Things You Gotta Know
Commonwealth Fusion Systems to Lead AI-Enabled Digital Twin Project for SPARC in Second Phase of DOE’s Genesis Mission
The U.S. Department of Energy selected Commonwealth Fusion Systems as the only private company to lead a project in the second phase of the Genesis Mission, and the only fusion-focused project among the new awards, which total $159 million across 12 Phase II projects (DOE did not disclose individual amounts). CFS will lead a team of 10 partners, including Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and SLAC national laboratories, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Synopsys and General Atomics, to build an AI-enabled digital twin of SPARC, the prototype fusion machine being assembled in Devens, Massachusetts. The multiyear project, which CFS describes as the largest collaboration to date on applying AI to fusion, will run on DOE supercomputers and includes AI surrogate models and an AI-based SPARC operations co-pilot to help plan plasma pulses in the control room.
Germany’s SPRIND Launches a €500 Million Milestone Program to Fund Fusion Startups Through 2029
Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND) announced a milestone-based fusion program with €500 million (about $560 million) available through 2029, funded from the government’s Special Fund for Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality, with total public funding that could rise to as much as €2.5 billion (about $2.8 billion) over the longer term. SPRIND runs the competitive program on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space as part of the High-Tech Agenda Germany, targeting fusion startups and young companies that each follow their own roadmap toward a demonstration power plant. Independent outside experts evaluate progress against technical and financial milestones, participants that miss a milestone leave the program and lose their funding, and the final milestone is a Technical Design Report for a fusion demonstration plant.
General Fusion Achieves World-First 1 keV Electron Temperature Milestone on Its LM26 Machine
General Fusion announced that its LM26 Magnetized Target Fusion machine reached electron temperatures above 1 keV, which the company says is the first 1 keV result from a fusion machine using practical, low-speed compression. Thomson scattering, developed with the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, measured about 1.1 keV (about 12.6 million °C) just before peak compression, while absolute extreme ultraviolet diagnostics showed about 1.2 keV at peak compression and ion temperature rose to about 0.46 keV, roughly double the starting level. Both results are in papers submitted for peer review and are not yet validated. The result completes the first of three LM26 technical milestones, and General Fusion is upgrading the machine to reach 10 keV next, ahead of the Lawson criterion, with a first-of-a-kind plant targeted around 2035.
DOE Approves Zap Energy’s Fusion Capacitor Design and First Prototype Under the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program
Zap Energy announced that the U.S. Department of Energy approved two capacitor milestones under its Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, following review by an independent expert panel convened by DOE. The first is a detailed design for a 35 kilovolt pulsed power capacitor rated for 50,000 amps peak current and a projected lifetime of 6 billion pulses at a continuous 10 pulses per second, built from self-healing metallized polypropylene film with active cooling. Commercial pulsed power capacitors are typically rated for about 100,000 pulses, while a 20-year commercial plant pulsing 10 times per second would need roughly 6 billion pulses per capacitor. The second milestone is a compact, 2.8-pound prototype that Zap designed, built, and tested in-house, which was cycled hundreds of times at 8 kV and more than 7,000 amps with capacitance holding within 0.25 percent. Zap plans to test the designs next at higher voltages and longer lifetimes.
Two Races, One Playbook: What The Small Modular Reactor Scorecard Says About The US-China Fusion Race
The Special Competitive Studies Project’s latest Tech Scorecard finds China ahead of the United States in four of five categories for small modular reactors, with the US keeping its edge in innovation. Shaun Walsh argues that the same structural pattern, many privately funded American designs set against fewer state-backed Chinese programs with a deep construction base, is now visible in commercial fusion energy. According to CSIS, China mobilized at least $6.5B in public fusion funding between 2023 and 2025, against $2.34B spent by DoE’s Fusion Energy Sciences program over the same period, while the Fusion Industry Association counted a record $4.48B in private fusion funding in the 12 months to July 2026. The analysis also weighs where the two races differ, starting with the fact that fusion physics has not yet been retired at power-plant scale. It closes by examining two bills before Congress, the American Leadership in Fusion Act and the Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act, which target public test infrastructure and a domestic fusion supply chain.
High Energy Plasma Heating/Diagnostics For MFE and HFE Systems
The Fusion Report’s series on the critical supporting technologies for commercial fusion energy continues with plasma heating and diagnostics. All fusion approaches rely on diagnostics to measure temperature, density, confinement, impurities, and fusion-neutron output, while MFE and hybrid systems must also supply heating energy externally. Tokamaks start with ohmic heating, which loses effectiveness as plasma resistivity declines with temperature, then add neutral beam injection and resonant RF and microwave heating; ITER’s two planned heating neutral beam injectors are designed to provide 16.5 MW each using 1 MeV deuterium beams. In hybrid concepts such as Sandia’s MagLIF, a laser preheats the magnetized fuel plasma to roughly 100 to 300 eV before a pulsed-power-driven metal liner compresses it. ITER is designed to use roughly 60 diagnostic instruments to measure 101 parameters, feeding real-time control of heating, fueling, magnetic fields, and protective actions.
