The Road Less Traveled to Fusion Energy
The modern quest for Promethean fire is underway in an anonymous office park in Foothill Ranch, California, an hour southeast of Los Angeles. In the park, along a meandering drive, you will find a huge, modern warehouse building with “TAE Technologies” emblazoned on the door. Inside, you will find a 100-foot-long, $200 million fusion-energy experiment named Norman. And in a second-floor office, upstairs from that looming machine, you will find the would-be Prometheus himself: Michl Binderbauer, TAE’s boyish-looking and relentlessly upbeat co-founder and CEO.
In keeping with the rest of the TAE headquarters, his office looks spare, functional, and slightly unfinished. The most striking object adorning the room is a large whiteboard next to his desk, its upper three-quarters jammed with equations and crude engineering sketches for upgraded fusion devices. Across the bottom, within the low reach of little hands, the business notations give way to a whimsical set of drawings created by Binderbauer’s two young children. At first he seems bemused that these silly scrawls, of all things, are what draws my attention. Then he rolls with it and recalls a recent conversation with his 10-year-old son, who had just learned about climate change in school:
“He’s a precocious kid. He asked me, ‘Is this right? Is this really what’s happening?’ I told him, ‘I hope not. If Daddy can help, it may not happen.’ So now when people ask him what I do, he says, ‘My dad is trying to save the planet’.”
Like so much of what Binderbauer, 51, says, the story sounds too good to be true and yet utterly sincere. As he sees it, his save-the-planet strategy is no do-gooder’s dream; it is the perfectly logical end point of a perfectly rational analysis about the state of the world. His indisputable starting proposition is that the world needs a growing supply of energy. Then he asks, how are we going to generate it? Coal, oil, and natural gas are causing disruptive and deadly climate changes, so fossil fuels cannot be the future. Nuclear power produces no direct carbon emissions, but it leaves behind radioactive waste and—fairly or not—faces bitter public resistance.
Solar and wind power are environmental darlings, but expanding them significantly will require vast new infrastructure to make their clean electricity available when and where it is needed. “Relying solely on solar and wind is a fool’s hope, I think,” Binderbauer says. Several recent studies, including a major technical analysis in the, back up his assessment: We simply do not know how to build an electric grid that can handle the inconsistent way that the sun shines and the wind blows. Even if renewables come to generate the majority of our electricity, they need to be combined with so-called dispatchable power that can be switched on at any time.
