The UK government has announced a GBP410 million (USD500 million) investment to accelerate development of fusion energy. The announcement came as five construction and engineering consortiums have been shortlisted to build the country's STEP prototype fusion plant.
The NEURONE Consortium - a UK Atomic Energy Authority working group - has demonstrated the industrial scale production of fusion-grade steel. This achievement, it says, has the potential to reduce production costs by an order of magnitude and improve the efficiency of future fusion power plants.
US private fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced plans to independently finance, construct, own and operate a commercial-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
Two British public sector entities - the UK Atomic Energy Authority and the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Hartree Centre - have teamed up with US-headquartered technology firm IBM to design future experimental fusion power plants.
The preliminary design of Russia's proposed TRT tokamak nuclear fusion reactor has been completed by JSC NIIEFA.
The energy departments of the US and UK governments are to partner with Tokamak Energy for a USD52 million upgrade of the ST40 fusion facility, which will coat its inner wall with lithium.
The fourth and final ITER vacuum vessel sector manufactured by South Korea has been delivered to the construction site of the tokamak fusion device in Cadarache, southern France.
Focused Energy has completed a scientific report detailing its initial high-gain target design based on direct-drive laser inertial fusion, the first of its Milestones in the US Department of Energy's Milestone-based Fusion Development Program.
A consortium of Assystem, Egis and Empresarios Agrupados has signed a contract with Fusion for Energy worth an initial EUR80 million (USD84 million) to provide consulting and engineering expertise on the ITER international fusion project.
The FAST (Fusion by Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) project has been launched in Japan with the aim of achieving fusion-based power generation by the end of the 2030s.