German start-up wins seed funding for breakthrough fusion energy machine

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A German start-up has secured seed funding to develop a breakthrough fusion energy machine it hopes will provide a future source of abundant, emissions-free energy.

Proxima Fusion, formed in January, aims to build a complex device known as a stellarator and is the latest company to join the emerging fusion industry’s effort to generate electricity fusing atoms.

While the funding amount is small at just €7 million, it is significant as Proxima is the first fusion company to come out of Germany’s revered Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

The institute is home to the world’s most advanced existing stellarator in Greifswald in the east Germanybuilt by government-funded scientists over the past 27 years using supercomputers and advanced engineering.

Little known outside the world of plasma physics, a stellarator is an alternative to the better-known tokamak device pioneered by Soviet scientists in the 1950s.

Both use huge magnets to suspend a billowing mass of hydrogen plasma as it is heated to extreme temperatures so that atomic nuclei fuse releasing energy.

Until recently, nearly all funding from so-called magnetic confinement fusion has been channeled into tokamaks such as the Joint European Torus in Oxford, England, or the Sparc device built by the Bill Gates-backed organization. Commonwealth fusion systems in Massachusetts.

The stellarator’s convoluted structure is more complicated to design and build than a traditional tokamak, but it produces a more stable plasma that could allow scientists to sustain the fusion reaction longer.

“A tokamak is quite easy to design, difficult to operate, while a stellarator is extremely difficult to design, but once designed, it’s much easier to operate,” said Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Plural Platform, who is at the spearheading the 7 million euro investment together with the German partners UVC.

The stellarator was conceived by American physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1951 but largely abandoned after tokamak discoveries in the 1960s appeared to offer an easier route to fusion. Germany has been one of the few countries that has persisted in stellarator research, starting work on the Wendelstein 7-X at the Max Planck Institute in 1996, at a total cost to date of €1.3 billion.

“During the construction of the machine, we learned how to build the machine,” Thomas Klinger, director of the institute’s Greifswald branch since 2001, told the Financial Times. The final design was the product of “tedious and exhausting research,” he added.

Then-Chancellor Angela Merkel fired up the W7-X for the first time in 2016, and the machine has since achieved a number of scientific breakthroughs.

“They basically did the impossible,” Hogarth said. “With 1990s computer resources they successfully designed a stellarator. . . and now it’s setting records that are basically defining the entire field of magnetic confinement fusion.

The close relationship between Proxima and the Max Planck Institute has invited comparisons to Commonwealth Fusion, which was spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 and has since raised a record $2 billion from investors.

“We are connected to an institution, which has more people [working on plasma physics] from MIT,” said Proxima CEO Francesco Sciortino, who worked at the Max Planck Institute before founding the company. “The question is, can we perform just as well and really make him a European champion?”

Despite the W 7-X results, Klinger said it was a long road from there to trading power, which he warned could still be 25 years away.

While advances in materials science and a flood of private investment have raised hopes that plentiful emissions-free fusion energy can be connected to the grid by 2030, a fusion machine has yet to produce more energy than it can. consume the system itself.

Philippe Larochelle of Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which has made four fusion investments, has backed both the Commonwealth Fusion tokamak and a stellarator concept developed by the US-based Type One.

“The idea of ​​the merger is that the prize is so big that it’s worth more shots on goal,” he said.