Zap Energy: a Public-Private Partnership Success Story

The sheared-flow-stabilized (SFS) Z-pinch concept, developed at University of Washington with LLNL collaborators, is now on a path to commercialization at Zap Energy. Zap Energy has a long history of support from ARPA-E programs, starting with the 2015 ALPHA funding at UW. After incorporating in 2017, Zap Energy continued with an OPEN award in 2019. While securing three private funding rounds, Zap Energy has participated in additional ARPA-E-funded public-private partnerships which have focused on plasma diagnostics. Zap Energy has benefited greatly from collaborations with ARPA-E funded Fusion Capability Teams, both through the BETHE and Fusion Diagnostics programs. As a small-scale startup attempting to commercialize nuclear fusion, these programs offer rapid access to deep technical expertise as well as advanced instrumentation.  

Among these collaborations are TINA and BETHE Awards with LANL, which furnished Zap with soft X-ray pinhole imaging, multichord visible survey spectroscopy, neutron activation detectors, a seven channel foil-filtered soft X-ray diode set and fast visible imaging. A collaboration with LLNL and UCB focuses on neutronics measurements, where the Portable and Adaptable Neutron Diagnostics for ARPA-E (PANDA) suite has been on FuZE since 2021. This suite features plastic scintillators coupled with photomultiplier tubes and lanthanum bromide (LaBr3) activation detectors, and has demonstrated  the thermonuclear origin of the FuZE neutrons [1] as well as the spatial extent of the source [2]. An additional effort with LLNL and UCSD has led to optical Thomson scattering measurements of the FuZE plasma, resulting in > 1 keV Te measurements [3]. Finally, work with UNR on a vacuum EUV spectrometer is currently underway for FuZE deployment this fall. 

These programs will be summarized and the scientific results will be presented.