Gabe Rissman
March 21, 2015
The need for scalable, reliable power is growing with the need for urgent action to combat climate change and energy poverty.
Fusion has long been considered the holy grail of energy generation because it is emission free and scalable, and may produce abundant fuel. Fusion has advantages over fission because it is meltdown-proof, less weaponizable than fission, and yields less radioactive waste.
Alternative fission reactors are also becoming more popular because they share the benefits of fusion.
While governments collaborate on the international fusion project, ITER, and government labs across the world work on fusion and fission technologies, there are many promising start-ups to keep an eye on, including these examples:
Fusion
- General Fusion (magnetized target fusion)
- Helion (the fusion engine—a field-reversed configuration based on inductive plasmoid accelerator)
- Lockheed Martin Skunk Works (compact fusion reactor)
- LPP Fusion (dense plasma focus)
- Tri-Alpha (colliding beam fusion reactor)
Alternative Fission
- Copenhagen Atomics (thorium molten salt reactor)
- Flibe Energy (lithium fluoride + beryllium fluoride molten salt reactor)
- TerraPower (traveling wave reactor uses nuclear waste)
- Terrestrial Energy (integral molten salt reactor)
- ThorCon Power (molten salt reactor experiment scale up)
- Transatomic Power (molten salt reactor uses nuclear waste)
Editor’s Note: Yale Climate & Energy Institute (YCEI) hosts a conference on the Future of Nuclear Energy on April 24.