Less than a month after Madison’s Realta Fusion conducted a milestone experiment that powered a lightbulb using direct energy conversion from a fusion reaction, the company has announced a new bright spot on its horizon.
Realta has secured substantial financial incentives from the state of Wisconsin in addition to a tax increment financing loan from the city of Madison to develop the Realta Forge, a corporate headquarters and R&D facility at OM Station — the former home of Oscar Mayer on the northeast side of the city.
The redevelopment will transform over 200,000 square feet of the 2099 Roth St. property into space for offices, research and manufacturing. It is anticipated to create 600 new jobs, including technical and non-technical roles. Realta plans to break ground on the Realta Forge before the end of this year.
The Madison City Council unanimously approved $2.8 million in TIF financing June 9, pending Realta’s decision to remain in Wisconsin. Just two years ago, fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison spinout, Type One Energy, sought greener pastures in Knoxville, Tennessee, as the inaugural recipient of Tennessee’s $50 million Nuclear Energy Fund.
“This decision … opens up the TIF financing from the city of Madison, and we will have enterprise zone tax credits (from Wisconsin),” said Kieran Furlong, Realta’s CEO.
The company said it is anticipating a significant financial commitment from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. — namely, up to $15 million in performance-based enterprise zone tax credits.
“Fusion energy is an emerging global industry where Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Region are uniquely positioned to lead,” said WEDC Secretary and CEO John W. Miller in an announcement released by Realta today. “WEDC welcomes Realta’s decision to stay in Wisconsin and continue its game-changing work where it all began.”
Realta’s Furlong noted that the company will also benefit from the sales and use tax exemption bill passed by the state Legislature, which was signed in April by Gov. Tony Evers. Realta expects it to help offset the costs of projects it has planned for its new facility by roughly $37.5 million.
Among these projects will be the company’s next-generation fusion machine, called Hammir.
“All in all, we’re estimating that at this current point, it’s an incentive package that’s worth around $55 million,” said Furlong. “The state of Wisconsin and the city of Madison are stepping up and want to be a home for the future fusion industry. And this isn’t, of course, just going to benefit us.
“Things like the sales (and use) tax exemption for fusion projects are intended as a kind of welcome sign to the rest of the global fusion industry that Wisconsin would be a good place to come and build your fusion projects, and develop your technology, and manufacture your future fusion power plant components as well.”
Furlong said the new financing will help Realta breathe new life into a city site that has long cried out for revitalization.
“Our desire (is) to take what essentially is a kind of blighted building … and be the first tenant in there to start turning it into a center of deep technology, R&D and commercialization,” he said. “It’s something that we are excited about. We’re excited that the city of Madison is supportive. We’ve had interaction with … the Sherman Neighborhood Association as well, just to make sure people are aware of what we’re up to, and we’re hopeful that the local neighborhood is going to be supportive.
“We see this as just another step in bringing life back to that side of town, and having more people coming there for work, and kind of stimulating the local economy or business there … all of the supportive businesses that would benefit from having hundreds of new employees based in that building.”
Furlong said one of the company’s first agenda items in the new space will be testing the core subsystems for Hammir before its buildout begins.
The company uses a magnetic mirror approach to fusion — a type of magnetic confinement that, in broad terms, creates plasma and uses strong magnetic fields to contain and heat it until nuclei fuse and energy is released.
Realta’s new fusion demonstration device will be even larger than WHAM, the roughly eight-meter-long machine the company operates in partnership with UW-Madison out of its current lodgings at the Physical Sciences Lab in Stoughton.
“We’ll be building a larger machine with a larger diameter of plasma,” said Furlong. “The plasma in our next machine will actually be at the same scale that we would have in commercially operating power plants, so that’s a significant step forward. It’s moving up to essentially a full-scale prototype of the equipment that we’ll need for future power plants.”
He also said the larger machine will require more power to heat the plasma it contains for fusion reactions, so it’s fortunate that MGE is the local utility for the OM Station site.
“That was one of the very attractive things. … There is ample power available there, and we’re happy to be able to use that in our R&D and use that as a reason to create more employment within the city of Madison,” he said.
Furlong emphasized that Realta Forge will always be an R&D facility, rather than evolving into a commercial site to produce heat and power. He expects Realta to be active in the building by the start of next year and to conduct its main R&D operations from the site “for the foreseeable future.”
A lightbulb moment
While Furlong said there is still a lot of work to be done, having a dedicated R&D facility puts the company on a better trajectory to reach its long-term goals.
“We’re aiming to do this as fast as possible so that we can get online with commercial fusion energy by the early- to mid-2030s,” he said. “This is a step in the right direction. … We need to go to a larger machine, and ultimately, our goal at the Realta Forge … will be to demonstrate the conditions needed for positive net energy generation.”
In simple terms, that’s when more energy can be captured from a fusion reaction than what was used to power it.
“We’re getting close to the point where we’re getting more energy out than the energy that we had to put in,” said Furlong. “We want to prove that we can get to those conditions … at our new R&D facility. And DEC (direct energy conversion) is absolutely a thing that helps us get to that position.”
DEC is just what happened on June 19, when Realta announced that energy from a WHAM fusion reaction successfully powered a lightbulb — a feat Realta said is a first among companies like itself.
“It had been previously shown in some experiments at national labs but had not yet been demonstrated by a private fusion company, at least as far as we’re aware,” said Furlong. “It makes it really tangible and real when you can do something useful with energy that we were able to pull directly from the plasma.”
Furlong explained that in the types of fusion reactions Realta is pursuing, 80% of the energy released is captured as heat, while the remaining 20% is carried by resultant helium ions.
DEC recovers as much of that 20% as possible “to produce energy effectively and efficiently,” and then power items directly, Furlong said.
“We estimated that we could get up to 90% efficient recovery of that additional 20% (of released energy),” he said. “And then the stuff that’s captured as heat … could be a product in itself if we’re trying to provide heat to an industrial process, or it could also be used to generate electricity through a conventional steam cycle. … There’ll still be some (energy) losses, but it greatly increases the amount of energy that we’re able to capture from a fusion reaction.”
Furlong said Realta’s DEC milestone represents not only a scientific breakthrough and a step toward commercial fusion energy, but also an opportunity to engage investors to secure the company’s future.
“We still have to go and raise a lot more capital to get where we’re going,” he said. “We still have to demonstrate continued performance improvement … proving that we can stabilize and control and confine plasma under the right conditions that will enable us to build a net energy generating commercial power plant. That’s work still to be done.
“And it’s one of those important things of being able to communicate progress and show what we’re doing. … This is really cut-and-dried, very straightforward. Were you able to get some current to pass through a circuit and light up a bulb, or were you not? Sure. So that was great.”
