NZ startup’s quest to make fossil fuel alternative with nuclear fusion reactor

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“I don’t know if I said this at the start, but we’re building a nuclear fusion reactor,” Ratu Mataira tells me midway through a tour of the nondescript Wellington warehouse that serves as headquarters of OpenStar Technologies.

A couple of boxy, expensive-looking machines used for manufacturing custom-made parts sit at one end of the room. A stainless-steel vacuum chamber – with a window reminiscent of the porthole on the ill-fated Titan submersible – and some liquid nitrogen canisters suggest highly specialised industrial activity.

But few visitors turning off State Highway 1 into the industrial park hidden in the Ngauranga Gorge would guess what Mataira and his team of 29 are cooking up at this startup.

By the end of the year, OpenStar – backed by investors to the tune of $11.3 million – plans to have built a prototype fusion device and sparked its first plasma reaction. That alone would be a first for New Zealand and constitute a small but crucial first step on the path to harnessing nuclear fusion to create clean energy.

Unlike the nuclear fission power plants that are dotted around the world and split atoms to generate energy, nuclear fusion forces lighter atoms together, releasing energy in the process.

A fusion reactor attempts to replicate the process underway in the middle of our sun and other stars in the universe – perpetual energy production, but without the carbon dioxide emissions associated with coal or gas-fired power stations.

It is the ultimate source of safe, clean, and cheap electricity. Eventually, Mataira says, fusion reactors will be built to replace decommissioned coal- and gas-fired power stations, feeding clean energy into the national grid more efficiently than solar or wind generation. But controlling a nuclear fusion reaction is a massively difficult task. The joke in nuclear physics is that fusion is 30 years away from being realised – and will always be 30 years away.

Nevertheless, the urgency of the climate crisis has spurred a new wave of interest and investment in nuclear fusion with the aim of accelerating progress. Some experts suggest we could see fusion breakthroughs in the next 6-10 years that pave the way for its role in generating electricity. After decades of marginal progress, scientists have recently hit some major milestones.

Last December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved fusion ignition in a reactor, which is the point at which a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, producing more energy than was put into creating it. That has given the US Department of Energy the confidence to extend funding to eight US companies to develop pilot-scale fusion power plants “within a decade”.

There are at least 30 nuclear fusion startups around the world working on the technology, with OpenStar possibly the newest and most far-flung of the group. Many of the established fusion research groups, such as the Plasma Science and Fusion Centre at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have focused on a type of reactor called a tokamak – a doughnut or spherical-shaped machine that uses magnetic fields created by metal coils to confine plasma, or superheated gases. Fuel (typically hydrogen-based) fed into the tokamak is subjected to intense pressure and temperatures of over 100,000,000°C. The atoms in the fuel fuse together, releasing huge amounts of energy in the form of heat.

The ultimate aim is to convert that heat to steam and drive a turbine that generates electricity. The magnetic coils contain the insanely hot plasma and prevent it from melting the walls of the reactor. The trick is holding the plasma, a swirl of subatomic particles, stable long enough for fusion reactions to occur.

This is the concept behind the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, the world’s largest tokamak, now under construction in southern France. It’s an ambitious project, but last November, it was announced that serious defects with components would push out the initial 2025 target of producing plasma by an indefinite period. Its €20 billion ($36b) estimated cost could also spiral.

“The tokamak is a very well understood, very mature technology,” says Mataira (Ngāti Kahungunu o Wairoa, Ngāti Porou), who completed his doctorate in applied superconductivity at Victoria University of Wellington just last year. “But we know exactly where its limits are – it’s not a pathway to economic fusion, unfortunately.”

Mataira, 31, and his team are taking a ­different approach. In doing so, they’ve revisited what is seen by some in the field as a dead end for fusion – the levitated dipole reactor. OpenStar’s reactor will levitate a doughnut-shaped magnet in a vacuum to create the strong magnetic field required to hold the plasma in place.

It leans on another natural phenomenon, the magnetosphere that surrounds Earth, which is produced by movements in the planet’s molten-metal centre. “That magnetic field extends out around the planet and traps plasma usually coming from the solar wind. Those plasmas are long lived and stable,” Mataira says.

When they hit the atmosphere, they appear in spectacular fashion in our part of the world as the green-purple hue of the aurora australis. The idea is that the reactor can replicate those magnetic fields but keep the plasma contained and add fuel to supercharge everything, creating a dense amount of energy in the process.

MIT developed its own levitated dipole reactor, which has some major technical advantages over tokamaks. But its experiment lost funding about a decade ago and was wound down. “There turned out to be hard engineering problems, so hard in fact that the community basically abandoned this concept,” says Mataira.

So why is his tiny, modestly funded team resurrecting it? The key to its success, he suggests, could rest on a new way of powering the reactor’s magnet, through the clever use of high-temperature superconductors. Superconducting materials are able to conduct electrical current with virtually no resistance and are essential to operating a fusion reactor. But the ones employed on MIT’s reactor were low-temperature superconductors, which need to be supercooled to operate.

High-temperature superconductors (HTS), made out of different materials, become superconductive at a relatively balmy -196.2°C. It turns out that New Zealand is a world leader in making them. Wellington scientists Jeff Tallon and Bob Buckley undertook pioneering research on them in the late 1980s at the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Their work eventually led to the creation of a spin-out company, HTS-110, which achieved success selling high-field electromagnets around the world. The pair were jointly awarded the inaugural Prime Minister’s Science Prize for their work in 2009.

The potential for HTS materials to be used in fusion reactors has come to the fore in the last decade. They allow for the creation of smaller, more powerful reactors. Mataira completed his doctorate at Victoria’s Robinson Research Institute, known for its world-class HTS research. His PhD looked at developing hybrid electric aircraft using a very similar technology. “It was the same argument – that you need really high currents out of these superconducting power supplies in order to make those hybrid electric aircraft work.”

