Tommy Washbush
Realta Fusion's Kieran Furlong.
Realta CEO Kieran Furlong in front of the WHAM, the company's current prototype for nuclear fusion energy housed at a Stoughton research facility.
Realta Fusion has made up its mind: The fusion energy company striving to create a clean “future of energy for humanity” will stay in Madison for the next stage of its research and development.
“We spent the better part of the past two years searching across the country to find the most favorable business environment and the most attractive site to build our R&D facility, and we found it in our own backyard,” Realta CEO Kieran Furlong says in a press release.
Realta, a private start-up founded in 2022 that spun off from decades of research at UW-Madison, will relocate its offices and research plant to the former Oscar Mayer plant now operating as OM Station. Realta will occupy more than 200,000 square feet across multiple buildings on the property, and may renovate existing structures for “The Forge.” They plan to begin work on their next prototype fusion machine, the “Hammir,” before the end of the year. The goal is to demonstrate that plasma can be turned into energy on a commercial scale.
“Energy is what underpins everything, and that's what underpins economic development, economic prosperity, and the standard of living that we all enjoy here in the U.S. today,” Furlong says in an interview. “So, energy is critical.”
Realta had considered moving outside of Madison, including to a site in New Jersey. A $55 million economic package compiled by state and local leaders helped drive Realta’s decision to stay in the city, according to Furlong. The package includes $37.5 million in newly created sales and use tax exemptions for commercial fusion companies, up to $15 million in performance-based enterprise zone tax credits from WEDC, the state’s economic development agency, and $2.8 million in staggered tax increment financing targeted at job growth from Madison, which the city council unanimously approved in June.
“Madison does not take the decision to provide tax increment financing lightly, but this was the right kind of project for the city to support,” said Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. “This is an opportunity to bring hundreds of high-paying jobs in the sustainable energy sector to our community and revitalize a largely vacant property that means so much to Madisonians.”
Ald. Julia Matthews, whose district includes the Oscar Mayer site at 910 Mayer Ave., says she’s received under a dozen emails from constituents over the project, largely split between enthusiasm and concerns over nuclear research in general, and the potential for contamination from tritium, a hydrogen isotope used as fusion fuel that’s weakly radioactive and can’t penetrate human skin. (Furlong says they will not use tritium on-site— the Hammir will only use a non-radioactive isotope called deuterium, or “heavy water.”)
Matthews says Realta answered concerns “as good as they could have,” and met with the Sherman Neighborhood Association to explain the project. “ I do really believe this is going to be a great opportunity for the Oscar Mayer area, with the potential job growth,” she adds.
Furlong says Realta ramped up conversations on incentives starting in the latter half of 2025, and says credit goes to those officials who “see the potential,” and recognize Wisconsin’s “comparative advantage in fusion” based on decades of research at UW-Madison. The enterprise zone credits, he says, are a “seed investment” for “one of the biggest industries of the 21st century.”
Furlong, like other boosters, sees fusion energy as an ecosystem that could drive future economic activity and tap into Wisconsin’s manufacturing base. “There’s a lot of machinery that needs to be made for these fusion power plants, and the state of Wisconsin is extremely well-placed to deliver on those,” he says, adding that nuclear fusion could be to Madison what the auto industry was to Detroit.
Today, Realta’s workforce is dominated by physicists and engineers. The company has hired about 45 people and expects to hire roughly 600 more in their next phase. Furlong expects that before long, fusion could rise all boats, and bring in more skilled tradespeople — technicians, welders and more. "I often talk about knocking the rust off the Rust Belt,” he says, predicting “a lot of work for a lot of people in the region.”
Courtesy Realta Fusion
A rendering of Realta Fusion's Forge.
A rendering of Realta Fusion's soon-to-be-new-digs on the site of the former Oscar Mayer plant.
Realta is currently based in Madison, with administrative offices on the west side on John Q Hammons Drive and a research facility shared with UW-Madison in Stoughton, where their current prototype, WHAM, is located.
The WHAM is a large, long cylinder with powerful magnets on either side. At OM Station, Realta will be hammering away at their next fusion prototype: the “Hammir.”
The Hammir won’t be used as a power plant. It will need electricity rather than generate it, and having available power hookups was one reason the site was attractive.
The Hammir will look like the WHAM. But it will have a second pair of powerful magnets, a set-up Realta calls a “tandem mirror” design. Furlong says the goal is to demonstrate the plasma conditions and magnetic field strength the company believes will be needed for commercial power plants in the future “that we’ll build out across the world.”
The cylinder design of both is unlike many other models used in nuclear fusion experiments, which more commonly use a donut-shaped design called a “tokamak.” But the WHAM’s cylinder shape, says Furlong, gives Realta more flexibility to experiment with something called “direct energy conversion” — a way of more efficiently converting plasma energy directly into electricity.
Direct energy conversion is something Realta demonstrated on an Isthmus visit to the WHAM — it only generated enough energy for a lightbulb. Furlong says that was just “showing what’s possible” for the future, but was an important proof of concept in making fusion energy efficient.
But the future is what Furlong is laser-focused on. To demonstrate, he holds up a clear glass tumbler. If this glass had heavy water instead of the regular stuff, he says, it would be more than enough to fulfill his lifetime energy needs many times over using fusion energy.
“It’s really important to understand. You need a very tiny amount of fuel for a fusion power plant,” Furlong says. He’s determined to make fusion energy not just possible, but cheap and scalable, so it can be used as a realistic alternative to fossil fuels. “It’s not just enough to make fusion work,” says Furlong. “We have to make sure we can make electricity cost-effective.”
