Fifteen projects have been selected to receive $32 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy Breakthroughs Enabling THermonuclear-fusion Energy (BETHE) program. The fusion-focused research initiatives will contribute to the ongoing development of cost-effective, low carbon and grid-ready power options for deployment in the latter half of the 21st century.

The BETHE program is designed to advance fusion technology by supporting research on inherently lower-cost but less-mature fusion concepts. This research category is exemplified by the Wisconsin High-field Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which will leverage advances in the stability and confinement of the mirror fusion concept, innovative plasma heating and high-field superconducting magnets to demonstrate a novel “end cell” that confines stable, heated plasmas with electron temperatures exceeding 1 keV and a fusion triple product exceeding 1018 keV s/m³.

Projects are also selected to focus on component technology developments that could significantly reduce the capital cost of more-mature fusion concepts. Commonwealth Fusion Systems of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will receive funding under this category to resolve several higher-risk engineering challenges in order to design a new fast-ramping, high-temperature-superconducting central solenoid. This component at the center of a tokamak induces an electric field and electrical current along the toroidal axis of the reactor vessel, enabling repetitive, long-pulse (hours) tokamak operation that could potentially eliminate the need for a costly auxiliary current drive.

The BETHE initiative also establishes capability teams to improve/adapt and apply existing machine learning, modeling and other capabilities to accelerate the development of multiple concepts. A project funded at MIT will apply established state-of-the-art theoretical and simulation tools, developed and tested by the fusion community on more traditional concepts, to accelerate the development of potentially transformative, lower-cost fusion concepts.

See the full list of newly funded BETHE projects.