Michael Heumann

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.

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.

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.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has become the first international partner in the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s LIBRTI program, a £220 million effort to demonstrate net tritium production for fusion power plants. The two organizations will jointly design the experimental setup and run investigations at a new facility being built at UKAEA’s Culham Campus, which will draw on a high-flux neutron source from Shine Technologies. CFS, which describes itself as the best-funded fusion company with more than $3 billion raised, will build the test articles used to validate the tritium breeding blanket design for its ARC power plant planned for Virginia. Tritium breeding blankets are a shared engineering challenge across fusion approaches, and cross-company collaboration on the technology is becoming more common as the industry moves toward first-of-a-kind machines.