Fusion


General Atomics marks completion of ITER’s superconducting fusion magnet

September 4, 2025, 3:03PMNuclear News
The sixth ITER central solenoid module is prepared to be shipped to France. (Photo: General Atomics)

General Atomics last week celebrated the completion of the central solenoid modules for the ITER reactor being built in southern France. Designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power, the ITER tokamak will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility.

Watch as solid hydrogen is extruded to feed German stellarator

August 29, 2025, 12:02PMNuclear News
A plastic pellet replica alongside a dime and the tool that cuts each pellet from a solid hydrogen filament. (Photo: Larry Baylor/ORNL)

In May, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Greifswald, Germany, concluded an experimental campaign by sustaining a plasma with a high triple product for 43 seconds. The machine far surpassed its own previous performance with a value that the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) says “exceeds previous tokamak records for long plasma durations”—in part because of a fuel pellet injection system developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Watch ORNL’s video of that fuel pellet injection system—in use since September 2024—as it extrudes a column of frozen hydrogen and then cuts individual 3.2-millimeter-long pellets. The process, which takes just half a millisecond, was captured in slow motion by ORNL engineer Steve Meitner.

Start-up looks to commercialize inertial fusion energy

August 28, 2025, 3:01PMNuclear News

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.

General Atomics makes $20M investment in Canadian fusion venture

August 28, 2025, 7:07AMNuclear News
UNITY-2 fuel cycle test facility. (Image: FFC)

San Diego, Calif.–based General Atomics has announced a $20 million, 10-year strategic investment in Canada’s Fusion Fuel Cycles Inc. (FFC), a joint venture between Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and Japan’s Kyoto Fusioneering. The investment will help accelerate the development of FFC’s flagship project, the Unique Integrated Testing Facility (UNITY-2), a deuterium-tritium fuel cycle test facility located at CNL’s Chalk River Laboratories.

University adds electrochemical boost in pursuit of cold fusion

August 25, 2025, 7:01AMNuclear News
Thunderbird, the University of British Columbia’s benchtop-scale particle accelerator and electrochemical reactor. (Photo: UBC)

Researchers at the University of British Columbia seeking the energy grail of cold fusion—alias lattice confinement fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR)— used electrochemistry to load extra deuterium ions into a metal lattice and found a “modest” performance boost of 15 percent, compared with experiments without the electrochemical loading technique, according to the university.

Faster fusion with AI?

August 15, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News
An artist’s interpretation of the inside of a fusion vessel, where some of the inner surfaces are directly exposed to the plasma. Some regions lie in the “magnetic shadow” of other components and are therefore magnetically shielded from the intense heat of the plasma. (Image: Kyle Palmer/PPPL Communications Department)

The article “Finding the shadows in a fusion system faster with AI,” published by the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, details the public-private partnership among PPPL, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The partnership has led to a new artificial intelligence approach that is faster at finding what’s known as “magnetic shadows” in a fusion vessel: “safe havens protected from the intense heat of the plasma.”

Westinghouse awarded $180M ITER contract

July 3, 2025, 9:30AMNuclear News
The ITER tokamak pit with the two vacuum vessel sector modules installed. (Photo: ITER)

Westinghouse Electric Company announced that it has signed a $180 million contract with the ITER Organization for the assembly of the vacuum vessel for the fusion reactor being built in southern France. Designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power, the ITER tokamak will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility.

Google announces power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion

July 2, 2025, 8:46AMNuclear News
A visualization of the SPARC tokamak experiment. (Image: Ken Filar/PSFC Research Affiliate)

In its June 30 announcement of a new deal to purchase 200 MW from Commonwealth Fusion Systems' (CFS) first ARC fusion power plant planned for Virginia, Google called it “the largest direct corporate offtake agreement for fusion energy” ever. While Google made no mention of its plans for the power, its press release noted that clean energy is needed to reduce data center emissions.

DOE opens Milestone fusion pilot plant program to new companies and teams

June 12, 2025, 12:00PMNuclear News

Eight companies were chosen to develop fusion pilot plant designs through the Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program just over two years ago. It wasn’t until June 2024 that the DOE announced that protracted negotiations over program metrics had been concluded. Now, two years on, the original eight are “making great progress,” according to Colleen Nehl, program manager for public-private partnerships in the DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES). Nehl spoke during a June 4 webinar convened on short notice to discuss the latest fusion Milestone news: a fast-tracked opportunity for additional teams to access remaining Fiscal Year 2025 funding for the Milestone program.

