Retrospective of the ARPA-E BETHE-GAMOW-Era Fusion Programs and Project Cohorts
arXiv:2505.01784 · doi:10.1007/s10894-025-00504-4
Abstract
This paper provides a retrospective of the BETHE (Breakthroughs Enabling THermonuclear-fusion Energy) and GAMOW (Galvanizing Advances in Market-aligned fusion for an Overabundance of Watts) fusion programs of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), as well as fusion project cohorts (associated with OPEN 2018, OPEN 2021, and Exploratory Topics) initiated during the same time period (2018-2022). BETHE (announced in 2019) aimed to increase the number of higher-maturity, lower-cost fusion approaches. GAMOW (announced in 2020) aimed to expand and translate research-and-development efforts in materials, fuel-cycle, and enabling technologies needed for commercial fusion energy. Both programs had a vision of enabling timely commercial fusion energy while laying the foundation for greater public-private collaborations to accelerate fusion-energy development. Finally, this paper describes ARPA-E's fusion Technology-to-Market (T2M) activities during this era, which included supporting ARPA-E fusion performers' commercialization pathways, improving fusion costing models, exploring cost targets for potential early markets for fusion energy, engaging with the broader fusion ecosystem (especially investors and nongovernmental organizations), and highlighting the importance of social license for timely fusion commercialization.
43 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables. Submitted for journal publication
References in corpus (24)
- Wave-Supported Hybrid Fast-Thermal p-B Fusion
- Improving the Feasibility of Economical Proton-Boron 11 Fusion via Alpha Channeling with a Hybrid Fast and Thermal Proton Scheme
- Potential Early Markets for Fusion Energy
- Confinement performance predictions for a high field axisymmetric tandem mirror
- Suppression of Bremsstrahlung losses from relativistic plasma with energy cutoff
- MCTrans++: A 0-D Model for Centrifugal Mirrors
- Sensitivity of synchrotron radiation to the superthermal electron population in mildly relativistic plasma
- Loss-Cone Stabilization in Rotating Mirrors: Thresholds and Thermodynamics
- Massive, Long-Lived Electrostatic Potentials in a Rotating Mirror Plasma
- Confinement Time and Ambipolar Potential in a Relativistic Mirror-Confined Plasma
- Energy-dependent implementation of secondary electron emission models in continuum kinetic sheath simulations
- Experimental Measurements of Ion Diffusion Coefficients and Heating in a Multi-Ion-Species Plasma Shock
- Plasma potential shaping using end-electrodes in the Large Plasma Device
- Continuum kinetic investigation of the impact of bias potentials in the current saturation regime on sheath formation
- Flowing plasma rearrangement in the presence of static perturbing fields
- Characterization of fast magnetosonic waves driven by compact toroid plasma injection along a magnetic field
- An investigation of shock formation versus shock mitigation of colliding plasma jets
- Upper and Lower Bounds on Phase-Space Rearrangements
- The Kadomtsev pinch revisited for sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch modeling
- A boundary value "reservoir problem" and boundary conditions for multi-moment multifluid simulations of sheaths
- Electron heating in 2-D: combining Fermi-Ulam acceleration and magnetic-moment non-adiabaticity in a mirror-configuration plasma
- Coriolis Forces Modify Magnetostatic Ponderomotive Potentials
- Extending the Single-Fluid Solvability Conditions for More General Plasma Systems
- Energizing charged particles by an orbit instability in a slowly rotating magnetic field