Company attributes
Avalanche Energy Designs is a fusion energy start-up designing, testing, and building micro-fusion reactors. Founded in 2018 and based in Seattle, Washington, Avalanche is developing a small form-factor fusion reactor called the Orbitron. A 5kWe (kilowatt electric) power device, the Orbitron has a modular design and can be stacked for higher power applications. Avalanche's fusion reactors aim to combine de-risked and commercialized technology in novel ways to produce proton-born fusion, with a smaller size enabling faster build/test iteration cycles using conventional manufacturing techniques. Developed by rocket scientists without significant plasma physics experience, the company's approach to fusion is different from other conventionally recognized plasma confinement strategies, such as magnetic confinement fusion, inertial confinement fusion, magnetized target fusion, or stellarators.
Coming out of stealth mode in early 2022, the VC-funded company has secured a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) International Patent for its technology. In the summer of 2022, it opened its research facility near Seattle's Museum of Flight in Tukwila. As of March 2022, the company had ten employees and plans to double its workforce by the end of 2022.
Avalanche was founded in 2018 by CEO Robin Langtry and COO Brian Riordan. Langtry holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Stuttgart and has experience developing advanced technologies at Blue Origin and Boeing. Previously a principal engineer at Blue Origin, Riordan has over fifteen years of experience in mechanical design and IP development. The founders met while working on rocket propulsion systems at Blue Origin in Kent, Washington. Langtry came across a graduate thesis by Tom McGuire, a Lockheed Martin researcher, while researching fusion. The thesis included open-source code for simulations of an electrostatic fusion reactor. McGuire's ideas formed the seed of what would become Avalanche's technology.
Avalanche raised a $5 million seed round, led by Prime Impact Fund (now Azolla Ventures) with participation from Congruent Ventures, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, and nearly a dozen smaller investors. The company received an undisclosed amount of funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit in May 2022, to further develop small-scale nuclear power. According to a filing with the SEC in August 2022, Avalanche raised a further $23.3 million. The equity round of funding was led by Azolla Ventures.
The Orbitron configuration was first invented in 2020. The device combines two instruments inside a vacuum chamber: an "orbitrap," which harnesses positive ions in a small orbit around a cathode, and a "magnetron," which generates a stream of electrons. A modified Knight trap, this orbiting ion trap acts as the core of the reactor, an electrostatic source of high-energy ion confinement for extended periods of time. As high-speed ions are confined in precessing elliptical orbits around a cathode, the density increases by the co-confinement of high-temperature electrons trapped due to a weak external magnetic field perpendicular to the electrostatic field in a "crossed field" configuration, the same principle behind magnetron microwave devices. The crossing elliptical paths of ions provides opportunities for fusion-relevant collisions before the ions lose energy, moving out of the interaction space to fall into the cathode. Avalanche uses ion guns that fire deuterium ions (a heavy form of hydrogen) into the ion trap.
Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan with a partial prototype of Avalanche's nuclear fusion reactor.
Avalanche's technology has generated high-speed neutrons from fusion and is working on adding magnets to the prototype to create a higher-density reactor and incorporating a method of transforming the heat produced into electrical energy. Challenges to future development include the small plasma interaction space for fusion, the need for extreme voltages in order to trap ions at fusion-relevant speeds, managing dielectric breakdown and flashover in a small space, and the plasma interactions of glancing beam-beam configurations.
