Virginia Venture Partners and Ecosphere Ventures invest in NearStar Fusion to create clean, safe and affordable energy

Investments will fund NearStar Fusion's first-generation plasma railgun and experiments on prototype fuel targets at hypervelocity.

CHANTILLY, VA, UNITED STATES, February 10, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Virginia Venture Partners (VVP), Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation’s (VIPC) venture capital program, and Houston-based climate tech venture firm, Ecosphere Ventures, have invested in Chantilly, Virginia-based NearStar Fusion Inc. (NearStar). NearStar is developing fusion energy power plants using their proprietary plasma railgun technology to put clean, safe and affordable baseload electricity both on and off the power grid using an approach called Magnetized Target Impact Fusion (MTIF).

NearStar expects to build and operate fusion power plants for off-grid customers including heavy industry, data centers, and military installations. The physical footprint of a NearStar power plant is roughly 400 feet long by 40 feet wide enabling the retrofitting of coal-burning boilers as the heat source in conventional fossil fuel power plants. According to Amit Singh, CEO of NearStar Fusion, “Our design is well-suited to retrofit coal burning power plants and reuse existing infrastructure such as balance of plant and grid connectivity, but I’m also excited about leveraging the existing workforce because you won’t need PhDs in plasma physics to work in our power plant.”

Fusion is the process powering the sun and is often hailed as the “holy grail of clean energy”. Traditional fusion approaches include magnetic confinement (MCF) using superconducting magnets or inertial confinement (ICF) with megajoule class lasers. NearStar Fusion is pursuing a hybrid approach by compressing, heating and magnetizing fusion fuel simultaneously using a plasma railgun driver to achieve fusion conditions with less energy input in turn increasing energy gain and profitability of a commercial fusion power plant.

NearStar is collaborating with The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) to develop computer performance models for target implosions. NearStar is also conducting experiments at the Texas A&M Hypervelocity Impact Laboratory (HVIL) on prototype fuel targets to validate computer models and evolve the fuel capsule design. NearStar states it will publish the results of the experiments and a detailed concept paper in 2025.

Notably, NearStar’s MTIF approach will only use deuterium, a common isotope of Hydrogen found in water, as the fusion fuel, versus adding tritium, a rare isotope of Hydrogen which is slightly radioactive. Founder and Chief Scientist, Dr. Douglas Witherspoon, states “While avoiding tritium in our power plant design reduces scientific gain of the fusion process, we believe the vastly reduced system complexity and cost savings of eliminating complicated supply chains, regulatory oversight, and breeding of tritium allows NearStar to operate power plants more profitably and serve more customers worldwide.”

NearStar plans to construct their power plant using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) materials and technologies avoiding expensive materials science R&D, superconducting magnets and megajoule class lasers. By leveraging COTS and avoiding tritium, NearStar believes they can achieve fusion ignition, extracting more energy out than energy in, faster and at a lower cost than other fusion approaches. Co-founder and Vice President of Corporate Development, Chris Faranetta, states “Unlike other fusion startups, our approach does not need massive amounts of money and time spent on R&D for advanced capacitors, tritium breeding technologies or plasma facing first wall materials to resist neutron damage.”

The unique driver technology in NearStar’s power plant design is a hypervelocity plasma-armature railgun currently under development capable of launching 50-gram fuel capsules at velocities of 10 km/s (22,369 mph), roughly 30 times the speed of sound. With smaller projectiles and slower speeds, NearStar emphasizes the railgun technology is capable of near-term revenue spin-outs including rock tunneling, shock physics, and on-demand medical isotopes. The technical roadmap for NearStar Fusion is slated to start break-even experiments in 5 years and commercialize the technology with an initial prototype power plant design within 10 years.

About NearStar Fusion Inc.

Founded in 2021 by Dr. Douglas Witherspoon and Chris Faranetta and headquartered in Chantilly, VA, NearStar Fusion is developing fusion energy power plants using a proprietary hypervelocity plasma-armature railgun design. The NearStar team has decades of experience with plasma physics and plasma railguns including working with Department of Energy, NASA, ARPA-E, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Science Foundation, United States Navy, Army and Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars).

NearStar Fusion’s approach combines magnetic confinement (MCF) and inertial confinement (ICF) into a hybrid approach called Magnetized Target Impact Fusion (MTIF). The MTIF approach is focused on leveraging COTS materials and technologies with deuterium-only (D-D) fusion fuel. Each instance of a NearStar fusion machine is expected to generate 50-100MW of baseload electricity.
For more information, visit www.NearStarFusion.com

About Ecosphere Ventures

Ecosphere Ventures is a Houston-based venture fund investing in transformative deep tech, climate tech, and sustainability innovations across Pre-Seed to late-Seed stages in the U.S. The fund backs both hardware solutions—ranging from molecular breakthroughs to advanced machinery—and software innovations, including cloud computing, high-performance computing, AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise SaaS. Ecosphere actively supports first-time entrepreneurs and technical founders.
For more information, visit www.ecosphere.vc

About Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC)

Connecting innovators with opportunities. VIPC operates as the nonprofit corporation on behalf of the Virginia Innovation Partnership Authority (VIPA). VIPA / VIPC is Virginia’s designated authority for leading innovation and economic development in the Commonwealth of Virginia through research, commercialization, and technology advancement; entrepreneurship, startup, and venture capital growth; and regional ecosystem, innovation network, and industry sector expansion. As part of its operations, VIPC helps attract and catalyze private investment into early-stage startup companies, provides research and technology commercialization grants to universities and entrepreneurs, and offers resource and funding support for entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovation networks, and public-private partnerships at local, state, federal levels.
For more information, visit www.VIPC.org

About Virginia Venture Partners (VVP)

Virginia Venture Partners (VVP) is VIPC’s venture capital investment platform that makes direct investments in Virginia-based startups with a high potential for achieving rapid growth and generating a significant economic return for entrepreneurs, co-investors, and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Since its inception in 2004, Virginia Venture Partners has helped catalyze investment in more than 300 startups and attract more than $2 billion of private industry capital into Virginia, resulting in 35x capital leverage.
For more information about VVP, visit www.VIPC.org/funding/virginia-venture-partners/

Amit Singh
NearStar Fusion Inc.
howdy@nearstarfusion.com
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Prototype fusion fuel target experiments at Texas A&M Hypervelocity Impact Laboratory (HVIL)