Michael Heumann

Thea Energy has announced collaborations with NVIDIA, Synopsys, Argonne National Laboratory, and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory to develop a digital twin of its planned Helios stellarator fusion power plant. The effort will combine NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and AI infrastructure, Synopsys multiphysics simulation, ANL neutronics and blanket-design data, and PPPL high-fidelity plasma modeling codes into a single virtual model of the plant. The project aligns with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission to accelerate fusion development with AI, and Thea says the approach will build the Helios digital twin faster and with orders of magnitude less capital than traditional models. It will be the first digital twin of a stellarator fusion power plant, with Helios targeted for operation in the 2030s following the company’s Eos demonstration system.

Realta Fusion has revealed Hammir-DT, a preconceptual design for an asymmetric tandem magnetic mirror fusion power plant targeting roughly 500 MW of fusion power and about 200 MWe of net electricity via direct energy conversion. In an interview with The Fusion Report, VP of R&D Derek Sutherland walked through the continuous (non-pulsed) design, the three enabling technologies behind its mirrors, and a roadmap that derisks the physics with D-D fusion before moving to D-T. Realta projects CapEx of $1B to $2B per plant and a levelized cost of electricity below $50/MWh. Having raised about $54 million to date, the company will need a substantially larger round to build its first plant.

Xcimer Energy has started operations at Phoenix, a krypton fluoride excimer laser system in Denver and the prototype for its commercial laser fusion architecture. Phoenix uses Stimulated Brillouin Scattering to compress a microsecond-long pulse into the nanosecond timescales fusion requires and runs on two beamlines rather than the 192 at the National Ignition Facility. Building it required Xcimer to rebuild large-scale excimer laser capabilities the United States had largely abandoned after the Cold War. The system is the proof of concept behind a roadmap that runs through Anvil and Vulcan toward Athena, a commercial fusion power plant targeted for the mid-2030s.

Pacific Fusion has completed its second set of technical milestones, validating a scaled prototype of its pulser module that delivered roughly 440 GW of peak output power and about 1.1 MV peak voltage in 80 nanoseconds. The prototype represents about one-third of a full module, and its performance keeps the company on track for net facility gain by 2030. We break down what was demonstrated and what comes next for the best-funded IFE developer.