Michael Heumann

Editor-in-Chief, The Fusion Report

What Does Andy Burnham Becoming the UK Prime Minister Mean for Their (and Our) Fusion Energy Programs?

What Does Andy Burnham Becoming the UK Prime Minister Mean for Their (and Our) Fusion Energy Programs?

Andy Burnham is the UK’s new Prime Minister, and The Fusion Report examines what the change could mean for the UK’s fusion energy programs. The UK currently runs one of the largest publicly funded fusion commercialization programs, an investment of $3.3B US (£2.5B UK) between 2026 and 2030. That includes £1.3 billion for the STEP prototype power plant at the former West Burton coal power station in Nottinghamshire, the National Fusion Laboratory at Culham, a £125 million AI growth zone with the ‘Sunrise’ supercomputer expected to deliver up to 6.76 exaflops, and £50 million in skills training aiming to prepare 2,000 experts for the fusion industry by 2030. A Burnham government is not expected to retrench the UK’s stated fusion commercialization goals, but it could pursue them through a lens of devolution, public control, and industrial renewal, potentially reshaping where fusion facilities, supply chains, and research clusters are located.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Raises $1 Billion, But It’s Really Just A Down Payment For Their ARC Machine

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Raises $1 Billion, But It’s Really Just A Down Payment For Their ARC Machine

Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced on July 30, 2026 that it raised $1 billion of additional equity financing, which the company says is the largest single funding round among fusion energy companies since its own $1.8 billion Series B round in 2021. With this capital and the $863 million raised last year, CFS says its total stands at $4 billion, or about 30 percent of all capital raised by the fusion industry to date. The round drew institutional investors including pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure investors, and industrial corporate partners rather than traditional venture capital. CFS also hired former Moderna chief financial officer Lorence Kim as its new CFO, a signal that more fundraising for its ARC power plant is still ahead. The company says it remains on track to put power on the grid in the early 2030s from the Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

Quantum Computing Helps Breeding of Tritium; Thea Expands Manufacturing of “Smart HTS Magnets”

Quantum Computing Helps Breeding of Tritium; Thea Expands Manufacturing of “Smart HTS Magnets”

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, and Michigan State University have used quantum supercomputing to investigate the molecular configurations of FLiBe, a leading candidate material for tritium breeding blankets in fusion reactors. The work aims to identify which of at least nine FLiBe configurations performs best under fusion conditions, a problem quantum computing may be better suited to solve than AI. In parallel, Thea Energy announced that the DOE’s ARPA-E has selected it for a $20 million SCALEUP award to build the first domestic production line of modular high-temperature superconducting magnets. Thea plans to use approximately 300 planar shaping coils in its first large-scale integrated stellarator system, ‘Eos’, and the award follows the company’s $100 million Series B raise. Together, the developments position quantum computing and advanced magnet manufacturing as growing forces in commercial fusion.

Barclays Joins UK IFC, Plans Funding Fusion Efforts; Inertia Announces Commercialization Roadmap

Barclays Joins UK IFC, Plans Funding Fusion Efforts; Inertia Announces Commercialization Roadmap

Barclays has announced it is supporting the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium, a private, sector-led collaboration formed in May 2026 by Type One Energy, Tokamak Energy, and AECOM to advance a commercial fusion power plant in the UK. The move puts one of Europe’s top five banks, with total assets of £1.54T, behind commercial fusion deployment and complements the UK Government’s Fusion Strategy and STEP program. Alongside the Barclays news, Inertia published its Phase 1 commercialization roadmap. Inertia’s ten Phase 1 goals include scaling target yield to more than 25x, which the company says is enough for a plant to deliver 250MW to the grid, and cutting high-power laser diode costs by roughly 50x. The Fusion Report weighs what a reliable capital source and a concrete engineering roadmap mean for the path to commercial fusion.

