September Round-Up from Fusion Energy Insights
September Round-Up from Fusion Energy Insights
Oct 15, 2025
Welcome to our round-up of what’s been happening in fusion and within Fusion Energy Insights over the past month.
3 Top Fusion News Stories
DOE invests $134 million to advance US leadership in fusion energy innovation
The funds’ objective is primarily to help scale scientific findings to practical solutions for future commercial plants. This enlarges coordinated US support for both early-stage science and industry-facing work, tightening the pipeline from lab results to pilot-plant-ready technologies, keeping the US one of the leaders in fusion development.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator based in Germany surpassed tokamaks and set the world record for core fusion performance metric
The W7-X stellarator provides the physics foundation for the SQuIDS (Stable Quasi- Isodynamic Designs) stellarator conceptualised by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, a design that meets the physics requirements for a fusion power plant. This triple product achievement is particularly impressive due to its smaller plasma volume and inherently higher heat losses.
ITER Restores Key Reactor Component After 20-Month Repair, Advances Diagnostic Design
The ITER project has repaired vacuum vessel sector #8 after a 20-month process caused by dimensional flaws, ensuring installation in the tokamak assembly by 2026. Meanwhile, scientists have published the design of a crucial diagnostic tool, the High-Resolution Neutron Spectrometer (HRNS), which will allow precise measurement of the amount and energies of neutrons produced by fusion plasma, helping optimise fuel composition and combustion quality in ITER and future machines. A prototype is planned within two years, though challenges around adequate neutron shielding and operating in high temperature and magnetic field regions are still under investigation.
This highlights ITER’s resilience in overcoming setbacks while advancing systems essential for monitoring and controlling fusion reactions.
FEI Premium subscribers can read our insights on all these stories in our FEI Premium space on our Circle community platform, along with all back-issues of our weekly newsletters. Sign up to our newsletter for free to get them for yourself week to week.
Which LLM Best Explains Fusion? A Comparison of OpenAI, Claude, and DeepSeek
This was our industry analysis “Graph of the Month” piece for September.
Every month, our industry experts at Fusion Advisory Services pick an interesting graph from the work that has been going on at FAS—something that gives some insight into significant trends, commercialisation considerations or fusion industry development.
This month, we analysed which LLM best explains fusion through a comparison of OpenAI, Claude and DeepSeek.
This matters because assessing whether a model can truly reason about nuclear fusion with great accuracy, beyond simply returning facts, determines its usefulness for analysts, policymakers and investors navigating a rapidly evolving field.
FEI Premium subscribers can read the full article.
Fusion Energy Insights Quarterly
We released our September issue of the Fusion Energy Insights Quarterly magazine to our FEI Premium subscribers.
The Fusion Energy Insights Quarterly provides a thorough and evolving overview of the industry. It is compiled with contributions from industry experts around the world, efficiently bringing together the progress of the past quarter into an easy reference point and giving insights and perspectives from fusion developers, suppliers, finance, law and others around the industry.
This issue features:
- News Update
- Global Update
- USA
- UK
- EU
- Canada
- Asia
- Investment Update
- Science Update
- 5 Questions With… Pacific Fusion – an interview with Keith LeChien, Cofounder & Chief Technology Officer
- Inside View – perspectives from Fusion Advisory Services Ltd
- FEI News
- New Industry Players
- Upcoming Events
In this issue’s 5 Questions with… Pacific Fusion, Keith LeChien shares details about their pulsed-power fusion concept, their demonstration machine (with a visual rendering of their Pulse Generator Modules) and insight into their financial structure.
Thank you to this quarter’s contributors:
Axel Meisen, Fusion Energy Council Canada – Canada in Global Update
Megumi Yogo, Kyoto Fusioneering – Asia in Global Update
Jack Moore, Clean Air Task Force – US in Global Update
Dr Michael Zdanowski, Chair, Fusion Industry Taskforce – UK in Global Update
Zihan Lin, Graduate of Princeton University, 2023 – News Update
Stuart Allen, CEO and Matthew Perks, Cofounder of Fusion X Group – Investment Update
Dr. Cyd Cowley, Fusion Solutions Engineer at digiLab – Science Update
Become an FEI Premium subscriber to get access to the Fusion Energy Insights Quarterly, Graph of the Month, Q&A and technical discovery online events, special reports, past newsletter insights and a growing community of fusion-focused individuals.
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Past Online Events
Shaping FEI Together (11th September) – FEI feedback session where we heard from our subscribers about what they want to see our team and community provide.
Looking Forward
22nd-24th October: Melanie Windridge, Fusion Energy Insights founder and also co-founder of FusionX Group, will be attending the FusionXInvest conference in Japan.
6th-9th November: Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin – Melanie will be moderating a plenary table on Fusion Made In Germany: Dream Or Future Reality? There is also the opportunity to attend online.