Modular Fusion Reactors for the Private Sector with Realta Fusion’s Kieran Furlong

Kieran Furlong is the CEO and co-founder of Realta Fusion, developing compact, scalable and modular fusion reactors based on magnetic mirror technology.

What does Realta Fusion do?

We’re developing fusion energy technology that will provide abundant and zero-carbon energy. This type of energy is essentially what we need to power the future of humanity. But we have a particular flavor that’s different from many others. We call it “cosmo fusion”, which is compact, scalable and modular.

When I got involved in fusion, I looked at what was out there and most looked like big science projects. What we’re focused on is developing technology that’s right-sized for private industry. It gives us something we can have a good go-to-market strategy with so that we can get in there and then scale up and roll out fusion energy across the world.

What led you to start a fusion company?

I’m a chemical engineer by background, not a plasma physicist. But as a child, I was an environmentalist. Back then, the ozone hole was a big thing. Throughout my career, I’ve been focused on how we can have a sustainable planet while recognizing that we’re going to have 10 billion people, all of whom deserve the comforts we enjoy in the developed world.

I spent years in the chemical industry working on sustainable technologies like bioplastics, then went to grad school just as the first clean tech boom was taking off. I ended up working on biofuels and bio-based plastics with a startup called Solazyme in the Bay Area, where we converted microalgae into fuel for the U.S. Navy and cosmetics. We actually launched a product in Sephora.

After the clean tech balloon deflated in the mid-2010s, I became a VC investor looking at sustainable technologies for food and agriculture systems. I took a reverse sabbatical at the University of Wisconsin, where I first met Professor Cary Forest, one of my co-founders at Realta Fusion. The tech transfer office asked me to consult on one project — the WHAM project at UW — which is what we ultimately spun the company out of.

Initially, I questioned whether we actually needed fusion. But when I looked at the expansion in wind and solar and the decline in battery storage costs, I became convinced that we absolutely need fusion. Wind and solar are fantastic, but they’ll hit their limits and aren’t perfect for every use case. Nuclear fission is very safe but not acceptable in many parts of the world. Fusion is the future. It’s what we need, and it won’t be limited by fuel the way fossil fuel technologies are.

What makes fusion particularly promising for meeting growing energy demands?

You can build a fusion power plant where you need the energy. The hyperscalers — big tech companies — are building data centers based on where they have people to work, proximity to financial centers for low latency, and other factors. They don’t want to add another constraint of needing to be near a particular energy source.

Consider the exponential growth in data. Think about how many photos there were of your grandparents versus your parents versus your kids. That’s an exponential curve, and all those photos need to be stored and processed somewhere. That’s before we even supercharge it with AI. With fusion, we can build a power plant where it’s needed on relatively small acreage compared to wind or solar. The fuel is a tiny amount in terms of both mass and cost. You really can put it where you need it.

How does the magnetic mirror fusion concept differ from other approaches?

The magnetic mirror was actually one of the original fusion concepts, with extensive research conducted on it in the U.S. during the ’60s and ’70s. But when fusion funding was drastically cut in the 1980s, the mirror was put on the shelf and what little funding remained went to the tokamak – the donut-shaped reactor. As a chemical engineer, the mirror’s form factor immediately attracted me. It’s cylindrical. I could see wrapping a heat exchanger around it and expanding it in one dimension by making it longer while everything else stays the same.

The mirror gets its name because charged particles in the plasma bounce back and forth between two regions of high magnetic field strength. While work stopped in the U.S., it continued in Japan and Russia. Around 2015, there were significant advances in dealing with plasma instabilities. My co-founders saw this and realized we could combine these advances with breakthroughs in high-temperature superconducting magnets to revisit the magnetic mirror approach.

The mirror offers engineering simplicity since it’s a steady-state operating fusion device without the extreme complexity of magnetic field coils needed in other designs. If we can tackle the plasma instabilities, we get all the engineering advantages.

Why focus on compact and modular reactors?

Our tandem mirror configuration gives us flexibility. We have high-field magnets on either end with a plasma pipe in the middle. Once those end caps are in place, we can make that central section as long or short as we like.

This allows us to scale from maybe 50 megawatts — enough to power a military base or university campus — up to 500 megawatts. At that point, rather than making it longer, we’d just stack them in parallel. The modularity means we’ll be making the same components over and over again, which is how you really get costs down on any technology.

Who are your target customers for initial commercialization?

Big tech companies are obvious candidates since they’re looking ahead to what they’ll need for data centers in the 2030s. Ireland, where I’m from originally, sends 21 percent of its electricity to data centers, and that’s probably growing.

We’re also looking at large industrial processes that use heat like oil refining, chemical production, paper manufacturing. Our initial go-to-market strategy focuses on large captive energy users who would consume all the energy we produce on-site, either as heat or electrical power.

Working with large, sophisticated customers who can potentially help finance that first build is crucial. Building plant number one is really hard. I’ve been through this with biofuels. We need to find the path of biggest pull to get that first plant built.

What role can the federal government play in making fusion commercially viable?

Realta Fusion was spun out of an ARPA-E funded project at the University of Wisconsin. While fusion will require significant capital even with our lower-capital approach, I see my role partly as figuring out how to bring together different funding strands.

Rather than having any one source bear the full burden, we need proper public-private partnerships. The Department of Energy wants to contribute to fusion’s development and commercialization. They just don’t want to be the only one holding the bag, which I fully agree with.

Fusion is going to change what we think of as the energy industry. By the end of the 21st century, we’ll be looking at an energy industry that’s not about fuel but about the machines and technology that release energy from atoms. It’s going to be a massive manufacturing industry, which justifies public funding to help seed and build this new sector.

What do you think about fusion’s cost competitiveness?

This is critical and doesn’t get talked about enough. There’s no point in making fusion work as a scientific curiosity if it’s too expensive as a mainstream energy source. We can look at early market entry points like a remote mine in Canada or Australia that might pay a premium for energy. But ultimately, we must produce energy at costs competitive with current forms. Humanity needs an awful lot more energy, and we need to make it cheap enough that it makes a difference in people’s lives.

How do you define deep tech?

Deep tech is something that’s really hard to do. It emerges from big research like the kind of thing that doesn’t get done in every lab but requires significant expertise, capital and capabilities. It’s that link between what happens in a major research project and getting technology into the hands of everyday people. Given how difficult it is, you really have to be directing it at solving big problems for big markets.

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