Other players have made similar calculations. He prodded his students to consider whether the advent of stronger magnets than those used by ITER could make a tokamak that could reach net energy but that was smaller and therefore cheaper to build. After stints at the University of California and the University of Wisconsin, he found his way to MIT in 2006. And unlike space flight, it is not a mature field that has simply to be emulated and streamlined by commercial players. True, fusion has a long track record of being more difficult and costly than expected – a transformational technology that is just years away and always will be, according to one long-running joke. Long the domain of large, government-backed projects, the pursuit has more recently expanded to include an array of private companies, particularly in the United States, Britain and Canada. The Promethean dream of nuclear fusion is about harnessing an abundant, uninterrupted, carbon-free source of electricity. Once Commonwealth or any other company pushes past the net-energy threshold, “everybody on the planet will know it’s a different world,” Dr. Commonwealth is the leader, having collected more than US$2-billion from backers who include Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy group, which is seeking to accelerate the path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.Īnother is Vancouver-based General Fusion, which has raised more than US$300-million from investors who include Jeff Bezos and Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s giant sovereign wealth fund. In total, those companies have raised more than US$5-billion from investors. He put this challenge to a class of graduate students: Start by assuming you can have all high temperature superconductor you want, then figure out what kind of machine it will make. Whyte, a Canadian scientist and engineer who directs fusion research at MIT, was among the first to see the possibilities. When wrapped around layers of metal, the material can be used to make the most powerful magnets on Earth.Īs it turns out, this has huge implications for the quest to develop nuclear fusion, the physical process that powers the sun and stars, as a commercial energy source. High temperature superconductors, once brittle and hard to work with, can now be purchased in bulk, conveniently deposited on strips of tape. Simon Simard/The Globe and MailĪnd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dennis Whyte had a hunch that if you design a nuclear fusion reactor with the strongest magnets possible, the exotic stuff required to make those magnets will become available by the time you need it. ![]() Canadian scientist and engineer Dennis Whyte, who directs fusion research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among the first to see the potential of a new form of magnet as a way to achieve fusion energy at a practical scale.
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