Fusion Fortnightly | 2026-09-15
No fluff, all facts: Blue Laser Fusion becomes public-reporting company. General Fusion / Spring Valley disclose $411 million accounting error. Matt Reinke writes about fusion and pop-culture as well as his dog.
Companies, financing, and commercial development
Blue Laser Fusion becomes an SEC-reporting company and raises $25 million. This means they are on the path to becoming publicly traded and have to file all the documents a publicly traded company does. The company now identifies directed-energy defense as its first target market, with commercialization targeted for 2028, while a fusion pilot plant is targeted for 2032 at the earliest.
Helion closes Series G at $500 million. The Series G was first reported in early June as $465 million, so the stragglers have finally sent in their checks.
NovaFusionX raises RMB 1.2 billion ($179 million) in a pre-Series A round. They’re aiming to have their FRC operating by the end of the year.
Kyoto Fusioneering secures $105 million in equity and access to $57 million in debt financing. The Series D first close raised ¥16.72 billion of equity alongside ¥9 billion in credit/loans. The financing supports UNITY fuel-cycle, blanket, and thermal-system demonstrations and expanded gyrotron production.
Pacific Fusion breaks ground in Albuquerque and signs a collaboration framework with NNSA. The campus will house Pacific Fusion’s planned high-yield demonstrator. The planned NNSA work is on high-energy-density and stockpile science.
SHINE is reported to be preparing for an IPO. Finally, a fusion company that’s going public that’s got a legitimate product! SHINE is using fusion from particle accelerators to produce neutrons for radiography as well as medical isotope production.
CFS identifies Hyundai Motor Group as an investor in its latest round. This last round for CFS was a bit of an oddity in that no investor names were shared with the round announcement; Hyundai is the first to be announced after the round. Hyundai makes big metal stuff and fusion needs a lot of big metal stuff, so an obvious partnership.
Realta Fusion and Madison Gas and Electric explore a 200 MWe Wisconsin fusion plant. MGE has previously invested in Realta, and given its 1.2 GWe capacity, a 200 MWe plant would be a large increase.
RTX invests in Xcimer and signs a pulsed-laser development agreement. RTX is the modern name for Raytheon and all the companies it’s merged with. Turns out lasers for fusion may also be good for drones (or bad for drones, depending on your perspective).
Eni discusses a European fusion plant with CFS by the early 2040s or sooner. The article gives some flavor to how Eni sees fusion evolving and its role.
Thea Energy extends its Series B financing. While the amount raised wasn’t shared, the names of new investors were.
General Fusion says its cash ($150 million) should fund LM26 experiments through the end of 2028.
Fusionality raises CHF 3 million ($3.7 million) to develop measurement, simulation, and control systems. It was founded by DeepMind alumni Federico Felici (fusion control expert) and Jonas Buchli (roboticist).
Axios reports Helion softens the language around its electricity milestones. As Fusion Conclusion reported in May, Axios repeats my “moving the goalposts” characterization of Helion revising its Polaris goal from demonstrating “net electricity” to merely “demonstrating electricity from fusion.” Axios now reports that Helion has similarly softened Orion’s 2028 milestone: its website says only that “initial operations” will begin in 2028, while a Helion executive says the plant will reach its full 50 MW by 2030.
Helion announces reaching 800 employees and expanding offices.
American Fusion reports high-pressure Texatron tests. And here’s Ron’s reaction.
Pranos shows its privately developed PRAGYA tokamak in India.
Supply chain, manufacturing, and enabling technology
Elmet secures $450 million for tungsten expansion from the U.S. Department of War. As covered in a previous Fusion Fortnightly, tungsten is a critical material in both weapons and fusion due to its extreme material properties. Also, Elmet agrees to buy ams OSRAM’s German tungsten and molybdenum operations. The plant would become Elmet’s first EU manufacturing facility and covers production from powders through finished components.
Proxima plans a €140 million public-private-funded high-temperature superconductor factory in Lower Saxony. The largest HTS producers are Shanghai Superconductor (China) and Faraday Factory (Japan with a Russian legacy), so some in the West are looking to form domestic supplies. The entity with the superconductor manufacturing expertise that will actually make it does not yet seem to be identified.
Tokamak Energy completes a 14-month integrated HTS magnet test campaign on Demo4. Demo4 comprises 14 toroidal field coils and 2 poloidal field coils, in an attempt to test a subscale, fusion-relevant set of magnets. It’s an impressive achievement by the team. But, as a technology roadmapping aficionado, I question whether it was the right path to take. Was it better to do what Tokamak Energy did and build an integrated tokamak-like magnet configuration, or was it better to do what CFS did and build a single large magnet trying to match internally relevant parameters? I bet you know my opinion, but in the end, time will tell.
Freemelt wins an order for 33,000 tungsten components for JT-60SA.
Bruker and Luvata partner up to expand niobium-tin superconducting-wire supply.
Molten Salt Solutions raises $7 million to scale lithium enrichment. The seed round will fund pilot enrichment of lithium. Lithium-6 enrichment is likely needed for D-T tritium-breeding systems.
Marathon Fusion demonstrates lithium and hydrogen isotope enrichment. The plasma-centrifuge experiments target enriched lithium for tritium breeding and hydrogen-isotope separation for fuel recycling.
