A New Zealand-based start-up, OpenStar, has made significant strides in the field of nuclear fusion, claiming a milestone with its innovative reactor design. In a groundbreaking test, the company successfully created and contained plasma at a staggering 300,000 degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, marking an important first step toward achieving nuclear fusion. This achievement comes less than two years after the company’s founding, with a budget under $10 million, demonstrating how rapidly progress can be made with unconventional approaches.

Nuclear fusion, which has been a dream of energy researchers for decades, promises to generate vast amounts of clean, carbon-free energy by fusing hydrogen isotopes in a superheated plasma. The challenge has always been containing this plasma long enough to initiate and sustain the fusion process. While the temperatures required for actual fusion are much higher than what OpenStar has achieved, the company’s progress is seen as a crucial leap toward overcoming the many technical barriers in fusion energy.

What sets OpenStar apart from other fusion projects, such as ITER in France or the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, is its unconventional reactor design. These larger projects typically rely on the "tokamak" model, which uses external magnets to contain plasma in a doughnut-shaped chamber. In contrast, OpenStar has turned this concept "inside out." The company’s design levitates a high-temperature superconducting magnet inside the plasma cloud, containing the plasma within the magnet’s north-to-south field lines. This breakthrough has the potential to drastically reduce the complexity of the reactor and allow for faster scaling and commercialization.

OpenStar’s CEO, Ratu Mataira, explained that the core challenge is ensuring the levitating magnet operates efficiently within the plasma without being destroyed by the extreme heat. The magnet itself is powered by a battery, and the system can run for up to 80 minutes before needing to be recharged. Mataira believes that this innovative approach will ultimately prove easier to modify and scale than the traditional tokamak design, which he likens to building a "ship in a bottle." Tokamak reactors require years of meticulous design and construction, while OpenStar's reactor can be adjusted more flexibly, speeding up the path to commercialization.

Dennis Whyte, a professor at MIT and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, expressed his excitement over OpenStar’s success, noting that the levitating magnet design could offer an important new direction in fusion research. While the reactor is still in its early stages, the progress made by OpenStar has generated significant interest within the fusion community.

New Zealand’s nuclear-free laws, which ban the use of nuclear power within its territorial sea, land, and airspace, present unique challenges for OpenStar. However, Mataira is confident that the public will differentiate between nuclear fission and fusion. Unlike fission, fusion does not produce long-lived radioactive waste, a major factor in the growing acceptance of fusion energy as a clean, sustainable energy source.

To date, OpenStar has been funded by local New Zealand investors, but the company plans to raise a Series A funding round in early 2025. The company projects it will need between $500 million and $1 billion to fully prove out the technology and address all technical risks. According to OpenStar’s estimates, nuclear fusion could become commercially viable within the next six years, a timeline that is especially crucial in the context of global efforts to decarbonize the energy sector and address climate change.

While the commercialization of nuclear fusion remains years away, OpenStar’s progress demonstrates the significant potential of innovative designs to bring this elusive energy source closer to reality. With ongoing advancements and growing interest in fusion, the future of energy could be much cleaner and more sustainable than many had anticipated.

FT.COM