Novatron Fusion's EIC Accelerator Mirror Machine for Fusion Power

A magnetic mirror holds a fusion plasma in a straight tube of magnetic field, pinched at both ends so that charged particles bounce back and forth between them. Its known weakness is curvature: where the field lines bend the wrong way, pressure-driven instabilities let the plasma escape sideways, as the company's own stability paper sets out. Novatron Fusion Group, a Stockholm company founded in 2019 on an idea by the Swedish inventor Jan Jäderberg, says it has a field shape that curves the right way everywhere the plasma sits, and it has built a machine at KTH Royal Institute of Technology to prove it.

In June 2026 the company appeared in the European Innovation Council's list of 38 companies selected for the EIC Accelerator, with its project Novatron CMMR, short for Concave Magnetic Mirror Reactor, recommended for blended finance. CORDIS now records a signed grant agreement: €2,491,125 of EU funding, signed on 2 October 2026, for a project that started on 1 November 2026 and runs to 31 October 2028.

A mirror that curves the right way

The company's founding paper, "Introducing the Novatron, a novel mirror fusion concept", posted to arXiv in October 2023 by Jäderberg and seven co-authors, describes an axisymmetric mirror-cusp field with favourable curvature throughout the plasma region, which the authors say suppresses the interchange instability. A second preprint, "Axial Confinement in the Novatron Mirror Machine", sets out how the ends of the trap would be sealed by three effects at once: the magnetic mirror itself, an electrostatic potential and a radio-frequency ponderomotive force. It gives a target of fusion power more than 30 times the heating power. Both are preprints; neither arXiv page lists a journal reference.

The pitch is cost. The company's website says its simpler design lowers construction, operating and maintenance costs, and the CORDIS title of the EIC project calls it "truly capital-efficient" fusion power. No cost estimate for a Novatron plant could be found in public to test that claim against tokamak or stellarator designs. The company holds a European patent application, EP4657461A1, for a mirror machine with a cell whose field lines have concave curvature, which it links to the stability of the confined plasma.

From first plasma to 3,000 experiments

NOVATRON 1 produced its first hydrogen plasma, ionised by electron cyclotron resonance heating, in January 2025, according to the company's announcement, which gives no plasma parameters. The machine was officially inaugurated on 9 June 2025, and KTH reported the ceremony in its Alfvén Laboratory, with the astronaut and KTH professor Christer Fuglesang among the speakers. The company calls NOVATRON 1 the first private, fully integrated fusion plasma system in the EU.

Its recap of the second quarter of 2026 says the team has now run more than 3,000 experiments on the machine. It does not report what they measured. The CORDIS summary of the Accelerator project states that NOVATRON 1 shows "stable plasma formation" in line with simulations and that the company has reached technology readiness level 4. These are the company's own statements in the project summary; no density, temperature or confinement time from the machine could be found in a paper, a CORDIS report or a company release.

The EIC money that came first

The Accelerator grant is not Novatron's first EIC funding. In December 2024 the company announced the TauEB project under the EIC Pathfinder, coordinated by KTH with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology and InnoEnergy. CORDIS records €2,944,905 of EU funding for TauEB from November 2024 to October 2027, of which €1,499,000 goes to Novatron. Its aim is to raise the plasma's energy confinement time more than a hundredfold by combining the three plugging effects in a tandem mirror.

The first periodic report, covering November 2024 to October 2025, says progress is "according to plans". It delivers a first version of the physics model, called Alpha, with initial tandem mirror configurations but without the heating and ponderomotive parts. The experiments on an upgraded NOVATRON 1 that would test the improved confinement are listed as planned. The report lists no patents and no measured confinement results.

What the Accelerator project promises

According to the CORDIS project summary, Novatron CMMR starts at technology readiness level 5. It sits under the 2026 EIC challenge "Alternative Concepts and Key Enabling Technologies for Fusion Power Plants". The company asked for €2.5 million of grant and €10 million of equity. The grant pays to finish the design of the key subsystems and the fuelling strategy of the next machine, N2, a proof-of-concept aimed at readiness level 6 or 7. The equity would go to preparing the N2 site and, the company writes, would help catalyse a €100 million equity round to commission a first version of N2. After that come N3, a pilot plant meant to show net power output, and N4, a commercial plant.

The equity half is not visible yet. Novatron is not among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund portfolio page as checked on 4 November 2026, and no EIC Fund investment in the company has been announced. The EIC's announcement of the round says that equity investments "will follow based on each company's individual development and funding strategy".

1. 2025

   N1

   Laboratory machine at KTH, running since 2025

   Built
2. Design

   N2

   Proof-of-concept machine, planned for the Stockholm area per World Nuclear News; site not yet announced

   EIC project
3. 2030s

   N3

   Industrial-scale pilot to show net power, planned in the Nordic region

   Plan
4. No date

   N4

   Prototype commercial fusion power plant

   Plan

The siting work has started at the far end of that list. VTT, commissioned by Novatron, assessed where N3 could be built in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and found Finland the most ready in regulation, with Sweden close behind, as World Nuclear News and VTT reported in October 2025. In March 2026 the listed nuclear services group Studsvik signed a memorandum of understanding with Novatron covering material testing, licensing support and the siting of an industrial-scale pilot reactor, with its licensed site in Nyköping named in the release. The company said in July 2026 that it would announce the N2 location in the autumn; no announcement could be found on its news page by 4 November 2026.

Losses growing with the team

The filed accounts show no sales. The 2024 annual report shows net revenue of zero in 2023 and 2024, a loss of SEK 65,963,363 in 2024 against SEK 36,153,666 in 2023, cash of SEK 18.8 million at the end of 2024 and an average of 35 employees. The key figures from the 2025 accounts, as shown on hitta.se, record a loss of SEK 76.0 million, equity of SEK 46.4 million and 67 employees on average; the site lists SEK 7.3 million of turnover for 2025 without saying whether it is sales, and the figures it lists as turnover for 2023 and 2024 match the other operating income in the annual report. Equity rose in 2025, the year of the round the company announced in March 2025: €10 million led by the Finnish energy company St1, whose chief executive Henrikki Talvitie signed the 2024 annual report as a board member. InnoEnergy reported the same round. An earlier seed round of €5 million was announced in August 2023.

Set against those figures, the €100 million round the CORDIS summary names for N2 would be about seven times the two announced rounds combined. No such round has been announced.

1. Integrated test machine runningDeliveredFirst plasma January 2025, inauguration June 2025, confirmed by KTH.
2. Stable plasma confinement shownClaimStated in the CORDIS summary; no measured figures found in public.
3. N2 subsystems and fuelling designedToo earlyThe EIC project started on 1 November 2026.
4. EIC equity and a €100M round for N2Not announcedNot on the EIC Fund portfolio page; no round announced.

Europe's fusion strategy, still pending

The Commission launched work on its first EU-wide fusion strategy in June 2025, aiming for a route to a pilot power plant, a European supply chain and more private involvement, and said it would publish the strategy by the end of 2025. A year later the Clean Air Task Force wrote on 18 June 2026 that it had still not appeared. Novatron co-signed an open letter to the Commission calling for a coordinated European fusion strategy, dedicated investment mechanisms and a regulatory framework, its Q2 recap says. The grant itself comes from the EIC's 2026 Accelerator challenge for alternative fusion concepts and enabling technologies, per CORDIS.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.