Fusion company Inertia, founded by the owner of The Onion, declares mass-production milestone after successfully making one thing faster. Inertia says it has checked off its “fast fueling” milestone after showing that a deuterium-tritium ice layer can be formed in hours rather than days and that simulations indicate it has sufficiently low roughness. The company has not yet demonstrated large-batch production or use of the targets.
Gauss Fusion deploys updated website. Way more pleasant to scroll through than the new Zap website.
General Fusion files SEC Form F-1. Not much new in there except that it said the company spent $21M in the first half of 2026; SEC Form 4 reports Chris Sorrells’s director compensation award; SEC Form 10-Q/A and SEC Form 6-K report an embarrassing $411 million accounting error by Spring Valley, the SPAC General Fusion merged with (basically, they used incorrect inputs to value a financial liability and lacked the internal expertise and controls to adequately check the work of their outside accounting and valuation specialists).
Government, regulation, and public programs
U.K. and U.S. announce fusion computing and regulatory agreements. It includes a UKAEA–PPPL partnership on AI and supercomputing as well as cooperation between the countries on fusion regulation.
Japan selects four company-led fusion projects for demonstration funding. EX-Fusion, Helical Fusion, LINEA Innovation, and Starlight Engine were selected for a program with ¥60 billion ($390 million) through 2028.
Tennessee issues Type One Energy a fusion-specific license. The headline of “First License for Commercial Fusion” is an overreach, with CFS and SHINE both receiving commercial fusion licenses in recent years. The more accurate statement of what was done is still significant: Tennessee is the first U.S. state to write dedicated regulations for fusion machines and is the first to issue a fusion-machine-specific byproduct-material license under such regulations.
California sends its fusion roadmap bill to the governor. SB 925 passed both chambers without opposing votes. It would require a state fusion strategy and make large fusion-component manufacturing projects eligible for streamlined review. A reaction to losing Pacific Fusion to the desert of New Mexico?
H.R. 5441 - Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act is in the House Ways and Means Committee. It would give U.S. manufacturers a 25% production tax credit (that goes down over the years) on the sale of nearly every fusion component.
U.K. Parliament scrutinizes fusion’s separate planning framework. U.K. officials refused to endorse the FIA’s fusion energy cost claims. They made it explicit that the framework is to attract foreign fusion companies.
U.K. regulators release early-engagement process for fusion.
80-page glossy U.K. Fusion: Investment Prospectus published.
ITER gives updates on summer progress. Unlike the Fusion Conclusion, ITER boasts it didn’t have a summer slowdown.
Japan and Europe expand training for students and early-career researchers at JT-60SA.
UKAEA looks to sell old JET equipment to reduce decommissioning costs. I call dibs on the flywheels and motor generators.
FIA lays out regulatory priorities for U.S. states.
FIA asks for more transparency in Europe’s fusion strategy.
NSF Engineering Research Vision Alliance releases Commercial Fusion Energy: From Ignition to Deployment, Rapid Report. It tries to go beyond the DOE’s roadmap to what is needed for widespread fusion deployment but doesn’t really cover anything new.
I’m really disappointed I wasn’t invited to the DANfusion Annual Meeting.
People and hiring
Matt Reinke, a good friend and former head of diagnostics for SPARC, started a newsletter and is writing about fusion in pop culture. That’s great because I’m completely detached from pop culture (unpopular culture as well), and he’ll provide a good complement to what I write about. If you only read one article, it must be the one about the dog photo badge.
TAE hires Darrell Taylor as general counsel. Taylor has more than 30 years of experience in energy transactions, securities, capital markets, and public-company compliance, including work on ten IPOs. He seems like a good, experienced lawyer to help them navigate the road ahead for TAE.
CFS seeks a vice president of capital markets and investor relations. The job description includes “Experience preparing a private company for public-company readiness — reporting, disclosure controls, and the S-1 process.”
Ryan Chaban becomes the Director, Fusion Prize Development at XPRIZE. It will be interesting to see what they come up with for a fusion XPRIZE.
American Fusion adds Samson Lee to its board. Samson is a fintech executive.
Legal and intellectual property
American Fusion says it now has 130 pending U.S. patent applications. That’s a ridiculous number of patents for a company with a low $100k R&D budget. They are also planning on switching which stock exchange they are listed on, filed a motion to vacate a legacy judgment in Alaska, and hired a new communications firm.
Contrast that with a real fusion program: The STEP developer, UK Fusion Energy, passes 50 patent applications.
Patent lawyers ask whether 20 years is enough for fusion. It probably is.
Papers and research
Thea Energy publishes 16 peer-reviewed papers on its Helios power plant design. They claim it is the “most practical fusion power plant design.” Can we all agree to stop with these arbitrary and subjective superlatives? Probably not. Nonetheless, it’s impressive work by the team pulling this all together.
Delgado-Aparicio, Ono, and Menard at PPPL publish work examining what it takes to get to ignition. This is a nice combination of the work of Lawson, Cordy, and Mills, examining whether a fusion machine can reach ignition without running into density, heating, radiation, or beta limits first. They find that adding in more physics makes the path narrower but also makes it more stable once there.
U.S. Fusion Materials Community Roadmap: Near-term priorities published. I share the authors’ pessimism about materials for early fusion devices; it’s probably the biggest challenge to making fusion economic.
Acceleron Fusion publishes on their diamond anvil cell for exploring muon-catalyzed fusion.