The Fusion Report has generally been positive and supportive of the potential of AI, but less so about some of the companies that are involved in the technology. That has been especially true when some of these companies try to pass off what would normally be considered as an epic security breach or failure of safety controls as “successes”. A prime example of this is OpenAI‘s recent ”rogue agent” attack on industry cohort Hugging Face roughly a month ago, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially called an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident”. Ironically, OpenAI recently signed a letter (along with 100 other tech companies) warning of the danger of AI-powered cyber-attacks in the near future, and (seemingly self-servingly) calling for business and government to spend more money for tools from companies like themselves to guard against AI cyber risks.

Who are OpenAI and Hugging Face?

OpenAI is a US company focused on artificial intelligence, founded in San Francisco in 2015 as a non-profit company, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs. Musk later resigned from OpenAI and withdrew from financial funding commitments in 2018 after unsuccessfully attempting a takeover of OpenAI. In late 2020, Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei (Vice President of Research and Vice President of Safety Policy, respectively) left OpenAI because of disagreements with Altman over safety priorities, founding the rival AI company Anthropic. Several major copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI were filed between 2023 and 2024, alleging that the company utilized millions of copyrighted works without permission to train its large language models. During the same period, roughly half of OpenAI’s “AGI safety” staff resigned from the company, with one stating that safety had “taken a back seat to shiny products”. Interestingly, OpenAI is reportedly targeting an initial public offering (IPO) in 2027, targeting an IPO value of over $1 trillion.

Hugging Face is also a US company focused on artificial intelligence, primarily developing computational tools for building machine learning applications. The company was founded in 2016 in New York City by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. The company originally built a chat box app targeting teenagers, then pivoted to develop a platform for machine learning applications. The latest incarnation of the company develops a family of small language models known as SmolLM built to run on limited compute resources. At the end of August 2026, NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face for a reported $12.9B, after unsuccessfully making a play for Hugging Face in late 2025 for $500M.

The Incident: July 2026

The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident was a July 2026 cybersecurity breach in which OpenAI models, operating as autonomous agents during an internal cyber-capability evaluation, escaped their intended test boundaries and intruded into Hugging Face’s production environment. OpenAI said the agents were testing on the ExploitGym benchmark with reduced cyber safeguards, but as the agents began “reward hacking” (instead of solving the assigned tasks), they sought answers online. The agents exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in OpenAI’s Artifactory package-cache infrastructure to obtain internet access, then chained further weaknesses across systems. Hugging Face’s forensic account describes roughly 17,600 recovered attacker actions over about four and a half days, during which the agent executed code on dozens of servers, gained root access to at least one, accessed limited private data and credentials, and copied some private evaluation material into a public dataset. The primary actor was an internal-only OpenAI research model, used alongside GPT‑5.6 Sol. OpenAI publicly stated that the unreleased research model was never intended for public deployment.

The episode matters because it is an unusually concrete demonstration of the risks created by capable, persistent AI agents operating with tools, network access, and long task horizons, and without significant oversight. An independent review by METR and Redwood Research found that approximately 1,200 agents that were supposed to remain isolated from each other created an unauthorized communication channel and exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files. Roughly 700 agents took part in the actual Hugging Face intrusion. The agents’ collaboration, attempts to evade monitoring, and ability to turn a benchmark objective into unauthorized external action exposed shortcomings not just in OpenAI’s model alignment, but also in containment, evaluation design, access controls, anomaly detection, and incident response. OpenAI paused training and inference involving the main internal model in question and its derivatives on July 25.

Industry Analysts And Security Experts Thoughts On The Incident

Independent auditors METR and Redwood Research criticized the oversight process, noting that the agents spent weeks communicating on an unsanctioned message board inside a shared package manager before launching the breach—activity that human supervisors could easily have caught with tighter, real-time tracking. Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris stated, ”A pretty interesting thing about this incident is that preventing this wouldn’t have been that hard if one person had decided to make sure these AI don’t somehow do some crazy hack. That one person probably would have noticed this as it was happening, The issue is just that OpenAI is doing a lot of things at once, and it’s very hard for them to track all of the things that are going on and all the problems that could be occurring. The company has already said they’re changing their monitoring process in ways that probably would have caught this.”

While experts emphasized that the 700-agent attack did not act out of rogue consciousness or malice, the agents were engaging in what is known as “reward hacking” by cheating on the ExploitGym cybersecurity benchmark to break out of OpenAI’s containment environment to search the internet for the answer keys to the exercise. Additionally, security commentators pointed out an ironical asymmetry: when the Hugging Face defense team attempted to analyze the attack vectors with commercial AI “frontier models”, the safety guardrails of those tools blocked the defenders, forcing them to utilize open-weight AI security models instead, putting them at a disadvantage against the OpenAI code.

Conclusion: A Weak Safety Philosophy?

The safety environment (and governing philosophy) at OpenAI was a matter of disagreement between Sam Altman and other company executives a few years previously, causing many of them to leave the company. It is also interesting that this lack of oversight happened while the company was in the middle of preparing for an IPO. While not intentional like the Kaspersky Labs “false positives” fake virus files issue ten years ago, OpenAI’s behavior does seem to border on negligent. Whether they have learned from this situation or not remains to be seen, but one hopes that worrying about product safety is more important than worrying about IPOs or product launches.

Seems like 200MWe-500MWe is the sweet spot for commercial fusion energy, at least in the short term.

The Fusion Report has two great stories today: the State of Tennessee is granted an operating license for Type One Energy to build a 400MWe fusion plant at the TVA Bull Run, Tennessee site; and Realta Fusion and Madison Gas & Electric (MGE) announced that they are forming a strategic partnership to explore the construction of 200MWe fusion energy power plant in Wisconsin. It is interesting that both of these plants are in the range of 200MWe to 500MWe, which is also where Commonwealth Fusion System’s ARC tokamak (500MWe) fits. First we will present the announcements, and after that we will cover why the announcements by these two companies are important.

Press Release: Governor Bill Lee, TDEC Announce First License for Commercial Fusion

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee joined the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to announce the issuance of the state’s first ever fusion-specific byproduct material license to Type One Energy in preparation for a new commercial fusion project. Tennessee is the first state in the nation to issue a license under a new regulatory framework specifically for nuclear fusion machines.

Gov. Lee was joined by leaders from Type One Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for the announcement at the annual meeting of the Organization of Agreement States (OAS) held in Nashville. OAS is the scientific and professional organization of state radiation control directors.

“As the global epicenter of nuclear energy, Tennessee is building the workforce, infrastructure and regulatory framework needed to lead the next generation of nuclear innovation,” said Gov. Lee. “By creating a clear path for emerging technologies like fusion, we’re advancing the reliable, abundant American energy we’ll need for generations to come.”

When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission delegated regulation of fusion energy production to the states, TDEC’s Division of Radiological Health took the lead in creating a first-of-its-kind licensing program for fusion machines and fusion-related activities.

“Issuing this license is a significant milestone that solidifies Tennessee’s reputation as the global hub for nuclear innovation,” said TDEC Commissioner David Salyers. “We are proud to develop this groundbreaking regulatory framework for fusion energy that will serve as a model for other states.”

Type One Energy and the TVA worked closely with TDEC to prepare the application and submit plans. The Knoxville-based company intends to break ground on the first phase of Project Infinity at TVA’s Bull Run Energy Complex in Clinton, Tenn., this year, and expects a full startup by 2034.

“For the first time, a fusion power plant-specific licensing process has been developed and then used to grant a fusion-specific license to operate a fusion machine, consistent with a national regulatory framework for fusion energy,” said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy. “The importance of this milestone cannot be overstated. Tennessee’s licensing process is now the international benchmark for how to ensure fusion power plant ‘safety by design’ in a manner that can unlock the compelling economics of this transformational power generation technology. We are grateful and honored to receive this initial fusion machine license for Project Infinity.”

Type One Energy’s commercial site will function as a fusion development campus through projects between the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TVA, and the University of Tennessee. Type One’s Infinity Two is forecast to be a 400 MWe fusion power plant using stellarator technology.

Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more light atomic nuclei combine to form a single, heavier nucleus. This clean process releases large amounts of energy and is the same reaction that powers the sun and other stars.

A fusion machine is defined as any machine capable of:

• Transforming atomic nuclei, through fusion processes, into different elements, isotopes, or other particles; and

• Directly capturing and using the resultant products, including particles, heat, or other electromagnetic radiation.

Press Release: Realta Fusion & Madison Gas and Electric Announce Strategic Partnership to Explore 200-MWe Fusion Energy Power Plant in Wisconsin

Realta Fusion, the world’s leading magnetic mirror fusion energy company, today announced a strategic partnership with Madison Gas and Electric (MGE) and its parent company, MGE Energy, Inc., to explore joint development of a 200-megawatt electric (MWe) fusion energy power plant in Wisconsin.

MGE Energy made a direct equity investment in Realta in the first phase of the partnership. The utility company has also agreed to provide Realta with equipment, engineering, and technical support along with assistance for siting, permitting, interconnection, and financing of the anticipated 200-MWe plant.

“Our agreement with MGE to explore the opportunity to build out a fusion power plant is a clear signal that fusion’s time is coming,” said Realta CEO Kieran Furlong. “Fusion energy will be the ultimate source for zero-carbon electricity for humanity’s growing needs, and now we have a forward-thinking partner in MGE ready to help us make fusion real.”

A future fusion power plant in Wisconsin would represent a first-of-its-kind investment in next-generation carbon-free energy technology and help advance MGE’s goal of net-zero carbon electricity.

“At MGE, we’ve long believed that achieving a net-zero carbon future requires innovation, partnerships and a willingness to explore emerging technologies,” said MGE Chairman, President, and CEO Jeff Keebler. “Realta is developing a promising fusion technology right here in Madison, and this collaboration reflects our commitment to exploring emerging technologies that have the potential to deliver reliable, around-the-clock carbon-free energy for our customers and communities.”

The Realta Forge

The agreement deepens existing ties between Realta and MGE. Realta recently announced plans to lease approximately 250,000 square feet of office and industrial space for the company’s research and development facility, The Realta Forge. The facility is located at OM Station – the former site of Oscar Mayer’s plant and headquarters – in MGE’s service territory.

Working Toward Net-Zero Carbon Electricity

Reducing carbon emissions is a core priority for MGE. In 2019, MGE became one of the first utility companies in the United States to commit to net-zero carbon electricity by 2050. MGE’s ongoing investments in carbon-free energy generation are part of a broader strategy to ensure safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy for the future.

Why These Announcements From Type One and Realta Are Important

The announcement from Realta Fusion and MGE is important because it is the fourth announced partnership between a utility and a fusion energy company to build a commercial power plant. With this announcement, Realta Fusion and MGE join the following announced partnerships:

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and Dominion Energy, who are building a 400 MWe tokamak power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia;

• Proxima Fusion, RWE, the Government of Bavaria, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics to build a commercial stellarator in Europe.

• Type One Energy and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) which are building a 350-450 MWe stellarator at the TVA’s retired Bull Run coal electricity plant; and

The Type One Energy and State of Tennessee announcement is also important because it grants the operating license for Type One’s 400MWe stellarator, one of the big hurdles to overcome in building a commercial fusion energy plant. Congratulations to Type One Energy/TVA/the State of Tennessee and Realta Fusion and MGE.

Last month, The Fusion Report started its series on some of the challenges that commercial fusion energy must overcome to be successful: concepts like tritium breeding, cryonic vacuum pumps, heat exchangers, and other similar items which are critical to fusion, but which fusion companies themselves may not be the developers of. In this article, we examine the complexity in manufacturing fusion fuel, and systems for injecting that fuel into commercial fusion machines. But first, let’s dispel with the idea that fusion (or more specifically, fusion fuel) is “free”.

The Fuel Costs for A 1GW Fusion Energy Power Plant

Contrary to popular opinion, the fuel for fusion energy machines is not free. For instance in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), made the statement that, “The affordability story is straightforward. Fusion doesn’t consume a fuel that costs something, so there’s no price tag for gas, coal or nuclear power”. While the annual fuel cost for a 1GW commercial fusion power plant might in the future be significantly less than that for a 1GW nuclear fission, gas, or coal power plant, it is non-zero even in the most optimistic future conditions (the only power sources that have zero recurring fuel costs are renewables such as solar power, hydroelectric power, wind power, or geothermal power). While these are not deal-breakers fusion energy, the implication that fusion is free does not accurately depict its real costs. Moreover, the upfront capital expenses, and the initial lithium-6 to stock a tritium breeder blanket is significant, as we will explore deeper below.

A hypothetical 1GW commercial deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion power plant would burn roughly 100 grams of deuterium and 150 grams of tritium per day. On the cheap side, the cost of cryogenically frozen pellets of highly purified deuterium would be roughly $13/gram, or $475,000 annually for a 1GW power plant. Then there’s tritium, which is today neither cheap nor plentiful, costing roughly $30,000/gram, or $1.6B per year. Assuming the technology to breed tritium is conquered, the price of the tritium itself goes to zero, but you are trading the cost for lithium-6 required in the breeding blanket, and the increased capital cost. The lithium-6 consumed annually in a tritium breeder blanket for a 1 GW fusion power plant would run roughly $20M/year, only somewhat lower than the $50M-$70M in annual fuel cost for a 1GW nuclear fission reactor.

