German startup secures funding for bizarre twisted fusion machine
A German startup has secured its first investment to scale a bizarrely twisted fusion machine that could provide the world with abundant, clean, and boundless energy.
Proxima Fusion increased €7 million in funding to build a device known as a stellarator, a little-known fusion reactor that could hold the key to unlock the potential of atomic fusion power during our lifetime.
While the first round of funding was small, it’s notable because the startup is the first spin-out from Germany’s esteemed Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.
The institute is dedicated exclusively to fusion research and is home to the world’s largest stellarator. Called the Wendelstein 7-X, the machine is the culmination of 27 years of research and design (and €1.3 billion in investment), aided by recent advances in supercomputing and state-of-the-art plasma theory.
While the physics behind the machine are extremely complicated, it’s important that stellarators offer some potential advantages to the more popular doughnut-shaped tokamak — a design that has dominated the fusion industry for decades.
The twisted configuration of the superconducting magnets in a stellarator helping to keep the superheated plasma they contain stable enough to fuse nuclei and release energy. Even more important for a future fusion power plant is that they could theoretically operate continuously, while tokamaks would have to stop periodically to reset their solenoid coils.
However, Stellarators are notoriously complex to design and build, which is why they were largely shelved in the 1960s in favor of their simpler cousin, the tokamak.
“A tokamak is kind of easy to design, hard to operate, while a stellarator is super hard to design, but once you design it, it’s much easier to operate,” said Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Plural Platform, which leading is the investment of € 7 million, told the Financial Times.
Since then-German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, turned on W7-X in 2016, it has made a number of scientific breakthroughs that “essentially define the entire field of magnetic confinement fusion,” Hogarth said.
Fusion physicist Josefine Proll of Eindhoven University of Technology is equally enthusiastic. “Suddenly stellarators are back in the game,” she said said.
Proxima Fusion, aided by the initial investment, looks set to commercialize these developments. CEO Francesco Sciortino believes the startup’s connection to the Max Planck Institute, where more people work on plasma physics than MIT, offers a unique advantage. “The question is, can we perform just as well and make this a real European champion?” he asked.
While private investment has poured into tokamak pioneers — such as CFS, an MIT spin-out valued at more than $2 billion — recent breakthroughs in stellarator technology could pave the way for a new cohort of fusion startups like Proxima.
Type One, a spin-off from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Proxima’s only other competitor to date, raised $29 million in March from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Ventures to develop a commercially viable stellarator.
As the stellarator startup scene takes off, Thomas Klinger, director of the Max Planck Institute’s Greifswald branch, warned that commercially viable operations could take another 25 years.
However, if the technology can deliver on the promise of boundless, clean energy, then it’s probably worth the wait.
If, like me, you really want to learn a little more about stellarator technology, check out this fascinating explanation from the Max Planck Institute:
