Avalanche Energy
Our Investment in Avalanche Energy
Harnessing the power of fusion energy through miniature reactors
Each day and night, the warmth of our sun and the stars in the night’s sky serve as a reminder of the awesome power of fusion energy. Since it was first theorized by scientists in the 1920s, fusion — the process by which energy is released from the melding of hydrogen atoms under intense heat and pressure — has been elusive to attain on Earth, save for the destructive application as a hydrogen bomb. While fusion has been used as a weapon, scientists have long hoped for its promise of offering a nearly unlimited supply of clean base load power, absent of the anxiety of radioactive waste or a nuclear meltdown that is often associated with fission energy. Recreating the incredibly complex conditions found in the core of our sun, that allow for fusion to occur, has been a long and grinding endeavor over the past 70 years. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent in large projects like ITER; and because progress in the field has historically fallen far short of the ultimate goal, many skeptics have joked that fusion is cursed with always being just decades away.
The first prototype of the Oribtron, developed while Avalanche Energy was in Stealth Mode in 2021.
We’ve had the pleasure of hosting fusion energy pioneers, like Bob Mumgaard of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and Harry Hamlin of TAE Technologies, on the podcast to share their views on the complexity, aspirations, and trajectory of the fusion energy sector. The recent renaissance in private sector fusion energy ventures, represented by companies like CFS, Zap Energy, Marvel Fusion, and Princeton Stellarators, has excited us as investors.
Recently, the industry - and the world at large - erupted in jubilation at the unexpected breakthrough in the U.S. government-run Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. On December 13th, 2022, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that, for the first time, scientists had accomplished generating more energy from a fusion reaction than was input — a milestone known as “ignition.” While commercially viable fusion reactors will need to generate orders of magnitude more energy than was created in the DOE experiment, the announcement represents a watershed moment in the quest for fusion energy. Seemingly overnight, the milestone imbued the field of fusion energy, long marked by slow progress and doubt, with new hope and interest. Just how quickly fusion energy accomplishes its next big step towards base load commercialization will likely depend on the work of innovative fusion startups that are pursuing designs of all types and sizes.
A number of different reactor designs for achieving fusion have been developed over the decades, chief among them the tokamak and inertial confinement fusion (ICF) systems. Striving to produce utility-scale energy similar to nuclear fission power plants, these solutions have focused on large-scale designs. This has required exorbitant investments and, invariably, resulted in protracted development cycles.
Avalanche Energy, based in Seattle, Washington, is taking a different tack. The company hopes to one day develop fusion reactors that “you can hold in your hands.” By miniaturizing the scale of a fusion reactor, Avalanche not only aims to mitigate the challenges and complexities of achieving viable fusion energy, but also solve for a host of modular and mobile energy needs. This includes renewable energy for electric vehicles, long-distance trucking, aviation, maritime shipping, distributed energy generation and other applications. The company was founded by Dr. Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan, who both previously worked in engineering at the private spaceflight company Blue Origin founded by Jeff Bezos. MCJ is excited to announce its investment in Avalanche Energy, as its team pursues the bold endeavor of realizing (micro)fusion energy. Avalanche recently won a contract in May 2022 with the Defense Innovation Unit to build prototype fusion propulsion systems for use in outer space.
What is Avalanche Energy?
To provide a sense of scale, a preliminary design of Orbitron, Avalanche Energy’s Micro-Fusion Reactor.
Founded in 2021, Avalanche is adapting a concept known as an “Orbitrap,” conceived of in the 1990s by physicist Alexander Makarov at Thermo Fisher Scientific. The Orbitrap represents a novel way of confining charged atoms (ions) in an electrostatic field such that they could be used in the domain of mass spectrometry, whereby various types of matter are measured and analyzed with atomic precision. Used in life science and food and safety research, Orbitraps are readily available in labs. Robin and Brian had their big “aha! moment” when they imagined an opportunity to apply the device’s functionality toward fusion. This inspiration has led to the development of the “Orbitron,” a new design that attempts to leverage the Orbitrap’s electrostatic energy confinement to facilitate a fusion reaction. With other fusion reactor systems, the aim (and challenge) is to create sufficient and sustained confinement of ionized plasma (i.e. super-heated hydrogen atoms) allowing for the collision and ultimate fusing of charged atoms. While leading reactor designs use high-energy consuming magnets or lasers to create confinement, the Oribitron utilizes electrostatic energy. In an Orbitron, ionized plasma is confined in an electrostatic field and cycles around a charged cathode in an elliptical orbit. A weak magnetic field is concurrently applied, causing a confinement of electrons and densities of plasma to be achieved. The desired result is that ions cross paths with one another and ideally collide and fuse.