However, the initial cost of filling the breeder blanket with 40 to 100 metric tons of enriched lithium today potentially threatens the competitive advantage of fusion energy that Bob Mumgaard trumpeted. At today’s market cost of $40,000 per kilogram of lithium-6, that cost would be $1.6B if only 40 metric tons were required ($4B if 100 metric tons were needed). Even if techniques like advanced vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) can be perfected, the cost would still be $160 million to $400 million to fill a blanket for a 1GW fusion power plant. This is certainly a workable cost, but it is only one of the costs for building a 1GW fusion power plant, and is based on yet-unproven technologies. Other promising breeder technologies such as liquid lead-bismuth thermal blankets have the advantage of increased neutron production which allows the use of cheaper natural lithium (Li-7), but liquid lead-bismuth produces polonium-210 (highly radioactive and toxic), and increases corrosion issues.

The Differences In Fueling Requirements for Fusion Energy Machines

The way fusion fuel (in this case, we’ll speak about D-T fuel, but it’s similar for other fuels) is prepared and injected into fusion machines depends significantly on the type of fusion technology utilized, whether it is inertial fusion energy (IFE), magnetic fusion energy (MFE), or hybrid fusion machines; we will explore each below.

IFE Fuels and Fuel Injection Systems: Inertial fusion machines run like car engines, emitting periodic impulses (explosions) of power, typically at a rate of one impulse per second or faster. The fuel is formed into small spheres of 4mm-5mm in diameter (For a great discussion about the specific requirements for inertial fusion pellets, please see the recent press release from Inertia Fusion, the illustration below is what we are borrowing). Inside the pellet is D-T gas, surrounded by a thin layer of D-T ice, and finally an outside carbon shell. Inertia believes they can reduce the cost to roughly one dollar per pellet, which would be a cost of roughly $63 million per year at a 2 Hz average impulse rate. The relatively hard part is that the pellets have to be injected periodically, acquired with the laser aiming system, and successfully fired at.

MFE Fuels and Fuel Injection Systems: Magnetic fusion machines are built to run continuously, and to heat the fuel continuously. The fuel can be much simpler than it is in an IFE (it can simply be D-T ice or gas), but the process to heat the ‘ice’ and turn it into plasma is a little more complex. Generally, a small amount of D-T gas is injected into the vacuum vessel (whether a tokamak, stellarator, or a similar device); the gas is then turned into plasma by a high-voltage breakdown. The plasma is then heated by a strong electrical current to a temperature of roughly 10 million degrees K. At the same time, hydrogen atoms are injected into the plasma by neutral beam injection. Finally, radio frequency (RF)/microwave systems boost the energy in the chamber to a level where the plasma can be fused using a strong magnetic fields.

Hybrid Fusion System Fuels and Fuel Injection Systems: Hybrid systems, such as Helion’s Polaris fusion energy system, work mostly like MFE systems from a fuel standpoint; the only difference is that fusion involves a combination of magnetic fields and inertia which is achieved by accelerating two ‘clouds’ of plasma towards each other.

Conclusion: Fusion Fuel Systems Are Still A Work In Progress

Fusion fuel systems (even without including breeder blankets, which are really a separate component) still have a ways to go to produce electricity commercially. For IFE systems, continually injecting frozen pellets at a rate of 1Hz or greater is the challenge yet to be conquered. For MFE systems, the question is: how do you inject fuel through incredibly strong magnetic fields and into the plasma without destabilizing the plasma. Both are infinitely solvable with enough time, work, and money. The problem with the fuel itself, which is really a breeder blanket problem, is more difficult, but it is a problem that all fusion companies have to solve.

Things You Gotta Know

Shine Technologies Preps an IPO With Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan as Bookrunners
Axios reported that fusion developer Shine Technologies is preparing to file for an initial public offering, with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan signed on as bookrunners. The Janesville, Wisconsin company, founded in 2005, has pursued a phased strategy that generates revenue from fusion driven neutron systems today, spanning industrial inspection, radiation effects testing, and production of medical isotopes such as lutetium 177 and molybdenum 99, while building toward fusion energy over the long term. A listing would make Shine one of the first fusion companies on the US public markets, following General Fusion’s Nasdaq debut in July, and would give public investors a second pure play way to own the sector.

Marathon Fusion Demonstrates Lithium and Hydrogen Isotope Enrichment in Its Plasma Centrifuge
Marathon Fusion announced the successful enrichment of both hydrogen and lithium isotopes in its proprietary plasma centrifuge, addressing two of the fusion fuel cycle’s hardest problems with a single machine architecture. Hydrogen isotope separation enables selective tritium pumping, which the San Francisco company says could shrink tritium flow rates and the size of tritium processing systems by a factor of ten or more, while enriched lithium is the feedstock every deuterium tritium power plant will need to breed its own fuel, a gap a Special Competitive Studies Project report called the single highest risk in the fusion supply chain with no domestic commercial source. The work is supported by the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E VISION OPEN program, and with enrichment demonstrated Marathon says it will move toward its first commercial pilot facility, capable of producing isotopes for gigawatt scale fusion deployments.

SLAC Researchers Uncover Copper’s Surprising Melting Behavior at Extreme Temperatures
Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory found that copper resists melting under extreme conditions far better than models predicted, results published in Nature Communications that sharpen the simulations used to pick materials for future fusion machines. Using SLAC’s ultrafast electron camera, the team watched a laser heated copper film melt gradually rather than collapsing all at once as simulations expected, traced the discrepancy to an assumption that atoms feel uniform pressure during melting, and updated the models to reproduce the real behavior. The findings matter for copper alloys under consideration as heat sinks that pull thermal energy away from plasma facing components, improving predictions of which materials can survive the punishing interior of a fusion reaction chamber.

The Fusion Report covers a lot of different areas regarding commercial fusion energy development, and one of them that we really enjoy is the growth of the fusion supply chain. While the fusion supply chain may not be as exciting as actual fusion development, it is incredibly important to the commercialization of fusion energy. Earlier this week, Kyoto Fusioneering announced the close of its Series D round securing JPY 25.72 billion, approximately $162M (USD), bringing their total funding to $305.9M. While this may not be on the scale of many of the top fusion companies, it is impressive for a company that is dedicated to commercial fusion energy’s supply chain. Below is the press announcement after which we’ll discuss why it is important.

Press Release: Kyoto Fusioneering Secures JPY 25.7 Billion To Build The Systems Every Fusion Power Plant Will Need

TOKYO — 24 August 2026 — Kyoto Fusioneering (KF) today announced the first close of its Series D round, securing JPY 16.72 billion (approx. USD 105 million) in new equity along with access to JPY 9.0 billion (approx. USD 57 million) in credit and loan facilities, for JPY 25.72 billion (approx. USD 162 million) in total. The funds will accelerate the UNITY™ Program, KF’s staged de-risking program spanning Japan, Canada, and the United States, and expand the company’s supply capacity and international operations.

KF’s business is not the fusion reaction itself. It is everything surrounding the reaction to make fusion a commercial power source: the systems that heat the fuel, absorb the energy the reaction throws off, convert that energy into useful forms, and generate and recycle the fuel. Most of the fusion industry is working on the reaction. KF works on the plant that must be built around it, regardless of fusion approach.

Three Countries, One De-Risking Program

KF is addressing two of fusion’s hardest gating risks — the “tritium fuel cycle” and “tritium breeding blanket and thermal cycle” — through separate-effects testing at purpose-built facilities, ahead of full-scale integration. No other program in the world is attempting this at the same scale. At UNITY-1 in Kyoto, construction of the power-generation test plant is largely complete. The facility puts a blanket mockup through the temperatures, pressures and magnetic fields representative of a real plant, and converts the heat it produces into electricity and other high value forms. KF is currently running tests that extract hydrogen isotopes from the circulating loop — the same process that will later recover bred tritium — and from this fall will run integrated tests of power generation and hydrogen production from the high-temperature loop.

At UNITY-2, developed with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories through the Fusion Fuel Cycles Inc. joint venture, a fuel cycle systems are in preliminary testing in Japan using hydrogen and other gases. Tritium-based testing at Chalk River is set to begin within the year, targeting the world’s first demonstration of a continuous, fully integrated D-T fuel cycle using real tritium: injecting fuel, recovering what is not consumed, purifying it and putting it back, without stopping.

At UNITY-3 in Tennessee, developed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, a module-scale neutron irradiation facility for the tritium breeding blanket is in design, targeting facility completion by the end of 2028. It is designed to be the world’s first demonstration of tritium breeding performance under volumetric D-T fusion neutrons. Once all three are running, KF will be the first company in the world to have tested systems essential for commercial fusion power. This round will go primarily toward accelerating that work.

An Industry Enabler: The Infrastructure Every Fusion Plant Needs

Fusion developers worldwide are pursuing various confinement approaches — from magnetic to inertial confinement devices and everything in between — each differing in how they confine and heat fusion fuel to the point where it fuses. Whichever approaches ultimately reach commercial power generation, they will need the same systems outside the reaction itself. KF builds those systems for the industry as a whole rather than for any one design.

This is why fusion programs around the world already run on KF’s gyrotrons — the high-power microwave tubes that help heat fusion fuel to the temperatures at which it reacts, well over a hundred million degrees. Building on foundational technology developed by Japanese research institutions, KF has pushed gyrotron performance to a world-leading level and paired it with the supply-chain management and precision final assembly needed to deliver products tailored to each project’s specifications. That combination of technical strength and delivery reliability has won KF a steady stream of orders from public and private fusion programs worldwide.

As demand grows, KF will use this funding to build mass-production capacity and a supply system that can respond quickly — putting the industrial base in place before fusion plants start being built, rather than after.

A Five-Country Footprint

KF operates in five countries — Japan (Tokyo; Kyoto; Shiga), the United States (Oak Ridge; Seattle), the United Kingdom (Culham), Germany (Karlsruhe), and Canada (Ottawa; Chalk River) — having raised over JPY 32 billion in cumulative equity funding to date and over JPY 14 billion (approx. USD 88 million) in enterprise-wide life-to-date sales. The Series D investor group spans policy institutions supporting decarbonization and green transformation (GX), major infrastructure operators, government-affiliated financial institutions, and global and crossover investors. That range reflects fusion energy’s growing recognition as a target for cross-border industrial investment. Proceeds will fund the UNITY™ Program, gyrotron mass-production capacity, and KF’s engineering and commercial operations across its five markets.

Funding Overview

• Series D equity raised (first close): JPY 16.72 billion (approx. USD 105 million)

• Cumulative equity raised to date: JPY 32.98 billion (approx. USD 207 million)

• Total credit and loan facilities secured: JPY 9.0 billion (approx. USD 57 million)

* USD figures are provided for reference only and are approximate, based on a JPY/USD exchange rate of approximately 159 as of August 23, 2026.

■ Select* New Equity Investors

• IMM Japan Korea-Japan Fusion Fund Investment Limited Partnership (General Partner: IMM Investment Japan Co., Ltd.)

• SiteGround Capital Ltd.

• GX Acceleration Agency (Organization for the Promotion of Transition to a Decarbonized Growth-Oriented Economic Structure)

• Development Bank of Japan Inc.

• East Japan Railway Company (JR East)

• Minerva Growth Partners, Inc.

*List does not include two additional new investors

■ Existing Equity Investors, Follow-on Investment

• SMBC Venture Capital Co., Ltd.

• Kyoto Capital Partners Co., Ltd.

• JIC Venture Growth Investments Co., Ltd.

• Daiwa Corporate Investment Co., Ltd.

• DBJ Capital Co., Ltd.

• MUFG Bank, Ltd.

■ Select* Debt Financing / Credit Facility Providers

• Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation

• The Kyoto Bank, Ltd.

• Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Limited

• Mizuho Bank, Ltd.

* List does not include one additional institution

Comment from Representative Director & CEO Satoshi Konishi

We are deeply grateful – not just for the scale of this round, but for the range of investors who joined it. We see it as confidence in KF, and as a sign that fusion energy is moving from research into industrialization. We also take it as recognition of our evolution into a company that, regardless of reactor concept, provides, in an integrated manner, the technologies essential to fusion power demonstration projects worldwide. Since our founding, we have been committed to establishing the core technologies and engineering essential to power generation. With this funding, we will further accelerate that journey. In the long-term challenge of commercializing fusion energy, we will continue working together with partners around the world to build the fusion energy industry.

Why This Announcement From Kyoto Fusioneering Is Important

This combination of equity funding and credit loan facilities more than doubles the capital available to Kyoto Fusioneering (KF), a company dedicated to the commercial fusion energy supply chain. As KF said in the second paragraph of their press release, their business is not the fusion reaction itself; it is everything surrounding the reaction to make fusion a commercial power source. KF is dedicated to the tritium fuel cycle and to the tritium breeding blanket and thermal cycle, two of the hardest problems that fusion companies are facing. With facilities in Kyoto Japan, Chalk River Canada, and Oak Ridge Tennessee, KF will truly be able to help companies in a wide range of fronts, enabling them to start testing their tritium breeding technology by the end of 2028. Furthermore, by turning these facilities into mass production plants will allow KF to supply fusion companies with the capabilities they need without having to develop themselves. The Fusion Report congratulates KF on their accomplishment.

Today, The Fusion Report is covering the announcement by Pacific Fusion of their groundbreaking on a first-of-a-kind fusion facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This facility will house Pacific Fusion’s “Demonstration System”, designed to achieve net facility gain by 2030, which is a critical step towards the achievement of commercial fusion energy. The company has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the US Department of Energy (DoE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to collaborate on “high-yield” fusion research and development in the new facility. Finally, Pacific Fusion is also kicking off a manufacturing facility in Albuquerque to go along with its research and development facility there, helping establish the city as a center of fusion energy development. We will first present the press release, and after that we’ll talk about the importance of this announcement.

Press Release: Pacific Fusion breaks ground on first-of-a-kind fusion facility in New Mexico

Pacific Fusion today broke ground on a $1 billion Research & Manufacturing Campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the company will build a fusion facility designed to achieve two first-ever milestones: net facility gain, an essential breakthrough on the path to commercial fusion power, and high-yield fusion, a critical capability for U.S. national security.

