Don’t expect Trump Media’s nuclear fusion power plant to generate electricity soon

Trump Media – yes, Truth Social’s parent company – is the latest entrant in the nearly century-long race to develop a nuclear fusion power plant. He announced a merger deal with fusion company TAE Technologies on Thursday and a bold plan to launch the first large-scale fusion plant sometime in 2026.

TAE does not plan to start generating electricity from its first plant until 2031, which remains an incredibly ambitious timetable. Of course, there will likely be a myriad of financial and regulatory issues to resolve along the way. But the scientific and technical challenges to be met, which we will address here, are also enormous.

Fusion is considered the “Holy Grail” of clean energy technologies, and AI companies are salivating over it as a potential source of abundant electricity for data centers. But while a future fusion reactor might one day help solve some of humanity’s headaches, it might be wishful thinking to expect it to come to the rescue of data centers any time soon.

Why would Trump Media care about the merger?

With fusion, scientists attempt to replicate the way stars create light and heat: atomic nuclei fuse together, generating an enormous amount of energy. A fusion power plant could avoid the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that are driving climate change, as well as the radioactive waste that current nuclear fission reactors create by splitting atoms to produce energy.

President Donald Trump has made clear his disdain for clean energy by falsely calling climate change a “fraud,” ending tax incentives for renewable energy, and ending federal funding and permitting for solar and wind projects. But it has aligned itself with the technological broligarchy by trying to accelerate the development of new AI data centers. How to power these energy-intensive facilities has become a major hurdle for the industry, sparking pushback from communities across the United States concerned about new data centers that could lead to higher electricity rates and increased pollution.

Big tech names are pouring money into fusion in the hope it could become a silver bullet to everyone’s energy problems. Google and Microsoft have announced deals to buy electricity from fusion plants that other companies plan to complete by the late 2020s or 2030s. Sam Altman, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have also backed startups developing their own fusion technologies.

“Fusion power will be the most dramatic energy breakthrough since commercial nuclear power began in the 1950s – an innovation that will lower energy prices, increase supply, ensure American supremacy in AI, revive America’s manufacturing base and strengthen national defense,” Devin Nunes, chairman and CEO of Trump Media, said on an investor call Thursday.

There is no large-scale nuclear fusion power plant yet, despite the rush of initiatives to design one that could actually work. Success always depends on researchers’ ability to resolve important scientific and engineering unknowns that they have been working on for decades.

How do we know TAE and Trump Media can actually make fusion power plants a reality?

We don’t do it. As you can imagine, recreating the dynamics of a star on Earth is very difficult. It takes a lot of energy just to trigger a fusion reaction. A difficulty that scientists have faced for decades – and still face – is how to achieve a net energy gain from a fusion reaction.

The first time anyone in the world was able to achieve this net energy gain, often called “ignition,” was in 2022 at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. No other group, including TAE, has yet managed to achieve this with their own technology.

The 2022 breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore was made by firing 192 laser beams at a diamond-wrapped fuel pellet. This is a form of inertial confinement, triggering a fusion reaction by compressing and heating a fuel-filled target. Another competing fusion technology is called tokamak, which uses magnetic fields to confine the plasma and trigger the reaction.

You can think of the reactor that TAE is developing as a sort of hybrid of the two strategies, using what’s called field inverted configuration (FRC). It still uses magnetic fields to lock the plasma and also shoots fuel beams directly into the plasma to stabilize it and create the conditions necessary for the reaction.

So, when will we see electricity from nuclear fusion?

Most experts The edge who we’ve spoken with over the years, have been cautious about when a commercial fusion power plant could actually begin powering homes and businesses.

Not only must TAE still demonstrate that it can achieve a net energy gain, but that gain must be large enough to make economic sense. Lawrence Livermore’s breakthrough, for example, achieved a net energy gain of 1.5 megajoules (the experiment produced 3.15 megajoules of energy compared to the 2.05 megajoules used by lasers to trigger the fusion reaction). A laser fusion power plant would likely achieve a gain of 50 to 100. The lab has repeated its experiments to try to achieve higher gains – reaching a record gain of 4.13 MJ in April this year.

All of this is to say that there are still many steps ahead for the industry. The Trump administration released a road map for advancing fusion technologies in October, and the Department of Energy has set a goal of deploying commercial-scale fusion energy on power grids by the mid-2030s.

“We’re really at a kind of unprecedented technological innovation, and it’s pretty hard to put direct timelines on these things,” says Patrick White, group leader for fusion energy safety and regulation at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF).

Commercial fusion reactors would also need robust supply chains of fuel and materials strong enough to withstand the extreme pressures and temperatures needed for nuclear fusion. In short, designing a working reactor would be a huge step forward, but then comes more difficult work to build the infrastructure and activities around it.

So how important is this merger?

The biggest impact this merger is likely to have – if it ultimately comes to fruition – is to inject significantly more cash into TAE’s ambitions.

TAE, founded in 1998, says its research has advanced enough to the point that “capital now becomes our biggest challenge,” TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer said on the investor call.

Trump Media agreed to pay TAE $300 million as part of the deal. This is in addition to the more than $1.3 billion in private capital that TAE says it has raised to date from Google (TAE has partnered with Google since 2014 to integrate machine learning into its research), Chevron Technology Ventures, Goldman Sachs and others.

With this money, TAE says it can begin construction of its first large-scale fusion plant by the end of 2026 and produce “first energy” in 2031. The first plant is supposed to have a capacity of 50 MWe, similar to a micro fission reactor. TAE did not immediately respond to questions from The edge on where this facility would be located and how much it would cost. But the company is already planning to build other fusion plants later, with a capacity of up to 500 MWe.

These plans are also dependent on regulatory approvals. But in a controversial decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was codified by Congress this year, fusion reactors are regulated as particle accelerators in the United States, along with equipment used in cancer therapies and to sterilize medical equipment. This allows fusion plants to bypass the lengthy federal licensing requirements that apply to fission reactors.

TAE has developed five iterations of its fusion reactor design and announced last April that it planned to unveil its sixth, called Copernicus, “before the end of the decade.” From there, the company would work to develop the company’s first power plant prototype, Da Vinci, “in the early 2030s.”

Then, in November, TAE announced that it was now moving past Copernicus and straight to Da Vinci. This is because its latest fusion research reactor, Norm, is small and efficient enough to reduce costs by up to 50%, according to TAE.

“Norm is such a huge step forward that it makes Copernicus unnecessary, saving us a lot of time and money,” Binderbauer said in a November press release.

But it will still take a lot of resources for TAE to take the next step in its reactor design. “As [TAE starts] Whether building a scientific demonstration machine or moving directly to a commercial prototype, these types of machines require a significant investment,” says CATF’s White. [merger] this could potentially allow them to receive the capital they need to begin testing and deploying their fusion technology.