Fusion's Next Race Is Over Superconducting Tape, Not Plasma

The race to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant has moved out of the physics lab and onto the factory floor. Private investors poured a record $4.48 billion into fusion last year, a 69% jump, bringing the industry’s total since 2021 to $14.24 billion. According to the Fusion Industry Association, 71% of the 56 private fusion companies it surveyed expect to deliver power to the grid by the 2030s. The front-runners already have buyers, with Washington-based Helion signing a power purchase agreement with Microsoft in 2023 to deliver at least 50 megawatts by 2028, with financial penalties if it misses, and Constellation Energy (NASDAQ:CEG) is acting as power marketer. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $4 billion and expects its SPARC reactor to reach scientific breakeven in 2027. It has sold half the output of its first commercial plant in Virginia to Google, and Eni has committed more than $1 billion for power from the same plant.Europe is now spending to catch up, with Germany’s Proxima Fusion raising €411 million in July at a €2.4 billion valuation, Europe’s largest fusion round on record. On October 28 in Tokyo, with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in attendance, Proxima signed memoranda of understanding with two Japanese industrial partners. The agreement with Fujikura covers high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape, which is wound into the magnets that confine the plasma. The agreement with Kyoto Fusioneering expands work on gyrotrons, the devices that heat the plasma with high-power microwaves.Proxima will explore industrial-scale HTS tape manufacturing in Germany with Fujikura, through a planned €140 million production facility in Lower Saxony that it hopes will make around 5,000 kilometers of tape a year by 2030. Proxima estimates it will need around 20,000 kilometers of the tape for its “Alpha” fusion demonstrator and another 40,000 kilometers for its planned “Stellaris” fusion power station. Proxima’s reactors use HTS magnets to generate the powerful magnetic fields that trap and stabilize plasma at temperatures of 100 to 150 million degrees Celsius.Fujikura, a 141-year-old company with more than 50,000 employees, built its reputation in optical fibers and is now a leader in manufacturing high-temperature superconducting tape. “They think this tape has the potential to be the next optical fibre,” Francesco Sciortino, CEO and co-founder of Proxima Fusion, told CNBC. Europe’s supply chain is the deciding factor, according to Ann Mettler, president of Brussels-based clean-energy think tank Catalyse Europe. “If Europe is first to develop this technology, it will give us a huge advantage, but key to that will be building the supply chain,” she said.Few companies make HTS tape because the manufacturing process is exceptionally complex and costly. HTS tape is a composite structure typically built around REBCO, or rare earth barium copper oxide. Manufacturers deposit buffer layers onto a metallic substrate such as Hastelloy using ion beam assisted deposition (IBAD), grow a roughly 1-micron REBCO superconducting layer on top using techniques such as pulsed laser deposition (PLD), and finish with silver and copper stabilizer layers. The product is prone to damage because the ceramic HTS layer is brittle and does not bend or flex easily. HTS magnets are also susceptible to quench, a localized loss of superconductivity that causes resistive heating and can lead to structural damage.HTS tape manufacturing also relies on yttrium and gadolinium, two critical minerals sourced mainly from China and subject to export restrictions. China produces most of the world’s yttrium, primarily alongside heavy rare earth elements from ionic-adsorption clay deposits in southern China, with significant output from Myanmar. China also accounts for about 69% of global rare earth mine output, and much of its gadolinium comes from the same southern ion-adsorption clays in Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Last year, China placed strict export controls on both yttrium and gadolinium, along with five other medium and heavy rare earth elements.Founded in 2023 as a spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Proxima Fusion is one of Europe’s most prominent fusion efforts. It has raised more than €650 million in private and public funding, with backers including Google and RWE, and Bavaria has committed €400 million in public funding to its roadmap. Building on the heritage of the Wendelstein 7-X research machine, Proxima’s design shapes three-dimensional magnetic fields to minimize fast particle losses and confine high-temperature plasma stably without requiring an internal plasma current. Tokamaks, the more common design, run in pulsed cycles that leave them exposed to sudden plasma disruptions. Proxima’s stellarators are designed for continuous operation.Helion Energy is among the companies furthest ahead in the fusion race. The company is currently building its Orion facility on land leased from the Chelan County PUD in Malaga, Washington, with operations targeted to begin by 2028. Helion’s design is a pulsed system that magnetically compresses deuterium and helium-3 fuel and recovers electricity directly from the plasma. The company has received radioactive materials and radioactive air emissions licenses from the Washington Department of Health and has completed its State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) review.By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.comBurnham Heads to COP31 Torn Between Cheaper Power and Net ZeroYttrium's 125-Fold Price Gap Looms Over Trump-Xi Talks in ShenzhenQuantum Computing Is Being Pitched as the Fix for AI's Runaway Power Appetite