Frankie Berry

Thea Energy operated its first full-scale stellarator shaping coil, and The Fusion Report dug into whether $50/MWh is really the bar for commercial fusion in the US. Fusion lands on China’s 15th Five-Year Plan as a frontier priority, ITER explains how fusion is pushing AI to evolve, Xcimer Energy keeps stacking senior hires, and Stellarex Energy and TAE Technologies both add new joint work with UKAEA.

This week’s fusion briefing covers Zap Energy’s new CEO and pivot to integrated fission-fusion, Commonwealth Fusion’s first-ever PJM interconnection filing, a joint CEO letter pressing Brussels for a coordinated fusion strategy, a new commentary on the $50/MWh cost bar, and nT-Tao’s MoU with Israel’s national water company to explore fusion-powered desalination.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard pegged SPARC’s turn-on to 2027 and teed up construction of the company’s 400 MW Virginia commercial plant to begin immediately after, in a Reuters NEXT interview. The UK Atomic Energy Authority took a strategic position in First Light Fusion’s £25 million first close, and General Fusion scheduled its April 29 Analyst Day at the Nasdaq MarketSite as its proposed $1 billion SVAC combination nears close. Peak Nano and E&P Technologies co-authored a piece on how impedance-matched generators are reshaping the capacitor stack behind inertial confinement fusion.

The UK cemented its bid for fusion leadership this week with a £1.3 billion National Fusion Energy Strategy and a £70 million STEP magnet contract awarded to Tokamak Energy. General Fusion named Ontario Power Generation Board Chair Wendy Kei to its Board as it prepares for a Nasdaq listing, and Inertia Enterprises signed a trio of R&D agreements with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to commercialize inertial fusion. The Fusion Report also covers highlights from the 2026 ARPA-E Innovation Summit and Part 3 of the Fusion Decathlon, Mike Heumann’s deep dive into magnetic fusion energy solutions.

A wave of federal funding headlines this week’s fusion news, with ARPA-E committing $135 million and SHINE securing a $263 million conditional DOE loan. TAE Technologies is scouting sites for its first power plant, Pulsar Fusion hit a propulsion milestone, and CSIS is sounding the alarm on China’s fusion push.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Realta Fusion announced a long-term strategic partnership on HTS magnets covering demonstration prototypes through commercial power plants. Physics Today profiles stellarators as leading fusion contenders. Siemens Energy deepens its industrial role across the fusion sector. nT-Tao shares Q1 progress including C3 first plasma. And New Mexico adds fusion to its state clean energy tax credit.

Fusion covered a lot of ground this week. Bret Baier brought the industry to a primetime Fox News audience, Rochester’s LLE signed its largest ever industrial research agreement with Focused Energy, the UK put £2.5 billion behind a national fusion strategy, and PPPL demonstrated how decades of federally funded code are now directly supporting private reactor design.

Pacific Fusion lays out a five-milestone framework for commercial fusion. Oil tops $102 as the U.S.-Iran conflict reshapes global energy. Pulsed power fusion faces a critical capacitor supply chain gap. And Commonwealth Fusion Systems enters 2026 with magnet installation, a Siemens-NVIDIA partnership, and two heavyweight board additions.