Copernicus
Copernicus is a FRC fusion project run by TAE Technologies in United States. It is planned. Like every fusion device built so far, it has produced no net electricity.
Nothing yet. Its predecessor machine reached what the company described as a hot enough plasma milestone; Copernicus, to be built at Irvine in California, is intended to operate well above 100 million degrees to simulate net energy production on the deuterium-tritium cycle.
One of the oldest and best-funded private fusion companies, backed by Google and Chevron among others, and pursuing a field-reversed configuration rather than a tokamak. Its long-term aim is proton-boron fuel, which produces no neutrons and requires temperatures roughly thirty times higher than deuterium-tritium, so Copernicus is a step toward a target harder than the one everyone else has not yet reached.
| Organisation | TAE Technologies |
|---|---|
| Approach | FRC |
| Confinement | magnetic |
| Country | United States |
| Status | Planned |
| First plasma | not yet |
| Target date | none stated |
|---|---|
| Power target | none stated |
| Energy gain target | none stated |
| Net electricity | No. no fusion device has produced any |
Other FRC projects
| Project | Status |
|---|---|
| Polaris and Orion |
Fusion needs tritium, and the world's civilian stock comes mostly from CANDU fission reactors. See the fusion overview.
Copernicus in context
2 of the 24 fusion projects on record use the FRC approach: 1 operating, 0 under construction, 1 planned.
Worked out from the entries on this site only, so a figure compares Copernicus with what is recorded here, not with everything that exists. An entry with no value for a measure is left out of that measure's ranking and median.
Sources
- World Nuclear News, TAE Technologies secures funds to build next fusion machine · retrieved 2026-09-07
How these sources are used, including the corrections applied on top of them and what is deliberately left blank · download the underlying data