Nuclear fusion has the potential to remove our reliance on fossil fuels by providing a practically limitless energy source that produces power in a similar way to the Sun and the stars. Fusion experiments, such as Europe's ITER, typically rely on large donut-shaped tokamak reactors using extremely powerful magnets to control the plasma generated during the fusion reaction.
Zap Energy has developed a different approach with its Z-pinch technology. The company uses an electromagnetic field instead of the expensive magnetic coils and shielding materials used in tokamaks. This, they say, pins the plasma inside a relatively small space and "pinches" it until it becomes hot and dense enough for the required reaction to take place.
Z pinch has long been an appealing way to achieve nuclear fusion, but for many years researchers considered Z-pinch’s plasma instabilities to be an insurmountable challenge," Shumlak, who serves as Zap Energy's Chief Science Officer, said in the company's press release.
-pinch technology was first thought up in the 1950s, but until recently, instability problems meant that research had been largely focused on the more stable tokamak technology. In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Washington proposed the use of sheared axial flow to smooth the plasma streams, preventing distortions that previously led to instability.
One of the authors of that study, Uri Shumlak, co-founded Zap Energy in 2017 in a bid to leverage the sheared axial flow technique to make Z-pinch technology commercially viable. Just last week, Zap Energy reached a key milestone by creating the first plasmas inside its prototype reactor, called the FuZE-Q.
The Zap Energy team also just closed a $160-million Series C funding round, which will help it to further develop its Z-pinch technology and hopefully bring it to the market. The company says its reactors could be small enough to fit inside a garage, meaning it could give both micro nuclear reactor and nuclear fusion firms a run for their money.
The key to Zap Energy’s success is a breakthrough method of confining and compressing plasma called a sheared-flow-stabilized (SFS) Z pinch. In Z-pinch fusion a line of plasma carrying an electrical current generates its own magnetic field that “pinches” the plasma until it’s hot and dense enough for fusion to occur. SFS then helps sustain the plasma by suppressing instabilities that have plagued historical attempts at Z-pinch fusion.
Compared to prevailing approaches to fusion, Zap Energy’s technology is incredibly elegant and does not require any superconducting magnets or high-powered lasers. A simpler method of producing fusion means an opportunity to build smaller, less complex, more scalable systems that will more quickly bring fusion energy to the grid.
The conceptual basis for the technology was developed at the University of Washington (UW) together with collaborators from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. UW professors Uri Shumlak and Brian A. Nelson teamed up with entrepreneur and investor Benj Conway to co-found Zap Energy in 2017 to accelerate and ultimately commercialize the research. The company now has over 60 employees based in Seattle, Everett and Mukilteo, Washington.
The more current used to make a Z pinch, the hotter and denser it will be, so climbing to higher and higher currents is a key part of advancing Z-pinch fusion. Having reached 500 kA and the limits of its current hardware capabilities this past fall, Zap Energy will now begin operation on its next-generation platform, known as FuZE-Q, and install a cutting-edge power bank later this year. The new system will be designed for the levels of current needed to reach an equivalent point of a scientific energy breakeven, where the energy coming out of the Z pinch will be greater than the energy put in to create it. Scientific modeling predicts the Q=1 equivalent point will occur around 650 kA of current.
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