By Mark Berglund
Northside News
The road from the University of Wisconsin Physical Sciences Lab near Lake Kegonsa and the former Oscar Mayer (OM) campus in Madison is shorter than we think. Developers of Realta Fusion hope to soon find an intersection between research at the university lab and development of the project at the OM site.
A nationwide search for possible sites has come down to Madison and a few others. The developers are moving toward an announcement of the site. They have the makings of a formal agreement with Madison. The deal would include tax incremental financing for the development of a portion of campus, which once housed the well-known food processor.
Realta Fusion hopes to take what it has learned at the UW lab to further develop a nuclear fusion reactor. Ultimately, the group envisions a commercial application in the next decade. The niche Realta Fusion hopes to eventually fill is modular, scalable reactors, built to size for industrial use. There are no plans to develop the OM site into a commercial production facility or power plant.
Producing fusion energy has been a scientific dream for the past century. Fusion is not fission, which splits unstable isotopes of uranium used in current power plants and weapons. Fusion’s natural model is the energy of the sun. Fusion joins the stable hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium. The reaction releases large scales of energy and harmless helium.
The developers envision their scalable reactors as being the carbonless path forward for an industrial world which currently relies on coal and gas. Fusion could be an energy equalizer for billions of human beings who do not benefit from the current industrial model.
A group of Northside neighbors made the drive to the Physical Sciences Lab in June to tour and learn more about the project.
The Physical Sciences Lab is a plain building from another era. Drawings and mathematical calculations are still done on old school chalkboards. Nuclear physicists in everyday work attire might pinch hit as the doorman on days when they are not drawing atoms together.
As an experimental level of science, the infrastructure for development and the workforce needed are at the beginning stage. Realta Fusion developers hope the project could make Wisconsin an academic and manufacturing center for fusion technology. They project a national workforce of 50,000 by 2040 and 400,000 by 2050.
“There is a concentration of fusion talent here. It’s a field being created out of nothing,” a team member said.
Realta Fusion shares the space with a couple of other on-going projects. The space it occupies at the lower level was once used for particle accelerator experiments. The space is cramped and includes plenty of important parts salvaged from other areas. The move to the OM site would allow the team to expand its numbers while having the space and equipment needed to develop more effectively.
“It is more of an experiment here,” a team member tells us. “It’s more research than development.”
The reactor is a stainless steel tube, with cylindrical magnets surrounding it. The magnets provide the density and temperature of the sun’s surface needed to heat plasma and pull the isotopes together. The energy produced in the experiment is then collected in a type of thermal blanket. The electrical needs of the plasma heating device come from a pulse shot draws from the grid into storage batteries fired by a sort of microwave device.
The project began in 2020. It is funded by a starting point of $50 million in capitalization. Since time of writing Realta Fusion officially announced (July 15, 2026) its decision to locate its headquarters and R&D facility at the former Oscar Mayer site now called OM Station on the Northside of Madison.
