NearStar Fusion

🇺🇸 Chantilly, US · Founded 2020 · Active

NearStar Fusion is a company in Chantilly, Virginia, developing a pulsed approach it calls Magnetized Target Impact Fusion. Its central component is a plasma-armature railgun that the company says will launch 50-gram fuel capsules at 10 km/s once per second; it describes its approach as building on the method of imploding metal fuel liners used on Sandia's Z machine. It plans to use deuterium-deuterium fuel, avoiding tritium, and says pulsed operation avoids the difficulty of holding a plasma steady and that its modular plant could replace the heat source in existing coal plants. It also proposes the railgun technology for space propulsion. The company says its team's past fusion work was funded by the Department of Energy, ARPA-E, NASA and the National Science Foundation, and it raises money from the public through equity crowdfunding on StartEngine.