ORNL hands a 50-year fusion-fueling breakthrough to Type One Energy
A deal signed at Knoxville's Nuclear Opportunities Workshop moves a core stellarator technology, decades in the making at ORNL, into the private sector as Type One prepares to build its Infinity One prototype.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has licensed a suite of its cryogenic pellet fueling technologies to Type One Energy, moving a capability the lab spent decades developing into the hands of the Knoxville-area company racing to build one of the country’s first commercial fusion power plants.
The agreement, signed at the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop (NOW) in Knoxville, covers four ORNL inventions for cryogenic pellet fueling, the technique that keeps a fusion reaction running by injecting frozen fuel pellets into the plasma. For Type One, the license removes a technical hurdle on the path to Infinity One, its prototype stellarator at Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bull Run Energy Complex in Clinton, and to Infinity Two, the power plant meant to follow it.
“We depend on partners like Type One Energy to take the technology that we develop and move it to market,” ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer said at the signing on day two of the NOW Conference.
Why the technology matters
A stellarator confines superheated plasma inside a twisting, figure-8 magnetic field. Keeping that plasma burning is a fueling problem: add too much fuel at once, and the reaction destabilizes… so operators have to feed it steadily, a little at a time.
That’s the issue ORNL’s pellet technology solves, and it’s something fusion engineers have been refining since it was invented at the lab in the 1970s.
“The technology that we’re transferring now is a gas gun technology, where you inject ice pellets in,” said Troy Carter, director of ORNL’s Fusion Energy Division, in an interview. “You have an extruder that makes little ice pellets, and then you shoot it in with gas. This allows for continuous fueling.”
Carter said the same approach also helps solve a second problem that has dogged the field, keeping the plasma confined so it does not leak out. Injecting pellets into the core, he said, reduces that risk. ORNL has been the only producer of this particular continuous deuterium-tritium pellet-fueling technology, and Carter said fusion developers in the U.S. and abroad have approached the lab about acquiring it.
“ORNL is an R&D organization, so we’re not intended to build pellet fueling devices and sell them to companies,” Carter said. “If this is going to be an enabler for the fusion industry, it has to be out in the private sector.”
Matt Miles, Type One’s senior vice president of external affairs, framed the deal as the national-lab model working as designed.
“National Labs are meant to take ideas, develop them, and hand them off to the private sector so companies can commercialize them,” Miles said. “This is a perfect example of that lifecycle.”
Type One Energy is preparing to soar
Type One has been in the Knoxville area for nearly three years, and a lot has happened in that span of time. The company now employs about 250 people, up from under 200 in March, and is looking for a larger home to replace its Hardin Valley headquarters.
The licensed pellet technology feeds directly into the company’s near-term plans. At the workshop, Type One Energy’s CEO Christofer Mowry said construction of Infinity One, the prototype that will train operators and de-risk the design, begins in November.
Miles put the price of getting Infinity One running at about $700 million, with a target of completion by late 2028 to early 2029.
If you think $700 million is a lot, brace yourself. Infinity Two is an even larger prize: a first-of-its-kind commercial stellarator power plant that the company says would deliver electricity to the grid by 2034.
“Infinity Two is its own animal,” Miles said. “It’s a multibillion-dollar power plant and will be the first one of its kind in the world.”
What gives him confidence, Miles said, is the money flowing into the sector.
“A lot of people feel that fusion is ready to be commercialized and brought to the public,” he said. “And it’s going to happen a lot sooner than people think.”
Watch Teknovation’s interview in March with Type One Energy co-founder and CSO, Dr. John Canik.
Learn more about Type One Energy.
Learn more about NOW conference, hosted by the East Tennessee Economic Council, and the TN Nuclear Network.
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