The ARPA-E 2022 Nuclear Fusion Annual Meeting in San Francisco

I attended the ARPA-E 2022 Fusion Annual Meeting at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. This is a meeting for all companies that have ARPA-E grants and are working on nuclear fusion technology. Below is the poster for our Princeton Field Reversed Configuration ARPA-E OPEN 2018 grant. The poster gives an overview of the technology and the latest results from the work.

Below is our ARPA-E GAMOW poster on power electronics. It includes work by Princeton Fusion Systems, Princeton University, Qorvo and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The first panel explains the benefits of wide bandgap semiconductors. The second panel shows the latest results on Class-E amplifiers for plasma heating. The next panel shows Qorvo’s latest 2 V SiC cascodes. The final panel shows the cooling systems being designed by NREL.

The meeting had two days of interesting talks by distinguished speakers. Dr. Robert Mumgaard of Commonwealth Fusion Systems talked about their work on advanced high-temperature superconducting magnets and the theory behind high field Tokamaks. Dennis Stone of NASA discussed NASA COTS programs. Dr. Wayne Sullivan of General Atomic talked about their research programs. General Atomics has been operating a Tokamak possibly longer than anyone else. We heard talks on the Centrifugal Mirror at the University of Maryland and WHAM, the high field mirror, at the University of Wisconsin. Andrew Holland of the Fusion Industry Association gave an overview of funding resources for fusion research. He said FIA had verified 31 companies that were developing fusion power technology. This is a huge change from just a few years ago when only large government entities were conducting fusion research.

We talked to several organizations in need of high voltage and high current power electronics. We plan to pivot our GAMOW work to meet the needs of these potentially near-term customers.

The meeting had breakout sessions in which we discussed funding for fusion research and how to help gain social acceptance for nuclear fusion power. Both are challenging.