German startup Proxima Fusion has revealed a concept design for what it says is the world’s most viable commercial nuclear fusion power plant.
The Munich-based company said its Stellaris plant is “the world’s first integrated concept for a commercial fusion power plant designed to operate reliably and continuously”.
The concept design is detailed in a peer-reviewed paper published in Fusion Engineering and Design.
Stellaris will use high-temperature superconducting magnets in a stellarator. A stellarator is a doughnut-shaped ring of precisely positioned magnets that can contain the plasma from which fusion energy is born.
Most fusion experiments today are tokamaks because they are better understood and are closer to achieving ignition conditions. However, there has been renewed interest in stellarators since the 1990s.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, both reactor types have certain advantages. While tokamaks are better at keeping plasmas hot, stellarators are better at keeping them stable. Despite the tokamak’s current prevalence, it is still possible that stellarators could one day become the preferred option for a prospective fusion energy plant.
Proxima Fusion said it is on track to build its demonstration stellarator, Alpha, by 2031. Alpha intends to show net fusion energy in a concept capable of continuous operation.
Stellaris will build on the results of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) research experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Germany.
W7-X cost over €1.3bn ($1.35bn) in funding from the German federal government and the European Union.
The Stellaris work is the result of a public-private partnership between Proxima Fusion engineers and IPP scientists. As the IPP’s first spin-out company, Proxima Fusion has been building on the institute’s experimental and theoretical work, with an engineering workforce from the likes of Google, Tesla, McLaren Formula-1 and SpaceX.
Proxima Fusion’s stellarator design has been put together to produce more power per unit volume than any stellarator power plant that has been designed before.
The much stronger magnetic fields that are enabled by high-temperature superconducting magnet technology allow for a significant reduction in size compared to previous stellarator concepts.
Proxima Fusion said that smaller reactors can be built more quickly, provide more efficient energy generation and promise to be more cost-effective in both construction and operation.
