Things You Gotta Know
Helion Secures the Regulatory Licenses Needed to Operate a Fusion Power Plant
Helion Energy announced on June 16 that it has secured the regulatory licenses required to operate a fusion power plant, receiving a Radioactive Materials License and a Radioactive Air Emissions License from the Washington State Department of Health. The licenses confirm that Helion has the facilities, trained personnel, and safety programs in place at Orion, its first power plant now under construction in Malaga, Washington, to meet the safety standards required for fusion operations. With the assembly and office buildings already complete, the company can now proceed with the generator building, where initial earthwork began in spring 2026. The milestone follows community engagement in Chelan County dating to 2023, including more than 10 public meetings, as Helion works toward a transmission interconnection agreement with the Chelan County Public Utility District.
General Atomics Will Design the First Full-Scale Fusion Blanket Test Facility for the U.S. Department of Energy
General Atomics announced on June 11 that it is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy to design the Fusion Blanket Component Test Facility (BCTF), the first facility built to test full-scale fusion power plant “blankets,” a critical system that has never been evaluated at this scale. Fusion blankets line the inside of a fusion vessel with specialized lithium-based materials, whether solid, liquid, or salt, to capture the energy released by fusion reactions and breed the tritium needed to sustain them. The public-private partnership was seeded by a DOE investment to Idaho National Laboratory to launch preconceptual design, with collaborators including INL, the University of California San Diego, and Japan-based Kyoto Fusioneering. The effort targets one of the most significant engineering gaps standing between today’s experimental machines and commercial fusion power plants.
General Fusion’s SPAC Merger With Spring Valley Clears SEC Review, Setting Up a July 6 Shareholder Vote on the Roughly $1 Billion Deal
General Fusion announced on June 15 that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has declared effective the joint F-4 registration statement for its proposed business combination with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III (NASDAQ: SVAC), clearing a key regulatory hurdle on the Vancouver-based developer’s path to the public markets. Spring Valley has filed its definitive proxy statement and set an extraordinary general meeting for July 6, 2026, where shareholders will vote on the deal. The transaction, governed by a business combination agreement dated January 21, 2026, implies a pro-forma equity value of roughly $1 billion, including about $108 million from a committed and oversubscribed PIPE financing and up to $230 million of Spring Valley trust capital, assuming no redemptions. A close would make General Fusion one of the few pure-play fusion companies trading on a public exchange.
Type One Energy Appoints Former bp CEO Bernard Looney to Its Board of Directors
Type One Energy announced on June 16 that it has appointed Bernard Looney, who served as chief executive of bp from 2020 to 2023, to its Board of Directors as an independent member. The appointment comes as the stellarator developer confirms plans to bring commercial fusion power to the grid by 2034, prepares to close its Series B funding round, and initiates procurement for its Infinity One prototype in East Tennessee. Looney brings more than three decades of experience across global energy, capital markets, and major project delivery, and currently holds board roles at several energy and AI companies. Type One is targeting a 2028 construction start for its 400 MWe Infinity Two plant at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bull Run site, and recently launched the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium with UK government support.
Global Fusion Leaders Join Inertia’s Advisory Board to Advance Its Path to Commercial Fusion Energy
Inertia announced on June 18 that it has formed a Science and Technology Advisory Board, assembling an independent group of experts in fusion plasma physics, high-energy laser systems, large-scale program execution, target fabrication, and nuclear materials science. The board includes Marvin Adams, former Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration. The California-based developer, which raised a $450 million Series A earlier this year and is led by CEO Jeff Lawson, chief scientist Annie Kritcher, and CTO Mike Dunne, is pursuing laser-based inertial confinement fusion and aims to begin construction of a grid-scale power plant by 2030. The advisory board is intended to serve as a coordinating hub for the multi-industry expertise required to commercialize inertial fusion.
China EAST Gets Set for Ignition in 2027
China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), the record-setting “Artificial Sun” in Hefei, is now scheduled to attempt fusion ignition in 2027, a milestone reached only once before, by Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility in 2022. If successful, EAST would be the first to achieve ignition in a steady-state magnetic confinement device, though Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC is racing toward the same goal on the same timeline. The Fusion Report breaks down what ignition actually requires (the Lawson Criteria of temperature, density, and confinement time) and assesses how close each machine really is. EAST leads on pathfinding plasma physics while SPARC targets Q > 1, but neither has yet crossed into a self-heating burning plasma. The bigger question: would a 2027 ignition milestone finally ignite broad investor interest across the fusion sector?
Putting Data Centers Into Space: Is That Really the Best Idea That Elon Musk Has for SpaceX?
With SpaceX freshly public and its stock up 28% over the IPO price, talk of putting AI data centers in orbit is back in the headlines. The Fusion Report looks past the one obvious upside, nearly unlimited solar power in a sun-synchronous orbit, and tallies the costs that doom the idea: $160M to $280M per megawatt just to launch, two-year hardware refresh cycles, dense low-earth-orbit debris, space weather, and the near-impossibility of radiating away server heat in a vacuum. Against a ship-borne data center that fits in a shipping container and cools itself for a fraction of the price, orbital compute simply doesn’t pencil out. The verdict: outside of analyzing data that originates in space, orbital data centers are not a great idea.
