Fusion power technology start-up creates hottest thing ever in Wellington

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

“This is New Zealand’s bid to win the fusion race,” says Ratu Mataira, founder of Wellington tech start-up OpenStar, which created a cloud of super-heated plasma hundreds of thousands of degrees strong on Thursday last week.

The plasma contained in the magnetic field reached a temperature in the range of 300,000 to 500,000 degrees celsius.

OpenStar thinks that is by far the hottest thing the country has ever contained and, in creating it, OpenStar took a step towards proving its technology could one day play a part in making abundant, cheap, clean fusion power available to replace the burning of fossil fuel.

But there was a still a long way to go, Mataira said.

“To produce fusion reactions, you do need to get it into the millions of degrees, so there’s still a little ways to go there, but that was never the intention with this machine,” he said.

Mataira is the majority owner of OpenStar Tehnologies but technology incubator Icehouse Ventures owns a stake in it, as does Outset Ventures, as well as the government-owned New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, and Ngāi Tahu New Economy.

The company, which operates from premises in Ngauranga, is trying to develop fusion reactors using very powerful floating magnets to contain super-heated plasma that’s hot enough to produce nuclear fusion, the energy-producing process happening in the sun.

It was a different approach to the giant multi-billion dollar ITER fusion project in France, being funded by 33 countries, Mataira said.

That aimed to prove the commercial viability of fusion power by containing super-heated plasma in a field between magnets, using a technology referred to as Tokomak.

“The Tokomak has dominated research across all of those countries, and we're even seeing private companies start who think they can build to a smaller, cheaper, better than that big public program”, Mataira said.

“We're the only ones pursuing it because we think it will make a great power plant,” he said.

“We've got this really cool, unique way of doing fusion, or confining plasmas, to heat them up to fusion temperatures. But everybody thinks that building these magnets is impossible,” he said.

But, he said: “What we've actually proven is you can build these magnets, you can make them work, and you can confine plasma with them.”

He hoped that would unblock the pathway to building functioning and economic fusion reactors.

While saving the world through clean, abundant fusion power is the ultimate aim with the heat energy generated being used to heat water to drive steam turbines to generate electricity, OpenStar sees a shorter-term commercial opportunity in building reactors to create the isotopes used in modern medical treatment.

“We actually think that you can get to that application sooner than building power plants,” Mataira said.

“And that's a really important thing for the journey of a company that you can start making money so that you can actually keep paying people without constantly needing to raise capital from investors, which is always an opportunity for a company to fail.”

Mataira is the grandson of Dame Kāterina Mataira, one of the leaders of the te reo Māori language revival.

He said he felt extremely privileged for having had her as a role model.

“One of the things I was taught as a kid was if you can take up responsibility for something, you should,” he said.

In his case, it is developing a technology that was being neglected by other fusion projects. “There's a lot of smart people who have attacked this thing on white boards with computer models with experiments, and it still looks like a great idea,” he said.

However, he said: “The journey might end because we build a machine that shows us that this is not a good idea.”