The DOE validated Commonwealth Fusion Systems' magnet performance test last quarter. Eighteen toroidal field coils go into SPARC at Devens through the summer, each magnet 24 tons at 20 tesla, the first already on the assembly jig. First plasma sits on the 2026 calendar. Net energy on the 2027 calendar. ARC, the 400 MW commercial plant, is sited in Chesterfield County, Virginia, with a grid interconnect schedule no fusion program in history has ever filed.

Helion's Polaris cleared 150 million degrees and the first private deuterium-tritium reactions in February. Microsoft's offtake contract for Helion electricity matures in 2028. TAE keeps Norman running as the data feed into Copernicus. None of these schedules belong to the public-sector machine that spent forty years arguing the engineering required indefinite cost-plus contracts, ITER-scale international consortia, and timelines no living physicist would see close.

The "always thirty years away" line held only as long as the budget for fusion ran through the agencies that institutionalized the delay. Private capital with a target price per megawatt-hour and a procurement lane collapsed the schedule the moment allocation moved. The pilot plant is being installed. The commercial successor is permitted. The first private fusion electron lands on the grid this decade.