By DAISUKE IGARASHI/ Correspondent
July 26, 2023 at 16:27 JST
Shuji Nakamura, co-founder of Blue Laser Fusion (Provided by Shuji Nakamura)
SAN FRANCISCO--A start-up that a Nobel laureate co-founded plans to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor using laser technology by around 2030.
Shuji Nakamura, co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes, founded Blue Laser Fusion in Palo Alto, California, in November.
Partners include Hiroaki Ohta, a former CEO of drone maker ACSL Ltd.
The start-up, which raised $25 million (about 3.5 billion yen) earlier this month, plans to work with a subsidiary of Toshiba Corp. and build a small experimental reactor in Japan in 2024.
“Japan is good at manufacturing while the United States excels in business and marketing,” Nakamura, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The Asahi Shimbun. “We want to build a nuclear fusion reactor by combining the strengths of the two countries.”
The company plans to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor that can produce 1 gigawatt of electricity, the output of a typical nuclear power reactor. Construction would cost about $3 billion.
Blue Laser Fusion is developing new technology to trigger nuclear fusion by continuously focusing powerful laser beams on fuel.
Currently, lasers can only be used for less than a second per day.
In nuclear fusion, two atoms collide under high temperatures and pressure to form a new atom while releasing large amounts of energy.
Many scientists have worked on an approach to generate nuclear fusion by creating a magnetic field to confine fuel in a plasma state, but a magnetic confinement fusion reactor requires a massive financial investment.
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