LLNL and Pacific Fusion Achieved 3,000 Shots On An Impedance-Matched Marx Generator

LLNL and Pacific Fusion Achieved 3,000 Shots On An Impedance-Matched Marx Generator

Pacific Fusion and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that Sirius, an impedance-matched Marx generator prototype designed and built at LLNL, has surpassed 3,000 shots under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. In the campaign, each pulse of the four-stage prototype delivered 60 gigawatts to a resistive load in a 100-nanosecond pulse at 95% energy efficiency, with the effort focused on component lifetime and reliability. The companies frame the result as evidence that technology developed at a national laboratory can be validated through repeated testing and scaled quickly by industry. Pacific Fusion says it has used the data to build a June prototype that reached roughly 440 GW of peak output power and about 1.1 MV in 80 nanoseconds, and it plans to break ground later this summer on its Demonstration System in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Fusion Report weighs the milestone against the roughly 31.5 million shots a production pulser would need to run for a year, and the tritium and neutron challenges that remain.

Commercial Fusion Energy Funding Status: Mid-Year 2026

Commercial Fusion Energy Funding Status: Mid-Year 2026

The Fusion Report’s mid-year 2026 funding status finds total lifetime private funding for commercial fusion at $11.52B as of June 30, 2026, up roughly $2.4B from June 2025. Four companies now top $1B in lifetime funding: Commonwealth Fusion Systems ($2.923B), Helion Energy ($1.502B), TAE ($1.321B), and Shine Fusion ($1.040B). Major rounds in the period include CFS at $863M, Helion at $465M, Inertia at $450M, and $240M each for Shine Fusion and Focused Energy. Nuclear fission and SMR startups raised roughly $2B in the same window, while AI captured 70% of global VC funding in Q2 2026 alone. In a July postscript, Proxima Fusion raised €411M ($468M US) in new funding and General Fusion went public on the NASDAQ, lifting industry lifetime funding to $12.18B.

Realta Fusion announces Madison Wisconsin For Its New Fusion Energy Headquarters and Research Facility

Realta Fusion announces Madison Wisconsin For Its New Fusion Energy Headquarters and Research Facility

Realta Fusion announced it will build its corporate headquarters and fusion R&D facility, “The Realta Forge,” at OM Station, the former Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, Wisconsin. The state and city committed up to $55 million in incentives: an estimated $37.5 million in state sales and use tax exemptions, up to $15 million in WEDC enterprise zone tax credits, and $2.8 million in city tax increment financing. Realta expects to create over 600 jobs and to break ground before the end of the year on the facility where it will build Hammir, its prototype magnetic mirror fusion machine. The deal follows Wisconsin Act 165, the first standalone state law in American history to exempt fusion energy capital expenditures from state sales tax. The Fusion Report looks at why the hometown choice makes sense and what it signals about Realta’s next funding round.

Arbor Energy: 3-D Printing Gas Turbines (and Money)

Arbor Energy: 3-D Printing Gas Turbines (and Money)

With wait times for large gas turbines now exceeding five years, Arbor Energy, founded by former SpaceX engineers, has raised a $55M Series A to advance its 25 MW modular Halcyon turbines, which combine rocket turbopump technology, a supercritical CO2 power cycle, and 3D-printed core components. The company has also secured an order from GridMarket for up to 200 units, reportedly worth billions of dollars.

Cosylab: Giving Control to Production Fusion Systems

Cosylab: Giving Control to Production Fusion Systems

The Fusion Report interviews Mark Pleško, CEO of Cosylab, a 250-person Slovenian company that has built control systems for ITER, UKAEA, and major research labs for over two decades. Pleško explains why fusion startups tend to treat controls as a problem to solve later, what that technical debt costs them, and how the Fusionics initiative co-founded with UKAEA aims to give the industry a standard control framework.

Workers with Helical Fusion's Helix Machine

Helical Fusion Progresses on Construction of Their First Production Power Plant

Helical Fusion has added a long-established Japanese general contractor to its Helix Program as an Official Partner and signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate toward the construction of Helix KANATA, the company’s fusion pilot plant targeted for the 2030s. The two firms will examine construction requirements and project execution approaches for future fusion power facilities. The contractor joins the earlier Official Partners announced in April 2026 in building out the industrial foundation for commercial fusion in Japan.

Watch on demandFusion 2035, from the companies building itPast Forum speakersCommonwealth Fusion SystemsPacific FusionXcimer EnergyITERThea EnergyType One EnergynT-Tao, Inertia, Realta Fusion and moreNext forum: Thursday, February 11, 2027. Free to attend.Watch the replays