- 16 hours ago
The next great energy technology is being built now. The question is no longer if fusion will happen, but where. Drawing on France’s history of strategic bets in energy technology, Luc Rémont and Francesco Sciortino explore what it takes for Europe to move from scientific leadership to industrial leadership in fusion. They will discuss the fusion architecture emerging as the path to scale, and why the window to establish that lead is open now. This session makes the case for fusion as Europe’s next great industrial opportunity, and for Europe to not just compete in the fusion race, but to define and lead the industry itself.
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TechTranscript
00:06Hi, everyone. It's great to be here with Luke. My name is Francesco Shortino. I'm a co-founder
00:12and CEO of Proxima Fusion, a European fusion company working on QI Stellarators. And I think
00:17we'll talk a little bit about QI Stellarators, but more broadly about Fusion and Europe. And
00:23maybe we'll connect that to Luke, to you, Luke. How did you end up with, from a background
00:28in Schneider Electric and then EDF? How did you get pulled into this conversation about
00:32Fusion? Look, now I'm a free electrician since one year, and that's the way I love to describe
00:39myself, which means that I have no specific interest in any of the technologies, but one
00:45generic interest in making electricity be a success for decarbonation for the long run,
00:51which means that my interest stays with any of the technologies that can enable the future
00:56of the electrical system to really bring to all the nations, and particularly, of course,
01:02in Europe, the right competencies, competitiveness, and the right system that would feed with the
01:09right energy all our future economies. So that's where I stand today. And that's a passion which
01:16took me a long time ago that I can now, of course, deploy for part of my time in supporting
01:23Proxima fusion. But maybe, Francesco, you should, we should start by saying a few words about
01:30fusion. Fusion is like a myth, like, you know, the energy of the sun. Many people hear about
01:38fusion like the ultimate goal, something that we may reach one day, but probably the day
01:44after the day after the day after the day. Why should we consider fusion is actually maybe much
01:50closer to what the common knowledge thinks today? And how do you work on that?
01:57Yeah, so the process of fusion we know very well. We've known it for more than 100 years. It's what
02:02burns inside every star. It's a little more complicated to do it on Earth. The option of building a sun
02:08in a
02:09lab is, sounds hard. It is indeed quite hard. We've been pursuing fusion on Earth other than for
02:14military purposes, but just for safe, clean energy for about 60, 70 years. Turned out to be a lot
02:22harder than people expected it to be. And we've been pursuing a number of concepts, basically a zoo of
02:28ways of harnessing this physical process on Earth. Now, in the last few years, this has gotten a lot more
02:34attention. So there are now more than 50 fusion reactor companies across the planet, and about 15
02:42billion dollars being raised in the private sector. The sector has received quite a lot of public
02:48financing over the last 60, 70 years. So it's not something where we are completely out of the blue.
02:54The more, let's say, interesting concepts, from my perspective, are those that have seen a lot of
03:00public research, where the technology readiness level has been raised by billions invested by the
03:06public sector for many decades. And now there are a number of private players that are seeing some
03:10tailwinds. Some of those tailwinds are in simulation, in the ability to design more complicated machines,
03:16or in particularly strong kinds of magnets, or particularly strong lasers. So if you look at that
03:21breadth of concepts, you can think of them as along a spectrum. On one end, there is inertial
03:28confinement fusion. One example is laser fusion. So laser fusion takes very powerful lasers,
03:34hits with them a small pellet, about millimeter-sized, and when you hit the pellet of heavy hydrogen,
03:42so deuterium and tritium, when you hit that with a lot of energy, that can implode and then explode.
03:47And in that explosion, you get fusion power. Now, doing it once is not so bad. Doing it many times,
03:5310 times per second is very hard. So that's where the threshold, where the barrier, let's say, to
03:59making it commercially viable is important. But lasers are becoming more important, more powerful.
