Focused Energy starts work on a laser-fusion plant inside Biblis reactor Block A

Focused Energy, a Darmstadt start-up, is converting the decommissioned Biblis nuclear power station in Hesse into a site for laser inertial-confinement fusion. Vice-president Ulrich Sigel told Euronews, which was given access to the guarded grounds this week, that the company intends to put a first demonstrator in former Reactor Block A within five years, a pilot plant within ten, and a commercially competitive station within fifteen. The target output for the later plant is almost one gigawatt, enough on the company’s figures for about two million households.

The pitch is reuse. Biblis already has a high-voltage grid connection, heavy buildings and a security perimeter. “We can make use of the existing infrastructure, from the grid connection right through to buildings,” Sigel said, standing in view of the old reactor dome. Germany shut its last fission reactors in 2023. The concrete that remains is now an asset for a different nuclear method.

The money and the method

This spring Focused Energy raised $240 million in a first funding round, the largest opening raise recorded in the global fusion industry. Laser fusion is the branch that uses concentrated light, rather than magnetic bottles, to compress a fuel pellet until nuclei join. The National Ignition Facility in California proved a net energy gain in a single shot in 2022. A power station requires that result on a cycle measured in seconds, with lasers, targets and heat-exchange hardware that survive commercial duty.

Critics of the Biblis plan make two points. The physics is not yet at power-plant frequency. The capital cost per kilowatt is still a projection. Focused Energy answers that laser systems are on a cost curve and that a retired fission site removes years of civil works. Neither side can settle that argument with a demonstration that does not yet exist.

Germany’s second fusion track

Biblis is not the only German fusion construction story this month. Proxima Fusion, a Munich stellarator company spun out of Max Planck research, signed a memorandum with Lower Saxony to build Europe’s first large factory for fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting tape. The first two phases are costed at about €140 million through 2029, split evenly between private capital and public funds. Lower Saxony pledged €21 million of the public share.

Proxima needs roughly 20,000 kilometres of tape for its Alpha demonstrator, aimed at net energy gain around 2031 in Garching, and 40,000 kilometres more for Stellaris, a commercial stellarator planned later in the 2030s at the former Gundremmingen fission station in Bavaria. Minister-President Olaf Lies called the tape plant a way to keep manufacturing value in the state.

The two projects use different machines. Focused Energy fires lasers. Proxima twists magnetic fields in a stellarator. They share a site strategy: put the new plant where a fission station already meets the grid. That is the concrete German choice in 2026. It is cheaper than a greenfield and politically easier than asking a town that never hosted a reactor to host the next one.

What “first in the world” actually claims

Euronews billed Biblis as the world’s first laser-fusion power station under construction. That claim is a schedule, not a completed turbine hall. The United States and China are spending at larger scale on both laser and magnetic fusion. A five-year demonstrator at Biblis would be an industrial event if it holds. A fifteen-year commercial plant would be a different category.

The useful fact for readers is narrower. A German company with a $240 million first round has a key to Block A at Biblis and a public timetable. A second German company has a tape factory memorandum and a former reactor site in Gundremmingen. Fusion in Europe is no longer only a laboratory budget line. It is a question of which retired dome gets the next set of cranes.