Proxima announces plan for German HTS production facility

The MoU covers the assessment of potential sites in Lower Saxony, establishing a milestone-based support and funding structure, facilitating permitting processes and developing partnerships with companies, municipalities and research institutions across the state. Around EUR140 million (USD46.5 million) in investment is planned for the first two project phases, running until the end of 2029. Proxima aims to finance the total investment equally through private capital and public funding, with the State of Lower Saxony providing EUR21 million, representing just under 30% of the proposed public funding contribution.

The planned production site, which will be the first-of-its-kind in Germany and Europe, will create an essential industrial foundation in Lower Saxony for Proxima's Alpha fusion demonstrator, its planned Stellaris power plant at the site of a former Gundremmingen nuclear power plant, and, ultimately, the production of stellarators at scale. Beyond supporting the stellarator supply chain, the High-temperature superconducting (HTS) manufacturing capacity would also serve other applications including high-performance electricity grids, medical imaging and treatment, advanced propulsion systems and other high-field magnet technologies. Under current plans, Proxima will require approximately 20,000 kilometres of HTS tape for Alpha and a further 40,000 kilometres for Stellaris.

"This plant enables Germany to retain manufacturing expertise and economic value, make its European supply chains more resilient and translate its world-leading stellarator research into an internationally significant industry," Proxima said. "By bringing together materials expertise, production processes, quality assurance, skilled workers and suppliers, it would create a critical upstream manufacturing capability with applications across a wide range of sectors while reducing dependence on overseas suppliers."

Proxima - which was spun out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics - said it is in discussions with several international technology partners about bringing established HTS manufacturing expertise and production capabilities to Lower Saxony.

"We are making Lower Saxony a pioneer in European HTS manufacturing," said Olaf Lies, Minister-President of Lower Saxony. "This will not only support Germany's ambitious fusion-energy goals, but also bring advanced manufacturing, new economic value, highly skilled jobs and technological expertise to our state, with the potential to generate positive innovation effects across many other industries. Lower Saxony will become, quite literally, a magnet for a new critical technology."

Francesco Sciortino, co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, added: "HTS tape is one of the critical technologies needed to scale fusion rapidly at an industrial level. Alpha and Stellaris will create the demand required to build this manufacturing expertise locally. Lower Saxony has the industrial base, energy expertise and political determination to turn a supply-chain dependency into an enduring strategic strength for Germany and Europe."

HTS tape is a specialised metallic tape that becomes superconducting at relatively high temperatures. In its superconducting state, it can carry electrical currents with virtually no resistive losses, making it possible to build electromagnets that are both exceptionally powerful and compact. The magnets built from the tape are essential to stellarators: they generate the magnetic fields that confine and control the extremely hot plasma inside a fusion machine. This makes HTS tape a key enabling technology for fusion. By enabling more compact and powerful fusion machines, it supports not only the technical realisation of fusion energy, but also the development of cost-effective power plants. Currently, HTS tape is manufactured at industrial scale primarily in Asia.

A stellarator fusion reactor is different to a tokamak fusion reactor such as the Joint European Torus in the UK or the ITER device under construction in France. A tokamak is based on a uniform toroid shape, whereas a stellarator twists that shape in a figure-8. This gets round the problems tokamaks face when magnetic coils confining the plasma are necessarily less dense on the outside of the toroidal ring.