Gauss forges European pacts to further fusion gigaplant plans

Collaborations in Italy, Spain and Germany mark next steps to European commercial fusion plant

“Europe’s fusion race will be won not by the size of a single fund-raise, but by the depth of industrial know-how committed to solving real engineering challenges.”

So says Milena Roveda, chief executive of Germany’s Gauss Fusion, which was founded to build Europe’s first commercial nuclear fusion-power plant by 2045.

And to that end, it has just announced a series of collaborations that Roveda says mark the start of the next phase of the company’s development.

“The laboratories, manufacturing capacity, and hours that our partners are investing in our project demonstrate the very real and tangible industry confidence there is in Gauss Fusion’s industry-first approach. Together, we are taking fusion from experiment to executable power-plant design.”

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In Italy, Gauss and the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) are co-developing HTS cables and joints capable of operating under extreme magnetic field strengths.

This pact is running in parallel to a further collaboration with the Italian Consortium for Applied Superconductivity (ICAS), a consortium involving ENEA, technology firm Criotec and cable company Tratos which is manufacturing LTS cables and maturing industrial processes for HTS conductors.

Elsewhere, Gauss is strengthening a long-term collaboration with Spanish engineering firm IDOM, Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the Jülich Research Centre (FZJ).

This team is finalising the industrial design of the Tritium Breeding Blanket (TBB) – the component that produces the tritium fuel inside a fusion reactor – and integrating it with the plant’s fuel-cycle systems.

Fusion engineering

This work – backed and partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research – combines KIT’s and FZJ’s expertise with the know-how of Gauss Fusion’s industrial partners, to apply robust, scalable engineering principles from the outset to minimise future redevelopment risk.

Gauss has also signed a new agreement with Alsymex, a French specialist manufacturer for established fusion project ITER, among others, to run a feasibility assessment of the TBB design and fabricate prototype sub-assemblies.

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The partnership will operate from Gauss Fusion’s ‘centre of excellence’ in Mérignac, ensuring that ability to manufacture and maintain the breeder blanket – as well as the costs associated with this – are properly incorporated before full-scale production begins.

Gauss Fusion and its partners are already exploring follow-on project opportunities that would potentially widen the scope of these collaborations in 2026 and beyond.

The company says these collaborations move it closer to its next milestone: full system engineering of its GAUSS GIGA plant concept and site selection from a Europe-wide study led by the Technical University of Munich.