Columbia and Germany's Max Planck team up on fusion

Fusion researchers have long split into two camps. One builds machines called tokamaks. The other builds stellarators, a different shape of magnetic cage for the same super-hot plasma. On Oct. 25, Columbia University and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics said they're done picking sides. They're launching a joint research center, with $13.3 million over five years, to study both designs together.

This isn't really about speed. Fusion has been "20 years away" for decades because both main reactor designs have different, serious flaws. Tokamaks are easier to build but prone to sudden instabilities. Stellarators are more stable but brutally hard to manufacture precisely. Instead of betting everything on one design winning, Columbia and Max Planck want researchers to borrow fixes from each other. The center will let scientists from each side spend up to a year working inside the other's lab. They'll get hands-on access to real hardware: Germany's Wendelstein 7-X stellarator and its ASDEX Upgrade tokamak.

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Will combining these two approaches actually speed up fusion power? Nobody will know for years. The center's own work doesn't start until 2027. And even then, it's funding researcher exchanges and shared experiments, not building a new reactor. Fusion has disappointed on timelines before. But this is a different kind of bet. Not a single company promising a breakthrough, but two serious research institutions agreeing their rivalry was holding each other back.