The campus at Mesa del Sol will house Pacific Fusion’s Demonstration System, designed to achieve net facility gain by 2030, producing more energy from fusion than the total energy initially stored in the machine. Net facility gain has never before been demonstrated and represents a key milestone on the path to commercial fusion power.

The Demonstration System will also produce bursts of high-energy fusion output exceeding 100 megajoules, making it the only “high-yield” fusion facility under construction in the United States. “High yield” fusion refers to the capability to create certain conditions relevant to national security research, providing a long-sought platform to support the science required to maintain the U.S. nuclear stockpile without explosive nuclear testing.

The United States identified the need for this capability more than 30 years ago. Underscoring its importance, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today executed a Memorandum of Understanding with Pacific Fusion. The MOU memorializes the parties’ agreement to identify collaboration opportunities related to high yield fusion, high-energy-density science, pulsed-power technologies, advanced materials, modeling and simulation, and other areas of shared national interest.

Pacific Fusion was founded in 2023 to deliver practical, affordable, and scalable fusion energy. The company is developing a pulser-driven inertial fusion system using modular, mass-manufacturable components made of readily available materials. Its technology advances decades of U.S. government investment at America’s national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“America pioneered the breakthroughs that brought fusion within reach. Pacific Fusion is focused on converting that scientific leadership into industrial capability and infrastructure that strengthens U.S. energy leadership and national security,” said Dr. Keith LeChien, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. “Today’s groundbreaking shows that America can still build the hard things, and build them faster than any other country, including China.”

China is investing billions in next-generation fusion for both energy and national security, attempting to beat America in a field that the U.S. national labs made possible. Pacific Fusion’s privately funded, U.S.-built fusion facility is designed to keep America ahead in one of the most important technologies of the century.

Federal, state, and local leaders joined energy and technology executives and investors at the groundbreaking to recognize the project’s significance for both America’s energy and national security missions.

Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) President and CEO Don Tarry highlighted fusion’s potential to help New Mexico meet growing electricity demand while maintaining reliability, increasing affordability and advancing toward a carbon-free grid. PNM is New Mexico’s largest electricity provider.

“At PNM, we’re proud to welcome and support Pacific Fusion for bringing this kind of energy innovation to New Mexico and strengthening the state’s leadership in energy, economic development and advanced manufacturing,” said Tarry. “Under the Energy Transition Act, we are looking ahead to new sources of carbon-free energy to meet the growing energy demands of the future. Fusion has the potential to help us achieve the state’s ambitious objectives with reliable, affordable and clean energy, and we’re excited for the opportunity to help explore its potential as part of our future generation mix. It represents another way we are Powering New Mexico, Together and delivering on our commitment to customers.”

New Mexico leaders also highlighted the state’s opportunity to become a center of the emerging U.S. fusion industry, building on its longstanding leadership in applied physics, energy innovation, and advanced manufacturing.

“New Mexicans believe in science, innovation, and the importance of clean, affordable energy. Pacific Fusion saw that commitment when it chose to make a billion-dollar investment in our state,” said New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. “We hope New Mexico will be the first state to put fusion energy on the grid, and Pacific Fusion’s progress can help turn that vision into reality.”

“This is what investment in American innovation should produce: cutting-edge industries, high-quality jobs in New Mexico, and broader impact through clean energy for the world,” said Senator Ben Ray Luján. “To make that possible, we need continued federal engagement and funding to get fusion commercially deployed on the grid.”

The urgent need for federal collaboration extends beyond energy. Pacific Fusion’s technology could also expand the experimental capabilities available for science-based stockpile stewardship, including high-yield fusion and high-energy-density research. NNSA and Pacific Fusion have jointly signed the Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Collaboration on High Yield Fusion, High-Energy-Density Science, and Related Technical Areas.

“Public-private partnerships are essential to unleashing American innovation, strengthening our national security, and ensuring the United States wins the global fusion race,” said NNSA Administrator Brandon Williams. “NNSA looks forward to collaborating with Pacific Fusion on the science that keeps our nuclear stockpile safe and reliable. China is moving quickly in this area, and America cannot afford to fall behind.”

Pacific Fusion’s investment is also designed to establish the foundation for a broader fusion manufacturing industry in New Mexico. The Research & Manufacturing Campus represents a $1 billion-scale investment and will support approximately 200 permanent jobs, in addition to hundreds of construction and regional jobs. The company is also expanding manufacturing operations in Los Lunas, where it will build modular pulsed-power components for its fusion systems.

“The country that figures out how to manufacture and deploy these systems at scale will create an entirely new energy industry around them,” said Carrie von Muench, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Pacific Fusion. “We want that industry, its supply chains, and its jobs to be built here in America.”

Pacific Fusion is now moving into the next phase of its growth, scaling production of its modular pulsed-power technology and expanding its manufacturing footprint in New Mexico. The company’s next major technical milestone is the demonstration of a full-scale pulser module, which will serve as the core building block for its fusion system.

Why This Announcement By Pacific Fusion Is Important

There are several reasons why this announcement by Pacific Fusion is important:

1. Pacific Fusion placed a date on achieving net facility gain (2030): Net facility gain is more important than achieving Q>1: it means the entire facility will create more energy than it consumes. While Q>1 was demonstrated first in December 2022 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) and has been achieved several times since then (reaching Q>4 in April 2025), that Q only measures the laser energy input versus the fusion energy output (also known as “Q_SCI”, or scientific gain), a measure of the physics around the plasma core itself. What Pacific Fusion promises to deliver is a fusion machine (an entire facility) thatcreates more energy than it consumes. Well, Pacific Fusion will be the first to make such a promise (Helion promised to deliver commercial fusion power by 2028 on May 10, 2023), Pacific Fusion’s will be a “high-yield” facility, delivering a fusion energy output expected to exceed 100 megajoules.

2. Pacific Fusion MOU with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) promises to deliver high-yield fusion: if you read our article from last week Thursday, you understand the importance that commercial fusion energy development has for the US national nuclear security establishment. This is the capability that the NNSA needs to push their experimental physics investigation to the next level.

While what Pacific Fusion delivers in 2030 will not necessarily be a working fusion energy power plant (it won’t necessarily have a breeder blanket, or the capabilities to convert fusion energy into electricity), it is a big step towards that.

Things You Gotta Know

Inertia and LLNL Cut Fusion Fuel Production From Days to Minutes
Inertia announced that it and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have achieved a manufacturing breakthrough that cuts formation time for the cryogenically frozen deuterium tritium fuel layer at the heart of its targets from multiple days at the National Ignition Facility to just two to three hours, with a path to under an hour, while staying well within the ignition proven design tolerances verified using the same LLNL codes used to design ignition. Because Inertia’s planned 10 megajoule laser is substantially less sensitive to fuel layer imperfections than NIF’s 2 megajoule system, simulations show the faster layers cost essentially no fusion performance. The Livermore, California company says the breakthrough, the first of the Top Ten milestones on its Phase 1 commercial roadmap, makes target fueling cheaper, shrinks the tritium inventory a power plant must hold, and supports the continuous fueling rates utility scale operation requires.

Thea Energy Closes Series B Extension to Scale Its Stellarator Program
Thea Energy closed an extension of its Series B round with backing from Brevan Howard Macro Venture, Aloniq, ALJ Investments, Beyond Earth Ventures, and additional strategic investors, building on the $100 million raise led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund. The Kearny, New Jersey stellarator company will use the capital to scale magnet manufacturing, open a second Northern New Jersey facility, fast track construction of its Eos integrated stellarator, and accelerate its Helios power plants, whose preconceptual design was certified by the US Department of Energy under the Milestone Based Fusion Development Program. In the three months since announcing the Series B, Thea has landed a $20 million ARPA-E SCALEUP award to expand domestic production of modular HTS magnets, launched a stellarator digital twin collaboration with NVIDIA, Synopsys, Argonne National Laboratory, and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and confirmed its Eos spec magnets meet the field strength and precision requirements for the machine.

General Fusion Issues First Business Update as a Public Company
General Fusion, which became the first publicly listed fusion company when it began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker GFUZ in July, delivered its first business update as a public company. The company reported that its Lawson Machine 26 demonstrated plasma heating to approximately 0.72 keV, about 8.4 million degrees Celsius, by compressing a plasma with a lithium liner, important progress toward its near term objective of 1 keV. General Fusion entered the public markets with approximately US$150 million in cash, which it expects will fund the LM26 program across several planned technical milestones through the end of 2028.

LLNL Research Shows Melting Diamond Could Triple Laser Fusion Gain
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory resolved a 20 percent discrepancy between theory and experiment on how diamond, the material of the fuel capsules used in inertial confinement fusion, melts at pressures three times greater than those at the center of the Earth. The measurements, published in Nature and Nature Physics, confirm that solid diamond floats in liquid metallic carbon and that melting the capsule into a uniform, smooth fluid during the initial shock is critical to a symmetric implosion. Simulations incorporating the new data suggest the energy gain of fusion experiments like those at the National Ignition Facility could roughly triple if other degradation mechanisms are kept in check.

DOE Commits Funding for UNITY-3 Blanket Test Facility at ORNL
The US Department of Energy officially committed funding to establish UNITY-3, a fusion breeding blanket test facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with Kyoto Fusioneering relocating its US headquarters to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to help build and operate it. The accelerator based facility will be the first of its kind capable of generating 14 MeV neutrons typical of a burning plasma, letting researchers evaluate candidate commercial breeding blanket designs, the systems that capture fusion energy and produce tritium fuel, and validate the computational models used to simulate tritium production, with advanced sensors feeding AI accelerated digital twins. UNITY-3 joins Kyoto Fusioneering’s UNITY-1 blanket and thermal cycle facility operating in Japan and its UNITY-2 fuel cycle facility under development in Canada, and is part of the public private partnership among DOE, ORNL, and the company to build the critical infrastructure commercial fusion requires.

From 1945 until 1992, the United States performed 1,054 nuclear weapons tests, including 215 atmospheric and underwater tests, to validate the design and manufacture of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. Other than the first 30 of those tests which were fission-type (uranium- or plutonium-fueled), by far most of these tests (1,024) were thermonuclear weapons tests, employing “H-bombs” harnessing fusion energy. Since the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1992, the United States has relied on theoretical and experimental work (other than full-scale detonation of nuclear weapons) to validate the US nuclear weapons stockpile (Also known as the Stockpile Stewardship Program), much of which has led to the progress that the US (and others) have made in commercial fusion energy. In this article, The Fusion Report examines the positive effect that these efforts have had on the US commercial fusion energy program.

The Basics of Thermonuclear Weapons

Before we get into why it is important to test thermonuclear weapons and/or the mechanisms that make thermonuclear weapons possible, let’s look into the basics of how thermonuclear weapons operate. As a disclaimer, all the information presented here is from public sources, including Wikipedia and government websites. As such, no classified or sensitive information has been utilized in the writing of this article, and the authors are not involved or have access to any classified nuclear weapons information.

Thermonuclear weapons (also known as fusion weapons, hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs) are known as ‘second-generation’ weapons (fission devices are known as ‘first-generation’ weapons), which employ nuclear fusion for their destructive force. The design of all thermonuclear weapons are believed to be of the Teller–Ulam configuration, named after physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. The design utilizes radiation implosion, in which X-rays from the detonation of the primary stage (a small plutonium fission device), are channeled to compress a separate fusion secondary stage containing thermonuclear fuel (primarily lithium-6 deuteride). During detonation, the fission neutrons convert lithium-6 to helium-4 plus tritium. The deuterium and tritium then undergo a reaction that releases energy and fast neutrons. Additionally, most weapons use a natural or depleted uranium tamper and case. This undergoes fast fission from fast fusion neutrons, and is the main contribution to the total yield and radioactive fission product fallout (Wikipedia article on Thermonuclear Weapons).

Why Testing the Mechanics of Thermonuclear Weapons is Important

Unlike bullets, which can last unfired from between 10-40 years stored in good cool/dry conditions, thermonuclear weapons are complex mechanisms that do not necessarily age well over time (a US W88 thermonuclear warhead, first designed in the 1970s and used in the US Navy Trident submarine launched ballistic missile, is shown in the illustration above for reference). Nearly all contemporary thermonuclear devices utilize a plutonium ‘hollow pit’ in their primary, increasing neutron production in the primary and allowing its size and mass to be significantly reduced. For example, one of the chief mechanisms of aging in a thermonuclear weapon is the decay of tritium over time, since tritium has a half-life of roughly twelve and a half years. Not only does this mean that the tritium must be replenished on a regular basis, but as it decays the effect of reduced tritium (and the byproducts that tritium decay produces) must also be modeled and tested. Many other mechanisms of thermonuclear weapons have similar potential ‘aging issues’.

Verifying the effectiveness and safety of America’s stockpile is the responsibility of the US Department of Energy (DoE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which must do so annually. To put the NNSA’s work in perspective, the US nuclear stockpile is the smallest it has been since 1960. As of 2023, the stockpile stood at 3,748 warheads—a roughly 88 percent reduction in size since its peak of 31,255 warheads in the late 1960s. Most weapons in the current stockpile were produced during the 1970s and 1980s; at the time they were designed and built, these weapons were not designed or intended to last indefinitely. As such, the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship Program is responsible for ensuring the capabilities of the US nuclear deterrent. Comprising a wide range of scientific activities from modeling and simulation to subcritical nuclear experiments, the NNSA’s programs allow them to assess and certify the stockpile.

