ARPA-E 2022 Fusion Annual Meeting

I attended the ARPA-E 2022 Fusion Annual Meeting at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. Here is the poster for our Princeton Field Reversed Configuration ARPA-E OPEN 2018 grant.

Here is our ARPA-E GAMOW poster on power electronics. It includes work by Princeton Fusion Systems, Princeton University, Qorvo and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The meeting had two days of interesting talks by distinguished speakers. Dr. Robert Mumgaard of Commonwealth Fusion Systems talked about their work on advanced high-temperature superconducting magnets and the theory behind high field Tokamaks. Dennis Stone of NASA discussed NASA COTS programs. Dr. Wayne Sullivan of General Atomic talked about their research programs. General Atomics has been operating a Tokamak possibly longer than anyone else. We heard talks on the Centrifugal Mirror at the University of Maryland and WHAM, the high field mirror, at the University of Wisconsin. Andrew Holland of the Fusion Industry Association said FIA had verified 31 companies that were developing fusion power technology.

We talked to several organizations in need of high voltage and high current power electronics. We plan to pivot our GAMOW work to meet the needs of these potentially near-term customers.

The meeting had breakout sessions in which we discussed funding for fusion research and how to help gain social acceptance for nuclear fusion power. Both are challenging.