A half-day virtual forum featuring speakers from Thea Energy, Type One Energy, Realta Fusion, and Inertia. May 7, 2026.
When The Fusion Report hosted Fusion 2035: The 10-Year Shot Clock last August, the conversation centered on whether the fusion industry could meet its own commercialization timelines. In the nine months since, the industry has moved from blueprints to building sites. SPARC tokamak assembly is underway. Helion’s Orion plant is under construction. The TAE-TMTG merger is set to create fusion’s first publicly traded pure-play. And Google, ENI, and Microsoft have signed power purchase agreements that shifted fusion from laboratory science to commercial energy procurement.
On May 7 at 10:00 AM Pacific, The Fusion Report is bringing the conversation back with FUSION 2035: The Shot Clock to Put Electricity on the Grid, a half-day webcast moderated by Mike Heumann, Chief Analyst at Ignition Research. The format pairs 20-minute presentations from each speaker company with a live panel discussion and audience Q&A. The event will air as a free live broadcast, with all presentations published on-demand on thefusionreport.com
The lineup spans seven companies representing different paths to putting fusion electricity on the grid. The panel covers multiple approaches to magnetic confinement, laser-driven inertial fusion, and the advanced materials and manufacturing capabilities that will underpin the supply chain for all of them.
Inertia
Inertia is taking laser-driven inertial fusion from the lab to the grid. The company is built on the physics proven at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, where co-founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Annie Kritcher’s team achieved the first controlled fusion ignition in December 2022. Alongside co-founders Jeff Lawson, former CEO of Twilio, and Prof. Mike Dunne, a Stanford fusion power plant designer who serves as CTO, the company has licensed nearly 200 patents from LLNL and is developing mass-produced, high-powered lasers and fuel targets designed for grid-scale fusion power.
TAE Technologies
TAE Technologies, founded in 1998, is the longest-running private fusion company in the world and the only one optimized for hydrogen-boron fuel, a cleaner, aneutronic reaction that produces minimal neutron radiation. TAE’s approach uses a field-reversed configuration (FRC), where the plasma self-organizes and generates its own magnetic field, reducing the need for massive external magnet systems. In 2025, the company published results in Nature Communications demonstrating the first-ever formation of an FRC plasma using only neutral beam injection, a breakthrough that cuts machine complexity and cost while improving plasma stability. TAE’s sixth-generation device, Norm, is now being upgraded to reach 100 million degrees Celsius as the company advances toward its next-generation Copernicus reactor.
Thea Energy
Thea Energy, a 2022 spin-out from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, is rethinking the stellarator from the magnets up. Instead of the complex three-dimensional coils that have made stellarators notoriously difficult to build, Thea uses arrays of flat superconducting magnets controlled entirely by software. In early 2025, the company successfully operated the world’s first superconducting planar coil magnet array, a milestone validated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Since then, Thea has completed the preconceptual design for its Helios fusion power plant and is now evaluating sites across five states for Eos, its large-scale demonstration system.
Type One Energy
Type One Energy is building on decades of stellarator research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X to design a commercially viable fusion power plant. The Knoxville-based company published a full physics basis for its Infinity Two stellarator pilot plant in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics and has partnered with the Tennessee Valley Authority and AECOM for its deployment path. Type One is now constructing Infinity One, the world’s first high-temperature superconducting stellarator, at TVA’s Bull Run Energy Complex.
Realta Fusion
Realta Fusion is reviving the magnetic mirror, a confinement concept that dates to the 1950s but was shelved for decades in favor of tokamak research. Working with the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) experiment, the Madison-based team achieved a world-record 17 Tesla magnetic field applied to a plasma. Realta is now developing its CoSMo fusion system for on-site industrial heat and power across data centers, chemical processing, and heavy industry, and recently announced a strategic partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering to advance plasma heating and fuel cycle technology for magnetic mirror machines.
Peak Nano
Peak Nano, headquartered in Valley View, Ohio, develops NanoPlex nanolayered polymer films engineered at the nanoscale for higher energy density, improved thermal stability, and longer operational lifetimes compared to conventional capacitor dielectric materials. The company’s NanoPlex HDC films are being developed for pulsed laser inertial confinement systems, while its NanoPlex LDF films target magnetic confinement applications. In March 2026, Peak Nano announced a strategic partnership with E&P Technologies to co-develop fusion-grade high-energy-density capacitors, and the company is building the first domestic U.S. manufacturing facility for advanced polymer capacitor films. With over 20 global patents protecting its NanoPlex technology, Peak Nano is positioning itself as a critical domestic supplier for the fusion supply chain.
E&P Technologies
E&P Technologies is a U.S.-based engineering and manufacturing firm designing and building high-voltage capacitors for fusion energy and advanced defense systems. Founded by engineers with direct program experience at Xcimer Energy and Blue Origin, the company specializes in system-level capacitor design from specification through integration, rapid prototyping validated against application-specific duty profiles, and advanced process automation for consistent quality at production scale. E&P is developing a new class of high-energy, high-reliability capacitors designed for fusion drivers capable of million-shot duty cycles, leveraging its partnership with Peak Nano to push performance beyond the limits of conventional polymer film dielectrics.
What the Panel Discussion Will Explore
The diversity of this lineup is the point. Two stellarator companies with fundamentally different optimization strategies. A magnetic mirror startup that bet on a concept the rest of the field walked away from. A laser-driven inertial fusion company built on the only experiment that has ever produced more fusion energy than it consumed. The longest-running private fusion company in the world, now pursuing aneutronic fuel with a streamlined reactor design. And an advanced materials company and its capacitor manufacturing partner building the domestic supply chain for fusion-grade pulsed power components. The live panel and audience Q&A will dig into how these approaches are each advancing the path to grid-connected fusion power, what technical and industrial milestones still lie ahead, and what needs to happen next to move fusion from construction sites to connected grids.
Registration is free. REGISTER HERE
