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Power Businesses United Kingdom

Nuclear Fusion Pioneer Abandons Plan for Prototype Reactor, Will License Reaction-Boosting Nuclear Fuel Capsule (yahoo.com) 65

Posted by EditorDavid from the power-plays dept.
Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 "successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy.

It's now "pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor," reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant based on its "projectile fusion" technology due to a lack of funding. The technology involves a 5p-sized projectile being fired at a fuel cell at extreme speeds using electromagnets to generate a powerful reaction and simulate collisions at extremely high speeds, such as those in space. Instead of building its own plant, First Light plans to supply other nuclear power companies with one of its inventions, called an "amplifier", which houses a nuclear fuel capsule and boosts the power of fusion reactions.

The group has burned through tens of millions of pounds trying to bring its technology to fruition... The decision to ditch its original plan will allow First Light Fusion to be more "capital light", the nuclear group said in March, while licensing its inventions would generate more revenues. The company said it had recently secured the first tranche of a new funding round. Mark Thomas, First Light Fusion's chief executive, said: "We have been very pleased with the response to our strategy pivot, moving to an enabler of inertial fusion while rapidly accelerating revenues...

First Light Fusion's other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.
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Nuclear Fusion Pioneer Abandons Plan for Prototype Reactor, Will License Reaction-Boosting Nuclear Fuel Capsule More

Nuclear Fusion Pioneer Abandons Plan for Prototype Reactor, Will License Reaction-Boosting Nuclear Fuel Capsule

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  • those who can't ... attempt to pivot to patent trolling?

    Eh... i'm just being a jerk. running out of money's a b-tch. Too bad they weren't able to secure something meaningful to bring forth a real plant. Hopefully they do have some useful thing to provide to the market other than patent trolling.

    • those who can't ... attempt to pivot to patent trolling?

      Eh... i'm just being a jerk. running out of money's a b-tch. Too bad they weren't able to secure something meaningful to bring forth a real plant. Hopefully they do have some useful thing to provide to the market other than patent trolling.

      Is pointing out some truth being a jerk? We keep getting these fusion startups, the only thing different in this case is after the inevitable failure, they've come up with is making that with from claiming 5 years to fusion power, it's now trying to sell their device to others. "It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them." (dodgeball)

  • Bombs not powerplants (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Such stuff is more for bombs and related stuff (bomb tests) than powerplants.

    Because they're as practical as burning Rolexes to generate power.

  • "Remember First Light Fusion?" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Sunday April 27, 2025 @09:26PM (#65335775)
    Nope.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Me neither, which is a little surprising, because I think I would remember heading about anyone daft enough to have "accelerate macroscopic slugs to relativistic velocities" as a plan for a fusion power plant.

      • Re:"Remember First Light Fusion?" (Score:5, Informative)

        by rta ( 559125 ) on Sunday April 27, 2025 @10:09PM (#65335825)

        it's only ~ Mach 20 ( or 0.000022 c )

        First Light Fusion uses a unique approach in which a 22-metre gas gun fires a 100g projectile at 6.5km/second - about twenty times the speed of sound - at a pellet containing tritium and deuterium.

        (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/27/british-nuclear-fusion-start-up-plans-570m-reactor/ )

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Entrope ( 68843 )

          And they expected that, plus a plant to generate the tritium, to produce more energy than it consumed? That's not really more plausible than what it sounded like originally.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

            And they expected that, plus a plant to generate the tritium, to produce more energy than it consumed? That's not really more plausible than what it sounded like originally.

            Err... what implausible, here? The "plant to generate the tritium" is probably going to be a fission reactor.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by BranMan ( 29917 )

              And to be fair, a much bigger percentage of energy expended (by the 22 meter gun) is going into the mach-20 impact than you would get with super high powered lasers that have an efficiency rating of less than 1%.

              You have to input a lot of energy to get a fusion reaction going. Making up for the loss of 99%+ of the energy going into lasers makes for a pretty steep hill to climb just to get back to break-even power. Kinetic energy may indeed be a more efficient way to transfer startup energy.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tschaine ( 10502969 )

      I do. I was cheering for them, because their idea was quite a bit outside-the-box. Basically they were going to shoot a big gun at a carefully constructed target in hopes of triggering enough fusion to extract more power than it took to fire the gun. One of the early atomic bombs used a similar approach, though I don't think first light intended to release anywhere near that much energy per cycle.

      I'm sad that it didn't pan out.

      Fusion is hard. I hope their pivot is able to raise enough funding for them to ta

      • Fusion isn't hard, it happens all the time.

        Mother nature has demonstrated to people both the nuclear fission [wikipedia.org] and the fusion [wikipedia.org] reactor.