04:04Our ability to do complex, very symmetric setups has become much better. So that's one part of the
04:11fusion industry. At the other extreme, there is magnetic confinement fusion, and that's where Proxima
04:16works. So we span out from the Max Planck Society, an organization of national labs in Germany, three
04:22years ago. And now, as a company, we are about 170 people across Europe, mostly Munich, Zurich, and
04:28Oxford. And we work on what is called a stellarator. A stellarator is a donut-shaped device with powerful
04:34magnets that is effectively holding in a magnetic bottle some hot ionized matter at about 100,
04:41150 million degrees. So that's about 10 times the center of the sun. If that doesn't sound hard,
04:47I'm not saying it right. It is very hard. But we know actually how to do that confinement. This cage,
04:52we built a particularly good one in W7X. W7X is the complex name of this stellarator, the most advanced
05:00stellarator on the planet, which is in northern Germany. And you came to see it. And it did something
05:05to you, I suspect, because it's a machine that is hard to ignore. If you just Google W7X stellarator,
05:11you'll get to see the results of 1.5 billion of European investment in building up a technical edge
05:20in fusion. And that's what we're building on, together with the Max Planck, together with a
05:23number of partners, the Paul Scheller Institute in Switzerland, the UK Atomic Energy Authority,
05:27SEA here in France. So we're seeing this as a European edge. And that's the theme of the panel.
05:32How do we make sure that this becomes an edge of Europe, not just for R&D? R&D is
05:38nice.
05:39But R&D is only part of the story.
05:42So if you position where you are today and where the project that you hold with Proxima Fusion
05:49versus the other projects, you know, we hear about ITER, we hear about many other projects.
05:57What are the objectives of these projects? What is the objective of Proxima Fusion here?
06:02You're building up on W7X experience. What's the next step for you there?
06:08We come from a fusion ecosystem that has been fully public so far. And that was just the
06:13nature of being at technology readiness levels of one, two, three, or something. We're now
06:18going in the field of magnetic confinement fusion, so-called tokamaks and stellarators,
06:23very similar concepts. We're getting into a phase where the R&D not only is speeding up
06:28because of these tailwinds on both simulation software and hardware, but we also need the
06:34involvement on industrial players. And that involvement of industrial players is a tailwind
06:39in itself. It's the moment in which we see a very different kind of investment. You know,
06:43we see major technology players investing in their own capabilities. We see supply chains
06:48being expanded. We see the hyperscalers that are starting to see, okay, this is not just an R&D
06:54topic. Maybe we need some patience. Everyone should understand fusion is not going to power
06:59our cities, our factories in the next five years. This is longer time scale. We're aiming
07:04for a first-of-a-kind power plant within the 2030s. And that everyone understands something
07:11different, but certainly it's not, you know, 2031. It's the second half of the 2030s. And that
07:16means that Sears industrial players now are getting in to make sure that this possibly the
07:22most important industry of the 21st century, that they have a part in this. And so that's
07:27important to proximate. It's why we started the industrial development board that Luke
07:30is a member of. And the industrial development board is our way to connect with major energy
07:35players, make sure that we're not just another scale-up of Europe that dies in silence. We intend
07:41to make a lot of noise and to build a new industry for Europe.
07:45So what I feel very interesting in the stage of the world where we are, where Proxima, Fusion,
07:52ITER and others are, is that we are a little bit like in France in the 50s or 60s, you
07:57know,
07:58where that's the period of time when our country tested many technologies in parallel. And they
08:03are, they actually all went to the stage of the demonstrated reactor. And there are some of,
08:11some of those are still here. They are now in dismantling in France, but you look in France
08:16where you have a gas graphite reactors, you have a different type of pressurized water on less
08:23pressurized reactor. All of those were tested by CEA and EDF before the point came when, okay,
08:30we had tested enough technologies and one occurred as being the one that could be scaled more than
08:36the others. And that was pressurized reactors. So we are a little bit at the same stage today on what
08:43is after pressurized reactors. So it can be what we call 4G reactors. So that's fast neutrons reactors,
08:50but it can be straight to fusion as well. And when I started to share the technology readiness of
08:58Proxima fusion, I realized that the hurdles that are still ahead of us between the scientific reactor
09:06and a nuclear reactor that is dedicated to power are of the same nature as the one that we have
09:13on 4G.
