Commercial Fusion Power — Net Electricity at Grid Scale

The claim requires three thresholds to be met simultaneously: net electricity at plant level, grid-scale capacity, and commercial viability. None has been demonstrated. The furthest-reached threshold is threshold 1 (net electricity), which has been approached but not achieved at the plant level — NIF achieved Q > 1 at target level, not at facility level. Thresholds 2 and 3 are not yet addressable by current experimental evidence. The pressure state is ESCALATING. The NIF ignition result (INST-002) demonstrates that positive fusion energy gain is achievable in the laboratory, a necessary, though not sufficient, precondition for all three thresholds even though it satisfies none of them directly. Substantial private capital (INST-003) and a public ITER/DEMO roadmap (INST-004) indicate the engineering path is being actively pursued, but threshold 1 (plant-level net electricity) remains undemonstrated, and thresholds 2 and 3 cannot yet be meaningfully assessed given the sequential dependency between them (BN-001).

No threshold has been crossed since AS-001. Threshold 1 (plant-level net electricity) remains undemonstrated; SPARC's own net-energy target is dated for 2026 and is not yet realised as of this assessment. What has changed is the density of engineering-milestone activity: SPARC assembly beginning, General Fusion's first-plasma result, and a coordinated DOE commercialisation roadmap all occurred within roughly the same window (late 2025), constituting the most concentrated burst of public engineering progress since the 2022 NIF/JET results that originally moved this record into ESCALATING. None of IN-006's events individually changes the assessment — they are pre-threshold engineering progress, the same evidence category as IN-003 — but their concentration is itself worth noting against OQ-001's resolution-criteria question: if SPARC's stated 2026 net-energy target is met, the Observatory will need exactly the governed procedure OQ-001 asks for and does not yet have.