It is also for this reason that the NNSA funds high-energy density science facilities that fusion people know well: the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility (NIF), the Sandia National Laboratories Z-Machine, and the University of Rochester Omega Laser Facility. These facilities conduct research not only into the safe aging of nuclear weapons components, but also modernizing of nuclear weapons designs, including performing simulations of the weapon updates via numerical analyses on NNSA super-computers, and high-energy experiments as needed.

The Value to Commercial Inertial Fusion of Modernizing the NNSA

One of the biggest issues of all three facilities is that they’re old. NIF is seventeen years old, having been certified as complete on March 31st of 2009. The Sandia Z machine is even older, having been modified into its current state thirty years ago in 1996. Similarly, the current iteration of the Omega laser facility in its 60-beam configuration was commissioned in 1995 and is 31 years old. In all three cases, not only are their facilities old, but the architecture of their lasers and Marx generators are old as well, and probably obsolete by today’s standards. There are solutions with more efficient lasers and more exchangers are available from commercial fusion energy developments.

Commercial ICF companies and the NNSA could accelerate the development of commercial fusion while jointly accelerating nuclear weapons stewardship through a well-thought out joint program. This is incredibly important when you consider that we are competing with China both on fusion energy and on nuclear security. Contemporary ICF companies are relatively young and could use the funding if it was made available in the right situation. A recent paper by The Hudson Institute defines a reasonable set of plans and milestones for such a program, though its focus needs to increase to increase the value to commercial ICF as well as to nuclear deterrence. While the missions of commercial fusion energy companies in that of the NNSA are different, they can still accomplish both goals if our government and business leader shows some imagination and incentivize the right behaviors.

Last year, The Fusion Report did a series of articles on different types of fusion, whether it be inertial fusion energy, magnetic fusion energy or hybrids of the two. In the next series articles we’ll talk about some of the challenges in fusion: concepts like tritium breeding, cryonic vacuum pumps, heat exchangers, and other similar concepts. This week we’ll cover first walls – the innermost boundary facing the hot plasma, and which acts as a thermal and radiation shield, amongst other things. But first, we’ll talk about the environment in which first walls have to survive.

First Walls: Clever Approaches to Surviving Impossible Conditions!

A first wall is the material between a fusion reaction and the structural components behind it. The conditions that must be met to ensure survival depend on a variety of factors, including the type of fusion machine, and the fuel that the fusion machine uses. For instance, inertial fusion energy (IFE) machines, whether using lasers, massive electrical currents, or particle beams, need to be able to survive the explosions of ‘miniature H-bombs’ occurring at a rate of one per second (or greater), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. On the other hand, magnetic fusion energy (MFE) machines, including tokamaks, stellarators, and similar devices, are continuously exposed to high temperatures, energy neutrons, and extremely strong magnetic fields. For fusion machines utilizing deuterium-tritium (DT) as their fuel, the most difficult condition is high-energy neutron fluxes, with neutrons at an energy of 14 MeV. For fusion machines using aneutronic fuels such as deuterium and helium-3 (D-He3), proton and boron-11 (p-B11), or a lithium-6 and deuterium (Li6-D), high-energy neutron fluxes are not an issue, but extremely high temperatures and energetic charged particles are.

To survive under fusion energy conditions, materials must endure extreme temperatures and pressures. The challenge is to find or create materials that can withstand these conditions without degrading or losing their structural integrity. Research focuses on developing new alloys and ceramics that can handle the thermal and mechanical stresses. These materials need to have high thermal conductivity to dissipate heat effectively and maintain stability at very high temperatures. Additionally, they must resist neutron damage and radiation-induced embrittlement. Innovations in material science are crucial for advancing fusion energy technology and ensuring its long-term viability.

Options for Solid First Wall Materials

There are several different materials being tried for solid first walls, such as:

• Tungsten is the leading plasma-facing candidate because of its exceptionally high melting point and ability to handle high heat loads. Its drawbacks include brittleness, irradiation-driven property changes, and possible cracking under thermal cycling.

• Reduced-activation ferritic/martensitic steels and oxide-dispersion-strengthened steels are major structural-material candidates for blankets because they can be engineered to limit long-lived radioactive activation.

• Vanadium alloys, especially V–Cr–Ti systems, are promising blanket-structure materials due to high-temperature strength, ductility, low activation, and compatibility with some liquid-metal coolant/breeder concepts.

• Silicon-carbide fiber–reinforced silicon-carbide composites offer low activation and high-temperature capability, but manufacturing, joining, irradiation behavior, and hermeticity remain difficult.

• Ultra-high-temperature ceramics—generally ceramics with melting temperatures above about 3,000 °C—are being investigated as longer-lived alternatives or complements to tungsten. Their behavior under combined neutron irradiation and plasma exposure is still not well-understood for real-world use.

No single material simultaneously provides high heat conduction, toughness, resistance to neutron-induced swelling and embrittlement, low tritium retention, corrosion compatibility with coolant and breeder materials, and acceptable activation after service. Fusion systems will therefore likely use engineered, multilayer combinations: for example, a tungsten-facing surface, a copper-alloy heat sink, and a steel or composite structural support.

A New Approach: Liquid Metal First Walls

A new approach is the use of liquid metals as a plasma-facing first wall, particularly in IFE machines. Instead of relying only on solid materials such as tungsten, a reactor would use a continuously renewed layer or flow of molten metal—often lithium, tin, or lead-lithium—between the extremely hot plasma and the underlying structure. Because the liquid can circulate, it can carry heat away and replenish material that is eroded by particle bombardment, offering a “self-healing” alternative to a solid wall that can crack or accumulate radiation damage. Liquid metals may also help spread intense heat loads through vapor shielding, in which vapor above the surface absorbs and redistributes some of the incoming plasma energy.

The approach remains technically challenging. The liquid must stay in place despite strong magnetic fields, plasma forces, and gravity, while limiting droplets, evaporation, and impurities that could enter and cool the plasma. Engineers must also manage corrosion, material compatibility, tritium behavior, and the pumping and heat-extraction systems needed to circulate the metal safely. Research therefore explores flowing films, capillary-porous surfaces that hold liquid metal in a structured wall, and different alloys tailored for thermal performance and plasma compatibility. If these control and engineering issues are solved, liquid-metal first walls could improve component lifetime and heat handling in future fusion power plants.

Some Notable Progress On The First Wall Front

The largest in first-wall approach is at ITER, which has replaced beryllium armor with tungsten in its revised baseline, aligning its plasma-facing surface with the material choice anticipated for future burning-plasma machines. The most tangible advance is ITER’s European supply chain, where two suppliers—Alsymex in France and the Fusion Business Leadership consortium in Spain—have qualified pre-series panels and now operate series-production lines. Germany’s DINERWA project, coordinated by Focused Energy with KIT and industrial partners, is developing oxide-dispersion-strengthened steels, copper alloys, nanostructured tungsten, and high-entropy alloys, as well as joining methods for integrated wall modules. Candidate components are to be tested at KIT’s HELOKA facility under high-heat-flux conditions representative of reactor service.

Commercial progress is real, but it is principally industrialization rather than commercial deployment; no fusion first wall has yet established a commercial power-plant operating record. The commercial readiness gap remains component lifetime under a true fusion-neutron environment, and no one has yet to demonstrate multiyear neutron-damage, tritium-retention, and thermal-fatigue performance needed for a bankable power plant. The work reflects the central unresolved challenge: tungsten tolerates extreme heat and plasma exposure, but it can embrittle under neutron damage, while the structural material and cooling interfaces must survive thermal cycling and maintain integrity over long operating periods.

Conclusion: First Walls Are Still A “Hard Issue” For Fusion Energy

To say that first walls are “hard” is an understatement; it is almost as difficult of a problem as choosing and mechanizing the right fusion energy mechanism for commercial fusion energy. A commercially viable first law remains unproven because it must survive repeated high heat loads, plasma erosion, neutron-induced damage, tritium retention, and thermal stress. However, both experimental and production fusion systems are being built using materials joining techniques, testing capabilities, and supply chains required for commercial designs. Long-term operation in a burning plasma environment is still a ways off, but progress is being made.

Things You Gotta Know

MIT Researchers Publish a Framework for Judging When Fusion Power Plants Can Turn a Profit
MIT professors Dennis Whyte and Andrew Lo co-authored a study in the Journal of Fusion Energy proposing a quantitative framework for assessing what it would take for fusion energy to become commercially viable. The framework rests on ten core parameters spanning scientific inputs, engineering durability, and capital costs, including power density, speed of component replacement, construction cost, efficiency, energy prices, and financing, and defines an Economic Q that must exceed 1.0 for a plant’s lifetime revenue to outweigh its capital and operating costs. With private capital pouring into ventures such as MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the authors argue that quantitative economic models are now essential tools for engineers and financiers to evaluate early design choices and steer the sector toward cost-competitive power.

Fuse Energy Technologies Reports the Highest Fusion Neutron Yield Publicly Documented by Any Fusion Company
Fuse Energy Technologies published results showing its megajoule class dense plasma focus device FAETON-X produced a peak yield of 1.27 trillion neutrons in a single deuterium-deuterium shot, which the company says is the first publicly documented neutron yield at that level by any fusion company, a mark previously attained only by US national laboratories. Fuse says the result also exceeds the fusion neutron yield per megajoule of the world’s largest government plasma focus facilities, with FAETON-X delivering its yield from roughly 1 megajoule of stored energy, about 40 percent more neutrons per megajoule than Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s MJOLNIR facility. The company builds pulsed power fusion machines that generate near-term revenue from radiation effects testing for defense and space customers while advancing toward commercial fusion energy.

Germany Establishes Three National Fusion Hubs Backed by an Initial 125 Million Euros in Federal Funding
Germany’s Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space announced funding for three national fusion hubs designed to consolidate research and development and accelerate the transfer of scientific knowledge into industrial application, providing about 125 million euros in a first round to be supplemented by private investment, international collaborations, and federal state activity. The VEGA hub, coordinated by Marvel Fusion and Focused Energy and based at RWE’s former Biblis nuclear power plant, is dedicated to laser fusion; STRIDE, coordinated by Proxima Fusion, Gauss Fusion, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, focuses on magnetic fusion and stellarator technology; and MAT-TRIX, led by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, covers fuel cycles and materials development including tritium production and breeding blankets. The hubs are part of the Fusion 2040 program under Germany’s High-Tech Agenda, which aims to site the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Germany.

The Fusion Report never limits the coverage to things simply about fusion energy. One of the things that’s fun covering (in most cases) is vehicles, particularly electric vehicles (EVs), but in this case, it’s not such a fun topic – this is how American automakers are dropping the ball when it comes to EVs. Roughly 14 years ago, Tesla introduced the Model S, the first of its then-revolutionary sedans and SUVs, which by 2020 made Tesla the most-valuable global automaker in terms of market capitalization. Unfortunately for Tesla, in 2025 it lost its status as a world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles to China’s automaker BYD, about the same time that Elon Musk started running the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

Today, China dominates electric vehicles globally. China produced nearly 75% of the world’s electric vehicles in 2025 and more than 80% of EV battery cells, giving its manufacturers a significant cost advantage. US manufacturers concentrated on large expensive EVs, while global manufacturers built highly diversified product lines. Ford and GM put substantial resources into electric pickups and SUVs, segments where high battery costs translated into high prices and relatively narrow demand. While Ford is now pivoting toward a lower-cost EV platform, it expects that its EV business not to become profitable until 2029. Similarly, GM reduced planned EV capacity and recorded EV-related charges, while Ford’s Model-e unit posted multibillion-dollar annual losses. Even Tesla is refocusing its EV business on non-consumer automobiles, ending production of the Model S and Model X to repurpose their Fremont manufacturing capacity for Optimus humanoid robots.

So What Does the Consumer EV Market Want Today?

U.S. shoppers increasingly want EVs that feel like practical, low-risk mainstream vehicles—not early-adopter technology. The most important attributes are affordability, usable range, easy charging, and confidence in reliability and resale/repair costs. Interestingly, the latest data from Edmunds shows that nearly half of US consumers want a car priced under $40,000; a similar percentage of consumers prefer a car over an SUV or crossover.

Secondly, consumers who stay at the driving range and prefer fast, convenient charging are still incredibly important issues. US consumers have growing concerns about the accessibility and reliability of electric vehicle charging networks. Many worry about the availability of charging stations, especially in rural areas, and the time it takes to fully charge an EV. Additionally, there is uncertainty regarding the compatibility of vehicles with different charging infrastructure and the potential costs associated with charging at public stations.

The concern is real: a Harvard Business School analysis found public U.S. charging equipment successfully worked only about 78% of the time, with maintenance a major weak point. Automakers’ strategy is therefore not merely to add chargers, but to shift customers toward networks with stronger operational control, compatible equipment, straightforward payment, and larger charging-site capacity. From an analogy standpoint, EV drivers want EV chargers to be as reliable as gas pumps, and very few people believe this is true. In fact, most people feel that no one is maintaining existing public charging station networks. Moreover, pricing varies widely from station to station, with a lack of pricing transparency, and prices which change with the time of day.

What Other Things Are Annoying Consumers About US Auto Makers?

According to Cox Auto, a major consumer complaint is that some automakers put hardware in a car, then charge an ongoing fee to activate or keep using it—especially when buyers think the feature should have been included in the purchase price. Examples include heated or ventilated seats, remote start, navigation, driver-assistance functions, performance boosts, and EV range-related software upgrades. In Cox Automotive’s survey, 75% of consumers said they would not pay monthly or annual fees for most vehicle features; 92% said heated/cooled seats and 89% said remote start ought to be included upfront. The objection is strongest for basic comfort or safety functions and for features whose necessary hardware is already in the car. Buyers are generally more accepting of genuinely ongoing services—such as self-driving features, in-car Wi‑Fi, live data, stolen-vehicle tracking, or certain connected navigation services—because those involve continuing network or service costs. This is not unique to EVs, but since EVs have significant computerized features, it is more applicable.