09:14So it makes this benchmarking very valid in the next few years to adapt the new technologies that are
09:22needed to make the scientific reactor a production reactor. And some of these technologies are in
09:28common with the ones that we need in 4G as well. Maybe you should say a word about these technologies
09:34that you see down the road where hopefully the modest contribution of the IDB would help you to pave the
09:40way with partners so that you can find the right partners for that. But as we have likely partners in
09:46the room, that's probably helpful that you share a little bit on what are the key technologies that
09:50would compose this production reactor once you move from the scientific reactor to the production reactor.
09:56Yeah. So let me expand also on that stage and why this industrial conversation is relevant.
10:02First, you have to fix your scientific basis. Until there is enough maturity on the scientific side,
10:09it's not terribly useful to go and do serious production of anything. It is partly thanks to W7X,
10:15and the latest tailwinds that we can now get into thinking about standardization, about getting to
10:21that first reactor that makes more energy than it consumes, which of course intuitively is important
10:27if you're trying to sell electricity at some point. And then you can go and look at all the components
10:32and think, okay, where can I cut the cost? How do I build this thing in a competitive timescale where
10:38it's not the cost of capital that is killing your project, but instead it's your ability to deliver fast.
10:45When you look at a stellarator, what you're seeing is a magnetic cage. So effectively,
10:49very powerful magnets, so-called superconductors. So materials that if you keep cold enough,
10:56they don't have any losses. So you can keep them running for as long as you want. And they create
11:03enormous magnetic fields. So Proxima is a glorified kind of magnet company. These are not the magnets
11:10that you hear lots about that go into cars. These are electromagnets with superconducting materials.
11:15So we started doing R&D prototypes, design prototypes, and now we're scaling up the production of high
11:23temperature superconducting cables. And the supply chains that support us there are really thoroughly
11:28European. It's a fantastic view of how industry comes together. And now we also have been producing
11:34structural components of specialized steel to lay these cables into and make magnets. We need to become
11:41really good at making these magnets. So this involves steel, special steel processing, machining,
11:47involves special kinds of assemblies, and eventually we have to become particularly good at doing this
11:52very fast. Then there is a vacuum vessel. This is a particularly large chamber where you want to
11:57get almost all the particles out so that you can keep it really, really clean and create a fusion plasma.
12:04So you can inject some heavy hydrogen, make it really, really hot with microwave systems. And then
12:10once you heat up this gas of heavy hydrogen, it becomes what is called a plasma. So star stuff,
12:17hot ionized matter. All of this involves vacuum systems, microwave systems, magnets, cryogenic systems,
12:25structures. So it's an incredibly interdisciplinary kind of, it's not one technology. It's an ecosystem
12:31of technologies. And so talking about industrial development is not an overstatement.
12:37And if I may, all this is already quite mature, thanks to all the developments that have been
12:41made on the scientific reactors. But you need to bring them to the industrial scale. That's
12:46right. That's really the challenge nowadays. So the public sector has lifted off this R&D
12:50projects inside various companies across Europe. And now the question is, do these stay as oftentimes
12:57SMEs, small and medium enterprises, or will they see the light of the day of becoming a new industry?
13:03And as the technology is really at the edge of what you can do in magnets, for example,
13:09you would expect these magnets to have other fields of application outside of fusion.
13:14So that's really a spearhead into a new world of magnetic fields management.
13:20Yeah, I think that's the general feature of deep tech, as opposed to investing in real estate and all
13:24the other wonderful things that Europeans like to do with their money. If we invested more in deep
13:29tech and created more of these deep tech champions across Europe, the spillover effects, they are
13:35fundamentally unpredictable. You can go and and should, when you found a company like Proxima,
13:40look at what are the applications. For example, for the superconducting magnets, you're fundamentally
13:45looking at the most powerful electrical systems that you can get. So across powerful motors, different
13:52kinds of big magnets for particle accelerators that have applications in medicine of different types.
13:59Many things will happen if we make these magnets really, really powerful and cheap enough.
