Inertia Enterprises Says Ignition-Benchmarked Simulations Show Its Target Design Delivers More Than 25x Gain and 250 MWe to 1.3 GWe of Grid Electricity
Inertia Enterprises announced that a high-fidelity virtual shot of its commercial Laser Indirect Drive target design, run with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the same design codes the lab used to achieve ignition at the National Ignition Facility, shows the design can produce enough fusion energy to generate between 250 MWe and 1.3 GWe of grid electricity. Driven with 10 MJ of laser energy, the baseline design yields about 260 MJ per shot for a target gain of roughly 26, compared with the roughly 8 MJ and 4x gain NIF has demonstrated, and early optimizations push modeled output above 400 MJ for gains up to 43x. At the planned 10 shots per second, the baseline corresponds to about 290 MWe of net electricity with a 12 percent efficient laser or 450 MWe at 15 percent, while the 43x case reaches roughly 1.05 GWe to 1.3 GWe. The design keeps NIF’s proven physics but scales up the target and fuel mass, swaps the gold-lined depleted uranium hohlraum for lead, assumes rougher fast-formed deuterium-tritium ice, and still ignites with full yield after accounting for injection and pointing errors and ablator voids. Co-founder and Chief Scientist Annie Kritcher called it a significant technical achievement; the result completes the 25x gain task on Inertia’s Top Ten Things list for phase one, and the underlying paper is on arXiv and being prepared for peer-reviewed submission.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems Runs SPARC’s Full Cryogenic System at Its 8 Kelvin Operating Temperature
Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced that the cryogenic system for its SPARC tokamak in Devens, Massachusetts has run at its full operating temperature of 8 kelvin, colder than the surface of Pluto. The plant circulates supercritical helium to chill SPARC’s toroidal field magnets to 8 K and its poloidal field and central solenoid magnets to 15 K, with 80 K coolant for supporting non-superconducting magnets. To commission the system before the tokamak is finished, CFS built a bypass pipe it calls a turnaround tool for practicing cooldowns, plus a blowdown system that stores 8 K helium in tanks to flush through SPARC during its most powerful 10 second pulses, followed by a roughly four hour recool. The run is a step toward an integrated dry dress rehearsal that links cryogenics with magnet power supplies and radio frequency heating without the tokamak running. CFS says the plant is essentially the equipment its ARC power plant will need, and the milestone follows the company’s $1 billion raise this summer that brought total capital raised to roughly $4 billion.
UKAEA and PPPL Sign Joint Declaration to Link Their SUNRISE and STELLAR-AI Fusion Supercomputers Across the Atlantic
The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory signed a Joint Declaration of Intent at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London to explore linking UKAEA’s SUNRISE supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform as the SUNRISE-STELLAR-AI Federation. SUNRISE is the UK’s first AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion, backed by £45 million from the UK government and anchoring the UK’s first AI Growth Zone at UKAEA’s Culham Campus; STELLAR-AI is PPPL’s AI and high performance computing platform, operated with support from Princeton University. The federation would train the same AI models on data from UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade in Oxfordshire and PPPL’s NSTX-U in New Jersey, two compact spherical tokamaks of similar design, because models trained on a single machine struggle to predict another. Next steps under discussion include digital twins of both facilities and moving computing jobs between the platforms, with the aim of accelerating designs such as the UK’s STEP plant and PPPL’s Spherical Tokamak Advanced Reactor. The declaration builds on a memorandum of understanding the two laboratories signed in June.
nT-Tao Deploys a 50 MW Pulsed-Power Subsystem to Push Its Compact Fusion Prototype Past 1.5 Million Degrees
Israeli compact fusion company nT-Tao announced that it has developed and deployed a proprietary 50 MW pulsed-power subsystem with real-time nonlinear control, expanding its MEGA (Modular Energy Generator Architecture) platform. The subsystem combines 50 compact Power Electronic Generators of roughly 1 MW each, arranged as ten parallel branches of five modules and designed to operate at 50 to 2,000 kHz, a roughly five-fold scale-up from the earlier 12 module, approximately 10 MW generation. It builds on nT-Tao’s recently proven real-time nonlinear controller, which maintains resonance and maximizes power transfer as the electrical characteristics of the system and the plasma change during each pulse. Co-founder and CTO Boaz Weinfeld said the hard part is not generating 50 MW but controlling 50 modules in real time so they act as a single tuned system, and that building from proven 1 MW modules keeps the footprint compact and makes scale-up a matter of repeating a unit. nT-Tao says the subsystem will drive its C3 prototype series past the 1.5 million degrees Celsius already demonstrated, toward a 20 MW on-site fusion system for distributed baseload power.
Helion Slides Dates, and What Is In The Department of Energy FY-2027 Plans For Fusion Energy Development?
Helion Energy has acknowledged that its Orion fusion power plant in Malaga, Washington will not reach full 50 MWe operation in 2028, with initial operation now expected by the end of 2028 and full power generation not until 2029 or 2030. The slip comes shortly after Helion closed a $465M funding round that brought its lifetime funding to slightly over $1.5B, second in the industry behind Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Meanwhile, the FY2027 Department of Energy budget request rises to $53.9 billion, but the increase is driven by a $7.4 billion boost for the National Nuclear Security Administration while non-NNSA programs decline by roughly $2.6 billion. The Fusion Energy Sciences request of $755.25 million is down 6.3% from FY2026, reflecting a $93 million cut to the U.S. ITER contribution, while $135 million goes to public-private partnerships and $10 million funds a new Office of Fusion. Mike Heumann weighs the U.S. request against the UK’s five-year fusion package and Germany’s Fusion Action Plan and asks whether the DoE is moving forward or backward on fusion.
Building Divertor and Heat Exhaust Systems for Commercial Fusion Energy Machines
The Fusion Report continues its series on the critical supporting technologies for commercial fusion energy with a look at divertors and heat exhaust systems. Tokamaks such as ITER use X-point divertors with tungsten armor to pull helium ash, fuel ions, and heat out of the plasma edge, and reactor-scale designs are exploring snowflake and long-leg geometries such as Super-X to spread the heat load. Stellarators such as Wendelstein 7-X require island or helical divertor modules that conform to a three-dimensional magnetic field. Magnetic mirrors instead need engineered end regions, including expanders, cooled collectors, pumping, and possibly direct energy converters that recover part of the escaping particle energy as electricity. Inertial fusion machines need chamber and first-wall protection systems but no divertor in the classical sense, which makes heat exhaust primarily a magnetic fusion energy problem.
