Slashing CO2Newfangled magnets for fusion.
Big Idea
The tokamak, a donut-shaped reactor surrounded by high-temperature superconducting magnets, has been the main focus of fusion research for the past half-century. Yet, their coiled and twisted cousin, stellarators, has long promised greater compactness, efficiency, and stability. The challenge has always been the prohibitively complex engineering task of building the model with real-world materials.
How it Works
Stellarator reactor designs are now possible thanks to faster and cheaper computing power and the rise of additive manufacturing. Renaissance Fusion is leveraging novel material science and laser patterning techniques to deposit high-temperature superconducting magnets directly onto a stellarator reactor, making them 7x faster to produce and at a fraction of the cost of HTS today.
Unfair Advantage
Based in France and a stone’s throw away from ITER, the world’s largest fusion energy research center, Renaissance benefits from generations of research and experience in fusion. Everything from high-temperature superconductor magnets to advanced manufacturing and novel materials development. All this combines to unlock what could be the lowest-cost fusion power plant within the decade.
07
times faster
manufacturing than conventional magnets
FRANCESCO VOLPE CEO & CO-FOUNDER
Francesco is a career fusion engineer, an Associate Professor in applied physics at Columbia, and worked on the W7-AS and JET fusion reactors.
DIEGO CAMMARANO COO
Diego is a nuclear engineer who previously led the development of testing sites across the UK for IBA, a particle accelerator technology.
Renaissance Fusion raises $16.4 million to build nuclear fusion technology in Europe
TechCrunch
Minimization of magnetic forces on stellarator coils
Nuclear Fusion
Demonstration of reduced neoclassical energy transport in Wendelstein 7-X
Nature