The Fusion Energy Market Heats Up (Again 😊!)

by Michael Heumann | Sep 3, 2025 | Fusion Energy

Nova Laser Bay LLNL

I hope that everyone had a great Labor Day holiday! In our last article of The Fusion Report before the holiday, we discussed the closing of the Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS) Series B2 funding round for $863 million. Shortly on the heels of this announcement (actually today) comes two more fusion energy announcements focused on furthering fusion energy:

We will discuss these in the following pages.

Pacific Fusion’s Use of FLASH for Target Development and Simulation

Pacific Fusion has a unique approach to fusion energy, which we covered in an interview with them this spring. By combining multiple Marx generators (called “pulsers”), Pacific Fusion utilizes high-energy current pulses to implode a fusion fuel target in a direct-drive fashion. The concept is that they can significantly reduce the energy loss that occurs in laser-based indirect-drive systems.

To achieve this approach, Pacific Fusion has taken a dual-track approach of both building their demonstration system (called the DS machine; estimated online date around or before 2030), and significant continuous modeling of the system using the FLASH code base. FLASH is a publicly available, massively parallel, multi-physics, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), finite-volume Eulerian hydrodynamics and magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) code. It has a world-wide user base of more than 4,900 scientists, and more than 1,300 papers have been published using the code to model problems in a wide range of disciplines. Using FLASH, Pacific Fusion has run six (6) benchmarks (single-mode Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor; multi-mode Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor; single-mode Richtmyer-Meshkov; ICF confinement time; MagLIF Shot z9277; and MagLIF Current Scaling Study) to validate their target design approach.

The results of these simulations demonstrate that, when correctly configured, FLASH is capable of modeling magnetically driven ICF targets to a sufficient degree of accuracy to enable simulation-based target design. Additionally, the validation benchmarks are also useful for better understanding the physical processes in these systems, which helps to inform the approach of the DS trials as Pacific Fusion starts to approach the performance of these tests in a real-world environment.

nT-Tao Publishes Peer-Reviewed Study on Experimental Results from a Compact Theta Pinch Device

nT-Tao, who is developing a compact (think cargo container-sized) fusion energy system (see our interview of them from June), today announced the publication of a peer-reviewed study from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology that detailed the experimental results on how advanced diagnostic techniques can be used to measure key plasma parameters in compact theta pinch devices.  “This research provides direct validation of the diagnostic framework we are using to characterize plasma behavior in early-stage devices,” said Dr. Daniel Maler (4PL graduate student at the time of the study), co-author of the paper and now an experimental physicist at nT-Tao. “It’s a foundational step toward optimizing plasma compression and heating in our next-generation fusion platform.”

During the experiments conducted for this study, the Technion/nT-Tao team was able to achieve the following results:

  • Successful creation of highly ionized Hydrogen and Helium plasmas using a compact Theta Pinch system.
  • Measurement of plasma densities exceeding 10¹⁶ cm⁻³ and ion/electron temperatures of ~20eV for ions and ~2eV for electrons.
  • Time-resolved imaging showing plasma compression speed of ~3 million cm/s.
  • Use of multiple diagnostic tools, including laser interferometry, Thomson scattering, visible spectroscopy, Laser-Induced Fluorescence (LIF), and microwave cutoff techniques, to provide independent confirmation of plasma properties.

As nT-Tao advances toward the high-gain plasma conditions required for a commercial fusion energy system, these findings will help steer and benchmark future experiments and simulations.

Why The Pacific Fusion and nT-Tao Studies Are Important

As anyone following fusion energy knows, this is not a sprint – it is a marathon. Like in marathons, progress towards milestones is often the only way to gauge if you are on schedule or not. Both of these studies (and those done at other companies in the fusion energy ecosystem) are very important to keep these various programs going in the right direction, and not down a “dead end”. The cost of going down a wrong path as real systems are tested is not just money – the negative impacts on system schedules are probably even more critical. From that perspective, we applaud both nT-Tao and Pacific Fusion (and CFS for their fund-raise last week, because all of this takes money) as they head towards success commercializing fusion energy. “The Heat is On”!