General Atomics is designing a first-of-its-kind fusion energy test facility in Poway that engineers say could help move commercial fusion power closer to reality. The San Diego-based company is developing the facility as part of a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. California will give General Atomics a $20 million state tax credit if the design is approved. The company says the design phase will take about a year, with testing expected to begin within three to five years. Behind a secure door at General Atomics’ Magnet Technologies Center in Poway is the chamber where that testing is expected to take place. “Inside this chamber is where the magic is going to happen,” said Nikolai Norausky, mechanical engineer and program manager for Magnets and Special Projects at General Atomics. “We’re still in the design phase, so many of the technical details are being worked out.” Norausky is leading a team of engineers designing a way to use the chamber to test a critical component of harnessing fusion energy, known as a blanket. The lithium-based component lines the walls of a fusion reactor, produces fuel needed to sustain fusion reactions and transfers heat out of the hot plasma core. “It’s the business end of the fusion reactor,” Norausky said. “That’s where the heat has to be carefully extracted and turned into something useful that can create electricity.” Fusion is the same process that powers the sun, releasing massive amounts of energy without long-lived nuclear waste. Inside a fusion core, temperatures can get ten times hotter than the sun, reaching about 150 million degrees, according to Norausky. “We use magnets to confine the plasma and hold it, so it doesn’t touch the walls. There’s been a lot of research into how to hold onto the plasma and now we have to sneak out just a little bit to get to the blanket component and that’s how we extract the heat,” Norausky said.  Norausky said large-scale blanket components have never been tested under the conditions the planned Poway facility would provide. “Nobody has taken a blanket component and tested it at relevant heat in a background magnetic field,” Norausky said. Some of the infrastructure, materials and expertise needed to develop the blanket component test facility are already at its Magnet Technologies Center. General Atomics plans to repurpose some materials from a previous project, which involved building massive superconducting magnets for fusion research. “What we have here in San Diego gets us a much faster timeline to be able to test blankets than if the Department of Energy had stood up this facility somewhere else,” Norausky said. “If a new facility were stood up, we think the timeline would roughly double; it would be 10 years for a test facility instead of three to five years.” The project is another piece of San Diego’s growing role in fusion research. General Atomics also operates the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in Torrey Pines, the nation’s largest magnetic fusion user facility and testbed. California recently created the California Fusion Research and Development Innovation Initiative through Senate Bill 80 to accelerate the commercialization of fusion technologies. The state says the fusion industry could eventually bring 40,000 jobs and a $120 billion economic impact to California. “California is a big player in this burgeoning fusion industry and at the center of it is San Diego,” Norausky said. Commercial fusion also holds the potential to provide a carbon-free source of energy. “It’s clean, it’s renewable, it’s virtually limitless,” Norausky said. “We know the physics is possible. Now the rest of it is an engineering challenge,” Norausky said. “We’re already making electricity from fusion. The solar panels that you have on your house are making electricity from the fusion that’s happening on the sun right now. So the engineering challenge is to bring all of that mass from the sun and make fusion happen here on earth at a smaller scale.” This story was originally reported for broadcast by NBC San Diego. AI tools helped convert the story to a digital article, and an NBC San Diego journalist edited the article for publication. ...read more read less