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This Week’s Fusion News: September 18, 2026

This Week’s Fusion News: September 18, 2026

This week Inertia Enterprises reported that ignition-benchmarked simulations run with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory show its commercial laser indirect drive target design achieves more than 25x gain, enough fusion energy to generate between 250 MWe and 1.3 GWe of grid electricity, with the paper posted to arXiv ahead of peer-reviewed submission. Commonwealth Fusion Systems ran the full cryogenic system for its SPARC tokamak at its 8 kelvin operating temperature, a commissioning milestone ahead of an integrated dry dress rehearsal of SPARC’s support systems and a preview of the equipment its ARC power plant will need. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory signed a Joint Declaration of Intent at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London to explore federating UKAEA’s £45 million SUNRISE supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform so both laboratories can train shared AI models on data from MAST Upgrade and NSTX-U. Israeli compact fusion company nT-Tao deployed a 50 MW pulsed-power subsystem built from 50 roughly 1 MW Power Electronic Generators with real-time nonlinear control, a five-fold scale-up meant to push its C3 prototype beyond 1.5 million degrees Celsius. Featured this week from The Fusion Report: Helion’s slide of full Orion output to 2029 or 2030 and what the FY2027 Department of Energy budget request means for fusion, plus the third article in the supporting technologies series on divertors and heat exhaust systems.

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Helion Slides Dates, and What Is In The Department of Energy FY-2027 Plans For Fusion Energy Development?

Helion Slides Dates, and What Is In The Department of Energy FY-2027 Plans For Fusion Energy Development?

Helion Energy has acknowledged that its Orion fusion power plant in Malaga, Washington will not reach full 50 MWe operation in 2028, with initial operation now expected by the end of 2028 and full power generation not until 2029 or 2030. The slip comes shortly after Helion closed a $465M funding round that brought its lifetime funding to slightly over $1.5B, second in the industry behind Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Meanwhile, the FY2027 Department of Energy budget request rises to $53.9 billion, but the increase is driven by a $7.4 billion boost for the National Nuclear Security Administration while non-NNSA programs decline by roughly $2.6 billion. The Fusion Energy Sciences request of $755.25 million is down 6.3% from FY2026, reflecting a $93 million cut to the U.S. ITER contribution, while $135 million goes to public-private partnerships and $10 million funds a new Office of Fusion. We weigh the U.S. request against the UK’s five-year fusion package and Germany’s Fusion Action Plan and asks whether the DoE is moving forward or backward on fusion.

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