TAE is a private company and the merger with Trump Media would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.
Trump Media & Technology will merge with a fusion power company in an all-stock deal that the companies said Thursday is valued at more than $6 billion.
Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman who resigned in 2021 to become the CEO of Trump Media, will be co-CEO of the new company with TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer.
TAE focuses on nuclear fusion, a technology that combines two light atomic nuclei to form a single heavier one. It releases enormous amount of energy, a process that occurs on the sun and other stars, according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
I just posted how I’ve grown skeptical of nuclear fusion.
This site outlines some misgivings quite well: https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/
As one example, the “lack of radioactivity,” an often touted benefit of fusion, is just… not true. In fact, D-T fusion releases much higher energy neutrons than any fission, and that’s inevitably going to degrade the equipment, turn it radioactive, and wreak all sorts of havoc.
Tritium production isn’t easy, nor particularly sustainable.
Many of fission’s “problems” it’s supposed to solve, like storing hot waste or the finite supply of uranium, really aren’t that big a deal, and can be addressed with the extra expense/engineering of breeder reactors or (possibly) thorium reactors if it’s so important.
Proliferation? Fusion reactors are great at producing fissile material.
Other issues, like fission’s required capital investment, are clearly worse with fusion, and don’t seem to be improving. Heck, we don’t even have the capital or political will for newer fission reactors.
Look. I want a fusion breakthough. This was a good avenue to try.
…But now, fusion feels like one of those interesting ideas that turned out to not be so practical in reality (not yet anyway), now transitioning into a grift.
And if Trump Media buying a fusion startup to put it on the market isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is.
Yeah, I think we’ll be able to figure out fusion. I just don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of it being cheaper than a bunch of solar panels and batteries. Hell, a big solar farm connected to a big hydrogen generator and hydrogen tank will probably be a much cheaper way of generating power than by using fusion reactors. The big fusion reactor in the sky is just going to end up being much cheaper.
Ah damn, I hadn’t even thought of that but of course they’d be just working on tritium fusion rather than H1 fusion. So not even the power of a brown dwarf, which fuses deuterium. Hydrogen is very abundant but tritium much less so. That might be a game breaker on its own, since the price of tritium will only go up when it is in demand for scaled fusion.
I’ve also wondered if fusion reactors will have a “plasma jet” mode of failure where the magnetic field containing the highly pressurized plasma partially fails and shoots out a beam of plasma that will quickly cut through anything in its path.
I agree that they should keep working on it (though not expecting big things from this particular company, other than maybe nuclear arms production). But it’s starting to look similar to space travel outside of our immediate neighborhood: a nice idea that physics will probably laugh and say not so fast!
H1 fusion is really, really hard.
Yeah, I don’t know about leaks. It may end up that pulses or some “alternate” form of compression than constant confinement works out better, but the physics are certainly hard however you slice it.