Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California–based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs.
“They’ve improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,” says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Fusion energy seeks to replicate the power source of the sun and stars: heating atoms to enormous temperatures so that their nuclei slam together with enough force to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse, releasing energy. The challenge on Earth is to confine plasma—an ionized gas, with electrons and nuclei separated—at high temperatures (greater than 150 million degrees Celsius) long enough for fusion reactions to occur. Most effort over the past 60 years of fusion research has focused on tokamaks—huge doughnut-shaped vessels that confine plasma with powerful magnets—and laser fusion, which uses high-energy laser pulses to squeeze tiny capsules of fuel. But between these low-density and high-density extremes there is a range of other approaches that have received little government funding. Now, startup companies are moving into that vacuum.
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