It's Happening: Europe Is Building an Impossible Fusion Reactor
For fifty years the tokamak — the classic donut-shaped reactor — has dominated fusion research. Now a Munich startup called Proxima Fusion, spun out of the Max Planck Institute and freshly funded with €411 million including checks from Google and energy giant RWE, is betting everything on the shape the field walked away from half a century ago: the stellarator, a twisted "donut" so absurdly complicated it was long believed impossible to build. This is the story of why fusion is so hard, why the tokamak has a fatal flaw, and how Europe's most ambitious energy bet plans to build the first stellarator power plant in history.