Welcome to the Eos Atomics Affiliate Interview!

In this sponsored series, we speak with leaders building the technology and infrastructure that will support a commercial fusion industry. This series aims to provide a clear look at our affiliates’ products and capabilities while helping foster new sales and partnerships.

We sat down with Rama Myers, co-founder of Eos Atomics, to discuss the company’s current work and its long-term vision for accelerating fusion development.

Here is a brief overview of Eos Atomics: Eos Atomics is based in San Francisco, specializing in compact negative ion neutral beam injection systems for commercial fusion energy. Eos Atomics offers NBI solutions for magnetic confinement fusion, leveraging proprietary ion-source and neutralizer technology to improve efficiency and reduce system size. Their systems operate in the 400-700 keV energy range and feature modular architecture for scalability. Eos Atomics plans to begin customer deliveries after completing and manufacturing scale-up by 2028.

What breakthroughs are you commercializing, and how do they set you apart?

Eos Atomics is commercializing a set of first-principles breakthroughs in modular negative-ion sources, advanced thin-film ceramics, and laser cavities. The core innovations include:

Compact modular negative-ion source. Eos Atomics is developing a modular RF ion source architecture to support steady-state operation, rapid component replacement, and parallel subsystem development. Traditional ion sources are typically built as monolithic assemblies within a single vacuum vessel, which inherently limit pulse duration, complicate maintenance, and hinder diagnostics access.

Next-generation gas neutralization scheme. Eos Atomics has developed a novel thin-film beam window concept for the specific challenge of transmitting energetic negative ions into a high-pressure gas neutralizer cell. This semi permeable window architecture enables higher differential pressure between the neutralizer and the source sections of the NBI, increasing wall-plug efficiency 2x, and decreasing the size by 3x compared to equivalent systems.

Advanced laser cavities: For our Gen 2 NBI, Eos Atomics will pioneer ultra-high power photoneutralization laser cavities to deliver ~99% neutralization efficiency. This replaces gas targets entirely, using high-intensity laser light to strip electrons via photodetachment.

Eos Atomics is optimizing for cost, reliability, uptime, manufacturability, and deployment at scale. This is what makes our technology differentiated — we’re building for a world where fusion developers need hundreds of beamlines, not two.

What’s the origin story behind your transition from AeroFuse to Eos Atomics?

We originally founded AeroFuse to explore air-breathing fusion propulsion concepts. But as we engaged more deeply with the fusion ecosystem, a more urgent market pain-point emerged: many magnetic-fusion companies — tokamaks, stellarators, mirrors, FRCs, dipole devices —face the same bottleneck: high-performance neutral beam injection that is far smaller, cheaper, and more electrically efficient than legacy systems.

By early-2025, multiple fusion developers told us directly that their path to net-electric power required a radically different plasma heating architecture than anything on the market. We realized our core expertise in advanced accelerators and thin-film materials science directly translated into next-generation negative-ion NBI.

The rebranding to Eos Atomics reflected a commitment to the fusion power-plant supply chain — helping usher in the new dawn of the fusion energy age by building the enabling technology that unlocks commercial fusion at scale.

What feedback have you received from fusion developers, and how did it shape your design?

Across the industry, we consistently heard five pain points:

  • Footprint: Legacy NBIs are too large for compact-HTS devices or modular plant layouts.
  • Efficiency: Wall-plug efficiency is too low for commercial power-plant energy balances.
  • Cost: Conventional NBIs are cost-prohibitive for competitive LCOE economics.
  • Supply Chain: Lead times are unacceptable; the current supply base is not configured to move at startup pace.
  • Reliability: Existing NBI systems with large port sizes expose ion sources to backstreaming neutron and particle damage which limit reliability and lifetime.

These insights directly drove our design choices:

  • We minimized footprint by re-architecting the neutralizer, reducing background pressure, and radically reducing the pumping requirements.
  • We focused on high efficiency CW operation, not only pulse-only operation, including a Low Energy Beam Transport (LEBT) section to offset the ion source from Line-of-Sight (LOS) particle and neutron damage.
  • We designed for factory manufacturing, not one-off assembly.
  • We architected sub-components that can be swapped rapidly in the field without venting large vacuum volumes. Eos Atomics exists because the fusion industry explicitly asked for a radically better NBI.

How mature is your current system? Are you in pilot, production, etc.?

