Insider Brief
- Type One Energy has released its first unified design basis for a fusion power plant, marking a step toward realistic deployment.
- The design provides a foundational reference for engineering, regulatory, and commercial planning across the company’s stellarator-based fusion program.
- The company aims to accelerate fusion development by aligning technical design with practical manufacturing and deployment pathways.
Type One Energy Unveils Fusion Power Plant Design
PRESS RELEASE — Type One Energy announced publication today of the world’s first comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis, with conservative design margins, for a practical fusion pilot power plant. This physics basis is presented in a series of seven peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP). They serve as the foundation for the company’s first Infinity Two stellarator fusion power plant project which Type One Energy is developing with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utility in the United States.
Realistic Fusion Power Plant Design
The Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant physics design basis realistically considers, for the first time, the complex relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, plant startup, construction logistics, power plant capacity factor, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience. This Infinity Two baseline physics solution makes use of the inherently favorable operating characteristics of highly optimized stellarator fusion technology using modular high-field magnets so successfully proven on the W7-X science machine in Germany.
“Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design based in reality,” said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy. “The physics basis for Infinity Two is grounded in the knowledge of what is required for application to, and performance in, the demanding environment of reliable electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organization that understands this isn’t about designing a science project.”
Led by Chris Hegna, widely recognized as a leading theorist in modern stellarators, Type One Energy performed high-fidelity computational plasma physics analyses to substantially reduce the risk of meeting Infinity Two power plant functional and performance requirements. This unique and transformational achievement is the result of a global development program led by the Type One Energy plasma physics and stellarator engineering organization, with significant contributions from a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. The company made use of a spectrum of high-performance computing facilities, including special access to the US Department of Energy supercomputers such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to perform its physics simulations.
“We committed to this ambitious fusion commercialization milestone two years ago and today we delivered,” said John Canik, Chief Science and Engineering Officer for Type One Energy. “The team was able to efficiently develop deep plasma physics insights to inform the design of our Infinity Two stellarator, by taking advantage of our access to high performance computing resources. This enabled the Type One Energy team to demonstrate an integrated stellarator design that moves far beyond conventional thinking and concepts derived from more limited modeling capabilities.”
Fusion Advantages of the Infinity Two Stellarator
The consistent and robust physics solution for Infinity Two results in a deuterium-tritium (D-T) fueled, burning plasma stellarator with 800 MW of fusion power and delivers a nominal 350 MWe to the power grid, which is one of the most significant nuclear fusion benefits. It is characterized by plasma with resilient and stable behavior across a broad range of operating conditions, very low heat loss due to turbulent transport, as well as tolerable direct energy losses to the first wall.
The Infinity Two stellarator has sufficient room for both adequately sized island divertors to exhaust helium ash and a blanket which provides appropriate shielding and tritium breeding. Type One Energy has high confidence that this essential physics solution provides a good baseline stellarator configuration for the Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant. These design features not only enhance fusion advantages but also ensure practical and sustainable power generation.
“The articles in this issue represent an important step towards a fusion reactor based on the stellarator concept. Thanks to decades of experiments and theoretical research, much of the latter published in JPP, it has become possible to lay out the physics basis for a stellarator power plant in considerable detail. JPP is very happy to publish this series of papers from Type One Energy, where this has been accomplished in a way that sets new standards for the fidelity and confidence level in this context,” said Per Helander, Associate Editor of the Journal of Plasma Physics and leading expert in stellarator physics at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Germany. The robust physics basis is essential for nuclear fusion advantages to become a reality, providing a clear pathway toward the practical deployment of fusion power plants.
Important to successful commercialization, this stellarator configuration has enabled Type One Energy to architect a maintenance solution that supports good power plant Capacity Factors (CF) and associated Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE), representing an important milestone for nuclear fusion benefits. It also supports favorable regulatory requirements for component manufacturing and power plant construction methods essential to achieving a reasonable Over-Night Cost (ONC) for Infinity Two.
