For a commercial nuclear-fusion plant a German startup has published plans, in what scientists are touting as an important breakthrough in making the energy that fuels stars a viable source of sustainable clean power here on earth.
Proxima Fusion, which was spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, in Munich, published its design in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design. Its plans for what it calls a Stellarator are being heralded as a milestone in what could eventually become a working fusion power plant, which physicists have long touted as a holy grail for clean energy supply.
Dennis Whyte said “This invokes every engineering discipline of how you put a fusion plant together,”, a leading fusion researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has seen the paper.
Unlike the fission reactions used in today’s nuclear power plants, which split atoms to generate energy while producing significant radioactive waste, nuclear fusion occurs when two light atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier one. This process releases immense energy, produces no carbon emissions, and results in only minimal radiation.
However, companies attempting to harness the energy have until now had to wrestle with finding a way to sustain fusion reactions while also turning the energy generated into net power.
Whyte said the paper published on Wednesday marks the biggest development in fusion technology since the Tokamaks breakthrough a decade ago, when a team from MIT showed for the first time how a commercial fusion plant could be built. Since then, companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is backed by Bill Gates’s venture fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, have worked to develop that technology.
However, the Max Planck Institute has opted for a different approach with its Stellarator design.
Francesco Sciortino (chief executive and co-founder of Proxima Fusion) said “It’s the first time anyone has shown a fusion power plant design that has full coherence on the physics and engineering side,”. He said “This is a very long publication and was a very technical piece of work,”.
Sciortino added that Proxima had opted to share the knowledge publicly because it supported open-source science and much had been achieved in a relatively short period. He said “There is a lot of engineering in this announcement,”.
Proxima was founded two years ago, with the aim of producing fusion power in Europe. It attracted engineers from Google X, McLaren Racing and SpaceX to design the Stellarator plant. It has also received $35 million in funding from the European Union and German government alongside $30 million in venture capital funding.
Chris Gadomski(head of nuclear at BloombergNEF) said “Fusion technology is hot right now,”. “The availability of supercomputing, advanced materials, 3-D printing and high-temperature superconducting magnets have given scientists and engineers the tools with which to build and operate promising prototype devices. Private startups suggest that net-energy gain, a key development milestone, is expected in the next few years.”
Gadomski added that BNEF estimates that private-sector fusion companies have raised more than $8 billion so far.
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Both Stellarators and Tokamaks use extremely strong electromagnets to contain fusion plasma in donut-shaped vacuum vessels.
Tokamaks plants do this using a combination of external magnets and a current induced in the plasma, whereas Stellarators use only external magnets. This requires Stellarators to have complex magnet shapes, but allows them to have better stability and run continuously. Stellarators can produce fusion power for longer with continuous operation and without interruption, and also that materials are not subjected to fatigue that comes from switching the operation on and off.
MIT’s Whyte added that in practice the main difference is that Stellarators are more simple to operate, but are more complex in design. Tokamaks by contrast are relatively simple in terms of design, but more complex to operate.
In 2027 Sciortino said that Proxima is aiming to complete its Stellarator model coil, and then proceed to the production of magnets for its pilot plant, Alpha, targeted for operation in 2031. The company’s ambitious goal is to operate a first-of-a-kind fusion power plant within the 2030s.
