How do we harness the power of the stars to deliver clean energy on Earth?

It has been a collective goal – and, perhaps, an impending imperative – for human civilization to secure renewable energy sources for its present and future needs. The team at Proxima Fusion (https://www.proximafusion.com/about), led by co-founder and CEO Francesco Sciortino (https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-sciortino-aa340180/), is focused on one approach to build a fusion power plant. Their use of a “stellarator”, a wildly complex machine that until recently has been literally impossible to build, could prove the economic viability of the design and its underlying physics.

Headquartered in the booming ‘tough tech’ center of Munich, Germany, and drawing in expertise globally, Francesco shares with us how his team of scientist-engineers are leveraging prior learnings from tokamak systems as well as integrating institutional knowledge from their stellarator’s predecessor, the famed Wendelstein 7-X reactor built by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

P.S. Thank you to our tough tech champions. Special shoutout to Erika – you are our first Advocate member. We really appreciate your support! If you’d like to follow Erika’s example, take a look at our pay-if-you-can membership options so you can help us bring Tough Tech Today to more folks!


🧠Relevant Links:

• Episode homepage: www.toughtechtoday.com/harnessing-the-power-of-a-star/
• Francesco Sciortino on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-sciortino-aa340180/
• Proxima Fusion homepage: http://proximafusion.com/
• MIT PSFC article about Proxima Fusion: https://www.psfc.mit.edu/news/2023/from-mit-bonds-to-stellarator-breakthroughs-proxima-fusion

👏Credit Roll:

• Producers: Jonathan 'JMill' Miller and Forrest Meyen
• Guest: Francesco Sciortino
• Hosts: JMill and Forrest Meyen
• Editing: JMill
• Transcript: Alan Yan and JMill
• Blog Author: JMill
• Art Design: JMill (stellarator icon credit Olena Panasovska)

🔖Topic Timecodes:

• [forthcoming]

📖Transcript:

Transcript is viewable here: https://otter.ai/u/cEyXpgYNFKgTPRZWbR78cvc-88A