TAE is a private company and the merger with Trump Media would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.
Trump Media & Technology will merge with a fusion power company in an all-stock deal that the companies said Thursday is valued at more than $6 billion.
Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman who resigned in 2021 to become the CEO of Trump Media, will be co-CEO of the new company with TAE Technologies CEO Michl Binderbauer.
TAE focuses on nuclear fusion, a technology that combines two light atomic nuclei to form a single heavier one. It releases enormous amount of energy, a process that occurs on the sun and other stars, according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
Ah damn, I hadn’t even thought of that but of course they’d be just working on tritium fusion rather than H1 fusion. So not even the power of a brown dwarf, which fuses deuterium. Hydrogen is very abundant but tritium much less so. That might be a game breaker on its own, since the price of tritium will only go up when it is in demand for scaled fusion.
I’ve also wondered if fusion reactors will have a “plasma jet” mode of failure where the magnetic field containing the highly pressurized plasma partially fails and shoots out a beam of plasma that will quickly cut through anything in its path.
I agree that they should keep working on it (though not expecting big things from this particular company, other than maybe nuclear arms production). But it’s starting to look similar to space travel outside of our immediate neighborhood: a nice idea that physics will probably laugh and say not so fast!
H1 fusion is really, really hard.
Yeah, I don’t know about leaks. It may end up that pulses or some “alternate” form of compression than constant confinement works out better, but the physics are certainly hard however you slice it.