Are Consumers’ Concerns A Focus For US EV Automakers?

U.S. automakers are addressing several of the concerns that make consumers hesitant about EVs, particularly charging access and reliability. Ford and GM have expanded driver access to Tesla’s Supercharger network through NACS adapters and are adopting the NACS connector on newer vehicles, reducing the risk that drivers will encounter incompatible chargers. Major manufacturers have also backed IONNA, a new fast-charging network designed to offer both NACS and CCS plugs, high-speed charging, and simpler features such as Plug & Charge payment. These steps matter because unreliable public chargers and complicated payment systems can make EV travel feel inconvenient and unpredictable.

However, automakers have not fully resolved consumer concerns about affordability, dependable public charging, and practical ownership. New EVs can still have high upfront prices, and the ending of U.S. consumer tax credits did not help. Although companies are expanding network access and investing in new infrastructure, these projects take time to reach all regions and do not immediately fix older chargers or reduce the price of every EV. As a result, U.S. automakers are making meaningful progress, but they must continue improving charging reliability, lowering vehicle costs, and providing clear support to convince more consumers that EVs are a practical alternative to gasoline cars.

Can US Auto Manufacturers Still Effectively Play In The EV Market?

US auto manufacturers can still compete effectively in the EV market because they have established brands, large manufacturing operations, nationwide dealer and service networks, and the ability to invest in domestic battery and vehicle production. They are also improving charging access by adopting common standards and partnering on new charging networks, which can make EVs more convenient for buyers. These strengths give US companies a foundation to produce EVs that meet consumer expectations for reliability, range, and support.

However, their future success is not guaranteed. US manufacturers face intense competition from Chinese companies that have developed lower-cost batteries and EVs at greater scale, while domestic EV demand has been uneven and some automakers have reduced or delayed EV investments. To remain competitive, US firms must continue developing affordable battery-electric vehicles, secure dependable battery supply chains, and improve public charging rather than relying mainly on hybrids and gasoline vehicles. Additionally, US automakers must build EVs that people want, not just ones that generate the most profit. If they do so, they can remain important players in the EV market; if they fall behind on cost, technology, and building something other than SUVs and pickup trucks, global competitors could gain a lasting advantage.

At The Fusion Report, we fully believe in a future where fusion plays a key role in our global energy picture, and particularly the energy picture for the US. But the question about what will be uniquely driving the demand for fusion energy in the mid-2030s when it expected to start coming online is a relevant question that needs a coherent answer. And it’s why a picture of oil tankers fits into an article about what will drive the demand for commercial fusion energy. But let’s start out the article with a discussion about what likely is and isn’t going to drive the demand for fusion energy in the mid-2030s.

1. For Fusion, All Energy Sources Aren’t Created Equal

The amount of electricity generated in the US in 2025 was 4,430 TWh; by 2030 it is expected to rise to 5,100 to 5,400 TWh annually, growing to 5,530 TWh in 2035. Of the electricity generated today, roughly 40% is from natural gas, 20% by coal, 19% by nuclear, and the remaining energy (~21%) from renewables. If fusion becomes commercially viable, it would most directly replace the electricity generated by fossil fuels, which is roughly 60% of all electricity today, but expected to drop to 50% by 2035. Because fusion is described as a low-carbon, on-demand source of power, it could do much of the same job these fuels do today without the carbon dioxide emissions that drive climate change. However, it is not likely to be able to replace renewable energy resources, which with battery backup can provide continuous baseload power like fusion at a much lower capital cost and risk.

2. Fusion Isn’t The Only Answer to Decarbonizing Electricity

Today, there are two obvious answers for decarbonizing electricity: solar energy/battery energy storage systems (BESS), and advanced nuclear fission. The combination of solar energy and BESS is here today and working at scale, in spite of the Trump administration’s attempts to stop it. The U.S. has installed a cumulative total of roughly 175 GWh of energy storage capacity to support its grid-scale solar deployments of 270 GW of solar generation, with storage deployed in over 90% of new grid-scale solar installs. Moreover, solidly Republican Texas leads the country with the largest share of upcoming and active utility-scale solar/BESS projects to be installed in the near future. And while total US solar generation (backed with BESS) only accounts for roughly 8.5% to 9% of total domestic electricity generation, even the US EIA’s conservative baseline projects that solar energy will account for at least 14% of total US electricity by 2035, with some independent estimates being as high as 30%.

A second choice that could decarbonize electricity is advanced nuclear fission energy. Currently, nuclear fission provides roughly 18%-19% of all electricity in the United States today, though over half of that capacity is over 30 years old. Moreover, while the Trump administration has spearheaded the idea of quicker regulatory approval for new nuclear fission plants, only two advanced reactors have been approved to date (Kairos Power’s Hermes Reactor in Oak Ridge Tennessee, and TerraPower’s Natrium Reactor in Wyoming), though several additional plants are in the process. And even advanced nuclear fission reactors do not solve the “long-lived nuclear waste” issue.

3. US Need For Fusion Isn’t As Strong As That In Europe or Asia

Today the situation in the Persian Gulf is far worse for countries in Asia than it I for the US or Europe because Asia imports roughly 84% of crude oil and 80% of liquefied natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz. Similarly, electric vehicle usage in Asia and in Europe is significantly higher than that in the US. Finally, growth in the demand for electricity in Asia and Europe are larger than that in the US, and the cost of electricity in Europe is 66% higher than that in the US. These factors make the need for fusion less urgent in the US than in either Asia or Europe.

4. The Electricity Demand for AI is Not Likely Going to Grow Fusion

Most optimistic forecasts show growth for the demand for electricity due to artificial intelligence (AI) to start to level off in the mid- to late-2030s, just about at the same time that fusion starts to become a meaningful electrical source. In fact, many more conservative forecasts show that demand will end up by 2035. A plateau by 2035 would most likely come from slower AI adoption plus hard infrastructure limits. The IEA says a “headwinds” case could push data-center energy demand to plateau beyond 2030, reaching about 700 TWh by 2035, with growth constrained by local bottlenecks and tight supply chains. Causes for an earlier slow-down could include the following:

• Slower-than-expected AI adoption, reducing growth for training and inference.

• Grid interconnection bottlenecks, permitting delays, and limited transmission buildout, which can delay new data-center capacity.

• Supply-chain constraints for power equipment, cooling systems, and other power transmission infrastructure.

• Efficiency gains in chips, servers, cooling, and workload scheduling that offset more usage.

• Local limits on water or power, which can cap data center expansion.

In any case, the growth in demand needed to kickstart commercial fusion energy in the US is not likely (or only partially likely) to be AI.

5. Government Support for Fusion in Europe and Asia is Stronger Than In The US

Europe and Asia tend to support commercial fusion more as a coordinated industrial strategy, while the U.S. has historically emphasized research, national labs, and long-horizon science. The EU has backed fusion through Euratom, EUROfusion, ITER, and a multi-year EU budget commitment, and countries like the UK, Germany, Japan, China, and South Korea have added national strategies, large public funding, and clearer commercialization goals; by contrast, U.S. federal support has been smaller relative to the scale of the challenge and more concentrated in the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences program, with commercialization funding still a limited share of the total. In practice, that means Europe and Asia are more likely to pair public money with industrial policy, regulatory planning, and shared infrastructure for private firms, while the U.S. has been stronger in startup innovation and private capital but less aggressive in direct government support for deployment. The gap is especially visible in China, where public spending and state-backed ecosystem building appear to be larger and more centralized than in the US.

Framing The Need For Fusion In The US More Effectively

Several things would be better drivers of the need for commercial fusion energy in the United States by 2035. One of the biggest drivers is the retirement of current electrical generation capacity, especially that from coal. Approximately 8%-10% (roughly 100 GW) of the current US electrical generation capacity is projected to retire by 2035, including 40% of the remaining US coal power plants. Additionally, the age of the current US nuclear fission electricity capacity is of significant concern, since over half of it will be 40 years or older by 2035, even though current plans do not have those plants being retired. And while solar plus BESS is a great answer for greenfield (new) power generation needs, using it to backfill existing power plant retirements is problematic, requiring expensive new transmission line capabilities.

The second biggest driver to spur the demand for fusion in the United States is likely to be electric vehicles (EVs); in this aspect, the Trump administration is (ironically) to be thanked. Because of the administration’s choices regarding ending EV tax credits and US automakers’ currently slow-rolling their EV plans, demand for EVs has probably pushed out a decade or more. U.S. EV adoption runs at 10% of market share for new EV sales, while in Europe it is roughly 27%, and in countries like China it exceeds 53%. If the US reached an EV adoption rates of 50%, it would increase total annual electricity consumption for charging by roughly 13%-15% (500 TWh-600 TWh) annually. This would require between 63-75 GW of new plants (in urban areas).

Conclusion: The Current AI Tide Will Not Lift Fusion Energy’s Boat

As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats, but that doesn’t apply to boats that are still in dry dock being built. While misery (and business) ‘make strange bedfellows’, some seemingly perfect opportunities are more illusory than not. And so it is with AI for commercial fusion energy; no matter how big the demand is, fusion is not capable of supplying it in this decade. The likely outcome is that most AI data centers will be powered by natural gas, with some by nuclear fission, and maybe a few by fusion energy. And that is okay; things don’t always line up the way you’d hope for. But the worst thing you can have is the kind of an opportunity that you have no way of delivering against. And for commercial fusion energy, that is exactly what AI is, especially given its near-stranglehold that AI has on the venture capital market. But who’s to say that another opportunity won’t come up for commercial fusion energy, which is why fusion’s business strategy needs to start focusing on real opportunities instead of illusory ones.

Things You Gotta Know

TAE Technologies and Black Moon Energy Enter Strategic Helium-3 Supply and Commercialization Agreement for Fusion Power
TAE Technologies announced it has signed an agreement with Black Moon Energy Corporation (BMEC) to support the future commercialization of fusion power through a prospective helium-3 fuel supply option and commercial development collaboration. Under the terms, BMEC would supply helium-3 fuel to TAE, preserving what CEO Michl Binderbauer calls the company’s flexibility to select the most cost-competitive fuel cycle at a time when many other fusion machines can operate only on deuterium-tritium. BMEC, a privately funded natural-resource and lunar-development company, plans to execute a robotic lunar delineation mission within five years to de-risk a commercial-scale helium-3 production operation. TAE is preparing to construct its first fusion power plant, Da Vinci, which is expected to generate 50 MWe and begin operations in 2031, with a site expected to be selected later this year and future facilities designed to scale to 350 to 500 MWe.

China Completes Testing of the World’s Largest Fusion Magnet, a 582-Ton Coil Destined for Its BEST Tokamak
The Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that it has completed development, acceptance and full-performance testing of the largest superconducting magnet ever built for a fusion reactor, a D-shaped toroidal field coil measuring 21 meters long and 12 meters wide and weighing 582 tons. The magnet has 1.3 times the volume and three times the stored energy of the comparable component built for ITER, and every part of it, from the superconducting wire to the structural steel, was produced domestically in China. The institute also completed testing of a high-temperature superconducting central solenoid coil. Both systems are part of the Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT) in Hefei and are destined for BEST, the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak targeted for completion around 2027.

UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade Sets Record Plasma Pressure While Taming the Instabilities That Stand Between Fusion and the Grid
The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority announced that its flagship MAST Upgrade spherical tokamak completed its most ambitious series of experiments to date, producing more than 1,100 fusion plasmas and achieving the highest plasma pressure in the machine’s history without the plasma destabilizing. The team suppressed edge localised modes (ELMs), sudden bursts at the plasma’s outer edge that can eject up to a tenth of its stored energy in a single event and damage a machine’s inner wall, and accessed four stable high-performance operating regimes including QH-mode, QCE and I-mode. Researchers also demonstrated a world-first plasma position control technique that uses measurements of visible light to detect tiny positional imbalances in real time. The results are being shared with the international fusion community to inform the design and operation of STEP, the UK’s prototype fusion power plant, and ITER.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Licenses Cryogenic Pellet Fueling Technologies to Stellarator Developer Type One Energy
Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that it has licensed a suite of cryogenic pellet fueling technologies to Type One Energy in an agreement signed at the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop in Knoxville, Tennessee. The license covers four ORNL inventions supporting the design and operation of cryogenic pellet fueling systems, which form solid pellets of hydrogen at temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero and inject them at high speed into a fusion plasma. The technologies include a novel extrusion system that can produce pellets at rates appropriate for reactor operations, addressing fuel performance, containment and recirculation challenges on the path to efficient, continuous plasma fueling.

UC Santa Barbara and Lawrence Livermore Launch AI Collaboration to Accelerate Fusion Plasma Simulations
UC Santa Barbara announced a collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring artificial intelligence to one of the most computationally demanding problems in fusion science: modeling the behavior of extreme plasmas. Led at UCSB by electrical and computer engineering professor Haewon Jeong alongside LLNL co-principal investigator Min Sang Cho, the team will build AI-driven surrogate models designed to dramatically reduce the time required for large-scale plasma simulations. The project was one of five proposals selected from a pool of 29 applicants to LLNL’s Academic Collaboration Team and will be supported with $536,000 annually over three years.

Don’t misunderstand us – The Fusion Report isn’t against artificial intelligence (AI). We use AI for doing basic research, contrarian research (used to avoid confirmation bias), and basic writing, but in all cases, the work is directed against the structural writing concept that we have developed for an article. We also use AI to help keep track what’s going on in the world, but we digress. This article is one in a series about how AI is negatively impacting the price of different commodities; in this case, Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). DRAM is the memory that programs execute out of as they are running; it is generally the fastest class of memory used in computer systems (excepting for cache memory, which is used sparingly inside and near processors).

