Today, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced the first selections of the DOE Office of Science Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, a key element of the Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy that was unveiled in March 2022 at a White House Fusion Summit. Many of these teams and their concepts have received longstanding support from the Office of Science, NNSA, as well as other public and private funding sources. Of the eight selected companies, five have or had a funding connection to ARPA-E:

• Zap Energy, which spun out from a University of Washington project Flow Z-Pinch for Fusion was part of the ARPA-E ALPHA program. Zap Energy was later directly funded by ARPA-E for two projects to pursue shear flow stabilized Z-pinch performance improvements as part of the ARPA-E BETHE and OPEN 2018 programs.
• Type One Energy was funded directly as part of the ARPA-E BETHE program to pursue Non-Planar Capability HTS Magnet Coil with Additive-Manufactured Components.
• Realta Fusion, which spun out of the Wisconsin High-field Axisymmetric Mirror Project at the University of Wisconsin, was funded in the ARPA-E BETHE program.
• Princeton Stellarators Inc., which spun out of the Stellarator Simplification using Permanent Magnets Project at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, was funded in the ARPA-E BETHE program.
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems was funded directly in the ARPA-E BETHE program to develop their Pulsed High Temperature Superconducting Central Solenoid.

We are very proud that these teams have been selected, and we look forward to their progress in the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program.