Nobody said building a fusion power plant would be easy. Physicists and engineers have been working for decades to crack the problem. But over the last year or so, fusion startup Zap Energy took a deeper look at its pathway to a working power plant and decided that it would be quicker to build a fission power plant first.
Wait, what?
“Fission and fusion are two sides of the same coin,” Zap’s new CEO, Zabrina Johal, told TechCrunch. “They have so many challenges that are congruent with each other.”
Zap is among the better-funded fusion startups, having raised more than $300 million, so this partial pivot holds some shock value, no matter how many synergies exist between fission and fusion.
It starts to make more sense against the backdrop of rising energy demand from AI data centers, which is expected to nearly triple by 2030. Tech companies want electricity today, and one of the challenges facing every fusion startup is that grid-ready power plants won’t be ready for several more years — likely a decade or more.
“There is not enough power and energy in the world to build all the data centers that are needed,” Johal said. “It just meant we need to pull this in faster; we need to get something that’s relevant to the grid today.”
Two ways to split an atom
Fission is commercially viable in a way that fusion is not. Fusion is the practice of fusing two light atoms like hydrogen, which also releases energy. One experiment has been able to produce more energy than the fusion reaction needed to ignite, but it wasn’t anywhere close to what a power plant would need to generate. Fission splits heavy atoms like uranium to produce power, and we’ve been doing that since the 1950s.
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Despite decades of experience, building fission reactors cost-effectively remains a significant challenge. Fission startups building small modular reactors (SMR) are counting on mass manufacturing to help bring costs …