        One is easy for people to copy, the other is currently impossible and will remain so for a considerable time, quite possibly forever.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by necro81 ( 917438 )

        One of the early atomic bombs used a similar approach

        You are referring to a "gun type [wikipedia.org]" atomic weapon using highly enriched U-235. The Hiroshima bomb [wikipedia.org] - a.k.a. "Little Boy" - was like that. It turns out that if you put a large enough compact mass of U-235 in one place, it'll spontaneously explode, because there's so much volume of fissile material compared to the surface area letting neutrons escape. A gun type weapon does this by firing two sub-critical masses together to create one supercritical mass.

  • We've been trying to collapse our way to fusion since the 1960s. One thing we have learned in that time is that it is much, much harder than we initially thought, and that the timing and symmetry has to be *perfect*.

    There was no way FLF's system could possibly achieve that. Even their own simulations on their website showed total chaotic collapse taking place over way too long a time scale. There was no way the system would have worked.

    And when they talked about it, their justification was "pistol shrimp... kewlz, amiright?!"

    • We've been trying to collapse our way to fusion since the 1960s. One thing we have learned in that time is that it is much, much harder than we initially thought, and that the timing and symmetry has to be *perfect*.

      That's controlled, energy-yielding fusion. Uncontrolled (i.e. thermonuclear bombs) is costly, but not that difficult, and controlled, energy-sucking fusion is even easier and cheaper.

  • The goal of fusion research is not to demonstrate fusion. We have that. Take a tritium and a hydrogen and zot you get a helium nucleus. What we are striving for is energy break even, that is, as much energy CAPTURED and USABLE versus the amount the energy put in. It's a question of scale of efficiency, re-usability, maintainability, reliability, etc. etc. etc. I don't see how this brings fusion energy any closer to fruition.

  • High Risk High Gain vs. Certain Fail No Gain (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday April 27, 2025 @09:39PM (#65335797)

    Over the last decades I have lost count of the number of startups that funded with the intent to bring fusion reactors to commercial reality. Yet they all end up like this. Who funds these things?

    I personally have participated in VC funded startup and met with dozens if not hundreds of funding organizations large and small. VCs, institutions, investment funds, investment bankers, corporate and you name it. They vary in their orientation and approach and technical acumen a lot but they all do due diligence. More than once I have been interviewed by highly credentialed academics on the tech I am asking funding for because if the investor is interested and don't understand, they hire that expertise. At the teeniest tiniest inconsistency or weakness they discover it gets reported and the money backs out. "Call us later when you get to break even"

    So the track record here on fusion technology is pretty much 0% for quite a while. The technical theories have to be quackery. I don't know what they are in individual cases but WTF the money flows into them nonstop. Yes I get it. If it "works" then the potential gain is staggering. But where do they get mainstream physicists to sign off on this or do they just skip that part or maybe just not care? Or are the quacks just that good at selling their novel new idea in high-energy physics that somehow nobody else has realized until now? Any insights on this welcome. Been wondering about this for a while.

    • The problem is that its easy to come up with a fusion idea that sounds plausible. Careful analysis is needed to find the fatal flaw, but that analysis requires experts in the field. My impression is that VCs are not finding and paying those experts to verify the startup's claims, and I know of specific examples where that is the case.

      My best guess as to the root cause is that plasma physics is extremely complicated and specialized. Simply hiring physicists to evaluate a proposal is not enough, you need

      • The problem is that its easy to come up with a fusion idea that sounds plausible.

        The problem is that people keep confusing "fusion" with "a plausible technological scheme to release energy from fusion reactions and convert it to usable power".

        The first is doable, the second is a fantasy.

        We have fission energy due to a lucky break from mother nature - there exists a mechanism of reaction, fission by the capture of an exogenous neutron with subsequent emissions of more neutrons - which gives us a reaction that is easy to start, is self-sustaining in principle and can be controlled with fa

        • Modding me with a "disagree" will do nothing to the fact that your dream of fusion is a pipe dream, space cadet.

          But you know you don't have the arguments for a real discussion :)

      • "The problem is that its easy to come up with a fusion idea that sounds plausible. Careful analysis is needed to find the fatal flaw, but that analysis requires experts in the field."

        Sounds like the type of problem best handled by governments and open fundamental research instead of private corporations, proprietary tech, and marketing spin.

        • > Sounds like the type of problem best handled by governments and open fundamental research

          Absolutely. However, given that 80 years of such research (the first fusion reactor was built in 1938) has failed to produce anything useful, and the money from those sources is drying up as people turn their attention to things that actually do work, the people that have invested their lives in that slice of the research world really have nowhere else to turn.

