Proxima Fusion has signed a cooperation agreement with the state of Bavaria, energy giant RWE, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics to build the world's first commercial stellarator fusion power plant, according to major media reports. The agreement, a Memorandum of Understanding, was presented in early March. Proxima Fusion was founded in 2023 as a spin-off from the Max Planck Institute.
The plan is divided into two steps: first, the demonstration facility Alpha will be built in Garching near Munich, planned to be operational in the 2030s at a cost of around 2 billion euros. The actual power plant Stellaris will then be built at the site of RWE's decommissioned nuclear power plant in Gundremminge. Proxima Fusion is working on a stellarator, a device that uses magnets to manipulate plasma in a reaction container with a complicated shape, making it more difficult and expensive to build than a tokamak. Proxima's stellarator, called Alpha, will draw on decades of work done by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and its stellarator the W7-X. The aim of Alpha is to produce more energy than it uses to operate.
I remember a few people said that the place where Proxima is today was impossible.
Proxima plans to finance about 20 percent of the project costs through private international investors. Bavaria has also signaled potential state co-financing of an additional 20 percent, and RWE has signaled willingness to fund within the framework of the agreement. The parties hope to jointly secure federal funds within the framework of Germany's High-Tech Agenda, a program of over 22 billion euros launched last year. Proxima recently won €400 million from the state of Bavaria and is bidding for more than a billion dollars of funding from the federal government, with a decision expected next year.
Proxima is racing other groups developing fusion technology, with 53 groups according to the Fusion Industry Association. According to BBC News - Business, Francesco Sciortino described the stellarator as a device that is objectively very difficult to design and build, but if done, it operates simply like a microwave oven. He also noted that some people considered Proxima's current position impossible. The exact timeline for Alpha's construction and operation remains unclear, and it is unknown how much federal funding has been secured or what specific technical challenges the stellarator approach entails.
A stellarator is a thing that is objectively very difficult to design, objectively very difficult to build. But if you do it, it is a dumb machine... just like a microwave oven.