We sat down with Shaun Walsh, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of PeakNano and Allison Gittings, Director of Communications, to discuss the company’s current work and its long-term vision for accelerating fusion development.
Peak Nano is a U.S.-based advanced materials company specializing in dielectric films engineered for fusion-grade capacitor applications. Founded in 2016 through collaborative research with Case Western Reserve University, DARPA, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the company develops NanoPlex™, a proprietary nanolayered film platform backed by 20+ global patents. NanoPlex HDC targets laser and ICF systems, while NanoPlex LDF serves magnetic confinement, stellarator, and Z-pinch platforms, both designed to meet the energy density, thermal, and duty cycle demands that conventional films cannot. Through a Films as a Service model and partnerships with capacitor manufacturers, Peak Nano delivers custom fusion-grade films in 6–10 weeks.
Can you give us a brief overview of Peak Nano and explain why capacitors (and the films inside of them) are important for the fusion industry?
Capacitors are central to powering fusion systems, whether they’re driving high-powered laser pulses in an inertial confinement fusion machine, cycling magnetic coils in tokamaks, or delivering the startup energy that makes the first reaction possible. But conventional capacitors, built around legacy films, were never designed for fusion’s combination of high voltage, extreme duty cycles, elevated temperatures, and multi‑decade lifetimes. At envisioned commercial pulse rates, today’s capacitors last on the order of a year; fusion economics demand three, five, or even ten. That mismatch is a bottleneck between today’s experiments and tomorrow’s grid‑scale plants.
Peak Nano is a U.S.-based nanomaterials company that engineers NanoPlex, a family of nanolayered dielectric films that improve capacitor performance. NanoPlex films are designed for the demands of both laser inertial fusion energy (IFE) and magnetic fusion energy (MFE).
- Laser IFE demands high shot rates, fast charge/discharge cycling, low impedance, and thermal endurance between pulses. Conventional capacitors can't sustain that duty cycle at commercial scale. NanoPlex HDC stores 4x more energy than conventional capacitors in half the footprint, with the thermal endurance and low impedance characteristics laser fusion requires. The result: smaller banks, less cooling, lower bill of materials, and a direct path to cost-competitive energy per shot.
- MFE concepts (tokamaks, stellarators, Z-pinch) demand long‑life and high‑temperature operation under relentless cycling. Conventional films degrade under heat and stress; replacement costs make commercial economics difficult. NanoPlex LDF maintains full energy capacity at 135°C, with a 50% lower dissipation factor and up to 4x faster charge-discharge cycling than conventional film. Projected operational lifetime: 3–5x longer than conventional capacitors. For a plant with a 20–30 year horizon, that's the difference between a cost structure that works and one that never reaches $50/MWh.
In short, conventional capacitors do not meet fusion’s life, temperature, and duty‑cycle requirements. Capacitors built on NanoPlex films are engineered to meet those demands and can be customized to the requirements of each fusion platform.
You recently announced a partnership with E&P Technologies to co-develop fusion-grade capacitors. What does that collaboration look like?
Our partnership with E&P Technologies reflects how Peak Nano approaches commercialization: find specialists who understand the end application deeply, and build the solution together.
E&P brings decades of pulsed‑power and high‑reliability capacitor experience, including work on fusion and aerospace programs. They manage capacitor design, automated manufacturing, and qualification under one roof. NanoPlex HDC provides the dielectric core that enables higher performance within that familiar design and manufacturing environment.
Our first collaboration with E&P focused on capacitors for Impedance-Matched Marx Generator systems. We were able to go from specification to prototype in under four months. For fusion developers, that means we can work directly with your engineering team to translate platform‑specific requirements into capacitor designs, then deliver hardware for integration, testing, and scale‑up on timelines aligned with your program milestones.
What specific problems do NanoPlex-based capacitors solve for fusion energy systems, and how do they compare to conventional Biaxially Oriented Polypropylene (BOPP)?
Conventional capacitors force trade-offs that fusion systems can no longer afford. They limit energy density, overheat at elevated temperatures, require substantial derating and cooling, and drive designs toward bulkier, higher‑cost capacitor banks.
Capacitors using NanoPlex film technology, such as those we’re co-developing with E&P Technologies and others, remove those constraints. They support higher energy density, higher operating temperatures, and higher repetition rates, with longer life and more predictable performance. For fusion developers, that means:
- Better support for high‑voltage operation and demanding pulse profiles
- Higher shot rates with less cooling overhead for laser/ICF systems
- Longer‑life, high‑temperature dielectric performance for magnetic systems
Our Films as a Service platform and rapid prototyping partnerships, including E&P and ETI's Advanced Conversion, allow us to deliver custom fusion-tailored solutions in a fraction of the usual time and cost.
Ultimately, NanoPlex raises the performance ceiling so system engineers can shrink banks, simplify balance‑of‑plant, and drive toward a cost‑per‑MWh that competes with today’s leading generation technologies.
Your technology applies to both inertial confinement and magnetic confinement fusion. How does NanoPlex serve each?
We designed NanoPlex as a platform to enable next-gen fusion systems. The technology can be tuned to the distinct demands of ICF and MCF.
- ICF / laser systems: NanoPlex HDC addresses that by storing around 4x more energy in a similar footprint, low impedance, with demonstrated shot life and thermal performance in surrogate pulsed-power testbeds.
- MCF / tokamak / stellarator / Z‑pinch systems: NanoPlex LDF maintains full capacitance at up to 135°C with no derating and extends component life by roughly 3-5x, providing the thermal stability and longevity magnetic concepts needed to close on commercial cost targets.
