Fusion Fortnightly | 2026-09-29

No fluff, allf facts: Bipartisan House bill teases $10 billion for fusion commercialization. StandardX raises £10 million to produce medical isotopes and tritium. New retrospective published on lessons learned from U.S. DOE’s fusion milestone program.

Companies, financing, and commercial development

ENN reports proton-boron fusion reactions on Xuanlong-50U and begins construction on Helong-2; both machines are spherical tokamaks. ENN says Xuanlong-50U produced more than 10⁸ proton-boron fusion reactions/s (about 0.14 mW of fusion power; a 1 GW fusion source would require roughly 7×10²⁰ p-B reactions/s), claiming to be the first to demonstrate p-B fusion on a commercial fusion company’s own machine. For comparison, the recent p-B results on LHD were about 10¹⁴ reactions/s. Helong-2 broke ground September 15 and is intended to pursue electricity generation by 2030, on a similar time scale to what TAE proposes. As with TAE, the large gap between present performance and what’s needed for a power plant gives the date low credibility.

First Light Fusion reports compression results for FLARE, indicating they achieved the compression expected from simulations.

Type One Energy completes the first phase of DOE’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. Type One says it completed all seven science, technology, and commercial milestones in its first budget period.

EnableFusion closes a ₩45 billion Series A. Quantum Ventures Korea led the round, which brings total funding to approximately ₩56 billion ($42 million). The company is working on precision manufacturing, AI, high-temperature superconductors, and tritium fuel systems for fusion.

StandardX raises £10 million to produce medical isotopes and tritium. Initial medical-isotope deliveries are planned for 2027.

Daedal Systems raises $4.04 million for plasma diagnostics. The round will fund the company’s first three diagnostic systems and deployments with pilot customers.

Marvel Fusion spins out Caelora to commercialize lasers. The subsidiary will develop diode-pumped lasers for fusion and scientific research, plus radiation sources for medical, industrial, and security applications.

Helion is letting employees sell shares on the secondary market. This is not uncommon these days for tech companies that are a long way from founding to IPO (see SpaceX). Also an opportunity for accredited investors with check sizes too small to get into the big rounds to invest, if you can figure out where they are selling.

nT-Tao and Orion Nuclear agree to explore U.S. fusion deployments. Orion is a newish small entity set up to do primarily small modular fission reactors.

General Fusion files SEC Form 6-K disclosing change of auditor.

Blue Laser Fusion files SEC Form D. It indicates they just got over the $25 million raise to complete the merger and had 118 investors (an average of $212,000 per investor).

Supply chain, manufacturing, and enabling technology

Kyoto Fusioneering receives order from Quaise Energy for gyrotrons. Quaise is using the gyrotron RF power to “drill” for geothermal applications.

SPARC’s cryogenic system reaches operational temperature of 8 Kelvin. This was a fun plant to design. To make SPARC as small as we could, we removed as much nuclear shielding of the superconducting magnets as we could. This means that a lot of the 140 MW of fusion power goes into the superconducting magnets during the 10 s pulses, which is uncharacteristic of a fusion power plant where the magnets are well shielded (driven by radiation damage requirements) and the fusion power getting to them is much lower. Two MIT master’s theses were written on early concepts of the SPARC cryogenic system.

Inertia, the company founded by the owner of The Onion, celebrates key milestone: people who make lasers have agreed to discuss making more lasers. A key part of Inertia’s value proposition is decreasing the cost of diode lasers and associated equipment, as well as scaling up the manufacturing volume by large factors.

Renaissance Fusion, DIFFER, and VDL to develop fusion manufacturing partnership.

Fusion for Energy publishes six reports mapping fusion technology and supply-chain gaps. Topics covered: fuel cycle, magnets, additive manufacturing, metrology and reverse engineering, artificial intelligence, and plasma-facing components. Haven’t had the time to go through them myself, but F4E typically produces quality work, so it’s worth a look if this is what you are interested in.

Government, regulation, and public programs

Bipartisan U.S. House bill teases $10 billion to help fusion commercialization. Still just proposed legislation, so don’t hold your breath. This is a step in the right direction for the U.S. government to support fusion at the level that fits its rhetoric.

South Korea plans central oversight for fusion and six other strategic technologies. The country’s focus on these technologies was reported in previous issues. The latest is to bring together efforts that were spread out.

People and hiring

Xcimer hires Cliff Thomas as Chief Scientist. Cliff was previously a Scientist at the University of Rochester and a Designer at LLNL working on inertial fusion.

Daedal Systems hires Alon Hazan as chief technology and product officer. Alon was previously CTO of RetiSpec, a hyperspectral retinal-scanning technology. He will lead industrial development of Daedal’s plasma diagnostics.

Fusion Science and Technology publishes a special issue on growing the fusion workforce.

Legal and intellectual property

American Fusion says it now has 151 pending U.S. patent applications. Up from the 130 reported last fortnight.

Papers and research

New retrospective published on lessons learned from U.S. DOE’s fusion milestone program. Great that they published these lessons.

TAE makes additions to WARPX particle-in-cell code and validates them on experiments.

LLNL and Inertia publish target designs projecting fusion gains of 26–43 with a 10 MJ laser pulse. Naturally, the designs scale up NIF’s approach. Am I allowed only one Onion-style headline per Fortnightly? I’ve got my lawyers looking into it.

People+AI produce counterexamples to Grad’s 59-year-old conjecture. While not a Millennium problem, it’s an important achievement in the pairing of humans and AI. Don’t let my MHD professor Jeff Friedberg know, but this math is well over my head.