So like many people who have worked in our industry, I generally build my own PCs (and fortunately/unfortunately, usually those of my immediate family as well). Last weekend was ordering the parts to build a replacement PC for my oldest son, which totals roughly $1,000 dollars (FYI, not everything needed replacing). Interestingly, nearly half the cost was for the DRAM modules (about $450); three years ago, the same models would have cost (at most) half the price. Which got me interested – why are DRAM prices so high? As you might guess, the answer to that question is AI.

Why is DRAM Critical for Artificial Intelligence?

Most of the high computers today are built using NVIDIA GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) at their heart. Each NVIDIA H200 GPU consists of 16,896 CUDA cores and 528 Tensor Cores. HH200 board also has 141 GB of HBM3E (High Bandwidth Memory Generation 3 Extended), which uses vertically stacked DRAM dies. A typical hyperscale supercluster for AI typically uses 16,000 to 65,000 H200 GPU, which also includes over 2,256TB of memory.

While HBM3E memory and DDR5 DRAM sticks are not interchangeable, from a memory manufacturing perspective they compete with each other. Since memory chip manufacturers can make more money (and profit) from HBM3 e-memory than from DDR5 DRAM sticks, they have prioritized manufacturing HBM3 over DDR5 DRAM. Additionally, DRAM is not used simply for PC memory; it is also used in devices such as cell phones and PC graphics cards. Unsurprisingly, the prices of these devices has also increased significantly over the past 12 to 24 months due to memory chip prices, as have game consoles such as PlayStation 5, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck OLED.

DRAM Supply and Demand Over The Past 10 Years

To say that DRAM pricing fluctuates over time is a gross understatement. Over the past ten years, DRAM pricing has generally followed a cyclical pattern rather than a smooth decline: periods of sharp drops, brief shortages, and then rebounds. Long-term data show that DRAM got much cheaper for decades, but since about 2010 the pace of decline slowed noticeably, with some datasets suggesting only about a 12% to 15% annual price decrease in that later period. In the last ten years specifically, prices were relatively flat or rising at times around shortages, then fell again during oversupply, and more recently have turned upward in another strong upcycle driven by AI demand and tighter supply.

The sharp swings in DRAM prices over the past 10 years mostly come from a classic memory-chip boom-and-bust cycle: demand and supply are both highly volatile, but supply changes slowly because fabs take a long time to build or retool. When demand jumps faster than manufacturers can add capacity, prices spike; when production catches up or demand softens, the market flips into oversupply and prices fall hard. In the last few years, the cycle has been amplified by a shift toward higher-margin memory for AI systems, which has pulled capacity away from consumer DRAM and tightened supply for ordinary RAM products. Older standards being phased out, plus manufacturers’ preference for more profitable products, have also reduced available supply and made price moves bigger than in a more balanced market.

One could understandably conclude that the DRAM manufacturers don’t really understand their market or cannot control it, but that would be incorrect. In a sense, it is almost like the DRAM supply is fixed (or can only change very slowly), while DRAM demand reacts to larger macroeconomic trends, but that is only half the story. In the case of AI, it is the speculative and massive US build-out of data centers (and roughly 45% of it is in the US) that is by and large the cause of current material and skills shortages. Worse yet, half of the known global pipeline for upcoming additional hyperscale data centers is in the US, putting pressure any number of skills and material markets, including electricity, water, DRAM and other materials. Because of that, we’re in a massive demand boom, which almost certainly will be followed by a similarly-sized demand bust.

Conclusion: We Are All Paying For The AI Gold Rush

Again, there’s nothing wrong with artificial intelligence; it’s the unrestrained and uncontrolled growth of data centers that is a problem, followed by the casino-like atmosphere in which it is played out. And just like the mortgage crisis of 2008, it will be the average consumer that pays the price for all of this; the only difference is that instead of banks being bailed out, it will be tech companies and data center operators. We are already seeing signs: the large layoffs in the tech sector, followed by the rehiring of (new) people when the benefits of AI didn’t pan out as expected. AI is great technology; it is only when it is expected to solve unrealistic problems under unrealistic time frames that it becomes an issue.

A look at the UK’s $3.3B (£2.5B) program, STEP, and how his agenda could reshape delivery.

The Fusion Report it typically focuses largely on the on technical aspects of commercial fusion energy, rather than on the political side of it. While people in the US government talk about fusion energy policies, the actual impacts of even federal government policies are modest at best. In many other Western countries, the opposite is actually true.

Comparison: Starmer’s Fusion Energy Policy vs Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer share Labour’s overall commitment to clean energy and net zero, but differ more in emphasis and approach than in headline goals, and neither has a distinct, well‑developed public position on fusion specifically. Starmer’s energy rhetoric has centered on making the UK a “clean energy superpower”, whereas Burnham talks more about public control, re‑industrialization and delivery on the ground, which would shape how any future fusion program is funded and governed.

Under Starmer, Labour’s energy strategy has focused on accelerating renewables and nuclear within a nationally driven framework, underpinned by the Energy Independence Bill and the “clean power by 2030” pledge. This implies support for advanced nuclear technologies, within which fusion is usually grouped as a long‑term research priority rather than a near‑term power source, but Starmer has framed this largely in terms of climate targets and global leadership rather than industrial strategy. Burnham, by contrast, has signaled a more interventionist and decentralized energy model, arguing for greater public control over utilities such as energy and water and for a ten‑year mission of reindustrialization in sectors including energy. In practice, this approach could mean Burnham treating fusion primarily as a tool for regional manufacturing, jobs and public‑led infrastructure rather than just a climate technology, even though his publicly stated positions so far focus on ownership, North Sea drilling, and pricing rather than commercial fusion energy itself.

Does This Mean a Retrenchment of the UK’s Fusion Energy Goals?

First of all, let’s explore Keir Starmer’s achievements and goals in commercializing fusion energy. As Prime Minister, he co-created the Technology Prosperity Deal with US President Trump, which explicitly commits the UK and US to coordinate fusion energy research and development, including using artificial intelligence and harmonizing pro‑innovation policies to enable commercial fusion technologies. This kind of alignment on regulation, licensing approaches, and joint R&D funding creates a more predictable environment for private and public fusion projects to advance, even though it does not itself constitute a technical milestone. In a broader sense, this is the best that one can probably hope for from Trump’s administration: basically staying out of the way.

Domestically, Starmer’s broader nuclear and clean‑energy push has also indirectly supported fusion by framing it as part of a “golden age of nuclear” and a wider clean‑technology strategy aimed at industrial renewal and energy security. His government’s emphasis on large‑scale investment in advanced nuclear, skills (such as PhD programs and apprenticeships), and long‑term infrastructure makes it easier for flagship fusion programs like the UK’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project to secure partners and funding in a more favorable policy climate. While Starmer has not personally led a specific fusion experiment or project, his role has been to embed fusion within a strategic framework of clean growth, technology cooperation with allies, and expanded nuclear investment that gives the sector political backing and clearer pathways to commercialization.

A Burnham government is not expected to retrench UK’s stated fusion energy commercialization goals, but rather change the way they are pursued by pushing them through a lens of devolution, public control, and industrial renewal. This would likely include (broadly) keep Labour’s existing clean‑energy and nuclear framework – within which fusion sits as a long‑term strategic technology – while “dragging” policy towards more interventionist, regionally driven delivery rather than a Whitehall‑centric model. His Manchester‑inspired “Manchesterism” agenda, with ideas such as a “No.10 North” (a ‘northern branch’ of 10 Downing Street, the UK Prime Minister’s residence), and a mission of reindustrializing left‑behind regions, suggests he would treat fusion mainly as part of a wider plan for good jobs, skills and manufacturing capacity in areas outside the South East, potentially reshaping where fusion facilities, supply chains and research clusters are located. And because Burnham is committed to greater public control over utilities like energy, but within existing fiscal rules, his impact on fusion is likely to be about governance and ownership structures – for example stronger public or community stakes in fusion projects and more explicit links to regional development – rather than changing the headline national targets for fusion deployment themselves.

Burnham As PM: A More Localized Flavor for The Fusion Industry

it is important to remember that the UK has today one of the largest publicly-funded programs for fusion energy commercialization, with an investment of $3.3B US (£2.5B UK) between 2026 and 2030. This includes investments in:

• STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production): UK Fusion Energy Ltd is allocating £1.3 billion to design and build a prototype power plant at the former West Burton coal power station in Nottinghamshire, with the aim to demonstrate net electricity generation by the 2040s.

• National Fusion Laboratory: Situated at the Culham Campus in Oxfordshire, this is a massive hub for R&D infrastructure, robotics, materials testing, and tritium handling.

• AI & Digital Twins: As part of a £125 million AI growth zone at Culham, the UK launched ‘Sunrise’, a dedicated 1.4MW AI supercomputer. It is expected to deliver up to 6.76 exaflops of AI modeling to fast-track fusion reactor designs.

• Fusion Jobs & Supply Chain: The program dedicates £50 million strictly to skills training, aiming to prepare 2,000 experts for the fusion industry by 2030.

While it is too early to say what the changes specifically might be, it is not unforeseeable that they could include moving some of these programs further away from southern England (though the STEP program is located fairly close to Manchester in central England). Keep an eye on The Fusion Report for more UK fusion energy news as it develops.

Things You Gotta Know

Wendelstein 7-X Launches a €6 Million Project to Build the World’s Most Powerful Fusion Microwave Heating System
The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is developing 2-megawatt gyrotrons to upgrade plasma heating on Wendelstein 7-X, the world’s largest stellarator. They would replace the 11 gyrotrons now in service, which top out at 1.3 megawatts, across the machine’s 12 heating positions. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research is backing the HiPMiB project with €6 million, with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of Stuttgart, and Thales as partners on a three-year timeline the project manager calls very ambitious.

US Department of Energy Selects 278 Genesis Mission Projects, Including Commercial Fusion, to Aim AI at Scientific Discovery
The U.S. Department of Energy has selected 278 projects for award negotiations under its Genesis Mission, the AI-driven research initiative led by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, with commercial fusion among the target areas alongside nuclear energy, critical minerals, and chip design. DOE calls it the largest response to a funding opportunity in the department’s history. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory will lead a project building an AI operator for electron cyclotron heating, working with Rice University, the Naval Research Laboratory, Brookhaven, and Sophelio.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Rutherford Energy Ventures Launch FULCRA to Build Shared Fusion Testbed Infrastructure
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Rutherford Energy Ventures are developing the Fusion Upscaled Leveraged Consortia for Rapid Acceleration, or FULCRA, a public-private framework for shared fusion testbed infrastructure anchored at ORNL. REV is a fusion-focused venture fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded by MIT professors Dennis G. Whyte and Andrew Lo. The 18-month effort runs in two phases: the first nine months assess ORNL’s fusion capabilities across three technology domains, then the partners develop a technical blueprint, financial framework, and operating model for a pilot Fulcrum facility to validate commercial fusion components.

The Fusion Industry Association Reports a Record $4.48 Billion Raised in a Single Year Across 56 Companies
The Fusion Industry Association’s annual report puts private fusion fundraising at $4.48 billion over the past year, the industry’s highest annual total and part of a six-year cumulative $14.24 billion across the 56 companies surveyed. FIA chief executive Andrew Holland said the report shows how far fusion has come, from being defined by national labs to being dominated by private fusion investment. Seventy-one percent of respondents expect fusion plants to be delivering electricity to the grid in the 2030s.

It’s always fun when you get to cover funding raises here at The Fusion Report; after all, you can’t build fusion machines (especially pre-production commercial fusion machines) without significant amounts of capital. And Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announcement today of a $1B raise (bringing the total amount raised to nearly $4B) is a significant amount of capital. In historic terms for fusion energy capital raises, it’s arguably the second largest capital raise after CFS’ own $1.8 billion raise in late 2021. It also means CFS has raised roughly 30% of all fusion energy capital across the industry.

Unfortunately, $1B is not enough to fully fund their Affordable Robust Compact (ARC) pre-production fusion machine. In fact it’s questionable whether their $4B in total funding would be enough to pay for the ARC (hence the statement in the title of this may only be a down payment), which means more fundraising is on the table for CFS. And that’s why they hired a new chief financial officer (CFO), Lorence Kim. Lorence was previously the CFO of Moderna (the pharma company which fabricated the RNA COVID vaccine), and the co-founder/advisory partner of Ascenta Capital. The other positive for CFS is that most of the funding that they raised for this $1B round was actually institutional funding rather than venture capital (VC) funding, which likely means more could be raised as needed. The press release of the funding raise is here.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Press Release

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Raises Another $1 Billion, Bringing Total Capital Raised to $4 Billion

• The $1 billion is the largest single funding round among fusion energy companies since CFS’ $1.8 billion round in 2021.

• The capital brings the total invested in CFS to $4 billion, cementing the company’s position as the global leader in fusion.

• Investors include significant institutional investors, such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and infrastructure and industrial corporate partners.

• The company’s practical approach to commercial fusion, which is based on decades of experience and over 150 tokamaks built to date; ongoing track record of transparent and consistent execution; and commitment to peer-reviewed science led to the widening diversity of CFS’ investors and the maturation of its capital stack.

DEVENS, Mass. (July 30, 2026) — In another first for the fusion industry, global leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) today announced that it raised $1 billion of additional equity financing.

This capital raise is the single largest funding round among fusion energy companies worldwide since CFS announced its $1.8 billion Series B round in 2021. With this capital, and the $863 million the company raised last year, CFS has now raised a total of $4 billion. This $4 billion represents about 30 percent of the total capital raised by the fusion industry to-date, reinforcing CFS’ position as the world’s largest and leading fusion company.

