The Department of Energy will grant $50M for further investigation of fusion energy.
The Office of Science will award $20M to pursue studies regarding the everyday use of fusion energy, the DoE said Thursday. These studies will be based on using spherical tokamaks and will be conducted at both domestic and international facilities.
“In addition to having potential performance advantages, spherical tokamaks can serve as excellent research instruments to probe key physics problems prior to burning plasma operation in ITER,” said Paul Dabbar, undersecretary for science at the DoE.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy will work with the Office of Science’s Fusion Energy Sciences initiative to award the remaining $30M to the Galvanizing Advances in Market-aligned fusion for the Overabundance of Watts, or GAMOW, program that aims to develop enabling technologies for fusion energy.
“The successful development of fusion energy systems has the potential to create an abundant, safe, carbon-free power source for a wide range of uses,” said Lane Genatowski, director at ARPA-E.
GAMOW’s research and development goals include creating cost-effective measures for additive manufacturing, novel fusion materials and advanced production as well as make streamlined cycle driver technology and fusion power plant components.
The program will provide funding for projects that improve, simplify, or reduce development costs for fusion energy platforms. ARPA-E and FES will grant $15M each in funds over the GAMOW program’s three-year run.