Proxima Fusion, a European fusion energy startup, has introduced Stellaris, which the company said is the world’s first integrated concept for a commercial fusion power plant designed for continuous, reliable operation. Published in Fusion Engineering and Design, it uses advanced computational optimization, high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets and quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarator technology to bring fusion energy near to commercialization, the company said.
Stellaris builds on the results of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) research experiment in Germany, the most advanced QI stellarator prototype in the world, directed by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the product of over €1.3 billion (about $1.4 billion) in funding from the German Federal Government and the European Union.
With Alpha, its prototype stellarator, Proxima Fusion is poised to show net fusion energy by 2031. In an interview with EE Times, Proxima Fusion CEO Francesco Sciortino remarked a clear road towards fusion on the grid over the next decade, addressing European energy security and worldwide energy needs.
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There is also this point of view for nuclear:
Nuclear power is not a renewable energy, given that it expends its fuel source, uranium, though there is a huge lobby seeking to promote it. Countries began adopting nuclear energy in the first place not for its energy benefits, but because it advanced their nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear plants come with a constant risk of meltdown, releasing large amounts of deadly radiation into the atmosphere and potentially making the territory uninhabitable for millennia. In the West, pop cultural rep- resentations of the Chernobyl meltdown ascribe the disaster to Soviet incompetence, but meltdowns and near meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan, Three Mile Island, United States, and Loir-et-Cher, France, shine a light on Cold War propaganda and show that no regime is immune to disaster. In fact, over one hundred nuclear accidents have occurred since 1952, the largest share of them in the US. But the daily, effective operation of a nuclear power plant may be even worse than a meltdown. In 2011, 75 percent of US nuclear power sites were found to be leaking radioac- tive tritium.28 Depleted plutonium rods have a half-life of 24,000 years, which, for reference, is far longer than agriculture or wheels have existed, more than 40 times longer than the longest lasting state survived, and roughly 500 to 1000 times longer than your typical nuclear storage site goes without experiencing a major leak. Nuclear proponents argue that the rods constitute a small volume of toxic material compared to mine tailing from coal production, for example. They tend to leave out the millions of tons of radioactive uranium mine tailings (11 million tons from a single site in Utah) and the 1.2 million metric tons of depleted uranium produced by uranium enrichment.29 This radioactive byprod- uct has a half-life of 4,400 million years (or, roughly the current age of the Earth). Inexcusably, those who developed nuclear technology invented no way to safely store all that waste for the amount of time it will pose a lethal danger to all life, and no such storage technology is even on the horizon. Many nuclear waste storage facilities have been found to leak radioactive compounds into the environment.
Fusion power doesn’t utilize uranium or plutonium, it uses hydrogen. Any radioactive outputs have short half-lives, making storage less of a concern.