Put simply: HDC solves the energy‑density and duty‑cycle challenge for high‑shot‑rate laser systems; LDF solves the thermal and lifetime challenge for magnetic and long‑pulse platforms.
Where does Peak Nano stand today in terms of production capacity, and what does the growth roadmap look like?
We’ve invested early in domestic capacity to ensure that as fusion matures, advanced dielectric films are not the bottleneck.
We’re working with contract manufacturing to build an allied-nation supply chain with manufacturing in North America, the EU, and APAC countries outside of China. That capacity supports not only fusion but also other high‑power markets, helping us keep unit costs moving down as volumes grow.
In parallel, we are working with multiple capacitor manufacturers, including E&P and others to deliver turnkey solutions for pulsed‑power and fusion systems. Our roadmap is built around the expected inflection from individual prototypes to first‑of‑a‑kind plants and then to multi‑plant deployments.
How does Peak Nano's U.S.-based manufacturing factor into your supply chain strategy?
Supply chain security is embedded in our product strategy. Today, the majority of capacitor film production is concentrated in China, and the U.S. lacks a domestic alternative at fusion‑class performance levels. For fusion programs tied to national labs, defense applications, or DOE funding, that’s a technical and geopolitical risk.
Peak’s supply chain, from raw polymer sourcing and film extrusion through metallization, is U.S. and allied-nation-based. NanoPlex is engineered as a drop‑in replacement for legacy films, so capacitor manufacturers can qualify new performance without re‑platforming equipment.
For fusion developers, that means:
- A domestic, high‑performance dielectric option aligned with policy and funding requirements
- Reduced exposure to geopolitical disruption as fusion moves toward commercialization
- The ability to qualify and lock in film specifications years before large‑scale plants break ground
Our Films as a Service (FaaS) platform underpins this, delivering custom film prototypes in 6–10 weeks so developers can begin dielectric and lifetime testing early and de‑risk their supply chain before commercial scale arrives.
How does the Films as a Service platform work, and what role could it play for fusion developers?
FaaS is a milestone-based development platform for moving from capacitor film performance requirements to qualified film and, ultimately, volume production, without multi‑year chemistry programs.
Instead of inventing entirely new polymers, we engineer nanolayered stacks from existing commercial resins, with tens to thousands of precisely controlled layers tuned to your dielectric, thermal, and mechanical targets. First‑generation prototypes are typically delivered in 6–10 weeks and are immediately available for dielectric testing, pulse‑life studies, and environmental screening against your specific duty cycle and envelope.
As the film is tuned and validated, we support technical transfer into your preferred capacitor suppliers (or into our partner network), so you have a clear path from lab evaluation to commercial‑scale hardware.
For fusion teams, this compresses iteration cycles, pulls qualification forward in time, and gives system engineers a clearer line of sight from capacitor design choices to plant‑level cost and reliability.
NanoPlex serves defense, EVs, grid, and fusion. How do you balance resources across these markets?
We’ve structured NanoPlex as a cross‑sector platform on purpose. The same nanolayered architecture that enables high‑energy‑density, high‑temperature capacitors for IFE also underpins compact, high‑temperature inverters for EVs and high‑reliability grid equipment.
- Thermal stability and lifetime work validated in grid applications directly informs LDF specifications for magnetic fusion.
- Defense and pulsed‑power programs generate qualification data under conditions highly relevant to fusion.
- EV and grid volumes help drive manufacturing learning curves, bringing down cost per square meter of film across all markets.
Our FaaS infrastructure sits across these verticals, so a single development and test pipeline serves multiple end uses. Fusion benefits from that shared foundation: it gets access to a more mature, better‑characterized film platform, at lower cost and with more manufacturing depth behind it.
What are the biggest challenges facing capacitor film supply for fusion, and how is Peak Nano addressing them?
The dominant bottleneck is building capacitor systems that truly match fusion’s operating conditions, technically, economically, and at scale.
Traditional capacitor films degrade under combined thermal and electrical stress, require significant derating as temperatures rise, and are largely produced offshore. Fusion developers have been forced to design around those constraints: oversizing banks, adding cooling, and planning for replacement schedules that are incompatible with commercial cost targets.
We address both sides of that problem:
- On the technical side, NanoPlex HDC and LDF are being validated in surrogate pulsed‑power environments and in reference designs with established capacitor manufacturers. They are engineered specifically for high shot rate, high‑temperature, and long‑life operation.
- On the supply-chain side, Peak is the only U.S. company focused on advanced dielectric films at this performance level, giving fusion developers a domestic option to lock in well before large-scale demand arrives.
The net effect is to remove capacitors as the limiting factor and to align pulsed‑power performance with the cost and reliability targets fusion needs.
Looking ahead five to ten years, what role do you want Peak Nano to play in the fusion ecosystem?
Our goal is to be the fusion ecosystem’s trusted dielectric film partner: the company that enables capacitors that actually meet fusion requirements and are available at scale from domestic and allied supply chains. NanoPlex HDC and LDF are already in qualification with multiple capacitor integrators, generating the data program offices, national labs, and private developers need to underwrite long‑term decisions.
As the industry moves from first‑of‑a‑kind plants to fleets, demand for high‑performance capacitor film will increase by orders of magnitude. Our expansion roadmap is built around that inflection point. We want to help ensure that capacitors, and the films inside them, are an enabler of cost‑competitive fusion.
To learn more about PeakNano, contact Shaun Walsh at [email protected] or visit their website.