Bavaria Pledges EUR 400 Million for Nuclear Fusion

The accompanying memorandum of understanding was announced by Bavarian state premier Markus Söder at the FusionXInvest:Global, a Munich conference bringing together investors to support projects, including what’s known as “Alpha.” 

Alpha is being developed by Proxima Fusion, a spin-out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) which describes itself as “Europe's fastest-growing fusion start-up.” The start-up hopes to develop a so-called demonstrator by next year and an operational facility by 2033.

Söder said that project would require an additional EUR 400 million in private investment in Proxima Fusion as well as EUR one billion in support he hoped would come from the German national government.

Utility company RWE has acquired the site of a decommissioned nuclear power plant, which it says it will share with Proxima. 

Proxima’s concept is based on quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators, donut-shaped devices designed to confine hot plasma using complex, 3D-shaped external magnetic coils. It’s not the only company trying to utilize this technology in Germany to build a fusion power plant. A pan-European corporation called Gauss Fusion is also working on a project in the area.

Other companies are taking a different approach, namely using lasers to make nuclear fusion commercially viable. Examples are Marvel Fusion, also from Munich, and Focused Energy from the western German regional state of Hessen.

Focused, a spin-out of the Technical University of Darmstadt, is aiming to build a laser fusion power plant on the site of another decommissioned nuclear power plant by 2035. “Fusion has the potential to be the next German leading industry,” company co-founder Thomas Forner told news magazine Der Spiegel.