        • It should be at the national labs, and the labs have the best scientists in the world. I worked at a national lab for many years and early on it was fantastic, but eventually left because the politics made it impossible to get things done. The political hierarchy wanted certainty where none was possible. High or even moderate risk experiments couldn't get funded because they might *fail* and that would look *bad*. Projects became extremely conservative, and people were promoted for doing simple things

    • VC investing is all about placing a large number of big bets on companies that will mostly fail, in the hope that just one or two will have 100x returns.

      After 10 investments, it's a win if 8 fail, 1 breaks even, and one is the big hit that makes everyone rich despite the failures.

      So, betting on a series of failed fusion startups doesn't sound out-of-character at all. Everyone in the VC world expects most of them to fail, but everyone also knows that one success is likely to make all of the investors rich de

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      I agree and have wondered that myself. However, I suspect it's not VC's who are investing in these, but angel investors. They're not necessarily expecting the company to succeed, but are interested in fostering a relationship with the team, and seeing if they might create something interesting. It this case, it looks like they might take a spin-off technology to market.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That's just normal VC behaviour. Throw money at things with a low probability of success, but a high potential reward. Like playing the lottery.

      Occasionally one of them turns out to be the next Google or Rivian and it makes up for the losses, hopefully.

    • > Who funds these things?

      Insta-billionares with nowhere else to put their money, and the ear of a community that can help them pump-n-dump if they can put out enough cool press releases.

      Let's take one example: TAE.

      Rostoker first published on the CBF topic in 1992, in a paper that was so obviously wrong it had already been debunked 40 years earlier. In 1998 he re-worked it and tossed in some new buzzwords. He took it to the Naval Research Labs to get funding. They assigned two guys to review it. By lunch,

  • Livermore has succeeded in igniting laser fusion (Score:5, Informative)

    by jhecht ( 143058 ) on Sunday April 27, 2025 @09:54PM (#65335809)
    It's not just China. DoE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported the first ignition of a laser fusion target in December 2022 and have scored six more ignitions since then. https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/b... [llnl.gov] It's the first real proof of principle for inertial confinement fusion, and it uses powerful laser pulses to achieve ignition. Inertial (laser) confinement fusion is the major competition for magnetic confinement, and what Livermore has done with the National Ignition Facility is to greatly improve the uniformity of target compression. It's taken a long time coming, and fusion reactors are not just around the corner. It may have been the final blow for First Light Fusion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      The problem with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment is that while on paper, it was energy positive, the power positivity disappears already at the first stage, the laser cannons. Their efficiency is somewhere at 1%, and that means while the photons coming out of the laser might have carried less energy then the target created while fusing its contents, just at the laser level, we are at a factor of 60 times the energy put in compared to the energy output. We are really far away from any u

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jhecht ( 143058 )
        Reasonable point. To clarify terms, what Livermore calls "ignition" measures the input energy as the laser energy delivered onto the target, not the power used to generate the laser pulse, which is what would count in operating a power plant. What makes ignition significant is that it marks the threshold where the energy generates starts increasing faster than the energy delivered, so there's hope that if we could make a laser that could deliver higher energy it could produce a lot more power. However, it t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          The big problem from my perspective is, after we get into power generating levels with fusion, what then? We still have to turn that power into something usable and the only way we have to do that at present is basically a big steam engine (I mean, I suppose we could do a big Sterling engine rather than steam engine, but still more or less the same thing from the point of view of complexity and expense). Basically, we just have a fission plant where the fission reactor is taken out and replaced with a fusio

  • That certainly is . . . interesting. Have they provided funding to any other fusion startups/companies?

    • Not that I can find; it appears to be the only one. And I'm not sure how much this company is worth, but Tencent only invested like $50M, which doesn't sound like a lot for this type of project.

      • It isn't much, no. But it was enough to get China's foot in the door. Doesn't look like it amounted to much though. There are other more-promising ventures, and it would be a bit unfortunate if Tencent had their mitts on one of those.

  • Modern business leaders: when everything else fails and we haven't been able to deliver on our promises, and no one will give us any more money, ONLY THEN will we try to just build a successful profitable company with an actual product people want and will pay money for.

  • Yet another company selling lies.

  • Target fusion is a dead end and always has been. If you do back off the napkin numbers you can find it won't work.

  • by rent seeking than doing,.

  • "...5p-sized projectile..."
    how big is that in normal units, like "Library of Congress", American "Football Field", or Rhode Island?

    • It's close to the size of a dime.

    • "...5p-sized projectile..."
      how big is that in normal units, like "Library of Congress", American "Football Field", or Rhode Island?

      It's a UK coin. 5 pence, 5/100 GBP

      From Tfs:

      First Light Fusion's other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.

      So £0.05 approx. = $0.10

      ...unless they meant 5 protons.

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