General Atomics, the San Diego-based energy and defense company, has been awarded a $20 million state tax credit to design and build the nation’s first full-scale fusion blanket component test facility, advancing California’s position as a hub for nuclear fusion energy development. The award, announced by Governor Gavin Newsom through the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz), will support a facility to be developed on the company’s Poway campus.
The fusion blanket is a critical component of any future commercial fusion power plant. Integrated fusion blanket systems use specialized lithium-based materials — solid, liquid, or salt-based — that line the inside of a fusion vessel to capture energy and produce the tritium needed to sustain fusion reactions. Engineers plan to use the test facility to confirm that circulating blanket fluids can effectively remove heat, withstand mechanical stress, and extract fuel at the levels needed for power plants.
“A blanket test facility would represent the next stage in turning scientific discovery into sustainable power,” said Wayne Solomon, vice president of Magnetic Fusion Energy at General Atomics, in a statement. The facility represents a challenge “that no one has ever been sufficiently compelled, or driven, to bring to this scale,” according to Brian Grierson, director of Fusion Energy Technologies at General Atomics. “This would be a facility to test engineering components that would then be bolted onto a fusion device to generate electricity and fusion fuel.”
The blanket is called a blanket, Grierson explained, “because it wraps all the way around the fusion core — and it’s nice and warm.” General Atomics plans to have the facility commissioned in three to five years.
The project is a public-private partnership that includes the Idaho National Laboratory, UC San Diego, and other organizations. “This is not just for the benefit of General Atomics,” Grierson said. “It’s a project we have with multiple organizations, universities, national labs and private industry. They are potentially considering relocating and setting up brick-and-mortar to add to the local economy.”
The facility will be designed and developed on General Atomics’ Poway campus, home of the company’s Magnet Technologies Center. That center is where six modules were assembled to form the central solenoid — a colossal magnet — at the heart of the ITER project in France, a vast international effort to determine the viability of commercial fusion. The last of the Magnet Technologies Center’s modules was shipped to ITER in 2025. The existing infrastructure and engineering expertise at the Poway site are expected to accelerate the blanket test facility’s timeline and reduce costs compared to building an entirely new facility.
“A lot of the equipment that is there is perfect for running a blanket test facility because it will have a large super-conducting magnet,” Grierson said. Standing up an entirely new facility “would take twice as long, if not longer, and it would be a much larger investment.”
Fusion energy has long been touted as a potentially transformative power source. Unlike fission reactors that split atoms — the process used in conventional nuclear power plants such as the now-shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station — nuclear fusion merges light atomic nuclei, releasing massive amounts of energy. It is the same process that powers the sun. Fusion reactors would produce no greenhouse gas emissions and leave behind no long-lived radioactive waste, making the technology attractive as a clean energy solution for a world facing growing energy demand and climate concerns.
However, finding ways to harness fusion’s vast potential has proven extraordinarily difficult, and the technology has its share of skeptics. Fusion power has been generated only for very short periods in laboratory settings, and no commercial reactors exist. There is a long-running joke in the energy industry that commercial fusion is always 30 years away.
Despite the challenges, California and San Diego in particular have emerged as significant centers for fusion development. General Atomics established the first fusion research program in the United States in 1957. The company’s Torrey Pines campus is home to the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, which it operates on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DIII-D boasts North America’s largest operating tokamak — a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber surrounded by powerful electromagnets.
San Diego also hosts the Fusion Data Science and Digital Engineering Center, a collaboration between General Atomics and UC San Diego that uses advanced digital engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing to accelerate fusion development. In Northern California, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made headlines in late 2022 when they achieved “net energy” through a nuclear fusion reaction — the first time a fusion experiment produced more energy than was put in.
The $20 million state tax credit represents a vote of confidence in General Atomics’ approach and in San Diego’s growing fusion energy cluster. While commercial fusion power plants may still be years away, the investment in blanket testing infrastructure brings the industry one step closer to determining whether fusion can move from laboratory curiosity to practical energy source — and whether San Diego will be at the center of that transition.
Sources: San Diego Union-Tribune, General Atomics – Fusion Blanket Facility, General Atomics – $20M Tax Credit, ITER Project
