NT-Tao: Fitting a fusion reactor in a container
The race to develop carbon-free energy is on, and Israel-based NT-Tao is bearing down with a clean, nuclear fusion source designed to power a small city.
By Matthew Kalman
NT-Tao seeks to revolutionize the nuclear fusion space by scaling down the generator to the size of a storage container.
“Without giving away our secret power, what we can say at this point is that NT-Tao is taking the best of existing tokamak technology and the best of existing stellarator technology”
Despite the technical hurdles, the company has attracted high-profile investors including Honda, the first automaker to invest in fusion energy, Natalie Lisbona reports for the BBC.
Honda anticipates that fusion technology will become increasingly important as electric vehicles become more popular.
After emerging from several years of stealth, NT-Tao raised $22 million in a Series A investment round, bringing its total funding to $28 million.
Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei combine under intense heat to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a larger amount of energy but no carbon. Unlike nuclear fission, the atom-splitting process used in nuclear reactors, nuclear fusion doesn’t carry the risk of a reactor meltdown or create long-term radioactive nuclear waste.
The potential of fusion has been recognized for decades, but it was only in December 2022 that scientists were able to achieve fusion ignition. For the first time ever, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California produced more energy from fusion than the technology used to drive it, a breakthrough that could mark the turning point for startups developing fusion energy technology.
One way to achieve fusion is to heat hydrogen isotopes to hundreds of millions of degrees until they break apart into a whirling state of matter called plasma. The plasma can then be contained by powerful magnetic fields, arranged either in a device known as a tokamak, where it is confined by magnets, or in a stellarator, where it is sent on a twisting path through the machine.
NT-Tao combines these two approaches in developing a high-density compact fusion reactor. The company is betting that by using denser plasma, its reactor core can be smaller – even as small as a shipping container – and so can all the other engineering around it.
“Without giving away our secret power, what we can say at this point is that NT-Tao is taking the best of existing tokamak technology and the best of existing stellarator technology,” says chief executive Oded Gour-Lavie, who founded NT-Tao in 2016 with Boaz and Doron Weinfeld.
“We are refining those technologies to make a new design that will operate at significantly higher plasma density, giving us the ability to generate a fusion reaction with a much smaller footprint than most of the other solutions under development,” he adds.
NT-Tao says its unique plasma heating technology will unlock 1,000 times higher density than other technology under development, yielding a fusion reaction that is 1 million times stronger. Gour-Lavie predicts that a prototype presenting net energy output from NT-Tao can be expected toward the end of this decade.
Money has been flooding into fusion projects in recent years as the search for clean energy heats up. A 2022 report by the Fusion Industry Association says fusion companies have declared over $4.7 billion of private funding to date, plus an additional $117 million in grants and other funding from governments.
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