Mazama Energy announced a superhot rock drilling performance milestone that the company says signals a turning point for the economics of engineered geothermal systems.
Pacific Fusion announced that Sirius, a pulsed-power prototype designed and built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the company, has surpassed 3,000 full-power shots. Sirius is an impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG) — a pulsed-power architecture that synchronises electromagnetic waves directly onto a common transmission line in a single step rather than inductively stacking voltage through conventional Marx banks, making it simpler, more efficient and easier to scale. It is the same core technology Pacific Fusion is scaling for its own system. CTO and co-founder Keith LeChien framed the campaign as evidence that national-lab technology can be validated by repeated testing and scaled quickly by industry, supporting both surging AI and electrification demand and high-yield experimental capability for stockpile stewardship.
On 30 June 2026 Realta Fusion announced that an experiment run on 19 June had powered lightbulbs using electricity harvested directly from WHAM, its magnetic mirror demonstration device, via a prototype direct energy converter attached to the end of the machine — producing multiple amps at 100 volts. CEO Kieran Furlong told TechCrunch that direct conversion is roughly 90% efficient against about 33% for the steam turbines in today's fission reactors, and that recirculating that electricity to heat the plasma could raise a commercial plant's net output by 20-30%. CRITICAL CAVEAT, published by TechCrunch as a correction on 1 July: because WHAM does not yet run on deuterium-tritium fuel, the direct energy converter harvested INPUT power, not the charged alpha particles produced by fusion. So this demonstrates the converter hardware operating on a fusion device — it is not electricity generated from fusion products. TechCrunch's own headline calls it 'an apparent first' and Realta says it 'believes' it is the first private company to do this. Net energy gain — getting more energy out of the machine than is put into it — was not addressed and has not been achieved. Helion, which also depends on direct energy conversion, has not demonstrated it publicly.
CFS submitted an interconnection request to PJM Interconnection (the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market) to connect its first ARC fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia, targeting power delivery in the early 2030s. It is the first fusion company ever to enter a grid-interconnection queue — a concrete, regulated step from R&D toward commercial generation.
CFS published a set of five peer-reviewed papers (special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics) detailing the scientific basis for its ARC commercial fusion plant, building on SPARC learnings. The company says the work validates the plasma confinement and stability physics underpinning its path to net-positive grid power in the early 2030s.
CFS published a set of five peer-reviewed papers (special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics) detailing the scientific basis for its ARC commercial fusion plant, building on SPARC learnings. The company says the work validates the plasma confinement and stability physics underpinning its path to net-positive grid power in the early 2030s.
Pacific Fusion announced completion of its second set of technical milestones, keeping it on track for net facility gain — more energy out than the total energy initially stored in the machine — by 2030. The central hardware milestone is the module, a shipping-container-sized pulser delivering more than a terawatt of peak power in a pulse of roughly 100 nanoseconds, charged from the wall plug using about twice the electricity needed to charge a laptop and discharged in tightly synchronised pulses with no additional pulse-compression or intermediate energy-storage stages. Completing the milestone set unlocks the next tranche of the company's $900m Series A, which is paid out against technical milestones rather than up front. The company said it had completed its first milestone set ahead of schedule, expanded into New Mexico, and grown past 200 scientists, engineers and builders in three years.