Things You Gotta Know
TAE Technologies and Black Moon Energy Enter Strategic Helium-3 Supply and Commercialization Agreement for Fusion Power
TAE Technologies announced it has signed an agreement with Black Moon Energy Corporation (BMEC) to support the future commercialization of fusion power through a prospective helium-3 fuel supply option and commercial development collaboration. Under the terms, BMEC would supply helium-3 fuel to TAE, preserving what CEO Michl Binderbauer calls the company’s flexibility to select the most cost-competitive fuel cycle at a time when many other fusion machines can operate only on deuterium-tritium. BMEC, a privately funded natural-resource and lunar-development company, plans to execute a robotic lunar delineation mission within five years to de-risk a commercial-scale helium-3 production operation. TAE is preparing to construct its first fusion power plant, Da Vinci, which is expected to generate 50 MWe and begin operations in 2031, with a site expected to be selected later this year and future facilities designed to scale to 350 to 500 MWe.
China Completes Testing of the World’s Largest Fusion Magnet, a 582-Ton Coil Destined for Its BEST Tokamak
The Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that it has completed development, acceptance and full-performance testing of the largest superconducting magnet ever built for a fusion reactor, a D-shaped toroidal field coil measuring 21 meters long and 12 meters wide and weighing 582 tons. The magnet has 1.3 times the volume and three times the stored energy of the comparable component built for ITER, and every part of it, from the superconducting wire to the structural steel, was produced domestically in China. The institute also completed testing of a high-temperature superconducting central solenoid coil. Both systems are part of the Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology (CRAFT) in Hefei and are destined for BEST, the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak targeted for completion around 2027.
UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade Sets Record Plasma Pressure While Taming the Instabilities That Stand Between Fusion and the Grid
The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority announced that its flagship MAST Upgrade spherical tokamak completed its most ambitious series of experiments to date, producing more than 1,100 fusion plasmas and achieving the highest plasma pressure in the machine’s history without the plasma destabilizing. The team suppressed edge localised modes (ELMs), sudden bursts at the plasma’s outer edge that can eject up to a tenth of its stored energy in a single event and damage a machine’s inner wall, and accessed four stable high-performance operating regimes including QH-mode, QCE and I-mode. Researchers also demonstrated a world-first plasma position control technique that uses measurements of visible light to detect tiny positional imbalances in real time. The results are being shared with the international fusion community to inform the design and operation of STEP, the UK’s prototype fusion power plant, and ITER.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Licenses Cryogenic Pellet Fueling Technologies to Stellarator Developer Type One Energy
Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that it has licensed a suite of cryogenic pellet fueling technologies to Type One Energy in an agreement signed at the Nuclear Opportunities Workshop in Knoxville, Tennessee. The license covers four ORNL inventions supporting the design and operation of cryogenic pellet fueling systems, which form solid pellets of hydrogen at temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero and inject them at high speed into a fusion plasma. The technologies include a novel extrusion system that can produce pellets at rates appropriate for reactor operations, addressing fuel performance, containment and recirculation challenges on the path to efficient, continuous plasma fueling.
UC Santa Barbara and Lawrence Livermore Launch AI Collaboration to Accelerate Fusion Plasma Simulations
UC Santa Barbara announced a collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring artificial intelligence to one of the most computationally demanding problems in fusion science: modeling the behavior of extreme plasmas. Led at UCSB by electrical and computer engineering professor Haewon Jeong alongside LLNL co-principal investigator Min Sang Cho, the team will build AI-driven surrogate models designed to dramatically reduce the time required for large-scale plasma simulations. The project was one of five proposals selected from a pool of 29 applicants to LLNL’s Academic Collaboration Team and will be supported with $536,000 annually over three years.
What Is Going On With The DRAM Shortage?
We examine why DRAM prices are so high. Big surprise, the culprit is AI. Memory manufacturers can make more money from HBM3E, the vertically stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators like NVIDIA’s H200, so they have prioritized it over the DDR5 modules that go into PCs, cell phones, graphics cards, and game consoles. The author reports that DRAM modules for a recent roughly $1,000 PC build cost about $450, while the same models would have cost at most half the price three years ago, and device prices have also increased significantly over the past 12 to 24 months. The article traces ten years of cyclical DRAM pricing and argues the current spike is amplified by the speculative US data center build-out, with roughly 45% of the build-out and half of the known global hyperscale pipeline located in the US. It closes with a warning: a massive demand boom that the author expects will almost certainly be followed by a similarly sized demand bust.
What Does Andy Burnham Becoming the UK Prime Minister Mean for Their (and Our) Fusion Energy Programs?
Andy Burnham is the UK’s new Prime Minister, and The Fusion Report examines what the change could mean for the UK’s fusion energy programs. The UK currently runs one of the largest publicly funded fusion commercialization programs, an investment of $3.3B US (£2.5B UK) between 2026 and 2030. That includes £1.3 billion for the STEP prototype power plant at the former West Burton coal power station in Nottinghamshire, the National Fusion Laboratory at Culham, a £125 million AI growth zone with the ‘Sunrise’ supercomputer expected to deliver up to 6.76 exaflops, and £50 million in skills training aiming to prepare 2,000 experts for the fusion industry by 2030. A Burnham government is not expected to retrench the UK’s stated fusion commercialization goals, but it could pursue them through a lens of devolution, public control, and industrial renewal, potentially reshaping where fusion facilities, supply chains, and research clusters are located.