But he realised the shift to hybrid aircraft engines would be dominated by big aerospace companies and his attention shifted to the holy grail of clean energy production: nuclear fusion.

“The innovation that made OpenStar appear in New Zealand is what’s in this polystyrene bucket,” Mataira tells the Listener in the frigid Wellington warehouse.

“What you’re looking at here is a superconducting circuit, just like what an electronics student would put together to achieve some kind of results.”

He believes an HTS component built into the levitated magnet will help him achieve the results that have eluded previous experiments.

Has the venture got a real shot at success? Professor Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Centre and a world-leading expert in nuclear fusion, says drawing on the Robinson institute’s expertise in high-temperature superconductors gives the team a huge advantage. “Somebody in the world should be building a levitated dipole that’s built out of kick-ass high-temperature superconductors that can get much higher magnetic fields,” he tells the Listener. “It’s going to be more thermally stable, it’s probably going to be lighter, so it’s a bit easier to construct. Robinson know that physics up, down and sideways.”

But Whyte is also realistic about the major technical challenges ahead. MIT’s own levitated dipole experiment, a collaboration with Columbia University, was actually a success – it showed that the underlying physics for plasma confinement in a dipole field worked. But the US Department of Energy opted to back tokamak experiments instead.

“Its relative physics maturity is still pretty low,” says Whyte of the alternative approach. But it has compelling advantages.

“I think we’ll look back at the beginning of 2023 as kind of being a real inflection point for fusion. Is it risky? Freaking right, it’s risky. Is it hard science? Bloody right, it’s hard. But is it worth a go? Of course. It’s a US$10 trillion industry on the other side and there’s this little problem called climate change that we’ve got to resolve.”

“Theory will take you only so far,” actor Cillian Murphy says in Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood biopic about J Robert Oppenheimer, who led the project to develop the first atomic bomb.

Mataira is now facing the same reality. In 2021, in his flat in Mt Victoria, he mapped out his plan for the fusion reactor on a whiteboard. His approach, says his OpenStar colleague and former flatmate Al Simpson, was to try to “kill” his fusion concept on paper as quickly as possible. But Simpson, who was completing his studies in quantum gravity at the time, realised his friend had an idea that worked beautifully in theory – it couldn’t be killed. “He’s got the brilliance that’s capable of dealing with these really difficult technical things,” he says of Mataira.

It convinced 28-year-old Simpson to join OpenStar, which was founded in late 2021. “I couldn’t ignore it. This was super compelling. It’s like, right, this has to be the thing that if I can contribute any value whatsoever, I should be doing that. Now we need to get our heads down and prove it.”

Green tape on the floor of the company’s warehouse marks where the fusion reactor will be built. Engineers were examining the area the day the Listener visited, discussing the reinforced foundations that will need to be built to house the reactor, which will be lowered into place by crane through a hole in the roof. If Mataira was feeling the pressure of juggling a construction project and running a start-up with a rapidly approaching deadline to spark the all-important fusion reaction, he wasn’t showing it.

The use of nuclear fusion reactors wouldn’t change our nuclear-free status, he says. The company’s activities conform to the Health and Safety at Work Act and the Radiation Safety Act. Fusion poses lower risks than nuclear fission power plants and dedicated regulations might be developed if the technology moves beyond experimental use. Although fusion reactors don’t melt down or produce radioactive materials that are hard to dispose of, things can still go wrong when dealing with incredibly hot material and pressure. “Frankly, we will probably still have accidents, because accidents happen,” Mataira concedes. “But we’re not talking about these things becoming massive risks to communities.”

Robbie Paul, chief executive of Icehouse Ventures, says Mataira has not only the grasp of physics required, but also the entrepreneurial drive that will be crucial to giving the company a chance of success.

“There are not many founders who you meet each year who have both extremely significant intellect and that versatility to go across the business,” says Paul. Icehouse Ventures manages a 23% stake in OpenStar on behalf of its investment partner Outset Ventures. Venture capital firms own around a third of the company, with Mataira retaining most of the rest for now. The government’s Aspire NZ Seed Fund has a 2.35% stake.

The prize investors are betting on is Mataira’s team demonstrating a viable nuclear fusion reactor. Outset Ventures partner Angus Blair rates Mataira the most ambitious Kiwi founder since Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck. “Ratu is working on the most important problem, bar none.”

Paul says even incremental gains that overcome engineering hurdles could justify the investment. And while we’re not exactly a hub of nuclear fusion expertise, our national innovation story is littered with examples of unlikely ventures that sprang from research projects. He points to PowerbyProxi, the Auckland University offshoot whose wireless charging technology for consumer devices such as smartphones was bought for a huge sum by Apple in 2017.

As MIT’s Whyte sees it, NZ is as likely a candidate as any other to play an important role in the advent of nuclear fusion. “Don’t count yourself out,” he says. “You might hit the home run, or you might at least play some part in the fusion ecosystem.”

Paul isn’t hung up on OpenStar’s target dates, though sparking the plasma will be integral to raising more funding. The engineering challenges, he realises, are incredibly complex. “If you’re not making mistakes, and if you’re not missing deadlines, it’s probably not hard enough.”

Mataira is up for the challenge, and appears to have the patience to see through a project that will probably take years of toil. His grandmother, Dame Kāterina Mataira, put in decades of work helping to revive te reo Māori. “I remember sitting at the dining room table and just realising that if I didn’t do it, if I didn’t build this company so that we could all do it, then it wouldn’t happen,” he says. “No matter how stressful it gets, that’s the bottom line.”

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