Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.

Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Pacific Fusion have surpassed 3,000 “shots” with Sirius, a four-stage prototype impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG) of the type that can provide pulsed power to an inertial confinement fusion machine. The team characterized this achievement as a “key milestone in the development of high-gain fusion and a practical example of government-industry partnership at work.”

Two nuclear fusion companies are setting up shop in disused industrial buildings. Realta Fusion just named a Madison, Wis., location for its “Realta Forge.” Meanwhile, last week, Inertia Enterprises announced the opening of its new headquarters in Livermore, Calif.

New calculations by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggest that changing the polarization of the National Ignition Facility’s lasers could reduce backscatter, an effect that can make an optic unusable after a single shot.

Yesterday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Inertia Enterprises announced a strategic research and development partnership to address fusion challenges including laser development, fusion target design, and target fabrication technologies on the path to a commercial power plant.

Two start-ups working to commercialize fusion energy made headlines last week. Helion Energy announced that its Polaris prototype fusion energy machine recently demonstrated measurable deuterium-tritium fusion and achieved a plasma temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Newcomer Inertia Enterprises announced that it has raised $450 million in its Series A fundraising round.

The University of California, through its Initiative for Fusion Energy, has awarded $8 million in multicampus research grants, in partnership with UC-managed national laboratories, to fund research aimed at accelerating progress toward fusion energy.

The Department of Energy announced recently it will provide more than $35 million for 42 projects to help move emerging energy technologies from DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing to the marketplace. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost-share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.

A full list of the FY2025 selections is available here.

Another start-up hoping to capitalize on progress the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has made in realizing inertial fusion energy has been launched. On August 27, San Francisco–based Inertia Enterprises, a private fusion power start-up, announced the formation of the company with the goal of commercializing fusion energy.

Pacific Fusion has a staff that knows its way around pulsers and inertial fusion, and an ongoing collaboration with General Atomics. Today, the two companies are announcing plans to test Pacific Fusion’s pulser-driven inertial fusion energy concept, with commercial fusion power as the goal.

“We are building a fusion machine and testing all equipment—including components and a pulser module—at our Pacific Fusion test center,” Pacific Fusion cofounder and chief technology officer Keith LeChien told Nuclear News. “GA’s engineering expertise remains an important part of our progress, and we expect this collaboration to continue through future phases of development.”

Inertial fusion energy (IFE) developer Pacific Fusion, based in Fremont, Calif., announced this morning that it is on target to achieve net facility gain—more fusion energy out than all energy stored in the system—with a demonstration system by 2030, and backs the claim with a technical paper published yesterday on arXiv: “Affordable, manageable, practical, and scalable (AMPS) high-yield and high-gain inertial fusion.”

With more than 40 fusion development companies announcing plans and funding, it’s hard for a newcomer to stand out, but Pacific Fusion is giving it a try. The company, based in Fremont, Calif., was founded in summer 2023 and emerged from “stealth mode” last Friday with $900 million in committed funding from investors, a team that includes people directly involved in the successful ignition experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), and a technical paper that makes a case for a pulsed magnetic fusion approach to fusion energy.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved fusion ignition at least five times, each time by directing its 192 high-powered lasers on a capsule containing a tiny, 2-millimeter target filled with hydrogen fuel. Not every shot achieves ignition, however. Tiny imperfections in the targets can mean fizzle, not fusion. But each of the targets used in successful experiments to date have something in common: they were characterized and selected by the 4Pi Integrated Metrology System, a new measurement system developed by General Atomics. Now, the team behind that system is being recognized.

GA announced last week that its Metrology Research and Development team had won the 2024 "Team of the Year" R&D 100 Professional Award from R&D World. The magazine that each year announces the R&D 100 awards that have been dubbed the “Oscars of Innovation” also selects just one “Team of the Year” and announces that award together with four other professional awards.

Lynne Degitz

Public and private sectors are actively advancing research and development and concepts to realize a path to practical, clean, safe fusion energy. New fusion performance records continue to be set around the world, including at the National Ignition Facility (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), which demonstrated fusion ignition in 2022 and 2023.

However, significant obstacles for practical fusion remain. One challenge is to create and sustain a fusion power source. That is the mission of the international ITER project and the fundamental reason ITER is so valuable to the United States and the other ITER members (China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia). Now under assembly in France, ITER is an experimental facility that will provide essential data and experience while also reducing risk for other fusion concepts. ITER will deliver unprecedented self-heated fusion performance, including fusion gain of up to 10 times greater power out of the plasma than the power into the plasma, fusion power of up to 500 megawatts, and long durations of hundreds to thousands of seconds.

The National Nuclear Security Administration has issued the fiscal year 2023 results of the performance of its managing and operating (M&O) partners in meeting the agency’s expectations.

The same high energy density that makes nuclear energy a clean and efficient source of power could make it a good alternative to defend the planet against catastrophic asteroid impacts. NASA demonstrated the world’s first planetary defense technology in September 2022 by deliberately crashing a “kinetic impactor”—a heavy, box-like spacecraft—into an asteroid. Now, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a new tool to model how a nuclear device could deflect—or even destroy—an asteroid threat to Earth in a more efficient and controlled way.

The Department of Energy recently announced that it was establishing three inertial fusion energy (IFE) hubs and funding them with a total of $42 million over four years. The leaders of the three hubs selected by competitive peer review—Colorado State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Rochester—all issued press releases touting the attributes and plans of their facilities and their research collaborators on the same day—December 7.

One year ago today, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a record shot at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) that set the world talking about the potential of fusion energy. And the buzz hasn’t stopped. Fusion energy is getting its most significant attention yet on the world stage at COP28 in Dubai, UAE, where John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, delivered a keynote address today titled “An inclusive fusion energy future,” followed by a panel discussion.

Focused Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have signed a strategic partnership project agreement that will allow LLNL—home of the National Ignition Facility (NIF)—to help the company develop and assess isochoric compression target designs for inertial fusion energy. Focused Energy announced the news on November 7.

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has published a notice of a final sitewide environmental impact statement for continued operation of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL SWEIS).

The notice was published in the Federal Register on November 3.