A German energy company has unveiled what’s being described as the world’s most viable fusion reactor concept and it’s bringing nuclear energy one step closer to mainstream adoption. The company, a Max Planck offshoot, has a planned timeframe to build the reactor and if it’s achieved, it will present a new route to the commercialization of fusion power. The reactor has been named Stellaris, a Latin word that means “of the stars,” which hints at the research team’s stellar ambitions.
Stellaris fusion energy reactor is moving towards reality
The startup company developing the Stellaris reactor is called Proxima Fusion and it’s based in Munich, Germany. The research team is made up of engineers and scientists from MIT, Google, McLaren, and SpaceX, and with such an abundance of brilliance under one roof, the project appears even more viable.
The Stellaris machine is a quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarator with high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. It functions by using complex magnetic fields to keep superhot plasma confined, thereby creating the conditions required for nuclear fusion reactions to take place. Francesco Sciortino, one of Proxima Fusion’s founders, told the media:
“Stellaris is designed to operate in continuous mode and be intrinsically stable. No other fusion power plant design has yet been demonstrated to be capable of that.”
Proxima Energy’s Max Planck-spinoff reactor project is ready for launching
The engineers working on the Stellaris unit used the Wendelstein 7-X as the basis for their technology, which is the largest stellarator in the world and is located at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics at the Greifswald site in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, also in Germany. The Wendelstein 7-X was developed purely for research, but Proxima has much bigger plans for Stellaris as it’s expected to one day contribute to powering the electricity grid.
Photographs of the unit show a piece of machinery that looks so futuristic and cutting-edge that some may say it resembles an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The team’s ambition is to have an active demonstrator ready in 6 years
The Proxima team is industriously building their first demonstrator, which will be referred to as “Alpha.” They’ve set a deadline of six years to bring Alpha to life and this relatively brief timeline makes the project even more ambitious. Sciortino explained that Alpha will be the world’s first fusion device capable of demonstrating “net energy production in a steady state.”
Alpha will serve as the foundation for a much bigger 1 GW fusion reactor unit that’s hoped to be online and generating electricity sometime in the 2030s.
What are the features of stellarators and how will Stellaris optimize them?
The other form of nuclear fusion machines, tokamaks, are more popular but don’t offer as many advantages as stellarators, which require less power to operate and produce more stable processes. The well-known ITER mega-project in France, which is currently under construction, is a tokamak nuclear device that’s less complex than Stellaris.
The biggest drawback of stellarators is how difficult they are to design and build. This is the reason why tokamaks became more popular and stellarators dropped out of development in the 1960s. Fortunately, advances in computational power and artificial intelligence have resulted in easier application of the technology by rapidly iterating the best fusion reactor designs according to parameters like efficiency, material availability, and cost. Industries like automotive and space are utilizing similar AI capabilities for their own advancement.
The application of AI means that Proxima won’t have to build multiple prototypes and can move straight to a functioning demonstrator unit. Sciortino explained:
“The understanding of complex geometry and its consequences is everything in stellarators. AI is helping Proxima to uncover patterns that lead to simpler, faster, and cheaper designs.”
Another innovation in the nuclear fusion realm comes in the form of a unique UK-based project involving installing a nuclear fusion power generator on the ocean.