14:04And some of these things are predictable. Some others, you have to walk the walk. And you have to
14:08know when you see teams that can move faster than any other competitor, when you see ecosystems that
14:14can capture the value. So for us, for Proxima, it's not just about coming to a first demonstrator,
14:20which is a very pretty kind of milestone. But the question is, can you capture the effect and then
14:25do what EDF did? I think that would be great for you to expand on what EDF has done in
14:32the 70s. The story
14:33goes that there was an oil embargo and that France decided to double down on the nuclear technology
14:40that was the only nuclear technology at that time and decided to go and not do one machine,
14:47but to really double down. So let's hope for that for Proxima. When you look at this opportunity,
14:53you look down the road, what are the key elements of development that you still need? So we are starting
15:00from a super good level of science that is a proven case of stable plasma in a stellarator,
15:10which is really an asset. What are the main steps that you see down the road to make it a
15:15production
15:17capacity? So which means a thermal machine that will extract heat from this heated plasma to generate
15:26power? What are the key steps that you see there? Right. First step, you have your stable,
15:31intrinsically stable, steady state, so continuously operating device. We're targeting this 90%
15:36availability as a baseload clean energy source. To do that, you need to be able to make this complicated,
15:43twisty superconducting magnets very fast. Already in the next three years, Proxima will be capable of
15:50making a layer of these magnets every day. So that involves a development across supply chains of steel,
15:55of machining, of cables, of copper, of different sorts. And it really goes through many players.
16:01We don't have to reinvent the way we make vacuum vessels. We don't need to reinvent how we do
16:06cryogenics. We don't need to reinvent how we do various kinds of support structures. So we're not
16:11starting from zero. That's important for people to realize. I said W7X is very important, but those
16:16supply chains have been developed with ITER, with Astex upgrade, with JET, various machines across Europe.
16:22It may be important for people in the context of European conversations to realize that Europe has
16:28more of these machines than the US by a factor of seven, possibly, much more than China. Although
16:35China is moving very fast, Europe is still very much at the forefront of this. And so the question is,
16:42how do you push the supply chains to develop much faster? The kind of attitude that Proxima is
16:46taking there is we need to always make careful decisions about make or buy. But in the cases where
16:52there might be a product, but it's too slow, we have to come in. So Proxima today has raised several
16:59hundreds of millions. And we have the support of the Bavarian government that last February,
17:04and we announced together 400 million euros of non-dilutive capital towards a net energy gain
17:09accelerator. We are targeting for the early 2030s, so six, seven years away. And that is our step to
17:17develop these supply chains to come in where we need across fueling systems, heating systems,
17:23various, the magnets, the magnets, we cannot just let someone else do it. And this is where our
17:29are in the edge is most important. And we'll test that magnet. The most advanced superconducting
17:36magnet on the planet will be tested here in Paris in about one year. We call it the Stellarator
17:41Model Coil. It's a great partnership with the Center for Atomic Energy of France. So that is the
17:48element of the story. So that's a true European venture that you lead with Proxima Fusion, with a lot
17:54of support from European governments. You said that it was mostly publicly funded Fusion in general
18:01till now. Do you get traction from investors at this stage? As you just mentioned, 400 million raised.
18:07You have private investors that are now stepping in? Yeah. So, so far we announced 200 million euros
18:14raised. And this involved investors across Europe, a few from the US. We, there is, this is not a project
18:23that will be funded with 200 million euros. So there is a capital journey that is quite demanding.
18:28I claim that Europe can do this and that what we are lacking in Europe is less funding. We don't
18:36have
18:37as much of a funding problem if we get our act together and have projects that demand that funding and
18:42that
18:42motivate the deployment of that funding. I think most, more, more often than not what we're lacking for
18:48are these images of lighthouse projects that can be pursued and the teams behind them. So now for the
18:54next six, seven years, you know, Proxima now is 170 people. We'll grow to more than a thousand people to
19:01accomplish this alpha project, as we call it. We have a site. We have key partners. One of them has
19:08been
19:08already announced. It's RWE, a major energy utility working across Europe and the US. The scale-up journey
19:14needs to be understood to be a manufacturing journey. The softer side, fundamental for the, as a tailwind to
19:21design faster. But this story is going to be about bringing together the supply chains. And this is a place
19:26where Europe can absolutely play at the forefront and we have no excuse but to really push the time.
