COVER STORY | LEVITATING DIPOLE FUSION
Fusion and the levitated dipole
A unique approach to plasma containment, the levitated dipole, potentially
offers a low-cost approach to commercial fusion power at pace. OpenStar sets out its pathway to unlimited power.
By Rod Badcock, chief technology officer, OpenStar
A scale model of Tama Nui, a commercial levitating dipole fusion power plant.
IN EARLY 2026, A 560KG superconducting magnet floated freely inside a vacuum chamber while plasma formed around it. The team at OpenStar Technologies had achieved fully levitated plasma in Junior, their first levitated dipole (LD) fusion energy prototype. The result drew New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to a live event alongside cabinet minister Shane Jones, who had earlier committed NZ$35m in government loan funding to build the facility for the company’s next machine. OpenStar was founded in 2021 and is the only one in the world pursuing the levitated dipole concept for commercial fusion. This confinement approach has sat largely dormant since the Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX), a collaboration between MIT and Columbia University, wound down in the mid-2010s. OpenStar has not only revived the concept but unlocked the potential for commercial scalability.
24 | October 2026 |
www.neimagazine.com
The concept was first proposed by Professor Akira
Hasegawa in a 1987 paper drawing on spacecraft observations of planetary magnetospheres, which showed self-organising, peaked plasma profiles that the dipole geometry replicates. Operating between 1998 and 2014, LDX demonstrated that levitated operation, rather than mechanically supported operation, produces the same peaked profiles observed in planetary magnetospheres, and that the confinement properties are substantially better when the magnet is levitated. The Ring Trap 1 (RT-1) experiment at the University of Tokyo reproduced these results and further demonstrated peak local plasma beta exceeding unity in a levitated dipole geometry, a result that reflects how efficiently a plasma is confined by the system. When LDX lost its funding in 2010 and wound down operations by 2014, the levitated dipole largely
Source for all images: OpenStar
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