🍩 Proxima Fusion (DE), a stellarator startup that already came up a few times on this newsletter, closed a €20m Seed. The round was led by redalpine with participation from multiple new and existing investors. The company leverages on the experience gained at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics while building and operating the Wendelstein 7-X, the world's largest stellarator. However, it plans to do better by using modern manufacturing and computational techniques. The announced timeline to fusion is mid-2030s.
🍩 On a similar topic, researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) designed and built a stellarator using permanent magnets. This is quite an innovation, as these devices typically require electromagnets with complex shapes and tights tolerances. Using off-the-shelf permnanent magnets embedded in a 3D-printed shell around the vacuum vessels is a drastic simplification, with large cost-reduction prospects.
🚀 The UK Space Agency funds two projects as part of the second phase of its International Bilateral Fund (IBF). First, Rolls-Royce and BWXT receive £1.18m to identify the optimum technologies for a fission nuclear system which balances flexibility and performance. Second, a consortium led by the University of Leicester receives over £783,000 to identify a range of mission opportunities for radioisotope power systems.
👨🎓 Paper of the week: "Tetris-inspired detector with neural network for radiation mapping", Nature Communications (2024).
👉 New prospects for high-quality radiation mapping with simple detectors.
👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me me know!