Week 5 of 2025

Three, no, FOUR nuclear energy innovation news!

☀️ Helion (US) secures $425 million in funding from investors including SoftBank Group Corp., Lightspeed, and existing backers such as Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, valuing the company at $5.4 billion. Their approach involves capturing the energy directly through electromagnetic induction, eliminating the need for traditional steam turbines. They plan to supply electricity to Microsoft in 2028, and committed to building a 500 MW power plant for Nucor Corporation.

🧲 Novatron Fusion Group AB (SE) successfully conducts the first plasma ionization tests and system integration of their Novatron 1 (N1) machine at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The N1 machine serves as a testbed for their unique axisymmetric mirror machine approach to plasma stability. Novatron aims to develop economically viable fusion energy in the 2030s.

💸 HEXANA (FR) secures a 25 m€ round to advance its modular sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor project. It comprises a 10 m€ grant from Bpifrance under the France 2030 initiative, and 15 m€ in private fundraising from Blast Club, Eren Industries Hellas, CEA Investment, and South Region Investment. Hexana targets market readiness by 2035.

🚀 General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) has successfully tested its nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) reactor fuel at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The fuel was subjected to six thermal cycles with peak temperatures of 2600 K in a hot hydrogen environment to simulate space conditions.

👨‍🎓 Papers of the week: Thea Energy has published four peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nuclear Fusion, detailing their planar coil stellarator approach for commercial fusion energy:

👉 “Stellarator fusion systems enabled by arrays of planar coils”

👉 “Coil optimization methods for a planar coil stellarator”

👉 “The scoping, design, and plasma physics optimization of the Eos neutron source stellarator”

👉 “Fast ion confinement in quasi-axisymmetric stellarator equilibria”