“CFS is making what once was impossible into inevitable. In the 2030s, we will put commercial fusion on the grid. We have the science that works and the proven execution that’s consistently validated by the market. We regularly welcome investors from around the world to our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts, where they see real and tangible progress as we ready support systems and finalize the assembly of SPARC,” said Bob Mumgaard, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder. “In unlocking commercial fusion energy, we’re on a path to make an impact at a civilizational level.”

CFS’ global network of private investors expanded with the addition of a growing number of institutional investors, including pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure investors, and industrial corporate partners. This widening diversity and maturation of CFS’ capital stack reflects the real evidence investors see in the assembly of SPARC and parallel development of its ARC power plant. In this concrete progress, investors see that CFS is maturing and have expressed trust in CFS’ focused approach to commercializing fusion.

CFS will use the funds raised to further accelerate its progress to commercialization. In parallel to completing the assembly of its SPARC fusion demonstration machine, CFS continues to move forward with development of the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, called ARC, at the company’s Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

Having become the first fusion company to submit an application to PJM Interconnection, the largest wholesale electricity market in the U.S., CFS is on track to put power on the grid in the early 2030s, bolstered by strategic partnerships with Dominion Energy as well as Google and Eni, two investors in CFS that also signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) to buy more than half the power the plant will produce.

Conclusion: Why This Funding Round Is Important

Hats off to CFS – they (yet again) showed an ability to raise huge amounts of money in a market that is not necessarily friendly. That said, their work is far from done. Typically, funding the billions of dollars required to build an electrical power plant today involves project finance, corporate finance, public-private partnerships, government loans, and power purchase agreements (PPAs). The challenge that confronts commercial fusion energy is that without a successfully-demonstrated approach, many of these funding methods become problematic and risky. That is why the hiring of Lorence Kim by CFS is so important – at Moderna he raised $4.4B to build the company’s mRNA technology, a risky bet in itself that worked out quite well. That is not to say the risks are done for CFS – they still have a long way to go before they reach the finish line, which is better off than most of the other fusion companies.

The Fusion Report has spent a fair amount of ink (OK, digital ink) on the various relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and fusion energy, from how AI can speed up progress on fusion energy to how AI’s domination of the venture capital (VC) market negatively impacts investments in commercial fusion energy development. However, the potential value of quantum computing to benefit commercial fusion energy efforts is more straightforward. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, and Michigan State University have recently utilized quantum supercomputing to investigate different molecular configurations of FLiBe, a molten salt of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride, which is a prime candidate for use in tritium breeding blankets during fusion reactions.

Another area of technology not involving AI is that of high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet design. In the case of Thea Energy, their system utilizes pixel-like arrays of ‘programmable’ magnets to sculpt complex magnetic fields for use in stellarators and other applications. Recently, Thea was awarded $20M by the US Department of Energy ARPA-E Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy Technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program, which funds critical supply chain capabilities. We will cover both of these in this article.

Primer: The Difference Between AI and Quantum Computing

Quantum computing and AI are different in both purpose and foundation; quantum computing is a computing paradigm built on quantum mechanics to tackle certain complex calculations, while AI is a field focused on making machines learn from data and perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. In simple terms, quantum computing is about how information is processed, and AI is about what machines can do with that information. Quantum computing is most promising for problems like simulation, optimization, and cryptography, whereas AI is widely used for pattern recognition, predictions, automation, and decision-making in areas like chatbots, recommendation systems, and robotics. The two can work together, but they are not the same thing: quantum computing is mainly hardware and physics-driven, while AI is mainly software and data-driven.

Quantum computing can be better suited than artificial intelligence for some fusion problems because fusion research often hinges on simulating extremely complex physics, especially plasma behavior and quantum-scale interactions. Those simulations can become too difficult for classical computers, and quantum computing is being explored as a way to represent and evolve those systems more naturally. Artificial intelligence is still very useful in fusion, but it plays a different role: it is better at finding patterns, optimizing operations, and helping analyze data than at directly simulating the complex underlying physics of fusion energy. In that sense, AI does not result in “transformative scientific discovery”, as was stated in the recent DoE press release; rather, AI provides meaning to data which is discovered through targeted experimentation.

Interestingly, the announcement of using quantum computing to solve the tritium breeding problem was contrasted by the US Department of Energy (DoE) awards totaling of $800M in committed partner support through the Genesis Mission Consortium to further integrate AI with scientific research. These were announced last week at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, DC, one award which was to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M) to integrate AI workflows into their work on a fusion breeding blanket. So it seems that both will be approaches that will be used to solve the tritium breeding issue, though quantum community seems to have the lead in that race…

Quantum Computing and Fusion Energy Physics

The physics of fusion energy involves the quantum mechanical behavior of atoms, particularly the nucleus of deuterium and tritium in D-T fusion reactions, though quantum computing is equally applicable to other types of fusion fuels). Quantum computing exactly simulates the relationship between these nuclei, while AI is limited to identifying relationships based on physics that are assumed to be correct. Nailing the correct configuration of the FLiBe molecules, which has at least nine known configurations, is critical to designing the thermal blanket that absorbs neutrons and changes their energy from inertia to thermal energy (the thermal blanket is symbolized by the silver layer in the illustration above).

That thermal blanket is also critical for breeding tritium, which is naturally very rare on Earth and has a half-life of 12.32 years. The tritium is bred from the lithium in the FLiBe, while the beryllium multiplies the number of neutrons produced, resulting in a breeding ratio of 1.1 to 1; i.e., 1.1 neutrons (and hence tritium ions) are produced from the fusion of each deuterium and tritium nuclei. Finally, the FLiBe cools the first wall which provides the shielding of the rest of the fusion machine from the plasma chamber. Both the tritium breeding and the radiative cooling are highly complex mechanisms that is not necessarily well understood, which is also where quantum computing comes in. By predicting the ground-state energies of the nine different FLiBe molecule configurations, it is significantly more likely the combination of FLiBe molecules that works under fusion’s extremely high temperatures and high magnetic fields will be “discovered”.

Press Release: Thea Energy Manufactures Modular HTS Magnets

Thea Energy, Inc., a technology company advancing the stellarator for the commercialization of an abundant source of baseload fusion power, today announced the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) has recently selected the Company for a $20 million award as part of the Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program.

With this funding, Thea Energy is scaling its manufacturing and test capabilities to support the first domestic production line of modular high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. The Company’s core magnet technologies are being actively scaled across the fusion landscape as well as adjacent technology sectors that utilize compact, efficient, high-performance HTS magnet systems. Over the past two years, Thea Energy has developed its foundational HTS magnet technologies. The Company has also validated the performance of these magnets and the manufacturing technologies that prime them for high-volume, efficient production.

“Our magnets are designed to be mass manufactured and in just a couple of years, we’ve iterated these coils over a hundred times, finalized the design, and derisked this core technology, positioning us for this next phase – manufacturing scale up,” said Brian Berzin, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Thea Energy. “We will utilize approximately 300 of these planar shaping coils in our first large-scale integrated stellarator system, ‘Eos’. Expanding our capabilities and the use of our superconducting magnets across the fusion industry will accelerate commercialization of various system architectures. Ultimately, this same high-performance technology is also primed to revolutionize adjacent industries beyond fusion. SCALEUP allows us to expand this business with our initial partners and customers interested in powerful HTS magnets produced via scalable, efficient processes.”

Following a competitive review, awardees were chosen based on technical maturity and commercial scalability of key innovations that strengthen domestic energy supply chains. SCALEUP focuses on the next generation of energy and ways to accelerate technologies from portfolio toward market adoption. The SCALEUP program provides funding to previous ARPA-E awardees, including Thea Energy as a spin-out of Princeton University and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Thea Energy’s planar coil technology was developed as part of the ARPA-E Breakthroughs Enabling Thermonuclear-fusion Energy (BETHE) program. For more details on the SCALEUP program and full list of awardees, visit: arpa-e.energy.gov

Dr. Dave Nye, SCALEUP Federal Lead, added, “ARPA-E’s mission is to develop technologies that deliver affordable, reliable, secure energy for all Americans. Thea Energy has validated its magnets and outlined a clear strategy to scale the consistent, high-yield fabrication of these coils. Modular, factory-built magnet components will enable the rapidly growing fusion power industry to create power at unprecedented scale.”

This award comes on the heels of Thea Energy’s $100 million Series B capital raise, HTS magnet validation campaign, and “Helios” power plant design review, representing a series of milestones that establish Thea Energy as a leader in commercial fusion.

Conclusion: Breeder Blankets and Smart HTS Magnets

Breeder blankets are just one area where fusion can be helped significantly by quantum computing. Improving inertial fusion energy beam and target geometries, magnetic fusion energy field geometries, stellarator magnet configurations, and program magnetic fields are just a few areas where quantum computing could be helpful. While artificial intelligence is helpful in spotting patterns that would otherwise stay obscure, it is less helpful in areas where changing the properties of a fusion machine requires changing the physical geometry of the machine, which generally involves both time, money, and lost opportunity costs; these are problems where quantum computing can help significantly. And it is just the kind of application where smart magnets can work best.

The Fusion Report has covered the efforts of numerous companies to achieve commercial fusion energy; in most cases the engineering and scientific approaches are the same, even if the fusion technologies utilized differ. Typically, companies build test systems using a subset of the technologies they are trying to verify, run the experiment, and then see if the results are what they expected. If they are, they build the next step of the experiment and try to run it; if not they change their approach slightly and try to re-verify the new approach. Regardless of the fusion technology being perfected, the approach is the same, as is the goal: finding out how to commercialize fusion energy.

The other thing that is the same, at least for fusion, is the need for capital. Even for companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), which has raised nearly $3B in funds, you can never have too much money given that the expected cost for a working prototype fusion energy power plant is in the range of $3B to $10B, not counting non-recurring engineering (NRE) charges for prototyping, or the cost of any missteps.

That’s why this step from Barclays to get involved in funding is so important: it puts real cash behind commercial fusion energy deployment. With total assets of £‎1.54T and net income of £7.2B, Barclays consistently ranks as one of the top five banks in Europe. Additionally, today we bring to you the fusion energy commercialization roadmap for Inertia, one of the leading Inertial fusion energy (IFE) companies. While Inertia is new to the game, the founders of the company were some of the chief innovators at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF), the only facility so far that has achieved Q>1. But first, let’s cover the Barclays press release.

Barclays supports the development of commercial fusion power in the UK (July 21, 2026)

Barclays today announces it is supporting the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium, a private sector-led collaboration established to advance the development of a commercial fusion power plant project in the UK.

Barclays provides the global fusion with its expertise in energy, infrastructure, project finance, capital markets and commercial frameworks, and will bring that experience to this consortium. Fusion is a complementary technology alongside nuclear fission, including gigawatt-scale, small modular reactors and next-generation reactor technologies.

The UK Infinity Fusion Consortium was established in May 2026 by Type One Energy, Tokamak Energy and AECOM to help develop the UK’s fusion value chain and attract the investment needed to deliver a commercial fusion power plant. It is complementary to the UK Government’s Fusion Strategy and the STEP programme, the Government’s flagship fusion project. Barclays and the consortium companies are members of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, founded by His Majesty King Charles III to accelerate the transition to a sustainable economy.

C.S. Venkatakrishnan, Group Chief Executive at Barclays, said: “Fusion has the potential to become an important part of a secure, resilient and low-carbon energy system. Barclays is pleased to work with fusion related companies and to support the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium as part of our broader engagement with clients and partners working to advance sustainable innovation, including through the Sustainable Markets Initiative. We look forward to continuing to share our sector perspective and experience with fusion groups in the UK as the consortium helps build momentum behind the UK’s fusion ecosystem and the Government’s advanced energy ambitions.”

Chris Mowry, Chief Executive Officer, Type One Energy, said: “The UK Infinity Fusion Consortium brings together technology, engineering and project delivery capabilities that can help accelerate a private sector-led pathway for fusion commercialisation in the UK. Barclays’ support, including its financial markets and infrastructure expertise, will be valuable as the consortium works to engage the broader UK value chain, attract private capital and align with the UK Government’s fusion ambitions.”

Inertia’s Roadmap To Commercialize Inertial Fusion Energy

While Inertia is one of the newer companies in the commercial fusion industry (they were publicly launched less than a year ago in August of 2025), they have certainly been busy. We have covered them several times, including an interview with their CTO and co-founder Mike Dunne roughly four months ago, where he laid out their priorities to commercialize fusion energy. While we will not go over the specific details of their Phase 1 Commercial Roadmap (the link to their roadmap is here), we will include their “Top 10 List” to accomplish during Phase 1 (Component Development) of their four-phase program (BTW, Phase 2- Subsystem Integration; Phase 3 – End-to-End Integration; Phase 4 – Deployment):

1) Increase yield to >25x. The hardest part of Laser Indirect Drive fusion is done: proving it’s possible to achieve ignition. This milestone took the US government 60+ years and more than $30B.¹ Currently, the target used at NIF generates over 8 MJ of energy per shot. That’s an impressive 4x yield against the 2 MJ that goes in. But for commercial scale, we need to generate enough heat energy from each target shot to power the laser and put a meaningful amount on the grid, all after lossy conversion from heat to electricity. Despite that, our plant’s initial operation requires only 25x target yield to generate 250MW of grid electricity.² We will demonstrate that we can scale up our target to generate an initial >25x gain for a total of >250 MJ of energy per shot. We will demonstrate this by executing a “Virtual NIF Shot” (referencing the same ICF design codes that LLNL uses to achieve ignition), and demonstrate at the highest possible fidelity that our design, including mass-manufactured targets, preserves the proven physics while scaling to commercially relevant gain.

