From Lab to Grid: Helion 10Xs Production, UC San Diego's $15M Breakthrough, and UK's Fusion Warning

(From Lab to Grid Weekly: November 8-15, 2025) This week brought critical developments across manufacturing infrastructure, materials testing capabilities, research precision, and strategic positioning that collectively advance fusion toward commercial viability. From Helion’s massive manufacturing expansion to California’s targeted research investments and UK warnings about competitive positioning, the week demonstrated both accelerating progress and intensifying global competition.

Manufacturing Scale-Up for Commercial Deployment

Helion Announces Omega Facility to 10X Capacitor Production

On November 11-12, Helion Energy unveiled Omega—a 165,000+ square-foot manufacturing facility in Everett, Washington, dedicated to dramatically scaling capacitor production for its fusion power plants.

Located just down the road from Helion’s headquarters and Polaris prototype facility, Omega represents a strategic commitment to vertical integration and manufacturing scale-up beyond the company’s first commercial plant. The facility, currently an empty shell, will be outfitted over the next year with automated assembly lines and robotics designed to more than 10X Helion’s current capacitor throughput.

Strategic Significance: Scaling Beyond Orion

What makes this announcement particularly significant is its forward-looking focus. Helion’s CEO David Kirtley emphasized: “These high-volume lines are not for our Orion machine, but for the next machine”—signaling that Helion is already planning production capacity for post-2028 commercial deployment, well before the first Microsoft power purchase agreement delivery deadline.

The capacitors Helion manufactures are not off-the-shelf components. Each of Helion’s fusion generators requires approximately 2,500 specialized high-voltage capacitors capable of storing and releasing enormous amounts of energy in sub-millisecond pulses. The Polaris prototype demonstrated this at scale with capacitor banks delivering 100 gigawatts of peak power—enough to create the magnetic compression necessary for Field Reversed Configuration fusion plasmas.

By bringing capacitor manufacturing entirely in-house at Omega, Helion achieves several strategic advantages:

Cost Reduction: Eliminating external supplier margins and optimizing production processes specifically for fusion requirements can dramatically reduce per-unit costs as production scales.

Quality Control: Direct oversight of the entire manufacturing process ensures components meet Helion’s exacting specifications for reliability, performance, and safety.

Supply Chain Security: Reducing dependence on external suppliers eliminates bottlenecks and ensures production can scale at the pace required for commercial deployment.

Rapid Iteration: Proximity to engineering headquarters enables tight feedback loops between design, testing, and manufacturing, accelerating development cycles.

Intellectual Property Protection: Keeping critical component manufacturing in-house protects proprietary designs and manufacturing processes from competitors.

The $425 million Series F funding Helion raised in January 2025 specifically targeted manufacturing buildout, and Omega represents a major deployment of that capital. The facility’s design emphasizes automation and robotics—not just to increase throughput but to ensure consistency and reliability at production scales orders of magnitude beyond prototype manufacturing.

Materials Testing Revolution

UC San Diego’s PISCES/POSEIDON Upgrade Operational

The University of California San Diego announced this week that its newly upgraded fusion materials research facility is now fully operational, combining capabilities no current tokamak can match. [UC San Diego]

The $15 million upgrade, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, adds the POSEIDON ion beam accelerator to the existing PISCES (Plasma Interaction with Surface Components Experimental Station) facility. For the first time, researchers can now expose materials samples to both fusion plasma and high-energy ions simultaneously in a controlled experimental setting—accurately simulating the conditions inside magnetic fusion reactors.

Why Dual Testing Matters

Previously, research groups studied how materials interact either with plasma alone or with neutron irradiation alone—but never both together. This represented a critical gap because real fusion reactor walls face both challenges simultaneously:

Plasma Surface Interactions: Hot plasma constantly bombards reactor walls, causing erosion, chemical reactions, and hydrogen retention that degrade material properties over time.

Neutron Damage: High-energy fusion neutrons penetrate deep into material structures, creating atomic displacements, embrittlement, and transmutation that fundamentally alter material properties.

The combined effects are not simply additive—they interact in complex ways that can only be understood through simultaneous exposure testing. A material that performs acceptably under plasma bombardment alone might fail catastrophically when neutron damage weakens its structure, while neutron-damaged materials might exhibit different plasma interaction behavior than pristine samples.

Technical Capabilities

POSEIDON generates high-energy ions (serving as neutron proxies) at millions of electron volts and hurls them across the laboratory at speeds exceeding 1,000 kilometers per second. Two-thirds of the way across the lab, powerful magnetic fields steer these ion beams precisely into material samples within the PISCES plasma chamber. The system can produce ions from both gases and solid materials, enabling testing of various irradiation scenarios.