Fusion energy surges in Great Lakes region

May 28, 2025, 9:32AMNuclear News

The new Great Lakes Fusion Energy Alliance wants to build a fusion energy engineering consortium in the Great Lakes region to expand the Midwestern momentum behind fusion energy development and commercialization. The ultimate goal is to build fusion energy power plants in the region, but first the nascent organization is looking to invite other stakeholders into its alliance of universities, fusion companies, and supply chain and government partners. Together, they plan to “accelerate commercialization, expand the workforce, grow the supply chain, and make fusion more economically viable and sustainable as a global center of excellence.”

Fusion Energy Week begins today

May 5, 2025, 3:01PMNuclear News

Excitement around fusion has only grown this year since the French magnetic confinement fusion tokamak known as WEST maintained a plasma for 1,337 seconds in February, toppling the 1,006-second record set by China’s EAST a few weeks prior. Investment, legislation, and new research are riding this new surge of attention, but fusion development has a long history.

Pacific Fusion: Fusing pulser innovation with General Atomics’ expertise

April 24, 2025, 12:10PMNuclear News
Concept art of Pacific Fusion’s planned demonstration system. (Image: Pacific Fusion)

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.”

Pacific Fusion predicts “1,000-fold leap” in performance, net facility gain by 2030

April 21, 2025, 9:39AMNuclear News
Pacific Fusion plans to build its demonstration system in Fremont, Calif. (Photo: Pacific Fusion)

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.”

Type One publishes design basis for its stellarator fusion pilot plant

April 1, 2025, 7:01AMNuclear News
Concept art showing Type One Energy’s Infinity One prototype stellarator inside TVA’s Bull Run fossil plant. (Photo/Image: Business Wire)

Fusion startup Type One Energy has announced the publication of a baseline physics design basis for its proposed Infinity Two stellarator fusion pilot power plant. The design basis was published in a series of seven papers in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics. According to the company, the design basis realistically considers for the first time the relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant startup, construction logistics, reliability, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience.

First Light Fusion shifts focus from power to amplify its technology and revenue

March 25, 2025, 7:01AMNuclear News
Representatives of First Light Fusion stand outside Sandia’s Z Pulsed Power Facility. (Photo: First Light Fusion)

First Light Fusion announced last week that it has set a new record for the highest quartz pressure achieved on Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine using its amplifier technology to achieve an output pressure of 3.67 terapascal (TPa)—roughly doubling the pressure the company reached in its first experiment on the machine one year ago.

WEST claims latest plasma confinement record

March 4, 2025, 9:32AMNuclear News
The WEST tokamak. (Photo: L. Godart/CEA)

The French magnetic confinement fusion tokamak known as WEST maintained a plasma in February for more than 22 minutes—1,337 seconds, to be precise—and “smashed” the previous record plasma duration for a tokamak with a 25 percent improvement, according to the CEA, which operates the machine. The previous 1,006-second record was set by China’s EAST just a few weeks prior. Records are made to be broken, but this rapid progress illustrates a collective, global increase in plasma confinement expertise, aided by tungsten in key components.

Thought experiment: What would it be like inside a tokamak?

February 27, 2025, 12:00PMANS News
Korea’s KSTAR tokamak. (Photo: Korea Institute of Fusion Energy)

The ITER organization (IO) recently published an article asking, “Have you ever wondered what it’s like inside an operating tokamak?” For speculative answers, the international nuclear fusion project turned to electrical engineer Michael Walsh, the new head of ITER’s Fusion Technology—Instrumentation & Control Division and previous head of ITER’s Diagnostics Division.

Type One Energy inks expanded fusion development deal with TVA

February 13, 2025, 7:02AMNuclear News
Concept art showing Type One Energy’s Infinity One prototype stellarator inside TVA’s Bull Run fossil plant. (Photo: Business Wire)

Type One Energy said it has entered into a cooperative agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority to jointly develop plans for a potential TVA fusion power plant project in the Tennessee Valley region using Type One Energy stellarator fusion power technology. The company said its 350-MWe fusion pilot power plant, named Infinity Two, could provide a complementary source of baseload electrical generation for the region as early as the mid-2030s.

UC San Diego joins General Atomics–led fusion collaborative

February 12, 2025, 7:02AMNuclear News
An experimental chamber that will be used by UC San Diego as part of the TINEX project. (Photo: David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering)

The University of California–San Diego has joined a new research collaborative focused on overcoming critical obstacles in developing and scaling up inertial fusion power plants. Led by San Diego-based General Atomics, the group was one of six research teams that were collectively awarded $107 million in January by the Department of Energy as part of the Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) Collaboratives.