Could fusion energy save Europe from the energy crisis?
Among the leading European startups in the field of fusion energy, Proxima Fusion is working on stellarators, an underused technology in the field.
Since the war in Iran began on 28 February, energy has returned to international headlines.
The conflict and Iran’s subsequent decision to heavily curb shipments through the Strait of Hormuz—a vital route for global oil transport—have triggered what the International Energy Agency has described as the largest supply disruption in oil market history.
The crisis has prompted European policymakers to assess dependence on imported fossil fuels and look for homegrown alternatives.
Renewable and nuclear energy are some of the alternative options. And the latter is not only about the well-known and divisive nuclear fission.
There’s another form of nuclear energy—fusion energy—that, according to some, could help solve Europe’s energy crisis in the long-term.
According to Francesco Sciortino, CEO and co-founder of the German startup Proxima Fusion, in fact, fusion energy plays “all the roles” in strengthening energy security in Europe.
But what is nuclear fusion? And what is the technology used by Proxima Fusion to create it?
Fusion energy: A promising energy source?
Fusion energy is one of the two ways—alongside nuclear fission—to produce energy through nuclear reactions.
Nuclear fission is the most well-known process, the one typically associated with power plants and nuclear waste, and it releases energy when the nucleus of a heavy atom is split.
Whereas nuclear fusion, also known as fusion energy, generates energy by merging light atomic nuclei.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), fusion energy has the potential to generate four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than nuclear fission, and nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal.
In addition, fusion energy does not produce CO2 emissions, it does not generate long-lived radioactive waste, it is considered safer than nuclear fission, and it’s more predictable than renewable energies.
All of this sounds promising, but fusion energy is not yet a commercial reality.
Creating and sustaining a fusion reaction is challenging and requires a large energy input, so experts are still working to demonstrate that it can produce more energy and money than it consumes.
Proxima Fusion and the stellarator technology
Among the projects working towards this purpose is Proxima Fusion, a Munich-based startup spun out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in 2023.
Unlike most European and international fusion projects, such as JET and ITER, Proxima Fusion does not use tokamaks but stellarators to create the fusion reaction.
Both technologies are doughnut-shaped devices that use magnetic fields to contain plasma, a state of matter and a key ingredient for fusion. What differs is how they keep the plasma stable and at the extremely high temperatures required for fusion.
Both have their pros and cons. “They [stellarators] are harder to design, harder to manufacture, but they are easier to operate, they can operate continuously, they can be intrinsically stable”.
Stellarators are still less common than tokamaks, but, according to the IAEA, they could potentially become the preferred option for a prospective fusion energy plant. And Proxima Fusion is indeed working in this direction.
“Alpha is the last device that we’ll have to build before we go to a first-of-a-kind fusion power plant with commercial operation conditions,” Sciortino said. Alpha is a demonstrator which will test how the stellarator works and whether it can achieve net energy gain, so whether the plasma can produce as much energy as is needed to heat it.
Alpha is now in its manufacturing stage and, as Sciortino said, the plan is to have it operating in the early 2030s.
On top of Alpha, Proxima Fusion is working on Stellaris, the first commercial fusion station in the world.
“The objective is to create something that can scale, and to make it scale, we need to make money, that means economic viability; in other words, to make a commercial case,” Sciortino said.
Sciortino plans to have Stellaris operational in the second part of the 2030s, a little later compared to Alpha.
“We are at the stage where we are creating a new industry,” he said. “It's not about just one company. It's about making sure that the supply chain invests in its own capabilities so that we can move this entire field faster than it has ever been. We have hardly started the history of fusion”.
Germany and Europe’s fusion energy future
The Stellaris power plant is planned for the site of a former nuclear fission power plant in Gudremmingen, Germany. This country completed its nuclear fission phase-out in April 2023 and is now investing money in the creation of fusion energy.
In October 2025, the Chancellor’s Friedrich Merz’s cabinet presented an action plan to support and speed up the development of nuclear fusion technology. With this plan, the German government will invest more than €two billion euros by 2029 to build a fusion power plant.
Although Proxima Fusion was not created in Germany for these reasons, Sciortino believes the German government understands the opportunities related to fusion energy.
“In Germany, that awareness has become clearer and clearer at a much faster rate than we thought,” he said.
According to him: “Fusion offers a spectacular economic opportunity for Europe more than for any other continent because of our need for sovereignty, because we don't have natural resources, because we are not making our photovoltaics, because wind is not working out so well from an economic perspective.”
Some more sceptical opinions
Despite the widespread excitement around fusion energy, some experts are more sceptical about its actual potential.
In a study published recently in Nature Energy, researchers argue that the future cost of fusion power plants is highly uncertain and that their experience rates are overestimated.
An experience rate is a percentage showing how much the cost of a technology decreases each time the total use of that technology doubles.
“A technology with a high experience rate would thus have a steeper cost decline as production increases, whereas a technology with a low experience rate would have its costs stay relatively steady even after massive deployment,” Lingxi Tang, one of the authors of the article and doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, told Euronews Next.
According to previous studies, fusion power plant technology could achieve experience rates of 8–20 percent. However, the study recently published by Tang and his colleagues suggests that the experience rates are likely to be lower, around 2-8 percent.
According to Tang, the sharp difference in percentage is due to the lack of proper reasoning behind some previous experience rates analysis and to a possible phenomenon, he refers to as ‘optimism bias’: “Especially in the private investment community, they are biased in their thinking, they tend to be biased in thinking towards an optimistic outcome,” he explained.
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