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Saturday, June 13, 2026
Proxima Fusion — Technical Profile & Analysis
Deep-dive assessment of the Stellarator architecture, fuel path, and market positioning.
Technology Assessment & Commercial Milestones
Stellarator Renaissance
3D-shaped external coils generate the entire confining field. No plasma current, no disruptions, native steady-state operation.
Reactor design
Magnetic / Stellarator (W7-X lineage)
Core tech focus
3D HTS REBCO magnets
Key milestones
€185M Series A (2025). 2026 RWE/Bavaria siting agreement.
The class's clearest commercial trajectory. IPP spin-out with a signed RWE/Bavaria agreement to site 'Stellaris' on a former fission site — the only stellarator with a confirmed utility partner and physical pilot location.
Inherits the Wendelstein 7-X operational dataset. Eliminates internal plasma current entirely, immunising the reactor against the catastrophic disruption events that threaten every tokamak. Targets the same D-T triple-product envelope (~3×10²¹ keV·s·m⁻³) but with continuous, not pulsed, confinement.
- Non-planar coil geometry historically required sub-millimetre manufacturing precision — the dominant cost driver.
- Heat exhaust in non-axisymmetric 3D geometry produces localised thermal peaking that threatens divertor plasma-facing components.
- Same tritium breeding and neutron-damage constraints as the D-T tokamak class.
- Coil manufacturing precision determines unit cost — simplified-geometry approaches (Thea, Renaissance) target order-of-magnitude reductions.
- Higher capacity factor than tokamaks (no disruption downtime) materially improves LCOE.
- Liquid-metal blankets (Helical, Renaissance) double as first-wall, breeding blanket, and heat exchanger — collapsing three subsystems into one.
Core IP originates from national labs (IPP, UW-Madison, Princeton). Proxima exhibits the clearest commercial trajectory — utility partnership with RWE and a physical site secured. The fundamental engineering divergence is coil manufacturability: Type One accepts complex 3D coils via AI-optimised manufacturing; Thea uses arrays of simple planar HTS coils tuned dynamically; Renaissance laser-etches custom coil shapes directly into HTS sheets.
Sourced from the 2026 Global Fusion Energy Comparison — triple-product physics, DEC architecture, and LCOE framework.
Who built Proxima Fusion
Proxima Fusion is the first official spin-out from the world-renowned Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). This elite founding team of next-generation researchers worked directly on the Wendelstein 7-X, the most advanced stellarator on Earth. Blending the intense academic rigor of MIT's plasma program (Sciortino and Milanese) with the stellarator-engineering mastery of the Max Planck Institute (Lion and Schilling), and paired with precision manufacturing expert Martin Kubie, the founders are deploying advanced computational optimization and HTS magnets to transform the stellarator into an economically viable, continuously operating baseload power plant.
Francesco Sciortino
PhD in Plasma Physics, MIT; MSc, EPFL
Lucio Milanese
PhD in Plasma Physics, MIT; BSc, University of Padua
Jorrit Lion
PhD in Physics, Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics
Jonathan Schilling
PhD in Engineering/Computer Science, Max Planck Institute
Martin Kubie
MSc in Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Munich
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