As it relates to small-scale fusion energy, the Orbitron presents many advantages. First, electrostatic confinement has far fewer energy and cooling requirements than superconducting magnets found in conventional reactor designs (e.g. tokamak). Relatedly, there is an opportunity to create the sustained confinement of plasma necessary to optimize for a fusion reaction. Lastly, the core technology not only already exists but is deployed widely in commercial mass spectrometry applications, thereby appreciably lowering the engineering costs as compared with other fusion reactor systems that rely on bespoke components.
Why did we invest?
The Avalanche Energy Team at their facility in Seattle, WA in 2023
Compelling Founder-Market Fit
The oft-quoted cliche, it’s not rocket science, would be misapplied to fusion energy, a field requiring a confluence of specialization in physics, engineering, and other esoteric domains. Appropriately, both Robin and Brian collectively have over two decades of aerospace engineering experience between them. Prior to founding Avalanche, Robin spent nearly six years at Blue Origin, where he worked on the Advanced Concepts team providing technical leadership as it related to design, analysis, and experimentation of new aerospace projects. Prior to that, Robin was a Senior Engineer at Boeing where he served as the Chairman of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Advisory Board, guiding research, development, and best practices throughout the company. Similarly hailing from Blue Origin, Brian served as a Principal Engineer there where his focus included project management and mechanical engineering. Earlier, Brian worked as an engineer at EMAS Group and Technip in the areas of project management, engineering and construction for the energy industry. Robin and Brian’s collective engineering expertise and careers tackling hard technical problems give us faith that they have the right backgrounds to take on the formidable challenge of commercial fusion energy!
Rapid Iterative Product Development
Much of the focus and investment in fusion energy has been directed at large utility-scale efforts. These projects are often plagued by protracted development timelines and high costs, in part due to the size and customization of the technology involved. Development is often incremental, and follows a “waterfall” style of planning. Capitalizing on its smaller scale and the use of off-the-shelf technologies, Avalanche is able to be more “agile'' in its development process, with sprints constituting 2 - 3 weeks instead of many months or even years (a typical sprint length for large fusion projects). This leaner product development cycle uniquely enables Avalanche to be more iterative and, ideally, yield results more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Encouraging Milestones
Avalanche Energy team testing setup to evaluate and analyze supporting technologies for Oribtron, Avalanche Energy’s Micro-Fusion Reactor.
Even in its infancy, Avalanche has been able to produce fusion energy, albeit not quite at the point of so-called ignition. That said, Avalanche recently announced that it achieved an impressive milestone of producing 200 kV of cathode fusion. With these incremental signs of progress, Avalanche gives us faith that it has a clear and reasonably-timed path toward achieving a net-gain fusion reaction.
A Strong Syndicate of Co-Investors
At MCJ Collective, we strive to make bold — yet responsible — investments in companies that offer an opportunity to maximize both climate impact and economic returns. With the domain of fusion replete with complexity and a commercial time horizon measured in decades, we would not have been able to develop a deep conviction without the insights and co-diligence of Avalanche’s strong syndicate of investors. To that point, the company has surrounded itself with a number of deep tech investors, such as Azolla Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and Congruent Ventures, whose perspectives we hold in high regard. As part of its recent $40MM Series A, Avalanche is welcoming Toyota Ventures and Founders Fund as its newest investors. With this experienced and well-resourced support network, we believe Avalanche is equipped to realize its vision.
It’s hard to refute that Avalanche’s ambitions represent anything short of a moonshot; and while its vision is not without technical risk, we believe its potential for transformative improvement of the human condition merits it. Fusion not only holds the promise of limitless clean energy that can address the climate crisis, but also it represents a potential solution to energy-scarcity that could lift billions of people throughout the world out of poverty. We’re hopeful that the work and ambition of Avalanche’s team will usher in this exciting new phase of human progress.
