Nuclear Fusion News & Discussions

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Trump Energy department drops renewables, promotes fusion in office reshuffle

The Trump administration revealed this week a revamped organizational chart for the Department of Energy, one which dumps several offices focused on renewable energy while elevating fusion.

The shakeup eliminates the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, the Office of State and Community Energy Programs, and Grid Deployment Office, and the Office of Federal Energy Management programs.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/21/trump ... reshuffle/

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Physicists Show Fusion Reactors Might Create Dark Matter Particles
By Michelle Starr
December 24, 2025

Introduction:

(Science Alert) Reactors designed to produce energy from the fusion of atoms could have an unexpected scientific side benefit.

An international team of researchers has shown that low-mass dark-sector particles, such as the hypothesized axion, might be forged in fusion facilities – not as by-products of the fusion process, but through interactions between high-energy neutrons and the reactor walls.

Their proposal turns what was once thought impossible into a realistic theoretical pathway and a promising step towards future experimental searches.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/fusion-re ... cists-show

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Every fusion startup that has raised over $100M

December 31, 2025

Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines.

The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets.

The bullish wave buoying the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more powerful computer chips, more sophisticated AI, and powerful high-temperature superconducting magnets. Together, they have helped deliver more sophisticated reactor designs, better simulations, and more complex control schemes.

It doesn’t hurt that, at the end of 2022, a U.S. Department of Energy lab announced that it had produced a controlled fusion reaction that produced more power than the lasers had imparted to the fuel pellet. The experiment had crossed what’s known as scientific breakeven, and while it’s still a long ways from commercial breakeven, where the reaction produces more than the entire facility consumes, it was a long-awaited step that proved the underlying science was sound.

Founders have built on that momentum in recent years, pushing the private fusion industry forward at a rapid pace.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every ... over-100m/

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Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST
Jiaxing Liu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9641-4368, Ping Zhu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5773-8861, Dominique Franck Escande https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0460-8385, Wenbin Liu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1042-4117, [...] , and the EAST team+14 authors

Abstract
High plasma density operation is crucial for a tokamak to achieve energy breakeven and burning plasma. However, there is often an empirical upper limit of electron density in tokamak operation, namely, the Greenwald density limit
, above which tokamaks generally disrupt. Achieving high-density operation above the density limit has been a long-standing challenge in magnetic confinement fusion research. Here, we report experimental results on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) achieving line-averaged electron density in the range of (1.3 to 1.65) , significantly above the typical EAST operational range of (0.8 to 1.0) . This is performed with electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH)–assisted ohmic start-up and sufficiently high initial neutral density. These experiments are shown to operate in the density-free regime first predicted by a recent plasma-wall self-organization theory. These results suggest a promising scheme for substantially increasing the density limit in tokamaks, a critical advancement toward achieving burning plasma.


China’s EAST Tokamak experiments achieve stable operation at densities beyond limits

The physical concept on the density-free regime has been verified for the first time on EAST in this work.
By
Prabhat Ranjan Mishra
China's EAST Tokamak experiments exceed plasma density limit.
The experimental achievements provide new physical insights into breaking through the long-standing density limit in tokamak operations.

Researchers in China have experimentally accessed a theorized “density-free regime” for fusion plasmas, achieving stable operation at densities well beyond conventional limits. This was achieved by China’s fully superconducting Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).

By realizing a novel high-density operating scheme on EAST, the team demonstrated that plasma density, long constrained by empirical limits in tokamak operation, can be substantially extended without triggering disruptive instabilities.

“The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices,” said Prof. Zhu Ping from Huazhong University of Science.

https://interestingengineering.com/ener ... -operation

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Twilio co-founder’s fusion power startup raises $450M from Bessemer and Alphabet’s GV

February 11, 2026

Inertia Enterprises has raised $450 million to build one of the world’s most powerful lasers, which it hopes will serve as the foundation of a grid-scale power plant the fusion startup intends to start construction on in 2030.

Inertia Enterprises is building on technology developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility. The NIF is the site of the world’s only controlled fusion reactions that have reached scientific breakeven, in which the reaction releases more energy than it took to start.

The Series A was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from GV, Modern Capital, Threshold Ventures, and others. Inertia’s co-founders include Jeff Lawson, who co-founded Twilio and served as its CEO, Annie Kircher, who led the successful experiments at NIF, and Mike Dunne, a Stanford professor who helped Lawrence Livermore develop a power plant design based on NIF. Kircher has remained in her position at Lawrence Livermore.

NIF’s breakeven experiments have been a key milestones on the road to widespread fusion power. However, considerable progress needs to be made before a fusion power plant can deliver electricity to the grid. For Inertia, that means building a laser capable of delivering 10 kilojoules ten times per second.

The startup’s reactor relies on a form of fusion known as inertial confinement. In Inertia’s flavor of inertial confinement, lasers bombard a fuel target, compressing the fuel until atoms inside fuse and release energy. The technique is based on NIF’s designs, in which laser light is converted into X-rays inside the target. The X-rays are what ultimately heat and compress the fuel pellet.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/twili ... habets-gv/

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Helion makes big bet on ‘Tiny Merge’ fusion testbed to meet aggressive Microsoft timeline

Sustainability: News about the rapidly growing climate tech sector and other areas of innovation to protect our planet. SEE MORE

by Lisa Stiffler on May 8, 2026 at 10:14 am
Helion Energy is building Tiny Merge, a fusion device that is one-eighth the size of its seventh generation prototype and will serve as a testbed for faster iterations of its designs. (Helion Photo)

EVERETT, Wash. — With just three years left on a hard deadline to prove its fusion approach works, Helion Energy is still wrestling with fundamental questions — and it’s building a new, smaller machine to help find answers faster.

Since launching more than a decade ago, Helion has built increasingly larger prototype devices to test and refine its fusion technology as it races to deliver a source of nearly limitless clean energy. But by 2028, Helion is contractually obligated to have a commercial facility producing energy from fusion reactions, essentially replicating the physics that power the sun.

So now it’s going small.

Yeah, I don't have much faith in this working.

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