Things You Gotta Know
Shine Technologies Preps an IPO With Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan as Bookrunners
Axios reported that fusion developer Shine Technologies is preparing to file for an initial public offering, with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan signed on as bookrunners. The Janesville, Wisconsin company, founded in 2005, has pursued a phased strategy that generates revenue from fusion driven neutron systems today, spanning industrial inspection, radiation effects testing, and production of medical isotopes such as lutetium 177 and molybdenum 99, while building toward fusion energy over the long term. A listing would make Shine one of the first fusion companies on the US public markets, following General Fusion’s Nasdaq debut in July, and would give public investors a second pure play way to own the sector.
Marathon Fusion Demonstrates Lithium and Hydrogen Isotope Enrichment in Its Plasma Centrifuge
Marathon Fusion announced the successful enrichment of both hydrogen and lithium isotopes in its proprietary plasma centrifuge, addressing two of the fusion fuel cycle’s hardest problems with a single machine architecture. Hydrogen isotope separation enables selective tritium pumping, which the San Francisco company says could shrink tritium flow rates and the size of tritium processing systems by a factor of ten or more, while enriched lithium is the feedstock every deuterium tritium power plant will need to breed its own fuel, a gap a Special Competitive Studies Project report called the single highest risk in the fusion supply chain with no domestic commercial source. The work is supported by the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E VISION OPEN program, and with enrichment demonstrated Marathon says it will move toward its first commercial pilot facility, capable of producing isotopes for gigawatt scale fusion deployments.
SLAC Researchers Uncover Copper’s Surprising Melting Behavior at Extreme Temperatures
Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory found that copper resists melting under extreme conditions far better than models predicted, results published in Nature Communications that sharpen the simulations used to pick materials for future fusion machines. Using SLAC’s ultrafast electron camera, the team watched a laser heated copper film melt gradually rather than collapsing all at once as simulations expected, traced the discrepancy to an assumption that atoms feel uniform pressure during melting, and updated the models to reproduce the real behavior. The findings matter for copper alloys under consideration as heat sinks that pull thermal energy away from plasma facing components, improving predictions of which materials can survive the punishing interior of a fusion reaction chamber.
Kyoto Fusioneering Raises New Funds, And Accelerates Their Unity Fusion Program
Kyoto Fusioneering (KF) announced the first close of its Series D round, securing JPY 16.72 billion (approx. USD 105 million) in new equity plus access to JPY 9.0 billion (approx. USD 57 million) in credit and loan facilities, for JPY 25.72 billion (approx. USD 162 million) in total. The Tokyo-based company builds the plant systems around the fusion reaction rather than the reaction itself: gyrotrons for heating, tritium fuel cycle systems, and breeding blanket and thermal cycle systems. Proceeds will accelerate the UNITY Program, a staged de-risking effort spanning UNITY-1 in Kyoto, UNITY-2 with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories at Chalk River, and UNITY-3 with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, targeting facility completion by the end of 2028. New investors include the Development Bank of Japan, GX Acceleration Agency, JR East, IMM Investment Japan, SiteGround Capital, and Minerva Growth Partners, joining follow-on investors such as SMBC Venture Capital, JIC, Daiwa, DBJ Capital, and MUFG Bank. KF reports cumulative equity funding of JPY 32.98 billion (approx. USD 207 million) to date.
Pacific Fusion Breaks Ground on Their State-of-the-Art Fusion Facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Pacific Fusion has broken ground on a $1 billion Research & Manufacturing Campus at Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The campus will house the company’s Demonstration System, designed to achieve net facility gain by 2030 and to produce high-yield fusion bursts expected to exceed 100 megajoules, which the company says would make it the only high-yield fusion facility under construction in the United States. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration executed a Memorandum of Understanding with Pacific Fusion to identify collaboration opportunities in high-yield fusion, high-energy-density science, and pulsed-power technologies. The company says the campus will support approximately 200 permanent jobs plus hundreds of construction and regional jobs, and it is expanding manufacturing in Los Lunas. The Fusion Report explains why a dated net facility gain commitment and the NNSA partnership matter.
