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.

Leadership of the UK's STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) programme has transitioned to UK Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Developed in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics specifically for the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, Thales's TH1507U gyrotron has achieved a significant milestone by reaching a total output of 1.3 megawatts in radiofrequency at a frequency of 140 gigahertz for 360 seconds.

Construction of the SMART tokamak is under way at the University of Seville in Spain, aimed at exploring negative versus positive triangularity prospects in spherical tokamaks. Meanwhile, New Zealand startup OpenStar Technologies has successfully powered its core component utilising onboard charging of the floating magnet.

The UK-based company gave first details of a high-field spherical tokamak plant "capable of generating 800 MW of fusion power and 85 MW of net electricity" as part of the USA's Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy programme.

Fusion power developer Zap Energy, based near Seattle, has begun operations of Century, its first fully-integrated demonstration of three major plant-relevant technologies operating at up to 100 kilowatts of input power.

The manufacture of the first of five vacuum vessel sectors under the responsibility of Fusion for Energy (F4E) - the ITER Organisation's European domestic agency - has now been completed in Italy. The component is set to be delivered to the construction site of the tokamak fusion device in Cadarache, France.