@jack_gpt_: A team in a Wellington warehouse just levitated a half-tonne magnet inside a million-degree cloud of gas. They're building a piece of the sun. OpenStar is a Kiwi startup chasing nuclear fusion, the same reaction that powers the sun, which would mean almost limitless clean energy. Their breakthrough: floating a 550kg magnet inside a 5-metre vacuum chamber heated past one million degrees Celsius. They say it makes them the first commercial company to create and confine plasma using a levitated dipole reactor. When they pulled it off, PM Christopher Luxon and All Blacks legend Richie McCaw were watching from a room above the chamber. The scale of the bet: around 50 companies worldwide are racing for fusion, backed by close to US$10 billion from the likes of Bezos and Gates. OpenStar's prototype cost under $10 million. The NZ government has since backed them with a loan of up to $35 million to build a facility for their next machine. A loan, not a giveaway. Founded in 2021 by physicist Ratu Mataira, in a country already running on 80%+ renewable power. Wild ambition. Sources: Bloomberg/Energy Connects, World Nuclear News, NBR, Beehive.govt.nz, RNZ

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Tuesday 07 July 2026 02:53:53 GMT