Proxima Fusion is leaning on state money to push its Alpha stellarator forward, after winning €400m (£340m; $460m) from the state of Bavaria and bidding for more than a billion dollars of funding from the federal government, with a decision expected next year. The company says the machine is meant to produce more energy than it uses to operate, but the road to that promise runs through expensive magnets, public subsidies, and a race among competing fusion outfits trying to turn a long-running scientific dream into a power plant.
Who Pays for the Dream
The hierarchy is plain enough: Proxima, based in Munich, is building Alpha with money from the state of Bavaria and hopes for even more from the federal government. The company is also racing other groups developing fusion technology, 53 according to the Fusion Industry Association, which represents the fusion industry and tracks developments. That means the future of this supposedly clean energy system is already being shaped by public funding, industrial competition, and the usual scramble for who gets to control the next big infrastructure prize.
Proxima co-founder and CEO Francesco Sciortino describes Alpha as a "dumb machine" that is "objectively very difficult to design" and "objectively very difficult to build," but, if successful, is "just like a microwave oven." The company says the lessons learned from Alpha are helping to design a more advanced fusion power plant called Stellaris. The project draws on decades of work from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and its stellarator W7-X.
Fusion itself is presented as a grand technical fix: capturing on Earth the reaction that powers the Sun. Success could mean abundant, cheap and emission-free electricity, but a working power station remains a long way off. Fusion works by fusing hydrogen nuclei together, releasing immense amounts of energy. On the Sun, huge gravitational forces help keep the reaction going. To maintain fusion on Earth, extremely high temperatures, many times those found on the Sun, are needed. A fuel, usually a combination of the hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium, is heated until it becomes a burning hot plasma, which then has to be controlled and manipulated to spark fusion.
The Machinery of Control
Proxima is pursuing a stellarator rather than a tokamak. A tokamak is a doughnut-shaped device that uses powerful magnets to contain the plasma. A stellarator also uses magnets to manipulate the plasma, but its reaction container has a more complicated shape, with twists and turns, making it much more difficult and expensive to build. Sciortino says that if the design works, the twists and turns of a stellarator make the burning hot plasma easier to control than in the rival tokamak design. He says a tokamak is a "beast" while the stellarator is a "little cat."
Ryan Ramsey, the director of Organisational Performance at Step and formerly captain of the nuclear submarine HMS Turbulent, says tokamaks have "the advantage of a deep experimental foundation built over decades" and have "demonstrated plasma performance closer to what's required for a fusion power plant, including operation with fusion fuel." He says tokamaks benefit from "comparatively simpler magnetic geometry, with fewer and more regular coils," which has implications for manufacturability, maintainability and cost.
That competition is not just about physics; it is about which apparatus can be built, maintained, and financed at scale. Step, or Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, is backed by the UK government and plans to build a prototype powerplant on the site of a former coal-fired power station in West Burton, Yorkshire. The state, in other words, remains central no matter which design wins the race.
Sciortino says he "loses sleep" over whether Proxima will be able to build the magnets, with their intricate shapes, at a speed and cost that will make the stellarator an economic proposition. He says, "The first magnet that we make will be very complicated and very expensive. But can we make it faster than people would expect, and can we drive down the cost?" He cites Germany's manufacturing expertise, including the number of workers who can operate CNC machines, computer-controlled machine tools that can cut, carve or shape materials including wood, metal or plastic. Sciortino estimates there are 550,000 CNC machinists in Germany, compared with 350,000 in the whole of the US.
What the Industry Calls Progress
Proxima uses a very expensive type of steel in its magnets, which needs machining to a high level of accuracy. Maintaining high levels of precision while keeping up the pace of development is crucial for Sciortino. He says the W7-X took more than a decade to get running and that he wants to get Alpha operational in a third of that time. A prototype magnetic coil is under construction and is planned to be tested next year. Proxima says its twisted geometry makes it one of the most complex magnets in the world. Once testing is complete, the company plans to build 40 more magnetic coils for Alpha. To do that, a magnet factory is in the early stages of construction. Sciortino says, "In, 2028, 2029 we need to be able to make magnets at a crazy, crazy speed."
Sciortino says that across Europe there are key suppliers, meaning Europe might be at the forefront of a future fusion industry. He says, "We [Europeans] missed the digital wave, didn't we? But it turns out that we still have people being trained in manufacturing." Ramsey says at Step that the fusion industry is well beyond a physics experiment now. He says, "There's real momentum across fusion right now, and that should be seen as a strength rather than something to divide. This isn't a single-path race, it's a set of approaches exploring different trade-offs. The real question now is not which concept is most interesting, but which can credibly deliver a power plant."
For now, the promised abundance remains tied to public funding, industrial capacity, and a long chain of technical hurdles. The people at the top talk about momentum, trade-offs, and credible delivery. The people footing the bill get a race between expensive machines, state-backed bets, and a future energy system still very much under construction.