19:33So maybe one question about people and talent. You mentioned that you are going to grow the team up to
19:391,000. What are the, you know, and this is the right place to seek for talent. What are the
19:45type of skills
19:45that you mostly need in the early steps of the journey? And what's your proposal to them?
19:53I think to some extent they are the same skills that every engineering company looks for. We don't
19:58need plasma physicists. We have a strong basis in plasma physics and we work with national labs,
20:04which are physics institutes. Proxima is not a physics research organization. So we need nuclear
20:10engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, mechanical engineers. The key feature that we, you know,
20:16it's harder to get into Proxima fusion than it is to get into MIT. I remind people sometimes. The thing
20:22that
20:22makes people suited for this journey is whether, how badly they want to, to really choose this
20:29mission for the next years of their life. It's a pretty demanding environment. I think that is
20:34intuitive. And what we're looking for is somewhat entrepreneurial spirit in people that come in.
20:39The entrepreneurial spirit should not be just with the founders. We're looking for people that are
20:43feeling like they're on a mission and that want to own the scope of a project, a project that has
20:49ambiguity, that has, you know, develops as it moves. We have a lighthouse achievement that we're pursuing,
20:57but anyone should not believe it. If I ever said that the next 10 years are fully planned and we
21:03know every
21:03step along the way. Instead, we're looking for engineers that are willing to take something and do the near
21:08impossible, but yet possible. We're looking for people from straight out of university. Some of our best
21:14engineering hires have been people that hardly finished. Sometimes they started as working
21:19students, and it's shocking how effective some folks can be very early on. And then we have people
21:26that are bringing their experience from large industry that have been individual contributors in
21:32large companies for 30 years. Some of them came from the energy industry, from looking at the wind. One
21:40person on my mind, team member called Jan came from mechanical structures in the wind industry, which has very
21:46little technical overlap with fusion. And he said, I want to pursue the next thing that can make Europe great.
21:53Some other folks came from the Google-like software companies, some others from Tesla, SpaceX. So
22:00generally, hardcore engineering, but it's less important where they come from, rather than what do they actually want to
22:07contribute. So clarity of culture. I think teams like this, projects like this are driven by culture, more than
22:13anything else. I suspect those were the people that you were looking for at EDF and Schneider Electric. It's not
22:17that
22:18different. I think what's special about Proxima is that the mission is really at the front, and that you have
22:25a lot of
22:25freedom on how you achieve it, eventually.
22:29So, as a conclusion, you are ready for fusion, not after tomorrow, but tomorrow.
22:34Right. It's not quite tomorrow, so don't look at your watch.
22:38No, tomorrow, I mean, nuclear scale of time is a decade, basically. We know that nuclear scale...
22:44We want a whole lot of progress before a decade.
22:46So you want to approach that in the time of this decade, basically.
22:49That's the challenge that Proxima fusion is taking.
22:52Right. Early 2030s, we want to get to a net energy gain device, so more energy out than in,
22:58in a device that can be steady state, that can operate continuously, and that is intrinsically
23:02stable. Within the 2030s, we're shooting for a first-of-a-kind, a first-of-a-kind device for which
23:09we have a site. It's in Western Bavaria. It's an ex-fission power plant that we are converting to fusion,
23:14and then we want to see the scale up that EDF saw in the 1970s and 80s, and that we
23:20believe can
23:20complement the renewables, stabilize the grid, lower the cost of the entire system,
23:26complementing a smart energy policy rather than fighting between different energy sources,
23:30which is a meaningless thing that you and I have discussed a few times.
23:34So fusion as part of the energy mix of Europe would make us a much stronger continent.
23:38Yep, and that would provide a base load
23:42fueled by the most common element in the universe.
23:46That's right, heavy forms of hydrogen.
23:47With no radiation and waste.
23:50There would be no long-lived radioactive waste, which means the whole thing is much easier to
23:54actually deal with.
23:56So that's the benefit of fusion. It was some work and some efforts.
23:59So thank you so much, Francesco, for bringing your testimony here.
24:04Thank you all for attendance and your interest to fusion. Thank you very much.
24:08Thank you, Luke.
24:08.
24:09.
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