Things You Gotta Know
Fusion Supply Chain Spending Rose 24% in 2025 as the FIA Hosts the Industry’s First Supply Chain Trade Show
The Fusion Industry Association published its fourth annual supply chain report on June 23, finding that fusion supply chain spending rose 24 percent in 2025 to $538 million, with the roughly half of the world’s private fusion companies that shared data projecting a further 27 percent jump to $681 million in 2026. The report, based on interviews and surveys with 25 fusion companies and 67 suppliers, sees the industry’s long-standing chicken-and-egg gridlock easing: 75 percent of suppliers invested in expanding fusion capacity over the past year, with individual investments ranging from $30,000 to $65 million, and 70 percent of fusion companies report established suppliers pivoting into fusion. Bottlenecks remain in power systems, heat management, and vacuum components, and 48 percent of fusion companies name fuel cycle systems as a major future concern.
General Fusion Signs a Framework Agreement With Renexia to Deploy Commercial Fusion Power Plants in Italy
General Fusion announced on June 24 a framework agreement with Renexia S.p.A., the renewable energy developer within Italy’s Toto Group, to pursue the siting, development, and construction of commercial Magnetized Target Fusion power plants in Italy. The milestone-based, multi-phase agreement begins with site evaluation and selection, then moves through commercial opportunities, offtake agreements, permitting, and construction, with site feasibility work starting immediately. Renexia already sits on General Fusion’s Market Development Advisory Committee. The deal lands as the Vancouver company closes in on a listing with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III shareholders scheduled to vote July 6 on the business combination that would list General Fusion on Nasdaq under the ticker GFUZ.
nT-Tao Logs More Than 1,000 Plasma Experiments and Launches a Fusion Power Barge Project in Its Q2 Update
Israeli compact fusion developer nT-Tao released its Q2 2026 update on June 30, reporting more than 1,000 experiments across the first two campaigns run since its dual-section magnetic field cage was introduced at the end of 2025, with an upgraded cage now operational. During the quarter the company completed final integration tests on its C3 prototype and brought a new pulse controller online that drives tens of kiloamps at frequencies from tens to hundreds of kilohertz, and it finished construction of a new partially insulated high-temperature superconducting pancake coil, advancing a second HTS magnet for its high-field plasma test bench. nT-Tao also joined the American Bureau of Shipping, Siemens Energy, TEMISTh, and P&P Marine Consultants at the Posidonia maritime event in Athens to launch FusPoB, a joint development project assessing the feasibility of deploying compact fusion power on a floating barge.
LLNL Scientists Find That Changing Laser Polarization Could Save Optics at the National Ignition Facility
In new calculations published in Physics of Plasmas, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicists show that switching the National Ignition Facility’s 192 laser beams from linear to circular polarization could reduce backscatter, the stray laser energy that can render an optic unusable after a single shot. The study, led by LLNL physicist Pierre Michel, found that initial laser polarization drives significant beam-to-beam variation in crossed-beam energy transfer as beams intersect inside the plasma, and the beams amplified in that exchange can trigger the backscatter instabilities that damage optics. Circular polarization would deliver an intermediate transfer rate that evens out those variations, though building it into NIF would require a quarter waveplate at an aperture size no one currently knows how to manufacture; LLNL is investigating fabrication methods including its patented metasurface technology.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the UK Atomic Energy Authority Team Up on Tritium Production
Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first international partner in the UKAEA’s flagship LIBRTI program, a £220 million UK initiative to demonstrate net tritium production at a first-of-a-kind facility at Culham. CFS will build the first test articles and validate the tritium breeding blanket design for its ARC power plant planned for Chesterfield, Virginia.
Realta Demonstrates Direct Energy Conversion In a Fusion Energy Setting
WHAM device overview. Figure source: D. Endrizzi et al., Physics basis for the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM), J. Plasma Physics 89, 975890501 (2023).
Realta Fusion demonstrated direct energy conversion (DEC) of plasma kinetic energy into electricity at the WHAM fusion machine at UW-Madison, drawing current at about 100 volts to light several bulbs. The company describes it as the first such demonstration by a commercial fusion company and points to DEC as a way to raise efficiency and lower cost in its planned mid-2030s plants.
