Over 25 Years
of Epic Innovation
The Moment of Discovery: TAE is Born
Technology co-founders Norman Rostoker and Michl Binderbauer collaborated on research that eventually led to the design for TAE’s proprietary fusion devices.
The promise of fusion has been explored theoretically for decades, but TAE Technologies began with a revolutionary goal: Clean, safe, commercial fusion power for all. In the 1990s, TAE’s technology co-founders Norman Rostoker and Michl Binderbauer began developing a unique approach to fusion at the University of California, Irvine that would leverage the deepest insights from plasma physics and accelerator physics for a scalable, cost-effective fusion power plant. They later expanded on this approach with a vision for using hydrogen-boron fuel via collaboration with Hendrik Monkhorst at the University of Florida.
Fusion is the process that powers the sun and stars. It’s a manifestation of Einstein’s famous equation: E=MC2. TAE is leveraging nature’s preferred source of energy to create a new form of carbon-free electricity using a non-radioactive and plentiful fuel source that produces negligible byproducts with no risk of meltdown. Working to create a mini Sun on Earth by smashing light atoms together in a plasma, we aim to harness the energy that’s released to eventually power our homes, cars, and more.
Norman Rostoker began working in the field of fusion energy in the early days of its development, becoming a leading researcher, beloved professor and founding father of the field of plasma physics over the course of his career.
Pioneering Fusion,
Delivering Milestones
As the ink dried on the creation of Tri Alpha Energy, exploration of commercial fusion energy began in earnest. TAE’s approach demanded mastering plasma physics and accelerator physics to control fickle plasma, a challenge in itself that has stymied generations of fusion scientists. TAE devised a series of experimental machines to test the company’s daring approach to aneutronic fusion energy development.
Built with found materials on the UC Irvine campus in 1999 and 2000, the Sewer Pipe was the first prototype reactor and was able to develop a compact, stable plasma core using a flux core technique. It led to the development of an expanded compact linear configuration, B, and its upgrade, C-1.
TAE achieved its C-1 milestone of 1 ms of FRC duration at the end of 2004. This graph and note from then-CEO Dale Prouty annotated a commemorative plaque given to members of the team and early supporters of the company, to mark the occasion.
It all started with TAE’s first exploratory device, “A,” which was named “the Sewer Pipe.” Along with a second-generation machine, “B,” and its upgrade, “C-1,” these devices all achieved their goal: to develop a compact, stable plasma core while testing early fuel injection methodologies.
With C-1, TAE achieved the first significant ability to confine FRC plasmas for 1 millisecond—a small blip in time that represented a paradigm shift for the company and fusion development.
By early 2005, TAE was ready to upgrade from early testing to fully integrated fusion machines. The third-generation device, “C-2,” had the goal of proving TAE’s plasma confinement technique in an advanced beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC).
C-2 successfully demonstrated the positive impact of large-orbit ion populations on confinement and stability as a basis to move toward commercial power plant development.
In 2010, TAE’s breakthrough work on plasma formation and retention was reported in Physical Review Letters.
In 2012, TAE reported results of another breakthrough—this time sharing research on FRC lifetime and the substantial fast ion effects. In 2014, TAE presented an invited paper at the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics meeting. Subsequently, the companion paper to this talk became the most-read paper of 2015 in Physics of Plasmas.
With those achievements in hand, TAE next developed “C-2U” to demonstrate that the technology’s design could confine plasma for a long enough amount of time to validate core stability. In 2015, TAE achieved that milestone as C-2U successfully kept an FRC plasma confined at operator will.
C-2U successfully combined a high-beta FRC plasma with intense high-power neutral beam injection, a significant advance toward the scientific validation of TAE’s advanced beam-driven FRC approach to fusion.
C-2U successfully combined a high-beta FRC plasma with intense high-power neutral beam injection, a significant advance toward the scientific validation of TAE’s advanced beam-driven FRC approach to fusion.
Mastering the
Plasma with
Norman
Magnets surround the quartz tube where Norman’s initial plasma discharge occurs.
Construction of the fifth-generation device began in 2015 and required TAE to source materials and ingenuity from all over the world to meet the demands of its design. In July 2017, the company announced that Norman was fully operational and had created its first plasma.
Plasmas are notoriously fickle and hard to manage, but TAE’s field-reversed configuration uses neutral beams to heat and stabilize plasma for optimal confinement.
