ZAP Energy News

[Carl White]

Here is a link to Zap's blog entry about it:

https://www.zapenergy.com/blog/the-righ ... f-neutrons

[bennmann]

https://www.zapenergy.com//news/doe-century-milestone

basically ZAPs DEMO machine is online. The commercial race is real.

[baking]

https://www.zapenergy.com//news/doe-century-milestone

basically ZAPs DEMO machine is online. The commercial race is real.

Century is not doing fusion. After FuZE-Q, their next fusion device will be FuZE-L, a liquid metal wall version of FuZE. It is planned for the same building as Century, but Century is just to work out the mechanics of plasma with a liquid metal wall before doing fusion.

[crowberry]

Here is a ZAP Energy presentation from last year which has some new details at least for me: Fusion Energy on the Horizon, https://apec-conf.org/wp-content/upload ... orizon.pdf.

[crowberry]

Here is the 2025 summary from Zap Energy: https://www.zapenergy.com/blog/2025-highlights.

[mvanwink5]

crowberry, thank you for that link.

Among all those records, density and pressure stand out. To get there, we commissioned a new three-electrode fusion device called FuZE-3

There are many parallel parts of Zap Energy’s fusion plant that require meeting new engineering challenges (like the liquid metal wall or electrodes that can handle a million amps for millions of pulses (they came up with liquid metal electrodes), or plasma breakthroughs for unknown issues revealed only upon scaling up (thermodynamic equilibrium revealed - knock out one doubt, plus good stability model developed indicating stability will not be an issue along with validation tests).

These unknowns seem to have been ingeniously dealt with in 2025, but the three-electrode FuZE-3 was clearly a breakthrough & addressed a nagging doubt -for me- on how Zap Energy would be able to deal with stability independent of higher compression. It had puzzled me.

Separating acceleration and compression
Tests at Zap to date have relied on systems with a single pulse of electrical current conducting between two electrodes. This means that the power driven into the device must accelerate the plasma to provide stabilizing flow as well as compress the plasma into a Z pinch.

“The capability to independently control plasma acceleration and compression gives us a new dial to tune the physics and increase the plasma density,” explains Adams. “The two-electrode systems have been effective at heating, but lacked the compression targeted in our theoretical models.”

Though the new measurements demonstrate very high pressures, Zap’s physics is a form of quasi-steady-state magnetic confinement, not the inertial fusion physics targeted by systems that compress a target in nanoseconds using huge arrays of powerful lasers (or also in some cases Z pinches). For Zap’s approach, controlling plasma acceleration to generate and sustain stabilizing flow is as important as controlling compression.

And this provided key insight to progress that elevated, to me, substantially their likelihood of success. 2026 may be the key for Zap Energy’s commercial fusion? My optimism has made a huge leap.

‍Aiming for milestone triple products
Zap’s latest results remain preliminary as the team continues active scientific campaigns on FuZE-3. Further details are being presented this week at the APS DPP meeting and the team plans to publish FuZE-3 results in the scientific literature in the coming months.

“We’re really just getting started with FuZE-3,” says Levitt. “It was built and commissioned just recently, we’re generating lots of high-quality shots with high repeatability, and we have plenty of headroom to continue making rapid progress in fusion performance. We’ll be integrating lessons from FuZE-3 into our next generation systems as we continue advancing toward commercial fusion.”

While FuZE-3 tests are ongoing, Zap plans to commission yet another next generation FuZE device, scheduled to come online this winter. Power plant engineering continues in parallel, anchored by the Century demonstration platform.