Renaissance Fusion is a Stellarator fusion reactor company based in Grenoble, France.
“Renaissance Fusion is a hardware R&D company with the goal of designing, building, and commercializing a fusion power-plant based on the stellarator, HTS and liquid metal technologies, on time to contribute solving the climate crisis caused by carbon emissions.”
“In 2019 our founder Francesco Volpe presented in New York and Milan the idea of creating the first magnetic fusion start-up in Europe. In October 2019 he visited 5 candidate cities in France, the Netherlands and Spain. In 2020 he moved to Grenoble, France, where in July he officially registered the company.”
“We are a single, multi-disciplinary company organized in 5 teams developing 3 technologies: one team on HTS film deposition, one on liquid metals and three on fusion science and engineering.”
“We are self-aware dwarfs on giants’ shoulders, thankful for the body of knowledge published by public labs over the decades, eager to “give back” and jointly advance fusion. For this, we regularly present our results at conferences, we have published or recently submitted several journal articles, and we welcome scrutiny by the scientific community.”
“Fusion is the process of combining two light atomic nuclei to form a heavier nucleus, releasing a large amount of energy in the process. The most well-known fusion reaction occurs in the sun, where hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium.”
“Energy scholars are clear: we need a diversified mix of (1) renewables, (2) energy storage and (3) carbon-free baseloads or, even better, load-following energy sources. That means energy sources whose supply can rapidly adjust, within minutes, to fluctuations in energy demand.”
“For 40 years fusion actually over-delivered: from the 50’s to the 90’s, a key performance metric called “triple product” grew by 6 orders of magnitude. It is now within 1 order of magnitude from net fusion power.”
“Fusion is the most fuel-efficient and resource-efficient energy source, and one of the most land-efficient. Therefore, there is practically no limit on the maximum number of fusion power-plants that can be built, from a natural resource perspective.”
“Not at all! On the contrary, we are dwarfs on giants’ shoulders, thankful to public laboratories for decades of fusion research.”
“To produce stellarator magnets, competitors wind narrow tapes (4-12 mm in width) on 3D structures. The complexity lies in fabricating the 3D structures and installing the tapes in 3D, with millimetric precision.”
“There is a wide range of applications for wide HTS, ranging from the simplification of HTS-based electric motors and generators especially for off-shore wind turbines, high-field gyrotron and MRI magnets, fault current limiters, undulators for synchrotrons and magnets for particle accelerators for physics research, material testing and cancer therapy.”
“Superconductors are required to carry high electrical currents and thus generate the strong magnetic fields needed for magnetic fusion. Regular conductors like copper are not suitable for the job due to Ohmic losses caused by the Joule effect.”
“For our 1 GWe stellarator fusion power plants, the power requirements for cryogenics are currently estimated to be less than 28 MW. Further work is underway to refine the calculations and cryogenic system design.”
“Meter-wide tapes are not available today. We are building the film-deposition machines that will demonstrate this technology and manufacture meter-wide HTS tapes in-house.”
“Plasma-facing liquids can handle neutrons and energetic charged particles better than solid walls. For instance, they suffer no structural damage by neutrons, because they have no crystal structure.”
“Li-based liquid walls, even thin ones (< 1 mm), have benign erosion, sputtering and recycling properties. They basically act like sponges that absorb impurities and do not release them back in the plasma.”
“Sufficiently thick walls (35 cm, for our choice of materials) stop most neutrons. This serves two purposes: preventing neutron damage and activation of the rest of the reactor, including HTS, and harvesting fusion energy, 80% of which is indeed carried by neutrons. The remaining 20%, in the form of alpha particles, remains in the plasma and keeps it fusion-hot.”
“Flowing walls exhaust the extreme heat and particle fluxes from the plasma, thus increasing the lifetime of plasma-facing components.”
“No: thanks to the high magnetic field generated by HTS to confine the plasma, the Lorentz force on the liquid metal can easily exceed gravity, even for small currents applied.”
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