Can fusion power save Europe from the energy crisis?

Since the war in Iran began on February 28, power has returned to international headlines.

The conflict and Iran’s subsequent decision to clamp down on exports through the Strait of Hormuz – a key global oil shipping route – have produced what the International Energy Agency has described as the biggest disruption in the history of the oil market.

The crisis has prompted European policymakers to reassess dependence on imported fuels and seek domestic alternatives.

Renewable and nuclear energy are some of the other options. And the latter is not just about the well-known and divisive nuclear conflict.

There is another form of nuclear power—fusion power—that, according to some, could help solve Europe’s long-term energy problem.

According to Francesco Sciortino, CEO and co-founder of the German company Proxima Fusion, in fact, fusion energy plays “all the roles” in strengthening energy security in Europe.

But what is nuclear fusion? And what technology does Proxima Fusion use to create it?

Fusion Energy: A promising energy source?

Fusion energy is one of the two ways—along with nuclear fission—to produce energy through nuclear reactions.

Nuclear fission is a well-known process, often associated with power plants and nuclear waste, and releases energy when the nucleus of a heavy atom splits apart.

Whereas nuclear fusion, also known as fusion energy, produces energy by fusing the light nuclei of atoms.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), fusion energy has the potential to produce four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than nuclear fission, and four million times more energy than burning oil or coal.

In addition, fusion energy does not produce CO2 emissions, does not produce long-term radioactive waste, is considered safer than nuclear fission, and is more popular than renewable energy.

This all sounds promising, but fusion power is not yet a commercial reality.

Creating and sustaining a fusion reaction is difficult and requires a lot of energy, so scientists are working to show that it can produce more energy and money than it consumes.

Proxima Fusion and star technology

One of the projects working towards this goal is Proxima Fusion, based in Munich and launched from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in 2023.

Unlike many European and international fusion projects, such as JET and ITER, Proxima Fusion does not use a tokamak but stars to create the fusion reaction.

Both technologies are donut-shaped devices that use gravity to contain plasma, the state of matter and the key ingredient for fusion. What is different is how they keep the plasma stable even at the very high temperatures required for fusion.

Both have their pros and cons. “They [stellarators] they are difficult to invent, difficult to make, but easy to work, they can work continuously, they can be stable forever”.

Stellarators are still less common than tokamaks, but, according to the IAEA, they could be the preferred choice for a prospective fusion power plant. And Proxima Fusion really works in this regard.

“Alpha is the last device we’ll have to build before we go to a commercial-scale power plant,” Sciortino said. Alpha is a demonstration that will test how the stars work and how they can achieve net energy gains, so that the plasma can produce as much energy as is needed to heat it.

Alpha is now in its production stage, and as Sciortino said, the plan is to have it operational in the early 2030s.

On top of Alpha, Proxima Fusion operates on Stellaris, the world’s first commercial fusion center.

“The goal is to create something that can, and to make it scale, we need to make money, which means that the economy will be successful; in other words, to make a business case,” Sciortino said.

Sciortino plans to make Stellaris operational in the second half of the 2030s, later than Alpha.

“We’re at a stage where we’re creating a new industry,” he said. “It’s not just about one company. It’s about making sure that the supply chain invests in its capacity so that we can move this entire field faster than it has ever been. We haven’t started the history of fusion”.

The future of German fusion power and Europe

The Stellaris power plant is planned to replace an old nuclear power plant in Gudremmingen, Germany. The country completed its nuclear phase-out in April 2023 and is now investing in fusion power.

In October 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s cabinet presented an action plan to support and accelerate 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 founded in Germany for these reasons, Sciortino believes that the German government understands the possibilities associated with fusion energy.

“In Germany, that awareness is becoming clearer and clearer at a faster pace than we thought,” he said.

According to him: “Fusion offers an amazing economic opportunity for Europe more than any other continent because of our need for sovereignty, because we do not have natural resources, because we do not make our own photovoltaics, because the wind is not efficient from an economic point of view.”

Some questionable comments

Despite widespread excitement about fusion power, some experts are very skeptical about its true potential.

In a study published recently in Nature Energy, the researchers argue that the future costs of fusion power plants are highly uncertain and that their experience levels are overestimated.

The rate of experience is a percentage that shows how much the cost of a technology decreases every time the total use of that technology doubles.

“Technology with high efficiency can become very cheap as production increases, while technology with low efficiency can keep its cost stable even after mass deployment,” Lingxi Tang, one of the authors of the article and a doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, told Euronews Next.

According to previous studies, fusion power plant technologies can achieve efficiency rates of 8-20 percent. However, a recently published study by Tang and his colleagues suggests that the experience rates may be lower, about 2-8 percent.

According to Tang, the strong difference in the percentage is due to the lack of proper reasoning behind the evaluation of the values ​​of past experience and what may happen, he talks about the ‘bias of optimism’: “Especially in the private investment community, they are biased in their thinking, they tend to be biased when they think of optimistic results,” he explained.