Professor Emeritus George Tynan, who led the upgrade, emphasized the national significance: “The upgraded facility is a huge win for the nation’s fusion R&D community. This capability fills an important need for fusion researchers looking to develop new reactor materials.”

The facility provides access to academic researchers, private fusion companies, and government laboratories, democratizing access to capabilities that would otherwise require expensive dedicated facilities. This shared infrastructure model accelerates materials development across the entire fusion ecosystem.

California Doubles Down on Fusion Research

$8 Million UC Initiative Targets Critical Challenges

On November 13, the University of California announced $8 million in multicampus research grants specifically targeting fusion energy’s most pressing materials and diagnostics challenges. [University of California]

The UC Initiative for Fusion Energy provides two grants of $4 million each over three years, bringing together faculty across five UC campuses (San Diego, Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley) with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The funding derives from fee income UC receives for managing the two national laboratories.

Center for Fusion Energy: Materials and Diagnostics for Extreme Conditions (MDEC)

The first $4 million grant established the MDEC Center, led by UC San Diego Professor Farhat Beg. The center’s research agenda addresses three critical challenge areas:

Materials Discovery and Development:

Model and develop new materials capable of withstanding extreme radiation environments
Improve materials-tritium interactions to reduce fuel losses
Utilize AI and machine learning to accelerate materials discovery and optimization

Advanced Diagnostics:

Design diagnostic and detection tools that can survive extreme radiation inside both magnetic and inertial fusion reactors
Develop sensor materials for use in fusion diagnostics
Deploy AI for real-time data analysis

Tritium Fuel Cycle:

Improve materials-tritium interactions to limit losses
Study how tritium affects the aging of other materials
Address regulatory and policy challenges for tritium handling

Diamond-Based Diagnostics Breakthrough

UC Santa Cruz received $555,000 of the MDEC funding to develop radiation-hardened diagnostic systems using artificial diamonds. Diamonds’ exceptional radiation resistance makes them uniquely suited for fusion diagnostics, where conventional sensors would be destroyed by the intense neutron and gamma radiation.

The UC Santa Cruz team, led by assistant research scientist Simone Mazza at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), will develop “extreme radiation-hardened” plasma-monitoring systems capable of tracking individual fusion burn profiles in real-time—critical capability for controlling and optimizing fusion reactions.

California Fusion Convening

The grant announcement coincided with the California Fusion Convening on November 13 at UC San Diego Park & Market, bringing together stakeholders from across California’s fusion ecosystem. The event, hosted by UC Office of the President, GO-Biz (Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development), and the California Energy Commission, focused on “Accelerating California’s Fusion Energy Economy.”

The convening showcased California’s recent legislative achievements (SB 80 dedicating $5 million to fusion R&D), state programs supporting fusion development, and regional hubs emerging across the state. With 16 core fusion companies—more than one-third of U.S. firms—California is positioning itself as the “Silicon Valley for fusion energy.”

Research Precision Breakthrough in Japan

Large Helical Device Achieves 3X Plasma Measurement Precision

Researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science announced a breakthrough in plasma measurement precision this week, achieving three times greater accuracy using novel “electrostatic lens” techniques at the Large Helical Device (LHD). [Phys.org]

The advancement addresses a fundamental challenge in fusion research: accurately measuring plasma properties under reactor-grade conditions. Previous measurement techniques struggled with precision at the temperatures, densities, and confinement times relevant to commercial fusion reactors.

Electrostatic Lens Innovation

The team developed an innovative electrostatic lens system that focuses and manipulates the trajectories of diagnostic particles passing through the plasma. By carefully controlling electric fields, researchers can steer diagnostic beams with unprecedented precision, enabling measurements at specific locations within the plasma with resolution previously unattainable.

This tripled measurement precision provides several critical advantages:

Improved Understanding: More accurate measurements reveal fine-scale plasma physics phenomena that were previously obscured by measurement uncertainty.

Better Control: Real-time feedback control systems require accurate measurements to make correct adjustments; tripled precision enables more sophisticated control strategies.

Faster Development: More precise measurements accelerate the learning rate from experimental campaigns, reducing the number of shots required to validate models and optimize performance.

Validation of Simulations: High-precision measurements provide stringent tests of computational models, increasing confidence in design predictions for future reactors.

The Large Helical Device, one of the world’s largest stellarators, provides an ideal platform for developing and validating advanced diagnostic techniques that will be essential for ITER, SPARC, ARC, STEP, and other next-generation fusion devices.

