ASSET MANAGEMENT | REPURPOSING BIBLIS Chamber maintenance and remote operation will also be
critical to ensure reliability. Control systems, for example, must achieve high uptime while managing enormous energy release, complex optics, cryogenics, and precise target injection. Target fabrication represents another frontier. Deuterium- tritium fuel capsules must be produced with precision and uniformity but a commercial plant may require perhaps a million targets per day. “This tiny pellet contains most of the IP,” Forner notes. “And that’s what we are working on.” The closed fuel cycle, in which lithium breeding generates
tritium for re-use in subsequent targets, integrates the reactor chamber, the fuel cycle, and materials science into a single coherent system, while technically feasible, also requires complex integration and high-reliability tritium handling.
Above:
The Biblis nuclear power plant is being decommissioned but the site offers opportunities for further development with fusion Source: RWE
“Short, Sariose, Amplitude, Trumpf, they are all
interested in co-locating with this site for supplying the campus and the future power plant,” says Forner noting the signing of an MOU together with the state of Hesse and the industrial partners. Laser development and manufacturing occupy a central
role in this ecosystem. The laser systems required for a commercial fusion plant, diode-pumped and kilojoule- scale, operating at 10 Hz with nanosecond precision, are far beyond conventional industrial lasers in terms of the required scale, reliability, and repetition rate. A single commercial power plant would require roughly one thousand such lasers, each of which must be produced at costs tolerable to the overall levelised cost of electricity (LCOE).
In this respect Forner stresses the shift from scientific
challenge to industrial challenge, saying: “You have to produce these lasers not like satellites, which is how they are produced today. You have to produce them like cars, mass manufacture them, bring costs down, make them maintainable and repairable.” He describes this as one of the “major components”
of Focused Energy’s strategy. It is also an area where the industrial strength of the partners in the Biblis development are expected to pay dividends. Trumpf, for instance, is a major industrial laser manufacturer while companies like Schott possess expertise in optical materials and high- specification glass, which are indispensable for the extreme fluence environments of inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The potential contribution of suppliers in Japan, Korea, and across Europe broadens the field further. Forner lists Sumitomo, Mitsui, Hamamatsu, and Samsung among the companies they hope to integrate into the supply chain. Nonetheless, while the shift to engineering dominates
the narrative, key scientific challenges remain. Focused Energy is pursuing direct-drive central hotspot ignition, a pathway that demands precise control over plasma instabilities. Beyond ignition physics, the development of materials capable of surviving several years in the face of high thermal loads and neutron fluxes represents another engineering challenge with economic implications, as Forner explains: “The inner wall of the reactor needs to be very strong because you cannot exchange it every two weeks. It has to last at least two or three years.”
28 | December 2025 |
www.neimagazine.com
A timeline to gigawatts Focused Energy is already designing its first warehouse and laser development hall at Biblis, aiming for operational readiness within 12 to 24 months. Within three years, they plan to operate their first integrated laser test facility, housed in a former machine hall already cleared for occupancy.
Beyond this, the company intends to establish a larger
integrated test facility by 2030, capable of demonstrating all major components to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6. From there, the schedule accelerates toward a prototype power plant, which they aim to have operational by 2035 or 2036. “We consider all the paths more as engineering and
technology development,” Forner says. “The prototype power plant is supposed to be up and running in 10 years.” While these numbers are striking they rest on years of technical risk mapping, what Forner calls their “risk register” and “technical engineering roadmap”. Focused Energy is aiming gigawatt-scale commercial plants given such plants can address industrial and metropolitan baseload demand directly and would resemble modern fission stations. The reuse of decommissioned electricity generation sites whether fission or coal also supports the gigawatt scale development. Focused Energy is currently centred on Biblis, but Forner acknowledges that discussions are already underway about future repurposing opportunities, both within Germany and internationally. As for customers, the interest is globally distributed. “We
are in touch with the UKAEA. They are extremely interested in collaboration,” Forner says. “Singapore and Qatar are already part of our cap table and are interested in becoming customers for first-of-a-kind power plants.” Concluding, Forner emphasises the opportunities from developing fusion at brownfield sites like Biblis. “We are still at the bottom line of a growth curve in fusion,” he says. “What I’m hoping for is that this whole market is going to accelerate and that we really will see fusion on the grid in the late 2030s.” While sceptics will point out that fusion has made similar
promises before, there has been a clear shift and the Biblis proposal frames fusion not as an endless scientific endeavour but as an engineering programme grounded in supply chains, regulatory reform, market demand, utility partnerships, and infrastructure reuse. It is a plan meant to be executed, not simply imagined. ■
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