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Recreating in a lab the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and other stars — which is called nuclear fusion — is a feat as complex as it sounds.
Fusion has the potential to create massive amounts of carbon-free or clean energy. So though no scientists have quite accomplished creating usable energy from fusion just yet, a handful of companies are working at it. The machines being built by scientists to accomplish this are called reactors, and they are massively heavy, cost tens of millions of dollars and represent the culmination of decades of scientific research. TAE Technologies, headquartered in Foothill Ranch, California, is a fusion company using a unique reactor design, and it recently reached a key milestone in the quest for usable energy from fusion.

TAE Technologies, a California-based firm building technology to generate power from nuclear fusion, said on Thursday it had raised $280 million from new and existing investors, including Google and New Enterprise Associates. The fresh capital will mostly be deployed towards further fusion work and a new reactor scale facility, the company said.

TAE Technologies Inc., a developer of nuclear fusion technology, raised $280 million to build a demonstration system after the company was able to produce superheated plasma at 50 million degrees Celsius (90 million degrees Fahrenheit), a key milestone in the effort to reproduce the power of stars to generate electricity on Earth. The company has now raised more than $880 million from backers including Google, Venrock Associates and Kuwait Investment Authority, TAE said in a statement Thursday. That’s more than any other company pursuing fusion, according to Chris Gadomski, nuclear analyst for BloombergNEF.

In a small industrial park located nearly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, one company is claiming to have hit a milestone in the development of a new technology for generating power from nuclear fusion. The 20-year-old fusion energy technology developer TAE Technologies said its reactors could be operating at commercial scale by the end of the decade, thanks to its newfound ability to produce stable plasma at temperatures over 50 million degrees (nearly twice as hot as the sun).