Realta Fusion, Inertia Enterprises select HQ locations

July 16, 2026, 9:22AMNuclear News

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.

Realta Fusion makes electricity, but not through heat conversion

July 6, 2026, 7:18AMNuclear News
Close-up of Realta's direct energy converter assembly prototype. (Photo: Realta, with credit to Dmitry Yakovlev and Tucker Peterson of UW-Madison and Ty Omark of Realta)


Realta Fusion announced it has achieved direct energy conversion at the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM), powering a lightbulb using electricity extracted from charged particles emitted by the plasma.

This process, called direct energy conversion (DEC), was theorized by Richard Post, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and has been demonstrated experimentally a few times, the earliest being the “Venetian blind” converter in the 1970s.

New coating could aid development of compact fusion reactors

January 8, 2024, 12:00PMANS Nuclear Cafe
From left, engineer Jeremiah Kirch, postdoctoral researcher Mykola Ialovega, and assistant scientist Marcos Xavier Navarro-Gonzalez pose in front of the WHAM device at UW-Madison. (Photo: Mykola Ialovega)

A new type of cold spray coating, made from the metal tantalum and applied to the plasma-facing steel walls of fusion reactors, could lead to efficient, compact fusion reactors that are easy to repair and maintain, according to a study recently published in the journal Physica Scripta. The study was led by scientists and engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and involved researchers from South Korea, France, and Germany.