While Norman Rostoker passed away before his namesake machine fired its first plasma, its existence stands as a testament to TAE’s beloved maverick, and his vision for “the end in mind”: a clean and reliable source of commercial fusion power.
Next, the TAE team set to work optimizing the performance of Norman and gathering valuable data. After firing thousands of plasma shots, TAE was able to meet its initial temperature goal of 30 million degrees C in August 2019, but our team didn’t stop there.
Through ongoing experimentation and refinements, and in collaboration with Google’s AI / Machine Learning team, Norman was pushed to an impressive 70+ million degrees C—going above and beyond “hot enough.”
Investors from around the world supported these important milestones, and TAE counts among its shareholders visionary investors including Buchanan Investments, Vulcan, Enel, Venrock, NEA, Goldman Sachs, Wellcome Trust, and the Kuwait Investment Authority, as well as the family offices of Addison Fischer, Art Samberg, and Charles Schwab, among others. The success of Norman also attracted a new class of institutional and strategic investors to TAE, including Chevron, Google, Reimagined Ventures, Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, and TIFF Investment Management.
Beyond Fusion:
Inspired Novel
Innovations
TAE Life Sciences’ Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) has been used to treat recurrent, invasive, heretofore untreatable, and metastatic cancers while sparing healthy tissues, all within 1 to 2 treatment sessions.
TAE Life Sciences Director of Translational Research Drug Development Karen Morrison at work on the company’s cancer treatment technology
TAE Life Sciences Director of Translational Research Drug Development Karen Morrison at work on the company’s cancer treatment technology
While fusion has always been at the heart of TAE’s mission, adjacent technologies have also proven fruitful as business ventures and opportunities to advance the company’s broader mission to serve humanity.
In 2017, TAE announced that the patented accelerator-based advanced beam technology developed for fusion would be leveraged to launch a company to commercialize medical innovations: TAE Life Sciences. The technology is being used to develop Boron Neutron Capture Therapy, a promising potential treatment for head and neck, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), and other cancers that are difficult or impossible to treat with traditional methods. TAE Life Sciences aims to deploy this adapted accelerator-based neutron source, in addition to developing targeted pharmaceuticals, as part of a holistic clinical platform to advance the potential of BNCT as a practical, widely accessible cancer treatment.
TAE Life Sciences’ revolutionary neutron beam system will be sized to fit in typical hospital facilities to provide a minimally invasive, cellularly targeted particle therapy that is a cost-effective source for neutrons that can be precision tuned for variable applications.
TAE Power Solutions is developing technologies to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and battery energy storage systems by using a revolutionary approach to power management.
Beyond the company’s world-leading acumen in advanced beam technologies, TAE’s proprietary power management and power delivery technology developed for fusion experiments led to the launch of TAE Power Solutions in 2022.
The company’s first-of-its-kind platform is a foundational step toward building a complete clean energy ecosystem to support mass onboarding of electric vehicles and deployment of intermittent renewable energy as dispatchable power with battery energy storage systems. TAE Power Solutions’ proprietary ultrafast pulse charging technology and modular ACi technology address the most fundamental challenges to electric transportation and energy storage adoption by providing peak power output, lower levelized cost of storage, and longer battery life. With these innovations, TAE Power Solutions is poised to deliver a clean electric future where the world’s best power systems run on TAE’s technologies.
The Future is Now
The Future is Now
Copernicus will be TAE’s final research reactor and a giant leap forward for the entire field of fusion science. It is designed to demonstrate the viability of net energy generation, the ability to harvest more power out than it requires to operate.
In 2023, TAE began work on “Copernicus,” the National Laboratory-scale machine expected to achieve net energy – a major milestone that would be a “Kitty Hawk moment” for the fusion industry.
Housed in a 100,000 square foot facility in Irvine, California, Copernicus will validate commercial fusion’s potential by demonstrating the viability of net energy with TAE’s unique approach. By integrating time (“long enough”) and temperature (“hot enough”) performance levels, Copernicus will demonstrate the viability of generating net energy with our approach. In other words, Copernicus is the opportunity to confirm that our system, when developed at scale as a commercial fusion power plant, can harvest more power than it takes to run the machine.
With the proof of concept accomplished, TAE will then develop “Da Vinci,” the reactor to revolutionize energy production around the world. Designed to deliver net electrons to the grid in the early 2030s, Da Vinci will be TAE’s first prototype commercial power plant to help meet our growing global carbon-free energy demand.