No fluff, all facts.

The following is my sampling of happenings in the greater fusion ecosystem over the last two weeks, with some commentary. If I missed anything from the past two weeks, or you spot something I should share in the next two, let me know.

This is the public tip of a much deeper tracking effort I run for clients. If you need a custom version of this for your own decisions, please get in touch.

dan@futuretech.partners

The Special Competitive Studies Project released its Fusion Supply Chain Report. It's U.S.-centric and policy-driven but contains a lot of good information on what is needed to build out a fusion industry. This is basically a shopping list of where new domestic suppliers will get paid to exist. It’s also a shortcut to where capital should flow if you want to ride the policy tailwinds. Although I have yet to read everything in detail, I haven't found anything that I substantially disagree with. No surprises for those familiar with fusion: China presently dominates most of the industries needed to supply fusion, and things like lithium enrichment, beryllium supply, and rare isotopes (tritium and helium-3) look to be bottlenecks.

The U.S. “Genesis Mission” has been launched, a Department of Energy (DOE)-led initiative leveraging AI to accelerate fusion, among other things. Behind the hyperbole of a Manhattan Project analogy (I'll believe it when I see the funding to back it up, as the order doesn't provide new funding), this is an attempt to unify research, data, and computation across federal funding recipients and then use that integrated machine, along with AI, to accelerate various research areas, fusion included. While a good idea in principle, it will be a massive and complex lift to organize and complete (especially with no new funding), will probably in the short run decrease individual researcher productivity due to working to comply with the new effort, and it will be a struggle for the government to attract good AI talent away from more lucrative careers in private industry.

In related news, the Fusion Industry Association members met with U.S. DOE officials to press for the billions of dollars needed to support a fusion energy industry. This follows on the coattails of the DOE restructuring and putting fusion into its own office. The posturing of the U.S. government around fusion is going to take serious increases in funding to make the impact they say they want to make.

TAE Technologies and the UKAEA partner to commercialize neutral beam injectors positioned around medical/industrial beams as near-term markets. UKAEA is making an equity investment of £5.6 million and TAE is planning to deliver the first short-pulse beams in 18-24 months. This is not at all surprising for TAE, one of the longest-operating private fusion companies founded in the late 1990s, as it has tried to commercialize technologies it developed for its fusion experiments in TAE Power Solutions (spinning out power electronics developments) and TAE Life Sciences (adapting neutral beam injector technology for cancer therapy). Neutral beams are basically a high-energy particle accelerator that passes the accelerated ions through a gas cloud to pick up electrons, neutralizing them so they can pass into the magnetic field of a fusion device and heat the core plasma. They have been one of the workhorse heating systems of fusion for decades. UKAEA is a natural partner for TAE on this as they operated the JET tokamak with over 30 MW of neutral beam power and were one of only two facilities (TFTR at Princeton being the other) to use them in a deuterium-tritium fusion device. While important for experiments, neutral beams are seen by some in fusion as not viable for fusion power plants due to their relatively large size and technical complexity. We chose not to use neutral beams on SPARC because of these reasons and the higher plasma densities that high-field fusion operates at require higher neutral beam energy (which makes the systems even more challenging) to get core heating. Anyway, they remain a fair option for other fusion concepts and this is a small win for TAE investors and public-private partnerships in fusion.

Maritime Fusion, a new startup out of Y Combinator, raised a $4.5 million seed round to develop a compact HTS tokamak for marine propulsion (i.e., CFS on a boat). Well, I hear that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I am fundamentally skeptical of their business model. The first generations of fusion power plants will almost certainly have low availability (i.e., the fraction of the time that they are on, providing power) and low predictability (relative to other power sources) on when they will need to go down for maintenance. Shipping needs very reliable power as it is mighty inconvenient to be stranded in the middle of the Pacific. If there were a real commercial opportunity here, I don't see how Maritime could overtake CFS' lead.

The Centre for Fusion Energy is established as a partnership among Government of Canada (through Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories), Ontario Power Generation (power generator with significant fission assets), and Stellarex (private fusion company) with $91.5M in initial capital contributions. Ontario Power Generation's tritium experience will be a significant asset to this collaboration. This may turn into a template for how smaller fusion ecosystems can organize themselves into credible hubs.

Starlight Engine, an industry-led public-private partnership in Japan, has completed their conceptual design for a fusion pilot plant: FAST (Fusion Advanced Superconducting Tokamak). Such an industry-led effort, supported by the deep experience of academic and national lab staff, is a great model for fusion development and a clear sign Japanese industry is continuing to take fusion energy seriously. The resulting design, an HTS-based, neutral-beam-heated spherical tokamak (ST) is no surprise given the parties behind it. It is not significantly different from other ST concepts (e.g., Tokamak Energy or UK's STEP).

Kyoto Fusioneering and Shimadzu Corp. announced their development of a prototype tritium-compatible turbomolecular vacuum pump. While such pumps have been developed for other fusion experiments, continued innovation is welcome. Tritium is a very challenging element to work with in vacuum systems, due to its small size (high permeability) and radioactivity (embrittlement), and requires very careful design and selection of materials.

Keio University in Japan has established new fusion research center (article in Japanese), starting with 15 researchers, to engage in the policy, regulatory, and public-facing side of fusion. This is a great sign of fusion maturing as an industry. Japan, having seen the public backlash after the 2011 accident at the Fukushima fission power plant well recognizes the importance of public opinion.

Tokyo-based Helical Fusion closed a $5.5 million Series A extension (led by Ecrowd NEXT, a crowd-funding platform), bringing Helical’s total capital to around $38M. They also signed Japan’s first-ever fusion power purchase agreement (PPA) with Aoki Super, a regional supermarket chain. After the Google and Eni deals with CFS and the Microsoft deal with Helion, it's very interesting to see a regional supermarket chain be the leader in PPAs in Japan.

On Nov 25, ITER lifted and placed the third 40° sector of its vacuum vessel into the tokamak pit (a massive 1,100-tonne steel section). The tortoise takes another step forward, how will he continue to fare given all the hares entering the race?

Fuse added a former U.S. Defense Counterintelligence Agency Director and a former Palantir executive to its advisory board. This further reinforces Fuse's path through defense applications on its way to try to make fusion energy.