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Proxima Fusion was born as a spin-out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) which was founded by the German physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg who, aware that fission developed commercially very rapidly, from a prototype power plant to full commercialization, perhaps thought that, by founding IPP in 1964, it was possible to have fusion power plants already 2 decades later, But this has not been the case, at least until today.
What I have said (obviously without explaining myself sufficiently) is that fission has developed commercially very rapidly, from a prototype power plant to full commercialization. Yet, fusion is taking much longer: Heisenberg perhaps thought that, by founding IPP in 1964, you could have fusion power plants as early as 2 decades later … But that was not the case.
Francesco Sciortino, co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, tells Startupbusiness about the scenario of nuclear fusion research, the system that will make it possible to produce energy without waste, without emissions, in a virtually infinite way.
Tokamak and stellarator
“The joke circulating in nuclear research circles is that fusion always takes another 20 years to arrive, but things have begun to change since the end of the last century, as early as 1998 the first Private companies engaged in nuclear fusion research and then in 2016 came Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) which was born within MIT in Boston where me and my co-founder Lucio Milanese we were doing our PhD and so we had the opportunity to assist directly the development of magnets based on high-temperature superconductors which are the technology that represents an important step forward in the development of nuclear fusion, even though they were initially used in more traditional magnetic confinement systems known as tokamaks.”
After his PhD, Sciortino joined Max Planck: ” Max Planck is the only organization in the world that has both tokamaks and the other model for magnetic confinement called stellarator, which we consider to be more effective. The stellarator we use is called W7-X, it is a revolutionary, almost improbable and very complex machine that was made thanks to an investment of 1.3 billion euros of which 80% came from Germany and the rest from other European sources, W7-X was definitively completed in 2022 even though it had already been working since 2015 and achieved all the objectives that had been set, which is very rare in the world of research.”
The W7X Stellarator
Investments and computational approach
Proxima Fusion was born in January 2023 with a first investment round of 7.5 million euros raised between April and November of the same year: “first we brought all the team members who come from various parts of the world to Munich where we have our headquarters and where today about 30 people work, including many Italians, and then we closed the new round of 20 million euros This allows us to accelerate both new hires and work on the high-temperature semiconductor magnets applied to the Stellarator. The competition between tokamak and stellarator is important because initially it was almost taken for granted that the first generation of nuclear fusion power plants was based on tokamak, but now things could also change because stellarator is proving to be an efficient technology capable of surpassing the concept of the tokamak thanks mainly to European support and research. our mission is to build a stellarator here in Munich capable of producing net energy continuously and we aim to do so by 2031, we are convinced that in the mid-30s of this century we could start to have the first fully functioning fusion power plants”.
It is not an easy path but Sciortino conveys a strong and genuine confidence: “There is a lot of work that still needs to be done, we still have at least 10 years of technological development ahead of us and we do it with the conviction of being able to create something wonderful and to do it with the processes and the right tools that allow us to constantly accelerate this process, every year we expect that the next one will be faster in terms of technological evolution, and we have shown it, the 7.5 million euros of the initial round according to the plans had to serve us to achieve expected results within two years, but we managed to achieve the objectives in just 9 months And that’s why we were able to have the confidence of investors and do a second round.
The shape of the stellarator
International and multi-skilled team
The Proxima Fusion team has people with the most diverse skills and backgrounds, most of them are people who were already at Max Planck or MIT, others come from GoogleX, then there are particle physicists who come from EPFL in Lausanne, and then people who come from the aerospace sector, from Tesla, experts in artificial intelligence, physical engineers such as Nicolò Riva, magnet engineer, Nicolò Foppiani, fusion researcher, particle physicist, Andrea Merlo, hardware engineer, Wei Guo, mechanical engineer, Jean-Claude Angles, aerospace engineer, Cornelia Hintze, materials physicist, Markus Kaiser, artificial intelligence,
Martin Kubie, simulation engineer and co-founder. “We need all these skills to give substance to the computational automation of engineering systems, which is the method that allows you to accelerate and optimize development processes, of course in our work we have both hardware and software issues to solve but it is thanks to software that we can reduce time and costs because by using computational systems we can know if something works even before we have built it, we can do tests even before we have physically built cars and devices, a bit like what happens with Formula 1 cars, They also simulate everything before producing, they can’t afford to do real tests on the circuits for every modification, and we, wanting to make a parallel, use this approach.”
Obviously, the work of Proxima Fusion is on a much higher scale of complexity than the design of a car for competitions, but the basic principle is the same and therefore this approach allows you to build cars in a computational way to understand if they can work and then physically build them, thus speeding up times and exponentially decreasing costs. “This type of approach can only be done in companies like ours, so in companies whose organization is born specifically from scratch, it is very difficult to apply it to existing organizations and this represents a significant advantage for us, an approach that must then also involve the supply chain and in any case must always take into account that at a certain point it is also necessary to make the physical components and there are times that can be made reduce only up to a point.”
The co-founders of Proxima Fusion: Lucio Milanese, Martin Kubie, Jonathan Schilling, Jorrit Lion, Francesco Sciortino
Europe’s competitive advantage
“The work we are doing will have an impact because it is an energy source with unique characteristics, but I am convinced that it will also be necessary to have other methods available, personally I strongly believe in photovoltaics and if we imagine an entirely decarbonized Europe in 2050 we must imagine that at that time most of the energy will come from photovoltaics and wind power, which, however, are not constant and we cannot rely exclusively on batteries. For this reason, nuclear fusion, but also new generation fission, are fundamental because they are systems capable of producing energy in a stable and centralized way that does not produce carbon emissions, just as it is right that we invest today in several directions because fusion, which certainly has unique advantages, still requires research and we cannot know whether slowdowns may occur in the development process. So it’s important to diversify. The new generation fission is much simpler, small modular reactors are not as complex as fusion, there it is above all a question of costs and what we can define as a ‘social license’ or to make everyone understand that nuclear power is a valid, clean and safe alternative”.
Here arises an issue related to the fact that if Europe wants to become carbon-free it cannot do so, but thinking with an approach that risks damaging its industries, as can be seen for example with the production of photovoltaic panels that other countries are able to produce at much lower costs, so it is necessary to keep competitiveness high and even here nuclear fusion can play a fundamental role: “To date, theEurope has invested far more than others in the development of nuclear fusion, today in Europe there are structures for magnetic confinement to an exponentially greater extent than in the rest of the world, in the USA there is for example only one tokamak while in Europe we have in Germany, Italy, France, United Kingdom, we actually and substantially have a huge advantage, we have companies in Europe that have skills and competencies that are not there elsewhere, companies that supply customers from all over the world, Commonwealth Fusion Systems itself sources certain components from European manufacturers and almost the entire Proxima Fusion supply chain is European, what is needed is to continue at this pace by accelerating in training talents who are a fundamental element, engineers, physicists who want to get involved and who make the choice to work in nuclear fusion as a challenge of their lives and we need governments to take note of their responsibilities in this regard and contribute to the common mission, today in Europe we have eight companies working on nuclear fusion, a world record, but for example we need to make regulatory aspects more agile, which is already the case in the US, to keep this competitiveness high and to maintain, if not further increase, the advantage we have“.
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