Imagine being able to harness the energy of the galaxy's mightiest stars, and power our entire planet. It sounds like a sci-fi plot, but in a warehouse in Wellington's Ngauranga Gorge, physicist Ratu Mataira and his young team are trying to do just that.
Fusion energy is what scientists around the world have been trying to achieve for decades, a near limitless power source that, if unlocked, could run entire cities on just a few teaspoons of fuel.
OpenStar, a 30-strong team of young scientists and engineers, is the first New Zealand company to start building a fusion reactor, with the aim of mitigating climate change through clean energy.
How does it work?
Fusion is the process that happens inside the sun and stars, described as "the holy grail" of energy.
It's where two light hydrogen atoms "fuse" to make helium, a heavier element.
The hydrogen going in weighs just slightly more – around 0.4 percent – than the helium coming out, and this deficit becomes pure energy through the one equation most of us remember from school: E = mc^2.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, which powers atomic bombs and nuclear power plants.
In fusion, hydrogen nuclei repel against each other, meaning they need to move super-fast in a small, very hot space to come into contact. The heat from that reaction is used to create steam, to drive turbines which turns into electricity.
Scientists believe unlocking fusion energy could be the key to mitigating climate change.
Not only does fusion produce no carbon dioxide or greenhouse gasses, it creates about four million times more energy than burning the same amount of oil, gas and coal.
The fuel, an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, comes from the most abundant natural resource on earth - seawater.
It's estimated it would take about 500 grams of fuel – a block of butter – to power New Zealand for an entire day.
If that all sounds a bit too good to be true, that's because there's a catch. Recreating fusion energy on Earth is really hard.
In space, fusion works because of the extreme pressure and immense gravitational force of the sun and stars.
In order to mimic this in a lab, scientists need to design a structure more robust than a rocket, and a magnet that can hold onto a 100-million-degree plasma. That's more than seven times hotter than the core of the sun.
Bringing fusion down to Earth
"It's about as big a goal as I could imagine taking on," OpenStar CEO and founder Ratu Mataira said.
The 31-year-old, who did his PhD at Wellington's internationally renowned Robinson Research Institute, said he's motivated by the pressing need to lower global emissions.
"This isn't about making lots of people rich. It's not about proving that we're smarter than anybody else. It's the fact that we've been given this challenge with climate change that we need to decarbonise energy, otherwise the world is not going to be able to support people."
Mataira is the grandson of the late Dame Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira, the "mother of Kura Kaupapa".
He said her legacy inspired him to try and solve seemingly impossible problems.
"She is recognised as being a major figure in the revitalisation of te reo Māori, and there's a moment in her life that I always look back on, where the government produced a report that said that te reo Māori was going to go extinct," Mataira said.
"Her academic supervisor basically put that report in front of her and asked her what she was going to do about it. To take that challenge and do something about it… that has always led me to be ambitious. I look back on that particular circumstance quite a lot."
The idea behind OpenStar sparked into life in 2020, when Mataira first heard about the levitated dipole, a nuclear reactor model that was being worked on in the US in the early 2000s before being scrapped due to funding cuts.
At Robinson Research, a world-leading lab focused on superconductors, Mataira had worked on technology he believed would make the model work to successfully create fusion energy.
"That was the eureka moment, it was the kind of academic fairy tale like what they show in the movies," he said.
"It's trying to solve the equations… any challenge or any hypothetical limitation I would throw at it, the dipole would spit back at me, 'No, you can just make that slightly bigger and it will be absolutely fine'.
"You stare into it, you get the answer and it's still not dead, and that leads us to today."
Three years later, OpenStar is in the midst of building its first fusion reactor prototype, thanks to over $10 million of private investment.
Venture capitalist Angus Blair of Outset Ventures said the knowledge and innovation of the OpenStar team means they are "the best people to be bringing this particular approach to life".
"The thing that attracted me most about Ratu in particular as a founder is that he is very clearly the most ambitious Kiwi founder since Peter Beck tried to start Rocket Lab here," Blair said.
"He is mission-driven, and he was focused on getting us to fusion as soon as possible to help with climate change, but also to unlock a really exciting future for humanity.
"I love all my portfolio companies equally. But this is the most exciting thing happening in New Zealand, period."
Blair said that when Mataira pitched to him, he had little more than an idea and a team.
Now, the company's being backed by big names like Sir Stephen Tindall and Rod Drury.
"Usually for companies at that stage, we talk about sort of pre-seed checks, and usually writing something between like $100,000, maybe half a million dollars…The OpenStar seed round was a $10 million round," Blair said.
Nuke-free NZ?
Fusion energy isn't completely waste-free, but it does create dramatically less waste than nuclear fission power plants used overseas, and the waste lasts for decades as opposed to millions of years.
"I think the big question on everybody's minds is. does this look like the kind of fission power plants New Zealand said that we were not going to build? And the answer is profoundly, no," Mataira said.
"We create what we call activated materials which become slightly radioactive - but how to manage them, how long they last is well within the range of what we already deal with. We're already dealing with this in hospitals today."
Experts like Robinson Research director Nick Long also said there's no risk of fusion power plants creating an explosion, because the process is much more stable.
"In a fusion reaction, you're adding in the fuel in a controlled way. You stop adding in the fuel, then the reaction stops," he said.
"It's intrinsically much safer [than fission]. There's no chance of it becoming a kind of bomb or having that Chernobyl scenario with things running badly out of control."
Mataira said: "My pitch to New Zealand is that fusion can be pure upside, purely good for humanity."
OpenStar is hoping to spark their first plasma by the end of this year, and have functioning power plant-type devices by the 2030s.
"Fusion seems too good to be true, but the fact that the sun rises every day and gives us the energy it already does - that is already a miracle, this is just the next step," Mataira said.
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