Strategic Warning: UK Risks Losing Fusion Race

First Light Fusion and Stonehaven Release Critical Report

On November 11-12, British inertial fusion energy developer First Light Fusion and UK strategic consultancy Stonehaven released “Future for Fusion Roadmap,” a comprehensive report warning that the UK risks losing the global fusion race to the United States and China unless it fundamentally changes its approach. [World Nuclear News] [Manufacturing Management]

The report argues that the UK’s current fusion strategy—heavily focused on magnetic confinement fusion through the £2.5 billion STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) program—must diversify to include inertial fusion energy approaches to remain competitive.

Core Arguments and Recommendations

Timeline Advantage: The report contends that by incorporating inertial fusion energy (IFE) alongside magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), the UK could achieve commercial fusion by 2035—five years ahead of the government’s current 2040 target. This accelerated timeline would position the UK ahead of most international competitors.

Regulatory Barriers: “Vague regulatory frameworks, restrictive regulators that lack expertise and capacity, protracted planning laws and grid connection bottlenecks all mean that the UK risks ceding its position as the fusion world leader to China or the US,” the report states. These structural barriers require urgent reform.

Technology Diversification: Rather than betting exclusively on magnetic confinement, the UK should pursue multiple technological pathways. First Light’s FLARE (Fusion via Low-power Assembly and Rapid Excitation) approach using pulsed power and imploding liners represents a complementary pathway that could reach commercialization on different timelines with different risk profiles.

Economic and Strategic Implications: Falling behind in fusion would cost the UK not just energy sector advantages but also spillover benefits in defense, aerospace, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing—sectors where fusion-related capabilities create broader competitive advantages.

Policy Recommendations

Adam Bell, Director of Policy at Stonehaven, emphasized: “There is a fusion race, and it is a race Britain can win. Thanks to our decades of research, we stand ready to lead the world in its deployment – if we can get our act together in time.”

The report calls for:

Recognition of IFE alongside MCF in the UK Fusion Strategy
Clear regulatory distinction between fusion and fission technologies
Emphasis on Britain’s AI capabilities and experimental infrastructure
Partnership frameworks across industry, academia, and government
De-risking mechanisms to attract private capital at scale

Global Competitive Context

The warning comes amid accelerating international competition. The United States has announced multiple demonstration plant projects, bipartisan manufacturing tax credits, and billions in private investment. China reportedly invested $6.5 billion in fusion since 2023—nearly triple U.S. DOE fusion funding. Japan, Germany, France, and other nations are committing substantial resources with concrete commercialization targets.

First Light’s concern is not merely about scientific achievement but economic positioning. The first nations to commercialize fusion will establish de facto standards, capture intellectual property advantages, develop specialized supply chains, train the specialized workforce, and attract the capital that determines long-term competitiveness.

Convergence: Infrastructure, Capability, and Strategic Positioning

This week’s developments reveal fusion’s maturation along multiple critical dimensions simultaneously:

Manufacturing Infrastructure: Helion’s Omega facility demonstrates that leading private companies are investing hundreds of millions in production capacity for post-first-plant scaling—a vote of confidence in near-term commercialization timelines.

Materials Testing: UC San Diego’s PISCES/POSEIDON upgrade provides capabilities no existing tokamak offers, accelerating materials development that represents one of fusion’s critical path bottlenecks.

Targeted Research Investment: California’s $8 million UC grants focus resources precisely on materials and diagnostics challenges that must be solved for commercial viability, leveraging the state’s unique national laboratory partnerships.

Measurement Precision: Japan’s LHD breakthrough demonstrates that fundamental research continues advancing the diagnostic capabilities essential for reactor optimization and control.

Strategic Competition: The UK report’s warnings reflect growing recognition that fusion is transitioning from collaborative scientific endeavor to competitive industrial race with first-mover advantages and economic consequences.

What unites these developments is recognition that fusion commercialization requires not just scientific breakthroughs but systematic buildout of manufacturing infrastructure, testing capabilities, skilled workforce, supportive policies, and coordinated strategies. The pace and scale of these investments—from Helion’s 165,000 sq ft manufacturing facility to California’s eight-figure research programs—signal that key players view 2030s commercial deployment as achievable and are positioning accordingly.

The week also highlights diverging national strategies. The United States emphasizes private-sector-led development with targeted government support for infrastructure and R&D. California doubles down on its regional advantages in research institutions, national laboratories, and existing fusion companies. Japan leverages its strengths in advanced diagnostics and materials science. The UK grapples with choosing between focused investment in a single approach versus hedging across multiple technological pathways.

These strategic choices—and how quickly nations execute them—will largely determine which countries capture the economic, strategic, and technological advantages that commercial fusion deployment will create. The mid-2030s timeline that once seemed optimistic now appears increasingly credible, intensifying the urgency of infrastructure buildout, capability development, and strategic positioning.

Major Sources:

From Lab to Grid: Helion 10Xs Production, UC San Diego’s $15M Breakthrough, and UK’s Fusion Warning