Fusion Fortnightly | 2026-03-03
No fluff, all facts.
Details on how General Fusion’s latest investors get preferential payout. SHINE raises $240M to further commercialize fusion medical technologies. OpenStar demonstrates first plasma with their dipole levitated.
Funding
SHINE announced a $240M equity funding round, bringing them into the 3-Commas-Club of fusion companies that have raised over $3B. As part of the round, investor Patrick Soon-Shiong joins the SHINE board. Patrick is a billionaire who made his fortune inventing an anti-cancer drug. To me, this signals that SHINE is focusing even more on using fusion reactions as a tool, rather than on energy generation on a timeline competitive with what most of the fusion energy focused companies are proposing.
General Fusion and Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III filed Form F‑4 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for their proposed business combination. It’s a ~300 page document laying out the details of the deal. In it you can see what deal the $107.7 million PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) investors got: The get highly protective Convertible Preferred Shares that carry a large dividend, a five-year put right, and a senior liquidation preference. In the event of a total corporate failure and liquidation, after the company’s debt obligations are settled, the PIPE investors recover their principal plus all accrued, compounding dividends from the remaining assets of the company. The common shareholders, including the SPAC retail investors and General Fusion’s founders and employees, stand at the back of the line and will only receive a payout if the liquidated assets exceed the massive, compounding obligation owed to the preferred tier. Otherwise, the PIPE investors absorb whatever capital is left, and the common shareholders are wiped out entirely. In a not-as-severe downside scenario where General Fusion is still moving along but not increased significantly in value, the PIPE investors can exercise their put right when the five-year mark arrives to force the struggling company to buy back their shares at the fully compounded value. This allows them to extract their principal and guaranteed yield while leaving the common shareholders holding a cash-starved, heavily diluted entity. As far as I can tell, there are no new results reported from LM26 in the document, only “In April 2025, LM26 achieved its first plasma compression, with multiple compression events completed since that time, validating integrated system performance.”
A potential spin‑off by Trump Media of businesses including Truth Social into a new public company was announced Basically, Truth Social would be acquired by a SPAC and TAE would be left in Trump Media and Technology Group (not sure about the other businesses involved). This is a really strange shuffling of cards. Why didn’t TAE just de-SPAC like General Fusion?
Silicon Valley Bank provided $9.5M in growth capital to Realta Fusion. This is a debt instrument that’s typically used to extend runway between rounds. It will be used for “covering pay for staff” and to “help Realta Fusion establish itself in a new space”.
Companies
Proxima Fusion, RWE, Bavaria, and Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics signed an MoU covering the Fusion Demonstrator Alpha and the planned commercial stellarator plant Stellaris. With a stated intent that Bavaria could provide up to 20% in co-financing and with Proxima stating an intention to fund 20% from private investors; RWE, a German energy company, may also contribute funding. The rest aiming to come from High-Tech Agenda Germany. The Alpha project budget is €2B, which feels ball-park right but a bit low. Alpha aims at a fusion triple product that would get Q~DT~=10 in steady state and be sited in Garching (just outside of Munich). It’s interesting that they are not siting it in Greifswald, Germany’s present stellarator lab but instead in Garching, Germany’s tokamak fusion lab and the historic home to German stellarators before the Greifswald move (which was a post-unification politics / industrial policy move).
Proxima Fusion announced the launch of the “Alpha Alliance,” an industrial consortium of more than 30 companies to deliver Alpha. Feels like an overly-hyped announcement of ones suppliers.
Don’t call it a comeback: OpenStar publicly demonstrated plasma confinement around its levitated dipole prototype (“Junior”), floating a half‑tonne magnet in a vacuum chamber, including a video of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, pushing the button. Previous experiments were with a mechanically supported rather than magnetically levitated magnet. Removing the mechanical supports reduces plasma losses and is required if it has a chance of being a fusion power plant. Junior builds on the experience of the Levitated Dipole Experiment that was at MIT and is about the same size with the same designed magnetic field strength.
OpenStar has also published their Deuterium-Tritium Levitated Dipole Fusion Power Plants concept paper, aka “The Snowball in Hell”. It’s on my reading list.
TAE announced the appointment of Cedric Burgher as Chief Financial Officer, who comes from the oil and gas industry. As I stated in the last fortnightly, when companies go public, they typically add staff, advisors, and board members with significant public company experience.
Government
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a proposed Regulatory Framework for Fusion Machines. This is the proposed rule text and draft implementation guidance that proposes specific edits to the CFR: (1) codifies the Part 30 (byproduct material) pathway for “fusion machines”, (2) adds a new definition of “fusion machine” and revise related definitions for “particle accelerator” and “byproduct material”, (3) creates fusion-specific license application content requirements, (4) adds fusion-specific waste disposal requirements for the novel fusion radionuclide profiles, and (5) requires an environmental report for construction/operation of a fusion machine.
Ohio Representative Brian Lorenz announced the “Ohio Fusion Energy Advancement Act,” framed around establishing an Ohio Fusion Energy Working Group to identify regulatory gaps, and assess workforce and supply chain needs.
Fusion for Energy reported completion of Europe’s third ITER vacuum vessel sector.
Techno-economics
Spring cleaning: scheduling maintenance for the spring increases the value of a fusion plant by 15%.
LLNL releases Generalized Economics Model for fusion energy. Now you too can design your own spreadsheet fusion power plant from the comfort of your own home.