Eos Atomics Gen 1 NBI is currently at a TRL 3–4 configuration with a 10kW 230keV negative-ion source beam already producing first ions. Key beam window subsystem validation is underway for materials survivability under irradiation, and differential pressure testing.

We will enter TRL 5 in 2026 with our sub-scale integrated engineering demonstrator aimed at a first full-energy beam in mid 2027.

What unique manufacturing or material-science advances enable your cost & size reductions?

Three manufacturing advances define our approach:

  • We've identified suitable thin film materials with exceptional mechanical, thermal, and radiation resistance properties required for a CW beam.
  • Eos Atomics has also developed a reliable and scalable fabrication process for our thin film beam windows, including the application of protective coatings to mitigated ion beam sputtering damage.
  • We've also designed a cooling system to dissipate sufficient waste heat.

What role do you see Eos Atomics playing in industry-wide standards?

We see a future where NBI systems, diagnostics ports, power-electronic interfaces, and vacuum architecture converge toward standardized interfaces and interchangeable modules that accelerate industry-wide deployment.

Eos Atomics aims to be an early contributor to:

  • Common vacuum and cryogenic interfaces
  • Beamline control and safety interlock protocols
  • Shared reliability and uptime standards for fusion-plant-grade NBIs. Fusion cannot scale without standardization. We intend to help drive it.

Can you describe a partnership or collaboration that has been pivotal?

Our most pivotal collaborations have been with fusion developers themselves, who have given us deep visibility into:

  • Required beam energy and species mix
  • Realistic plant-layout constraints
  • Efficiency requirements for net-electric operation
  • Maintainability expectations for near 24/7 operations and high industrial uptime

We are also working with laser cavity research groups to unlock extremely high neutralization efficiency and compact HV power supply providers that could enable modular CW beamlines. These partnerships shape our roadmap and accelerate our ability to meet commercial requirements.

What regulatory or safety hurdles do you face, and how are you addressing them?

Key regulatory vectors include:

  • Radiation shielding requirements for neutron-generating systems and activation control
  • Vacuum-system safety, including stored hydrogen deflagration standards, and fail-safe
  • venting and pressure-relief protocols
  • Hazardous materials handling, especially when using work-function modifiers or
  • specialty coolants
  • Export controls related to advanced accelerator technologies.

We are designing power plant grade NBIs with inherent safety architectures, documented compliance pathways, and modular certification that simplifies site approval for fusion developers.

How do you see your technology’s role as fusion moves from demonstrations to mass deployment?

In a world where commercial fusion plants have become widespread, NBI transitions from a bespoke research technology to a mass-manufactured industrial subsystem. That shift requires:

  • Drastic reductions in CAPEX and OPEX
  • Factory-scale production rates
  • Reliability measured in years, not shots Plug-and-play replacements and upgrades

Eos Atomics’ compact, cost-efficient NNBI systems are being built for this future — enabling fusion developers to scale from one or two beamlines to hundreds across global deployments.

What unexpected challenges have you encountered building at this intersection?

  • Balancing physics-grade performance with industrial manufacturability. Many legacy design choices break down when you try to scale production.
  • Supply-chain gaps. Few vendors can meet the tolerances, materials, and thermal properties required for 24/7 NBI operation. We’ve had to become substantially vertically stacked and build early capabilities in-house.
  • Customer heterogeneity. Every fusion company has a different geometry, timeline, and power requirement — so ensuring modularity while maintaining performance has been a key design challenge. These challenges validated our hypothesis that NBI needs a complete redesign for the commercial fusion era.

How are you approaching workforce development and talent recruitment?

We focus on three pillars:

  • Early investment in multidisciplinary scientists and engineers — plasma physics, power electronics, materials science, and mechanical design.
  • Partnerships with universities and national labs for pipeline development.
  • Cross-training that enables a small team to move quickly between experiments, analysis, and manufacturing.

The goal is a workforce fluent in accelerator physics, vacuum engineering, and industrial manufacturing — the capabilities required to build the world’s first commercially viable NNBI.

What adjacent markets or unexpected applications exist for your technology?

Beyond fusion energy, our compact beam and subsystem technologies have potential applications in:

  • Modular ion source for third party particle accelerators.
  • Compact neutral particle beam technology for space-based directed energy or power beaming.
  • Ion beam window implementation within accelerator-based neutron sources for increased isotope production.

Eos Atomics is focused on fusion as our primary market, but the underlying technologies have broader industrial utility.

To learn more about Eos Atomics and Neutral Beam Systems, contact [email protected] or visit their website.