OpenStar floats half-tonne magnet in crucial step towards nuclear fusion
Tuesday, 17 February 2026
Wellington fusion energy company OpenStar Technologies has made a huge step forward in the global race to build the world’s first fusion power plant that promises endless green energy.
With a demonstration at its factory on Tuesday, OpenStar has become the first company to float a 500kg magnet confining a cloud of ultrahot ionised gas called plasma, taking a crucial new step towards nuclear fusion.
Chief executive Ratu Mataira said the feat marked a major milestone in the company’s ultimate goal of creating a sustained fusion reaction, where atoms fused together at over 100 million degrees Celsius to produce abundant, safe and carbon free energy - the same process which powers the Sun.
At the heart of the machine, named Junior, is a powerful magnet that floats freely in a vacuum chamber, held in place by another magnet above it with no physical support structures. This made OpenStar’s design potentially simpler, cheaper, and easier to maintain than the opposite approach from competitors using the “tokamak” method which involved a huge, doughnut-shaped machine that trapped the plasma in a high-temperature, superconducting magnetic field.
Read more:
Fusion power technology start-up creates hottest thing ever in Wellington
Dragon’s Den in the sky puts Kiwi startups on board with global investors
“Fusion is a holy grail of making energy. You can build machines and they become factories for making power. And unlike other methods that we have, they are more reliable”, Mataira said.
The machines could run continuously and did not consume limited fuels, and did not emit CO2. “Fusion is something that humanity has been chasing since the 50s, and we haven't quite cracked it yet.”
Junior was built, tested, and achieved its first plasma, creating and confining the super hot ionised gas needed to trigger the fusion reaction, within two years, joining only a handful of companies to have done so worldwide.
The demonstration was the final step of OpenStar’s first prototype, housed in the company’s lab in Ngauranga, and marked the start of a new phase for the project with the ultimate goal of producing fusion energy at a commercial scale.
“This is about getting the world off its addiction to fossil fuels and making sure that we have enough energy abundantly to actually keep power prices down so that access to electricity does not become a metaphor only for wealthy,” Mataira said.
New Zealand could potentially be the first site for a OpenStar power plant, but the focus would be on speed to build and profitability. “This is not about avoiding CO2 in one country. It's about avoiding CO2 in the whole world,” he said.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, which is used in nuclear power plants that split atoms to create energy, but also comes with the dangers of radiation that can last thousands of years.
Mataira said the milestone test laid the groundwork for the development of the company’s next prototype device called Tahi, which would be capable of generating a magnetic field four times stronger than its predecessor, with a magnetic field 20 times stronger than the strongest permanent magnet.
Experiments using Tahi would inform how OpenStar could be scaled to a commercial reactor, with the aim to have the technology in production by the 2030s supplying commercial power to a national grid, he said.
The company has received up to $35 million from the Regional Infrastructure Fund to build its next fusion research facility to house Tahi.
Openstar’s rapid progress and engineering innovation has caught the eye of fusion experts worldwide.
Michael Mauel, professor emeritus at Columbia University, said levitation of the Junior magnet “marked an important milestone for superconducting magnet technology and a big step to steady fusion power'.
“OpenStar's high-energy flux-pump technology is a game-changer for dipole fusion research, and today’s demonstration will make possible larger levitated magnets in the future with growing fusion energy performance,” Mauel said.
Fusion as an industry was still nascent and was the largest science experiment taking place around the world, with its biggest prize.
Mataira said OpenStar was a relative late comer to the fusion race with competing programmes around the world to crack the fusion energy puzzle, but its scientific breakthrough was unique.
OpenStar’s approach used what was called a levitated dipole and was the only device of its kind in the world. It mimics nature’s magnetospheres that surround planets like Earth and Jupiter capturing and confining charged cosmic particles in their magnetic fields generated by the North and South poles.
Other programmes going back decades the plasma is contained by superconducting magnets pushing the magnetic fields they produce inwards.
OpenStar is one of more than 50 companies globally competing to make the technology a reality.