Fusion fired up? Milestones met and six FIRE Collaboratives named
The Department of Energy announced six Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives set to receive funding of $107 million on January 16. The six selected teams represent a first round of awards from a funding opportunity announcement released in May 2023 as part of the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences’ (FES) goal of creating a “fusion innovation ecosystem.”
On the same day, the DOE announced that three of the eight companies in the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program—also under FES program in the DOE’s Office of Science—have reached critical-path science and technology milestones toward preliminary engineering designs for fusion pilot plants.
“The launch of the DOE Milestone Program and FIRE collaboratives are critical steps in accelerating progress toward the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy,” said deputy secretary of energy David Turk. “As the world races to make fusion a viable source of energy for industry and consumers, these programs signal that the U.S. intends to be the first to commercialize fusion energy through strong partnerships among our national laboratories, universities, and the private sector to realize industry-led designs for fusion pilot plants.”
FIRE Collaboratives: FES wants the new collaboratives to function as virtual, centrally managed teams bridging FES’s basic science research programs and the needs of the fusion industry, including the eight companies in the Milestone Program. A FIRE Data Repository would make their findings available to other researchers and end users.
The FIRE program was announced in May 2023 with four cross-cutting areas of focus: fusion materials, fusion blanket and fuel cycle systems, fusion enabling technologies, and advanced simulations for design and optimization. The six chosen collaboratives are listed below:
- Advanced Profile Prediction for Fusion Pilot Plant Design (APP-FPP). Lead organization, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Members include Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
- Fuel Cycle Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FC-FIRE). Lead organization, Savannah River National Laboratory. Members include Idaho, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Sandia National Laboratories.
- Accelerating Fusion Blanket Development through Nuclear Testing (BNT). Lead organization, INL. Members include Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, Princeton Plasma Physics, and Savannah River National Laboratories.
- Target Injector Nexus for Development Research (TINDeR). Lead organization, General Atomics. Members include SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and LLNL.
- Rapid High-Fidelity Bulk Irradiated Materials Data Generation to Accelerate Solutions for Commercial Fusion Energy Systems. Lead organization, MIT.
- Integrated Materials Program to Accelerate Chamber Technologies (IMPACT). Lead organization, University of Tennessee. Members include ORNL and INL.
The total anticipated funding for FIRE collaboratives is $180 million for projects lasting up to four years. Additional awards may be made in the future, contingent on the availability of congressional appropriations.
Milestones set, milestones met: The eight privately funded fusion companies in the DOE’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program receive cost-shared federal funding only after mutually negotiated milestones are completed and verified. The program was first authorized in the Energy Act of 2020 and announced in September 2022.
Eight selectees were named in May 2023, but it wasn’t until June 2024 that the DOE announced that negotiations on program metrics had been concluded for all companies. To date, Milestone awardees have collectively raised over $350 million of new private funding since their selection into the program was announced in May 2023, dwarfing the $46 million of federal funding initially committed for 18 months of work. The program was authorized for a total of $415 million through fiscal year 2027 in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
All eight awardees are to produce preconceptual designs and technology road maps of their concepts within the first 18 months of the Milestone program—roughly by late 2025. If they meet these milestones—and if Congress continues to appropriate funds—they will proceed to build and operate major integrated experiments and/or demonstrate some of the technologies that are central to their concepts.
The DOE announced last week that three companies had to date met milestones that have been confirmed with quantitative metrics:
Focused Energy: Computational modeling for a high-gain target design for laser-driven inertial fusion energy and demonstration of ion-beam focusing to support the fast-ignition approach to inertial fusion energy.
Realta Fusion: Whole-device modeling of simple mirror equilibria to enable scientific energy gains of at least 5 for the tandem-mirror approach to fusion energy.
Thea Energy: Down selection to a family of optimized stellarator equilibria taking into account multiple factors of plasma confinement, stability, and stellarator components and subsystems; and engineering design, prototyping, and operation of a single, high-temperature-superconducting magnet coil that is the building block of Thea Energy’s approach to generating three-dimensional, optimized stellarator fields using only planar coils.
The other Milestone awardees currently working on early milestones are Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Tokamak Energy, Type One Energy, Xcimer Energy, and Zap Energy.
