Proxima Fusion raised $468 million from Google and others to build Europe's first commercial fusion power plant. Commercial meaning it doesn't exist yet. First meaning nobody else has done it either. Fusion meaning the thing we've been thirty years away from for the past seventy years.
The company plans to move toward commercializing nuclear fusion. Move toward. Not commercialize. Move toward commercializing. That's like saying you're moving toward thinking about possibly dating someone. It's three levels of abstraction away from anything happening.
Google looked at this pitch and wrote a check. The same Google that kills products people actually use. Google Reader worked perfectly and they shot it in the street. But sure, let's fund the Sun-in-a-box people. That'll definitely ship before they cancel it.
Retail traders see this headline and think they've spotted the next energy revolution. They'll hunt for a ticker. There isn't one. They'll buy uranium stocks instead. Wrong kind of nuclear, but the line goes up sometimes, and that's basically research.
The technical challenge is described as infamously difficult. Infamous means well-known for being bad. Difficult means we can't do it. Infamously difficult means everybody knows we can't do it. They raised half a billion dollars by admitting this up front.
Europe's first commercial fusion plant sounds impressive until you remember Europe also doesn't have a second one, or a first non-commercial one that works, or a plan B when this becomes a very expensive science fair project. But they do have $468 million now, which will pay for a lot of PowerPoint decks about plasma containment before reality shows up.
Promising but infamously difficult is just a ten-dollar way to say we have no idea if this works.
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