do. They are better credentialed than you are. Their backers are better credentialed than you are. Their backers have greener eyeshades than you do. They have more to lose than you do.

I too thought that fusion power was 20 years in the future and always will be. I have been persuaded in the last two years that it’s the real deal. That we will see the first fruits before the end of this decade in terms of real power generation.

But there’s no need for you to feel alone. There are plenty of old guys on freerepublic—even veterans of the nuclear industry—who still hold fusion 20 years in the future and always will be. They’re retirees. They didn’t enter into the nuclear industry until the 1970s or just after the glory days of nuclear power development. So all of their experience is with a fairly static industry with only incremental changes.

what’s up now in fusion is something like what happened in the nuclear power industry from 1940-1970. We’re only in the first years of the first decade of that period.

Alvin Weinberg was right. The US made a terrible mistake when it shut down his thorium reactor in +-1973. The result has been that our generation never got to see the glory of the promises of nuclear power that were made in the 1950s-60’s. The glory was the tremendous price reduction.

That all died with Three Mile Island.

Fusion power does not have the same regulatory burden as fission. Nuclear Regulatory Commission puts it in the same category as hospital MRIs. As a result, regulation has shifted to the states. They are very accommodating to the budding nuclear power companies.

btw there are scientific endeavors that I’m deeply skeptical about.

The biggest one is string theory/quantum theory which has swallowed the careers of the best physicists and mathematicians for half a century and produced nothing of note.

the death of physics like the death nuclear power research started in the 1970’s.

My guess is that just as AI is resurrecting nuclear power research by accelerating the rate of applied fusion power research—AI will also resurrect and accelerate the rate of basic physics research. I would guess that Musk’s AI called grok which specializes in compute mathematics—will at some point gain the ability to self-improve.

That’s when the really big stuff happens. But that won’t be for another five years or more —Unless AGI shows up everywhere later this year—as some say it will.

Sam Altman has a paper he published in 2021 called Moore’s law of Everything. https://moores.samaltman.com/

He makes the case that physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists are driving the progress of AI. But at some point, the AI will learn to self-improve. So that it won’t be just computer chips that double in power and decrease in price every 18 months or so. It will be everything.

That’s the end game that frightens and excites everyone.

This is just my opinion as to the state of the play.

You only need Q=1 to have viable fusion fission hybrid reactors that crank out PU239 by the metric tonnes per year. Humans have gotten to Q=1.54 and Q=1 is now just a normal thing.

This was 1979 and we as humans had the tech for fusion hybrids that traitor JCarter ruined not only our reprocessing program without that fusion hybrids are also out of reach.

A hybrid of 3000MWhthr puts out 1800kg of PU239 per year that’s enough for 18 to 20 CANDU reactors yearly fissile fuel needs. No other reactor tech on earth is more efficient in fissile use other than fast reactors with a breed ratio greater than 1. CANDU reactors have a C ratio of .8 for MOX PU based fuels PWRs are sub .6 and a crime against humanity to burn PU in such a waste of energy value.

There are two reasons hybrids never get the spotlight. One they would work today making net energy and fueling a vast fleet of regular reactors. So no grant money gravy train. Second is they make HUGE amounts of PU239 which is also the perfect weapons material a single hybrid would make enough for 180 kg weapons per year every year that scares the politico types. Humans need to get past the nuclear war thing if we are to survive as a species we will need breed reactors or fusion hybrids both make large amounts of PU which is the fuel that never ends there is so much uranium in the crust and oceans it’s inexhaustible at human use scales even with 10+ billion souls.

Remember this is 1979 and tech has moved past by leaps and bounds.
http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/bethe.pdf

The Soviets and the Russians both use breed reactor tech the Russians have the only commercially successful fast reactors in the world the BN600/800 sodium cooled fast reactors. One is on the Caspian Sea making power, and desal water since the Soviet times they are building a new BN800 to upscale the tech. Their fast attack subs had lead cooled fast reactors in them they are the world leaders in that field.

