Zap Energy Doubles Down on Fission and Fusion

Zap Energy, a fusion energy startup based in Everett, WA, startled the energy industry this week with an unprecedented announcement that it is doubling down on atomic energy by starting work on a 10 MW sodium cooled advanced reactor in addition to its ongoing work on a fusion energy machine.

Accordiong to a report by GeekWire, the company’s approach builds on technology from the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II), developed and tested over decades at the Idaho National Laboratory. The strategy was later adopted by Toshiba for its 4S (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) reactor. Zap said it is now revitalizing the Toshiba design.Technical details about the Zap fission project are parttially addressed in a long white paper. A summary of the white paper is included below. Link to full text (PDF file)

The move to jointly pursue fission on top of a maturing fusion project is uniqued in the nuclear energy sector but it comes with significant challenges including dual and sometimes overlapping timeframes for technical development, regulatory compliance, raising money, and, most important, securing customers for two highly advanced nuclear technologies.

In an interview with the New York Times on 04/30/26 Benj Conway, the company’s president and co-founder, said, “By pursuing fission we’ll be building fusion power plants much, much earlier than we would be doing otherwise.” He added that Zap hopes to bring its fission reactor to market in the early 2030s.”

Meanwhile, a write up in Tech Crunch raises serious questions about the new strategy. It warns that a dual track approach to commercial success, fission and fusion, could result in a long delay for commercialization of fusion while the firm sells fission reactors at 10 MW a pop to AI data centers. A “side hustle,” which is what the New York Times calls the strategy, could become the main event according to the analysis in Tech Crunch.

For Zap, switching lanes from fusion to fission may produce revenue earlier than the expected timeline for similar gains from fusion.

Generally, the global market for advanced small modular and microreactors is expected to see growth in the early 2030s. By comparison, fusion power is more likely to mature as a commercial offering by 2040 or later according to the UK Atomic Energy Agency.

Some of the leading fusion developers in the U.S. will dispute this timeline, but among the more than 50 startups in the U.S. racing to develop commercial fusion power plants, and nearly $10 billion in private investment in them, none have yet achieved net energy gains, which refers to more energy generated than used to start and run the system.

TechCrunch closes its assessment with this skeptical summary. It writes, “Zap’s arguments that adding fission to its plate will help it reach commercial fusion power sooner are compelling, but time may prove me wrong. Still, it’s hard to square those ambitions with the challenges — and costs — of building a second reactor based on a very different technology. There are enough similarities to prevent this from being a one-eighty, but it’s far enough from Zap’s previous path that it will need to tread carefully to ensure it doesn’t turn into a permanent detour.”

The question is whether investors will follow the firm’s new business strategy? So far Zap Energy has done well in convincing investors that its approach to fusion is a viable path to commercial success. According to Fusion Energy Base, Zap has raised $330 million from investors including the oil giants Chevron and Shell, the Japanese bank Mizuho and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Bill Gates.

The company says it continues to make rapid progress in fusion, achieving new milestones on its FuZE-3 device and bringing its next-generation FuZE-A system online. Zap is also a participant in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program and is advancing toward a pilot plant design later this decade.

New CEO Comes with Sterling Credentials in the Nuclear Energy Industry

At the same time Zap Energy made this announcement, it also hired a new CEO. Zap Energy announced the appointment of Zabrina Johal as Chief Executive Officer, marking a defining step in the company’s evolution into an integrated nuclear platform spanning both fission and fusion. Cofounder Benj Conway will transition to President, focusing on strategy, partnerships, and long-term technology development.

Johal brings deep experience across nuclear technology, commercialization, and large-scale project delivery, with prior leadership roles at AtkinsRéalis and General Atomics. She also served as an officer in the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Program.

Her appointment reflects Zap’s shift from a research-driven organization to one focused on deployment, industrialization, and global scale. Rather than treating fission as a bridge or fusion as a distant goal, she says that Zap is building a unified platform designed to scale with demand.

“Demand for reliable power is moving faster than traditional energy systems can respond. Meeting that demand requires simpler, more adaptable systems and a faster path to deployment. Fission gives us a path to deploy.  Fusion gives us a path to transform. Bringing them together is how we do both,” said Johal.

Zap has also expanded its fission leadership team, including the appointment of Daniel Walter, former project lead for TerraPower’s Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment, as Director of Nuclear Engineering. Matthew C. Thompson, Zap’s SVP of Fission Technology, will lead development across integrated platform technologies.

The leadership transition comes as Zap launches a unique strategy developed over the past year to combine near-term fission deployment with the long-term breakthrough potential of fusion.

“Zap is entering its next phase—bringing fission and fusion together to accelerate innovation across the entire system, from core technologies to deployment,” said Zabrina Johal. “This alignment allows us to accelerate progress, reduce complexity, and deliver power on timelines that match demand.”

Expansion to an Integrated Nuclear Platform

Target Markets for Fission

Zap is initially targeting distributed, industrial, and data-intensive energy applications where modular systems can be deployed on accelerated timelines. Zap is advancing a modular fission system designed for early deployment across grid-connected, distributed energy, and industrial applications, establishing a commercial foundation while leveraging technologies shared with its fusion platform.

