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Jan 28, 2024

Fusion cuisine: Zap Energy fires up BBQ grill built to look like one of its high

by Kurt Schlosser on August 26, 2023 at 8:00 amAugust 25, 2023 at 2:02 pm Geek Life: Fun stories, memes, humor and other random items at the intersection of tech, science, business and culture. SEE

by Kurt Schlosser on August 26, 2023 at 8:00 amAugust 25, 2023 at 2:02 pm

Geek Life: Fun stories, memes, humor and other random items at the intersection of tech, science, business and culture. SEE MORE

Zap Energy, the Seattle-area startup that’s been cooking up a better way to generate fusion power, fired up a custom-made grill recently for a summer barbecue that featured an appropriate fusion menu.

The star of the BBQ was a hefty new device, dubbed FuZE Grill, which was given to Zap by Trico, a Burlington, Wash.-based construction company that worked to finish Zap’s new headquarters building project in Everett, Wash. The grill was made in Trico’s fabrication shop.

The FuZE Grill is made to look like Zap’s FuZE or FuZE-Q, devices that are similar in size but instead of making smash burgers, produce fusion energy by smashing atoms together in super hot, high pressure conditions.

“We thought it was only appropriate to inaugurate it with a fusion menu,” said Andy Freeberg, head of communications at Zap Energy. “We made Chinese baby back ribs, Korean chicken skewers and veggie kabobs with a Thai dressing. The food was delicious and the grill worked great.”

The lunchtime event in Everett attracted about 40 people. Zap employs about 150 people, with offices also located in nearby Mukilteo.

The chunky silver grill, with Zap’s lightning bolt logos in various spots, looks like something your dad would cook on if he was a total alternative energy geek. One side of the grill is a standard propane setup with four burners. The other side is a charcoal grill/smoker that Zap will wait to fire up when Western Washington has a little less smoke already in the air from wildfires.

With Zap co-founder and CTO Brian Nelson manning the tongs, the grill reached a temperature of about 650 degrees Fahrenheit.

“To compare that with the real thing, the hottest temperatures measured in FuZE-Q have been around 60 million degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the center of the sun,” Freeberg said, adding that instead of propane for fuel, FuZE-Q uses tanks of deuterium gas, a form of hydrogen. “The important scientific distinction is that burning propane is a chemical process, whereas fusing deuterium is a nuclear one.”

Zap was launched in 2017 by Nelson and fellow University of Washington professor Uri Shumlak, with technology developed in collaboration with researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The third founder is entrepreneur and investor Benj Conway. The company has raised a total of roughly $200 million.

The grill struck a chord because of its similarity in look and size to Zap’s fusion devices, which are among the most compact ways to do fusion.

“People often ask for a comparison of how small they are — we can now say they’re about the size of a backyard combo gas/charcoal grill,” Freeberg said. “Neither the grill nor our devices require any magnets, lasers or superconductivity either.”

There’s more here on how Zap’s sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion technology works.

Firing up a BBQ for a summer lunch at work is certainly easier, more predictable and more immediately gratifying than powering up one of Zap’s actual devices.

But the startup is focused on generating energy, not burning it up.

“Our systems could be the forerunners of technology with the potential to one day power the planet with on demand, carbon-free energy,” Freeberg said. “So nothing is going to be quite as satisfying for us as getting a key new insight or hitting a milestone after a successful R&D run on FuZE or FuZE-Q.”

Zap plans to build a storage shed for the grill, to keep it out of the elements and make it easily available for anyone on the team to use.

“Hopefully it will feed many productive plasma physics discussions,” Freeberg said.

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