Overview of Magnetic Confinement Fusion Energy Concepts

The fields of nuclear fusion research have long been led by government-sponsored work done primarily in academic and national labs. However, over the last two decades, there has been a remarkable growth in the number of private companies in fusion energy R&D as well as the amount of funding supporting this work. There are a variety of steady-state magnetic confinement concepts presently pursued by private industry. This paper presents a summary of the work being performed at companies pursuing fusion concepts that roughly fall under the categorization of steady-state magnetic confinement, extending into magneto-electrostatic confinement. (Companies pursuing pulsed inertial confinement and magnet-inertial confinement will be discussed in later papers.) Although these concepts span a wide range of technological readiness and feasibility/scalability under present scientific understanding, this work makes no attempt at comparing them by these important metrics. It is rather to serve as a compilation of the present state of each company, the near-term work, and challenges moving forward.