Fusion Energy Base Newsletter #11

Realta Fusion to Build Hammir in Madison, WI

Realta Fusion is staying home. After a two-year national site search spanning Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Tennessee, Realta will build its headquarters and R&D facility, The Realta Forge, at the former Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, Wisconsin, backed by up to $55 million in state and city incentives. The magnetic mirror developer expects 600+ jobs at the site and plans to break ground before year's end on the facility that will house Hammir, its next-step fusion machine.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has become the first international partner in LIBRTI, the UK Atomic Energy Authority's program for testing tritium breeding blankets at its Culham Campus. CFS will supply a blanket test unit containing tons of FLiBe, the lithium-bearing molten salt it plans to use as the breeding medium in its ARC power plant, a major scale-up from the bench-scale quantities tested to date. The neutrons will come from a SHINE source delivering about 10^10 neutrons per second per square centimeter, which reproduces the fast neutron energy spectrum of the D-T reaction but about a thousand to ten thousand times less than the flux expected in a power plant like ARC. Assembly at UKAEA is slated to begin around the end of 2029.

This neutron flux gap is exactly the hole that EMC2, our featured affiliate spotlight interview subject intends to fill on its path to fusion energy.

EMC2 (Energy Matter Conversion Corporation) is a California-based fusion machine developer. It has the distinction of being the oldest private fusion company in the world, founded in 1985 by Dr. Robert Bussard to develop the Polywell, a concept that combines inherently stable magnetic cusp confinement of electrons with electrostatic confinement of ions. Over four decades and 20 test devices, much of that work funded by the US Navy, the company has built an experimental record it recently synthesized into a new paper, Polywell Revisited.

We spoke with CEO Dr. Jaeyoung Park about the company's next steps: WB-11, a 1-meter, 1-Tesla device intended to validate those simulation predictions over the next three years, and beyond that, a near-term commercial application in the form of an ion beam-driven volumetric neutron source (VNS). The VNS targets a D-T neutron flux of on order 10^13 neutrons per second per square centimeter at a facility cost of around $500M, aimed at the materials testing and tritium breeding bottlenecks facing the fusion industry.

Ability Engineering Technology, High Temperature Superconductors, Morgan Advanced Materials, Sydor Optics, Fusion Energy Partners, and Wuhan Senmu Leishi Technology have recently built out their supply chain organization pages on Fusion Energy Base, serving as good examples of how companies can maximize their presence on the platform.

Established listings are growing too: ALSYMEX expanded its profile with seven new product categories, and Cryomagnetics refreshed its page and added its superconducting magnets to the directory.

If your organization is not yet listed on Fusion Energy Base you can add it free of charge. If it's already listed, click the "Edit Page" button on the organization detail page to claim and edit it.

It was great to catch up with so many fusion supply chain companies and fusion machine developers at the first Fusion Supply Chain Trade show in Santa Fe, New Mexico last month. We're already looking forward to the next one!

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