Meet Renaissance Fusion, a Grenoble-based startup that has been working on fusion for the past few years. The company recently raised his $16.4 million (€15 million) funding in a seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital.
European investors such as HCVC, Positron Ventures and Norssken also participated in the round.
“We are proud to have Francesco Volpe and his team support the emergence and industrialization of disruptive solutions in energy production and distribution technology in France and Europe. Grenoble is a very strategic location. and will benefit from a favorable environment for the development of nuclear energy, a strong ecosystem such as CEA, and an unrivaled pool of talent,” the statement.
Unlike most fusion experiments based on tokamak, Renaissance Fusion is working on a Stellarator reactor. The company expects to be able to deliver a small 1 GW capacity fusion reactor in the 2030s, so it is well aware of the long and windy road ahead. We do not directly operate power plants. Instead, the company planned to sell the reactors to power plant builders and operators.
“We have a very unique technology,” Renaissance Fusion founder Francesco Volpe told me. Instead of designing complex 3D coils to generate magnetic fields, Renaissance Fusion greatly simplifies this process by drawing tracks on a cylinder.
After doing some calculations based on the magnetic field they want to generate, the team can decide on the shape of the coil they need. The cylinder rotates on its axis and the device moves left and right to engrave a track on the surface of the cylinder with a laser.
Image credit: renaissance fusion
The cylinder blocks are then combined to form the reactor. This modularity should help with shipping and logistics. As for the neutrons emitted by nuclear reactions in cylinders, Renaissance Fusion hopes to use liquid lithium to create thick walls that separate the plasma from the outside world.
“You inject a layer of liquid metal. It flows inside the cylinder and is extracted from the bottom. It’s thick enough to absorb most of the neutrons,” Volpe said.
This liquid metal is also used to extract heat from the Stellarator. It can be used to generate steam, it can be used to propel turbines, and it can be used to generate electricity.
Image credit: Renaissance Fusion /
According to the startup founder, Renaissance Fusion is highly innovative using liquid metal. “We are the only commercial fusion where liquid lithium faces the plasma,” he said.
Now the company can create liquid lithium-based walls 1 cm thick. Renaissance Fusion is estimated to require a thickness of 30-40 cm, so many iterations are required before it can be used for fusion.
The company is already looking at commercial applications that could be released by the 2030s. For example, Volpe believes Renaissane Fusion’s coil-patterning technology could be used for his MRI and energy storage. “Anytime you need a strong magnetic field, high capacity and high precision,” he said.
With today’s funding round, Renaissance Fusion plans to triple the size of its team to 60 people by the end of 2023. In many ways, this is still early days for Renaissance Fusion. So let’s see how that unfolds in the next few years.
