Thea Energy Inc., formerly Princeton Stellarators, a fusion energy company advancing stellarator technology for commercialization, recently announced the U.S. Department of Energy selected the Princeton-based company for an award provided through the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy, or INFUSE, program and sponsored by the Fusion Energy Sciences program office to accelerate fusion energy development through public-private research partnerships.
About Thea Energy
Thea Energy, formerly Princeton Stellarators, was founded in 2022 with a focus on leveraging recent breakthroughs in stellarator physics and engineering to create a faster, simpler approach to commercializing fusion energy. Thea Energy is reinventing the stellarator using computer-controlled arrays of planar coils and replacing the intricate, complex modular magnets required in all other proposed stellarator architectures.
Total funding is $4.6 million for 18 projects lasting up to two years in duration. The awardees were selected via a competitive peer review process managed by the INFUSE leadership team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Thea Energy will collaborate with the University of California, San Diego, in the newly funded project to develop a boron-based renewable first wall capable of sufficient heat removal and tritium recovery from stellarator fusion devices. Specifically, researchers will focus on a technique to make boron pebble rods that can be tested under power plant-relevant conditions.
A stellarator is a plasma device used in magnetic confinement fusion research.