Bill Gates fund backs ‘Star Wars’ fusion tech in bid for limitless power

Bill Gates’ energy innovation fund is among investors to have pumped $100m into a nuclear fusion start-up using 'Star Wars' technology in a bid to unlock limitless clean energy.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the fund set up by Microsoft founder Gates to support clean tech start-ups, has helped raise the sum for US start-up Xcimer Energy in a funding round led by venture capital firm Hedosophia.

Xcimer, founded in 2022 in Denver, Colorado and previously the recipient of funding from the US Department of Energy, said it will use the money to set up a new facility in its home city to test its prototype laser system.

“This Series A financing enables us to achieve key milestones along the path to commercial inertial fusion energy,” said Xcimer CEO and chief science officer Conner Galloway.

Xcimer is among dozens of start-ups vying to be the first to generate commercial scale power from fusion, the same process that generates light and heat from stars.

Xcimer is pursuing laser-driven inertial fusion, which it says “many experts recognise as having the best long-term economics and therefore most viable commercialisation prospects of any fusion approach.”

This method uses high-powered lasers to create an incredibly intense pulse of light, focused onto a sphere of fuel the size of a pea, creating high temperature and pressure that initiates fusion reactions.

The fusion energy from each burning capsule is captured by a river of molten salt in the chamber walls. This carries away the heat to generate steam, which in turn drives turbines to produce electricity.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), a laser-based inertial confinement fusion research device located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made history in 2022 by achieving fusion ignition for the first time, after six decades of scientific research in the field.

Xcimer says its laser architecture will produce up to 10 times more laser energy at 10 times higher efficiency and over 30 times lower cost per joule than the NIF laser system.

Xcimer is building upon laser technologies originally pursued for the “Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a. ‘Star Wars’)” US defence program proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 to ward off potential nuclear attacks from the Soviet Union.

The program, having been proposed around the same time the original Star Wars film series was released, picked up the nickname due to the fact the technology would be positioned in space, an idea seen by critics as impractical science fiction.

Xcimer says this “Star Wars” tech enables “much higher laser energies, which in turn enables scaling the fusion performance achieved on the NIF to much higher gain.”

Xcimer’s inertial confinement approach is a lesser-trodden path to fusion. Most companies and organisations pursuing the energy source use machines called tokamaks or stellarators that confine plasma for longer periods of time using huge magnets to generate reactions.

Proponents of inertial fusion including Xcimer claim the reactors for their method are easier to design and cheaper to run.

Although commercial-scale fusion reactors are not generally expected until the early-mid 2030s, they are being eyed as a potential future means of powering data centres, whose energy demands are skyrocketing due to the huge energy demands of artificial intelligence.