Stellarator

We have Institute of Plasma Research in India, which has done a lot of pioneering work in the science of and engineering of Tokamak.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting IPR and participated in the a day-long conference on the feasibility of fusion energy in the country other variation of tokamak is known as tellerator it is also a donut shaped reactor but it is all twisted on each other is almost like if you visualize a jalebi it's almost like you know if you keep twisting a donut it can acquire a jalebi or a pretzel shape it easier to confine the plasma and potentially achieve fusion at a more steady state Germany's Proxima fusion is betting on Stellator then there is a whole other technique where you are not using a container such as tokamak but what you do is you capture the tritium fuel in a tiny very tiny capsule the size of rice grain uh you keep it suspended in one location and then you point hundreds of laser beam from all direction at extremely high intensity and the effect of so many laser beams zooming into one point results in achieving extreme temperature This is exactly a technology in a milder form, which is used in laser surgery.

So what doctors do is they will take a dozen or so laser beams.

They will fire at the target from very different angles.

So, and we have, it's public now, we have invested in one stellarator company from Princeton.

Coming back to New Zealand, we know about OpenSTAR, which is a deep-hole technology.

Actually, that's probably in terms of innovation capability, very similar to Stellarator.

So, you know, that's a great pin on the map in New Zealand.

Yes, yeah.

New investors include Siemens Energy, alongside Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and others.

The company is developing a Stellarator fusion reactor and plans to...

Stellar!

I was waiting for that, yeah.