Fusion

Fusion energy for commercial use is a technology that is yet to be realized, but one company is already setting its sights on taking it from land to sea.

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.

Canada’s Fusion Fuel Cycles Inc. (FFC), a joint venture between Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and Japan’s Kyoto Fusioneering, announced that it has officially entered the construction phase of its flagship project, the Unique Integrated Testing Facility (UNITY-2), at CNL’s Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario.

Curtis

Cantwell

Sens. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) and John Curtis (R., Utah) have introduced a bill that would enable nuclear fusion energy technologies to have access to the federal advanced manufacturing production tax credit.

The companion version of the bill was introduced in the House by Reps. Carol Miller (R., W.Va.), Suzan DelBene (D., Wash.), Claudia Tenney (R., N.Y.), and Don Beyer (D., Va.)

The Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act extends the federal advanced manufacturing production credit (45X) by adding a 25 percent tax credit for companies that are domestically manufacturing fusion energy components.

In the report Fusion Forward: Powering America’s Future issued earlier this month by the Special Competitive Studies Project’s (SCSP) Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy, it warns that the United States is on the verge of losing the fusion power race to China.

Noting that China has invested at least $6.5 billion in its fusion enterprise since 2023, almost three times the funding received by the U.S. Department of Energy’s fusion program over the same period, the commission report urges the U.S. government to prioritize the rapid commercialization of fusion energy to secure U.S. national security and restore American energy leadership.

SCSP is a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative making recommendations to strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness in emerging technologies. Launched in fall 2024, the 13-member commission is led by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) and Jim Risch (R., Idaho), along with SCSP president and commission co-chair Ylli Bajraktari.

Helical Fusion, a Japan-based fusion start-up that is developing a stellarator fusion power reactor, has announced it has successfully demonstrated its high-temperature superconducting (HTS) coil under relevant magnetic conditions.

A video highlighting the stellarator’s technology testing can be found here.

The Department of Energy introduced a Fusion Science & Technology (S&T) Roadmap on October 16 as a national “Build–Innovate–Grow” strategy to develop and commercialize fusion energy by the mid-2030s by aligning public investment and private innovation. Hailed by Darío Gil, the DOE’s new undersecretary for science, as bringing “unprecedented coordination across America's fusion enterprise” and advancing President Trump’s January 2025 executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” the road map echoes plans issued by the DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) in 2023 and 2024, with a new emphasis on the convergence of AI and fusion.

The road map release coincided with other fusion energy events held this week in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has issued a letter of intent to fusion energy start-up Type One Energy regarding the utility’s interest in the potential deployment of Type One Energy’s fusion power plant technology at TVA’s former Bull Run fossil plant site once it is commercially ready.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.”