Bottling the sun

A New Zealand startup has joined the quest to make nuclear fusion a viable alternative to burning fossil fuels

- PETER GRIFFIN

'I don't know if I said this at the start, but we're building a nuclear fusion reactor," Ratu Mataira tells me midway through a tour of the nonde-script Wellington warehouse that serves as headquarters of OpenStar Technologies.

A couple of boxy, expensive-looking machines used for manufacturing custommade parts sit at one end of the room. A stainless-steel vacuum chamber - with a window reminiscent of the porthole on the ill-fated Titan submersible - and some liquid nitrogen canisters suggest highly specialised industrial activity.

But few visitors turning off State Highway 1 into the industrial park hidden in the Ngauranga Gorge would guess what Mataira and his team of 29 are cooking up at this startup.

By the end of the year, OpenStar - backed by investors to the tune of $11.3 million plans to have built a prototype fusion device and sparked its first plasma reaction. That alone would be a first for New Zealand and constitute a small but crucial first step on the path to harnessing nuclear fusion to create clean energy.

Unlike the nuclear fission power plants that are dotted around the world and split atoms to generate energy, nuclear fusion forces lighter atoms together, releasing energy in the process.

A fusion reactor attempts to replicate the process underway in the middle of our sun and other stars in the universe - perpetual energy production, but without the carbon dioxide emissions associated with coal or gas-fired power stations.

It is the ultimate source of safe, clean, and cheap electricity. Eventually, Mataira says, fusion reactors will be built to replace decommissioned coal- and gas-fired power stations, feeding clean energy into the national grid more efficiently than solar or wind generation. But controlling a nuclear fusion reaction is a massively difficult task. The joke in nuclear physics is that fusion is 30 years away from being realised - and will always be 30 years away.