It’s a newly proposed fusion reactor prototype. It’s a stellerator type reactor. Together with the Tokamak type reactor these two are the currently most promising types to achieve fusion and generate more energy than they take to operate. While the tokamakak type looks more symmetrical to the human eye the stellerator types have adopted very weird looking shapes where the symmetries are more hidden. The pictures are from this paper by mostly people from the institute who created the to date biggest stellerator type fusion generator Wendelstein 7-x. Their proposed prototype ‘Stelaris’ is a lot bigger than the 7-x.
Bonus (with little context):
And heres a shematic view oft how it would look like from outside. Just like a donut.
Yeah I’m blind that’s four. Having fewer twists means more coils have the same shape so it’s going to be cheaper to build but of course that’s just one dimension of a massive, massive, design space. That’s practically all they’ve been working on since Wendelstein turned on and exceeded everyone’s expectations by behaving exactly as predicted. Wouldn’t make sense to build a thing that gets Q > 1 but can’t compete with at least fossil fuels, in fact that’d be rather embarrassing.
Oh that’s a good explanation for four twists. It sounds pretty likely that this was factored into the design.