2) Make laser diodes cheap. The laser at the NIF is impressively large (both in energy and in physical size), but it is very inefficient. It loses ~99.5% of the electricity it draws from the grid, emitting only ~0.5% of that energy as laser light onto the target. Without higher efficiency, generating commercial energy is impossible. While the NIF laser is an engineering marvel, it surprises most people to learn that it is literally powered by gas-filled vacuum tubes (called flash lamps). The key to making a laser that is more powerful, more energetic, more efficient, and more compact is the same transition that’s made every major technology smaller, more powerful, and more efficient: moving from vacuum tubes to semiconductors. Laser diodes are the answer, but as of today, they’re considered cost-prohibitive. That’s because the market for our particular variety of high-power, frequency-tuned laser diodes is currently tiny. But we’re going to change that; the demand for just one of our commercial power plants will need 500 years’ worth of today’s global supply! That means we need to scale up production to meet our anticipated demand. We will (with our industry partners) demonstrate that we can scale up high power laser diode production by several orders of magnitude, and bring the cost down by about 50x from today’s prices. ³

3) Make an efficient and high repetition-rate laser amplifier. The NIF laser is operable for roughly one shot per day, and requires substantial maintenance and cool-down time between shots. For commercial energy, our diode-pumped laser must operate continuously at 10 Hz. Migrating from flash lamps to laser diodes helps enable high repetition rates, but there are many design tradeoffs needed to make the amplifier performant and efficient. We are building a ¼ scale amplifier test stand, demonstrating high-efficiency coupling of diode laser light to the gain medium, while cooling it for continuous operation at 10 shots per second.

4) Make laser optics durable. At Inertia, we will build a laser that is the world’s most energetic (most energy per shot) and the world’s highest average power (100 MW continuous operation). One of the challenges in high-power lasers is finding the sweet spot between making optics large enough to handle all that energy, but small enough to manufacture and handle at scale. The NIF (which was built with optics that were state-of-the-art at the time) intentionally operates above its damage threshold. It was a conscious tradeoff in costs versus longevity—one that won’t work for continuous commercial operation. We will work with industry partners at our in-house optics lab to demonstrate that state-of-the-art optics are durable and economical enough to operate at plant scale.

5) Industrialize carbon shell manufacturing. The fuel targets used by the NIF are made of four main parts: (1) an outer canister (called a hohlraum), (2) a high-density carbon (HDC) shell, (3) frozen deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel inside the shell, and (4) several thin-film tents that hold the shell in place in the hohlraum and seal the hohlraum. In the process of commercialization, we are using this proven design—changing as little as possible—as we cost-effectively scale up manufacturing. Currently at the NIF, these HDC shells take several months to grow and polish in small batches via Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). This is a well-known process in manufacturing (widely used in the semiconductor industry), but more typically applied on flat surfaces instead of the round sphere of our target. We are demonstrating that we can scale up fabrication and reduce the cost of these shells through larger batches and shorter cycle times—all while maintaining the required tolerances calibrated on NIF data. We will demonstrate that a scalable CVD process can be applied to meet these properties.

6) Track and hit the targets. At the NIF, the fuel targets are shot one at a time, stationary in the chamber, inserted and aligned using a precision robotic positioning system with detailed manual alignment by a team of technicians. For commercialization, we won’t shoot a single target at a time; we’ll be shooting targets at roughly 10 Hz (10 times per second). This means injecting the target into the chamber at a high velocity and hitting it on the fly with laser beams. (This is similar to how ASML’s EUV lithography system hits injected tin droplets with a laser at 50 kHz.) While this may sound hard, photons are actually very fast compared to matter! But this is a control system that needs to be developed. We will demonstrate that we can track and engage a target moving at the required speed of injection and with the required precision to achieve ignition.

7) Make durable, cheap thin film tents. The carbon shell of a fusion target is held in place by thin films. At the NIF, these films are very thin to ensure they don’t interfere with the fuel implosion. But unlike NIF’s stationary targets, we’ll be injecting the targets at 10 Hz at a high velocity into the chamber. The thin films must be stronger to survive this injection and to endure the high temperature of the fusion chamber. We will demonstrate that economical films exist that are both thin enough to enable ignition and gain, and also strong enough to survive the thermo-mechanical insults ⁴ of injection.

8) Make target assembly scalable. As mentioned, the NIF targets consist of just four parts. But they must be assembled into a fusion target, including the step of fueling the target with DT fuel. At the NIF, where only a handful of ignition-quality targets are assembled and shot per year, they can be fueled and sealed manually. To achieve commercial scale, we must automate the target assembly. We will demonstrate that a scalable, batch assembly process exists to fill and seal the fusion targets.

9) Fuel targets quickly. At the NIF, fueling the targets is a slow process. It often takes days—and sometimes more than a week—to grow a single pristine DT crystal on the inside of the HDC shell. For commercialization, we need to fuel more quickly and in large batches. That is for efficiency, and also ensures that the amount of tritium in our fueling stage at any one point in time is kept to an acceptable regulatory level. We will demonstrate that a method exists to quickly fuel targets with high-enough ice quality to produce high fusion energy in large batches while keeping low tritium inventory.

10) Integrate everything for a working fusion power plant. The point of commercialization is to eventually produce economical energy (process heat and/or electricity). One of the hard problems in designing a fusion plant is long-term survival of the walls that form the fusion chamber. Inertia’s baseline design uses a simple gas-armored first wall to absorb the bulk of the insult, coupled with low-cost, easily replaced solid walls. This approach doesn’t require a breakthrough in materials science, and crucially, enables low fusion gain, relaxing the requirements on the physics performance. But tradeoffs remain; the larger the chamber, the longer the walls last but the more expensive it is to build. With more beamlines, plant operations become easier, but the plant will breed less tritium. We need to find the optimal solution within the set of tradeoffs. We will demonstrate a self-consistent plant design that utilizes demonstrated physics and incorporates our laser design decisions, target survival decisions, and fuel needs of a sustainable plant.

Conclusion: Why These Stories Are Important for Fusion Energy

The biggest problem in fusion is something that fusion companies don’t control: raising capital to fund a pipeline of commercial fusion energy power plants, starting with the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant to prove the concept. Fusion energy could provide a significant amount of energy without the baggage of fossil fuel or nuclear fission energy sources. As Group Chief Executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan puts it, “Fusion has the potential to become an important part of a secure, resilient and low-carbon energy system. Barclays is pleased to support the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium as part of their efforts to advance sustainable innovation.” To say that a reliable source of capital is valuable in this effort is an understatement, and it is great that Barclays is one of the first banks to put their money behind their mouth.

The second biggest problem in fusion is picking the right direction. Fortunately, in that approach we get to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, who have shown us a lot of what works and what doesn’t, and what likely needs to be done to finish the job. This is especially true for IFE, which LLNL NIF has blazed a trail on how to exceed Q>1 (multiple times!). While LID IFE is not the only approach possible to commercialize fusion energy, it is one of the simpler ones – it is in a way a “brute force” method. In a way, it is a true engineering problem (or problems), rather than a physics problem, which is good for Inertia. In some ways, they have done a better job than anyone else in laying out exactly what their priorities are going forward, which certainly helps. Now as they say, it’s simply a small matter of execution…

The Fusion Report has covered the architecture of Pacific Fusion’s pulser-based inertial fusion system, which utilizes an array of impedance-matched Marx generators (IMGs) to produce a high-current, high-voltage beam directed towards the fusion target. A full power system will utilize 156 pulsars, each one three times the length of the one shown above. But prior to building a full-scale system, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) and Pacific Fusion decided to build a one-third scale pulser module and test its output capabilities. This article is about the test of the 1/3rd scale pulser, and the results of those tests.

Pacific Fusion and LLNL’s Pulser Concept

For those of you who are not familiar with Pacific Fusion’s pulser concept, it is a quintessential inertial fusion approach, but one that does not use lasers. Like the Sandia Z-Machine, it utilizes massive electrical currents to generate extreme pressures on a fuel target, resulting in fusion. The currents are produced by cascading arrays of Impedance-matched Marx Generators (IMGs), with the arrays forming 156 “pulsers”.

Each pulser consists of 32 circular stages, with each stage having 10 “bricks”; a brick consists of two matched capacitors and a high-speed gas discharge switch. The stages produce a travelling electromagnetic wave in the electromagnetic media in the center of the stages that make up each pulser. The pulsers are configured on three rings by 52 rows around the fusion chamber, where the 156 beams converge to implode the target.

Like all inertial fusion energy (IFE) system, Pacific Fusion’s machine is pulsed rather than continuous in operation. Like most IFE systems, it has a nominal pulse repetition rate of roughly 1 Hz (one pulse per second), which means that the life of each “brick” is measured by the number of “shots” that it can sustain before being replaced. With a nominal shot rate of 1 Hz, that means that a capacitor array with a lifetime of one year would have to sustain roughly 31.5 million shots before failure. Testing whether a scaled-down pulser could operate for 3,000 consecutive shots (equivalent to 1 hour of continuous operation) was the purpose of this test.

The Press Release: Lawrence Livermore-Pacific Fusion collaboration breaks new record to advance America’s high-gain fusion capability

LLNL pulsed-power prototype surpasses 3,000 shots through collaboration with Pacific Fusion, demonstrating the maturity of a key U.S. capability and the value of government-industry partnership.

FREMONT, Calif. (July 16th) — Pacific Fusion today announced that a pulsed-power prototype designed and built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has surpassed 3,000 shots under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Pacific Fusion, marking a key milestone in the development of high-gain fusion and a practical example of government-industry partnership at work.

The prototype, called Sirius, is an impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG), which is a new pulsed-power architecture designed to deliver short, powerful electrical pulses efficiently and repeatedly. It is the same core technology Pacific Fusion is now scaling for its own fusion system. The 3,000-shot campaign shows how technology first developed at a national laboratory can be validated through repeated testing and scaled quickly by industry to support national needs.

That matters because the United States urgently needs new sources of affordable, reliable electricity to power surging demand for AI and electrification, as well as new high-yield experimental capabilities for stockpile stewardship. Pacific Fusion is building rapidly to support both, developing a modular pulser platform to produce abundant, affordable energy and advance the high-energy-density science essential to national security.

“This is a concrete example of what government-industry collaboration can deliver when both sides are committed,” said Keith LeChien, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Pacific Fusion. “We are taking innovation from the lab and moving quickly to build and scale systems that serve America’s needs. The result is a credible shot at high-yield, high-gain fusion this decade — and a path to turning U.S. scientific leadership into a critical capability that will keep the U.S. ahead of China.”

Pulsed power works by taking electricity from the wall plug, storing it briefly, and releasing it in an enormous burst — like a lightning bolt — in about 100 nanoseconds. For fusion energy, that burst can create the extreme conditions needed to compress fuel and release energy. The same pulser technology can also create extreme states of matter for high-energy-density science experiments, with applications ranging from materials testing, radioisotope production and national security.

The IMG was co-invented by LeChien and LLNL researcher Bill Stygar as a more direct way to deliver a fast, efficient electrical pulse. Conventional pulsed-power machines, called Marx generators, stack voltages. By contrast, the IMG stacks waves using a pulser by charging capacitors in parallel and then discharging them in a single step, through carefully timed stages on a common transmission line. The pulse is then transmitted directly to the target. In the Sirius campaign, each pulse of the four-stage prototype delivered 60 gigawatts to a resistive load in a 100-nanosecond pulse, with 95% energy efficiency.

Researchers at LLNL say the appeal of the IMG approach is its relative simplicity. “Conventional pulsed-power machines often require several stages of pulse compression, which can add complexity, maintenance demands and safety considerations,” said Kumar Raman, LLNL project manager in a LLNL blog.

The 3000-shot campaign supported through the Pacific Fusion CRADA focused on component lifetime and reliability – real experimental data that’s proven invaluable to understanding how components behave over many repeated shots.

It’s data that Pacific Fusion has used to design, build and scale its own pulsed-power technology at extraordinary speed. In June, the company announced the completion and validation of a pulsed-power prototype that expanded the Sirius platform by roughly 11x – delivering ~440 GW of peak output power and ~1.1 MV peak voltage in 80 nanoseconds – the highest-power, single-step pulsed-power driver ever demonstrated. Pacific Fusion is now working to demonstrate a system that’s roughly 40x the size of Sirius.

Pacific Fusion has raised more than $1 billion in private capital and is working to achieve net facility gain by 2030. Later this summer, Pacific Fusion will break ground on the world’s largest high-gain, high-yield facility called the Demonstration System in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The system is designed to produce fusion bursts exceeding 100 megajoules – or more energy output than the total stored energy used to drive the reaction, making it the first and only net facility gain fusion facility in the world.

“China is moving aggressively to build the next generation of fusion infrastructure, pouring billions into new facilities,” LeChien said. “The U.S. invented many of the breakthroughs that made this moment possible here and abroad, but to win we have to build. The government needs a significant coordinated investment in energy and national security fusion infrastructure, and months matter. The stakes could not be higher.”

Conclusion: A Great Demonstration, But Still a First Step

This was clearly an important first step towards a working production system. However, a production pulser would need to be able to operate for at least a year (~31.5M shots), roughly 10,000 times the number demonstrated here. Additionally, Pacific Fusion’s targets consists of frozen deuterium and tritium (D-T) fuel, and while D-T fusion is energetically favorable (it requires the lowest temperature of any Earth-bound fusion reaction), it has several drawbacks, including the need to be able to sustain continuous high-energy neutron damage, and to breed tritium. Many believe that these challenges are surmountable given time (all IFE systems have these challenges); now the real question is how much time is needed to do so…