Avalanche's desktop fusion reactor delivers blistering-hot plasma | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. No one has made a fusion reactor capable of generating power, but physicists have a pretty good road map for how to get there. One major milestone is heating fusion fuel up above 10 million degrees Celsius — nearly as hot as the center of the sun. Avalanche exclusively told TechCrunch that its desktop-scale fusion prototype has exceeded the milestone, heating a plasma to roughly 11 million degrees Celsius. Only a handful of companies have accomplished the feat. Most fusion startups burned through more cash to get there, too. Avalanche said it had spent less than $50 million of venture investment to hit the mark. Plasma physicists don’t measure the temperature using a thermometer, but instead study the energy of the particles inside the plasma using a metric known as the kiloelectron volt (keV). The fusion world is always on the lookout for experiments that exceed 1 keV. “That’s hot enough that the world will take notice,” Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, has said.