Nobody said building a fusion power plant would be easy. Physicists and engineers have been working for decades to crack the problem. But over the last year or so, fusion startup Zap Energy took a deeper look at its pathway to a working power plant and decided that it would be quicker to build a fission power plant first. Wait, what? “Fission and fusion are two sides of the same coin,” Zap’s new CEO Zabrina Johal told TechCrunch. “They have so many challenges that are congruent with each other.” Zap is among the better-funded fusion startups , having raised more than $300 million, so this partial pivot holds some shock value, no matter how many synergies exist between fission and fusion. It starts to make more sense against the backdrop of rising energy demand from AI data centers, which is expected to nearly triple by 2030 .…