Companies from the USA, Great Britain, China and Germany have been working for several years to bring energy production as it occurs in the sun to earth: with nuclear fusion power plants. More than $6 billion in investments have already flowed into fusion companies – although none have yet managed to generate more electricity in fusion experiments than was needed to get them started.
The start-up Proxima Fusion from Munich, founded at the beginning of the year, is entering the race for abundant clean energy a little late. Nevertheless, co-founder and company boss Francesco Sciortino is self-confident.
“Ultimately, the companies that will commercialize fusion will be those that have a concept that works, not those that pour money into devices that don’t scale effectively into a power plant.”
The reason for the optimism: Proxima Fusion can build on the results of decades of research at the German Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, of which the company is the first spin-off. The institute is considered a leader in the development of stellarators, an alternative design to the more common and well-known tokamaks, which are reminiscent of donuts. Stellarators are more complex and do not work without superconductors, but they are said to be more stable and better suited for continuous operation.
In the next decade, Proxima Fusion wants to build the first commercial power plants.