The chicoms also have at least two fast reactors online both for research and future breeding programs. Uranium like oil has a cheap to expensive curve it is currently cheaper to just mine out more of the remaining cheap uranium reserve than to breed PU239 and burn that. The wildcard is ocean uranium the Japanese who also have a fast reactor program have succeeded in making small amounts of yellow cake from seawater they have the price down to $300lb or so mined uranium while it lasts is $80 so no incentive to go after ocean uranium yet and yet is the key word. Uranium reserves at $300 and under are around 8 million tonnes that’s enough for 500 reactors for 50 years or so. To pull 6 billion out of energy poverty and up to EU level energy consumption levels we need ten times that number of reactors or more. One reactor @1GWe supplies 1 million people with 1kWh per hr of electricity that’s roughly the EU average per per over a years time 24/7/365 peaks and valleys averaged out. 6 billion live in energy poverty so we would need 6000 reactors online clearly there is not enough uranium for that unless those reactors are fast spectrum and can breed more fuel than they use. The stockpile of U238 becomes fuel then and you get 100 times the energy out of.every kg of mined uranium. You go from 0.07% fissile to 100% fissile/fertile in natural uranium. It should be a crime against humanity to use uranium in a once through fuel cycle with PWR reactors and in the future likely will be. Every pellet of fuel you throw away is equal to 96 tonnes of coal or 340 barrels of oil. That’s a single thimble sized pellet when used with reprocessing and fast reactors.

Ocean uranium makes any reactor tech sustainable even at $300lb a CANDU reactor has a burn up of 9375 megawatt days per tonne of natural U or 225 megawatt hours per kg when not if the Japanese scale up ocean uranium harvesting even at $660 kg for natural uranium a CANDU reactor in just raw fuel cost would be 0.2933333333 cents per kWh or one third of a cent per kWh.

fuel costs in the CANDU are the lowest in the world needing no enrichment of U235 at all. Take raw uranium turn it into Uranium oxide put it inside pellet form and put those in a CANDU bundle and fission baby fission.

There is 4 billion tonnes of uranium in the oceans and more comes every year via rivers and crustal weathering humans couldn’t draw down the ocean uranium levels at any rate of withdraw vs the incoming erosion rates.

This is why only nuclear power can fuel a species past its first industrial phase where it burns everything in sight. You will run out of things to burn that is just cold hard mathematics.

Those are the two paths humans will have to.chose one. Mine all the cheap uranium then go after ocean uranium on a HUGE scale to only use 0.07% of fissile U235 in it , CANDU help with a conversion ratio of 0.75_0.8 so just over half the total output is breed PU239 in the CANDU itself still total is less than 1.5% energy usage per Kg of mined uranium. If the Japanese can scale up to millions of KG per year from the oceans then that way would work.

The other choice is go to a breeder program with hybrids leading the way having massive outputs of fissile material enough for a dozen or more CANDU reactors on the back end. Or go the fast spectrum reactor that can feed itself and maybe one satellite PWR or two CANDU with reprocessing tech. Either way you get to near 100% burn up with natural uranium and repeated reprocessing.
The Koreans have got the reprocessing costs back in the 1990s down too six tenths of a cent per kWh in pwr reactors they never reprocessed CANDU which they have because at 0.02% fissile material in spent CANDU fuel it is already burned down to depleted uranium levels no incentive to harvest it again. That six tenths of a cent per kWh covered not only reprocessing but making the reprocessed fuel into new pellets and into MOX fuel rods for reuse. At the time new rods cost was 4 tenths of a cent per kWh so here again profit motives won. From a long term resource management strategy reprocessing costs are trivial. Two tenths of a cent only.matters when you can save the two tenths once cheap mined uranium is gone that gap is moot.

Fast reactors would gladly eat 0.02% spent fuel in their breeder blankets breeding it back up to 10% fissile or more in a few years time. Only fast reactors or hybrids can “eat” depleted uranium levels.

For those who really want to get into cold hard math this is a break down by joule and grams for the CANDU and natural mineable uranium. Since CANDU beats every other reactor tech except breeders all the numbers are less for PWR. Scroll all the way to the bottom to see the total resource vs reserves with a calculation for breeders as well. Then remember this is for world wide energy consumption levels not raising the 6 billion people in energy poverty to anywhere near middle European class levels.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1CzRVCU2VDLq68f7M38OB7EAj0S0eplRftBBUJB5c2as/mobilebasic?pli=1

This planet is over populated period full stop. Even if we burn baby burn and mine baby mine and drill baby drill 8 billion burn all that out in less than a generation at middle class energy consumption levels for all. So what people are saying if they don’t want to move our species to solar,nuclear fission and eventually fusion for all our energy needs they are saying keep billions in poverty so my lifestyle doesn’t have to change, or cost more for energy to make the transition that is coming regardless of generational greed.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.