Zap says its strategy is grounded in the facts, as it sees them that “”fission and fusion are not separate industries, but deeply connected disciplines that share materials, engineering challenges, supply chains, and system architectures. Rather than pursuing fusion in isolation, Zap says in its press statement that it is building an integrated platform designed to:

• Deliver near-term, bankable power through compact, modular fission systems
• Exploit deep technology overlap between fission and fusion, particularly in liquid metals, neutron environments, and high-power-density design, to speed progress across both.
• Leverage AI advances, AI-driven demand, and regulatory momentum to accelerate nuclear deployment
• Build upgradeable nuclear assets that can evolve from fission to fusion over multi-decade lifetimes

What’s in the Zap Energy Joint Fission / Fusion Strategy?
~ Executive Summary ~

The white paper issued by the company is titled, “Integrated Approach to Fission and Fusion“, and is dated April 2026. The executive summary below has a focus on issues related to technological advantage in the nuclear energy market as well as cost competitiveness of the proposed nuclear reactors design.

This briefing prepared by Neutron Bytes summarizes Zap Energy’s integrated nuclear platform strategy. It is based on the white paper which asserts there is global demand for firm, carbon-free power regardless of whether it is fusion or fission.

Market Drivers & Strategic Positioning

• Surging Power Demand: The AI revolution is driving a 160% projected increase in data center power usage by 2030, requiring an estimated 85-90 GW of new nuclear capacity.
• Integrated Platform Strategy: Zap Energy is not pursuing fission and fusion as parallel, independent efforts but as a sequenced, shared engineering and deployment architecture.
• Near-Term Market Entry: Fission microreactors (up to 50 MWe) provide a commercial foundation today, while fusion builds on that same industrial and technical base for long-term differentiation.

Technological Advantages

Alkali Metal Cooling Excellence: Zap leverages liquid sodium (for fission) and liquid lithium (for fusion) as coolants. These metals offer high thermal conductivity and high boiling points, allowing systems to operate at near-atmospheric pressure, which simplifies engineering compared to pressurized water reactors.

• Sheared-Flow-Stabilized (SFS) Z-Pinch: Zap’s proprietary fusion approach avoids the massive costs and complexities of other fusion methods, advancing rapidly at a uniquely low cost.
• Synergistic Scaling: Both product lines are designed at similar physical scales (up to 50 MWe, ~3-4 meter core dimensions), maximizing engineering cross-pollination and manufacturing efficiencies.

Cost Competitiveness & Economic Considerations

• Shared Supply Chain & Infrastructure: By using common materials and component designs (pumps, heat exchangers, vessels) across both fission and fusion, Zap compounds the value of its vendor qualifications and operational experience.
• Factory Fabrication Model: Small reactor sizes enable a high-volume, standardized factory production model, reducing the logistics and construction costs typically associated with large-scale nuclear projects.
• Waste-to-Energy (Hybridization): Long-term plans include fusion-fission hybridization, using fusion neutrons to transmute spent nuclear fuel. [This creates a potential revenue stream from both taking in used fuel and selling the resulting power.

Safety & Regulatory Pathways

• Passive Fission Safety: Sodium coolant properties enable designs that shut down automatically if overheated and remove decay heat via natural circulation without active intervention or external power.
• Inherent Fusion Safety: Fusion requires external drive energy; the reaction ceases immediately if power is cut, and it produces no self-sustaining chain reaction or significant post-shutdown decay heat.
• Regulatory Acceleration: Non-light-water reactor licensing pathways at the NRC overlap significantly for sodium-cooled fission and liquid-metal fusion systems, allowing lessons from one to accelerate the other.

Zap Energy’s Elevator Pitch for Fission

Zap Energy represents a “vertically integrated nuclear engineering organization.” It mitigates the traditional risks of fusion development by anchoring its near-term commercial viability in advanced fission microreactors, while simultaneously building the specialized liquid-metal expertise required to dominate the future fusion market.”

Source: Zap Energy’s Integrated Approach to Fission and Fusion April 2026
M. C. Thompson, Z. Johal, B. Conway, U. Shumlak, B. A. Nelson, A. Cheung, D. J. Walter, B. Kelleher, R. Umstattd

How Zap Energy’s Fusion Process Works

According to information on the company’s website, sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion doesn’t require magnets, cryogenics or high-powered lasers. Electric currents create magnetic fields. The Z-pinch effect is an electromagnetic phenomenon where electric currents create magnetic fields so powerful that they compress matter. If you run a powerful enough current through plasma, a Z pinch can create conditions hot and dense enough for fusion.

Fusion energy is created when the forces separating the centers of atoms are overcome and two smaller nuclei fuse into a larger one. Zap Energy’s fusion technology is designed to heat deuterium and tritium to millions of degrees Fahrenheit until they fuse into high-energy helium and neutrons, which can be captured to generate heat and electricity.

Keeping fusion reactions going is fundamentally difficult because plasmas quickly fizzle out. Zap Energy’s key advance relies on considering the plasma as a dynamic moving flow, like a river. Sheared-flow stabilization in a Z pinch — a plasma physics innovation pioneered by Zap Energy Co-Founder Uri Shumlak — can theoretically extend the lifetime of a Z-pinched plasma almost indefinitely.