When Germany shut down its last fission reactors in 2023, few imagined that one of those sites might soon be touted as one of Europe’s most advanced candidates for a commercial fusion power plant. Yet, just two years after its final shuttering, the Biblis nuclear power plant site in southern Hesse is re-emerging as the cornerstone of a future fusion industry.
A detailed feasibility study by Arthur D. Little (ADL) and laser fusion company Focused Energy proposes that Biblis be transformed into a full-scale fusion hub, culminating in what could become Europe’s first operational fusion power plant. The proposal not only reflects a new confidence that fusion is transitioning from research into industrial engineering but the potential for Germany to take the lead in fusion technology development.
“This is a great opportunity for Germany, as fusion energy is rapidly gaining strategic importance,” Thomas Forner, co-founder and joint CEO of Focused Energy tells NEi. Fundamentally though, the feasibility study depicts Biblis as technically advantageous for fusion. According to ADL, the existing building structures, including turbine halls, storage buildings, and especially the large reinforced reactor domes, can be repurposed for laser laboratories, target fabrication, high-power laser test stations, and eventually a full demonstration power plant.
This is not merely a matter of saving money, though the financial implications are substantial. It also represents a timely reuse of existing assets. Decommissioning a fission site to greenfield condition can be a lengthy process when all the various radioactive components, civil structures are fully accounted for within the rigorous regulatory frameworks that govern nuclear sites. Germany’s accelerated fission phase-out meant that sites like Biblis have already entered this long, expensive cycle but the Focused Energy proposal interrupts that trajectory in a targeted manner. Forner explains: “Rather than building it back to greenfield, which is almost impossible and takes ages, we said the only thing we need to do is decommission to a certain extent. We need a lot of infrastructure you need in fusion as well. We need access to the grid. We need warehouses. So all the supporting buildings that are there can be used.”
The reactor secondary containment domes having already undergone most of the internal decommissioning work needed to clear fission reactor components, what remains is compatible with the regulatory framework for fusion. As Forner explains: “Currently fusion is still in a radiation safety environment, which we still will continue. So with this site, we already have a favourable regulatory baseline for fusion,” says Forner noting that. Germany is also in the process of revising the regulatory framework under the federal government’s “Fusion Action Plan” which was announced in October 2025. Under this revised rulebook, fusion installations will no longer fall under nuclear law but under radiation protection law. In effect, this removes fusion facilities from regulatory regime designed for fission reactors. Forner describes the rationale succinctly: “Fission has almost nothing to do with fusion. We are inherently safe. We have almost no radiation. We have some radiation only in the chamber because we activate material. But there is no long-term nuclear waste.”
From a lifecycle perspective, Focused Energy anticipates a total operating and decommissioning timeline of roughly a century, but with drastically reduced radiological burdens. The only activated material is expected to be the first wall and chamber, which must be stored for around 50 years before recycling and a significant improvement over the multi-millennial burdens associated with conventional spent nuclear fuel for example.
According to Forner, one of the most compelling arguments for repurposing Biblis is that the decommissioning at Biblis and the developmental timeline for laser fusion align to a degree rarely achieved in major energy projects. The plant’s decommissioning stages open critical industrial spaces at the same time Focused Energy needs them. Entire halls, already cleared or nearing clearance, are available for immediate conversion. The International Atomic Energy Agency recently declared that “fusion has entered the stage of engineering,” explicitly identifying the Biblis proposal as a lighthouse project.
“We ended up a year ago studying how we can transition a former fission power plant into a fusion campus,” Forner says. Adding: Biblis is a perfect location for building all our test facilities up to the prototype fusion power plant and then in the next step, the first of a kind commercial plant. And it’s not only a fit for us, it’s a fit for a whole partnership with academia and with other industry partners where we can build out the supply chain and also provide research facilities for academia in the future”.
Forner also highlights a key relationship that the Biblis site represents: RWE is a major German utility and the owner and former operator of the Biblis nuclear power plant. Today RWE is a strategic partner, bringing the potential for utility-scale demand and in-depth operational expertise of commercial power generation assets. As Forner explains, “The reason we wanted to do this is, of course, if you want to build a power plant, you ideally have a strategic partner as possible”. The involvement of RWE thus turns the project from a speculative scientific venture into something resembling a conventional energy infrastructure project, albeit one underpinned by physics that until recently remained experimental.
From research to engineering
While acknowledging that significant research efforts are still needed to establish fusion as a commercial source of energy Forner, who co-founded Focused Energy with plasma physicist Markus Roth four and a half years ago, frames their early strategy as a calculated commercial gamble but one grounded in scientific momentum.
“We took two major bets,” he says. “One was that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory would show net energy gain soon. And the other bet was once they show net energy gain, we can hire the team from them. Both worked out.”
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) repeated achievement of ignition, culminating in a 4.13-fold energy gain, shifted the field’s global outlook and today Focused Energy employs two of LLNL’s four leading laser fusion scientists full-time, with a third acting as a consultant. Roth’s decades of work in inertial confinement fusion, including extended periods at LLNL, provided the scientific foundation for the company, for example. Now comprising roughly 100 people split between Darmstadt in Germany and the Bay Area of San Francisco in California, the company positions itself as a world leader in laser fusion.
The long-term goal of transforming Biblis is not to build a single fusion plant but rather to create an industrial and research ecosystem around laser fusion technology. The German state of Hesse has already designated laser fusion as a political priority and signed a declaration of intent with Focused Energy, RWE, Schott, Trumpf, and others. Forner notes that the University of Darmstadt plans to expand its infrastructure into the Biblis location, effectively co-locating academic research with industrial development.
The feasibility study proposes a coordinated industrial implementation model for the project. Together with Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), ways are being sought to establish the hub with additional technology partners including suppliers, financial institutions, system integrators, energy suppliers, technical service providers, and public actors with a clearly defined structure governing development, operation, and ownership on the campus.
“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.”
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.
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.
