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By Jeff Young
Environment and Sustainability Editor
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Fusion energy, a technology that promises to harness the power of the stars to create abundant, clean electricity on earth, is sometimes said to be "the energy of the future.” Then comes the cruel punchline: “And it always will be.”
The tantalizing promise of fusion energy has long seemed to be just over the horizon. Past predictions that fusion might be a decade or so away have come and gone for, well, decades.
But a combination of historic recent scientific breakthroughs, surging global energy demand, a boom in commercial fusion companies and billions of dollars of public and private investment now make the promise of fusion seem closer than ever.
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“Fusion matters, and it could matter massively if we successfully deliver on it,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Tuesday at an AI+ Fusion Summit in Washington, D.C., hosted by the think tank Special Competitive Studies Project.
As Wright spoke, the Department of Energy unveiled a fusion road map outlining a strategy of public investment and research that Wright called “synergistic to commercial efforts” to speed the promise of fusion.
The DOE report and Wright’s remarks came amid a number of fusion-related events in the U.S. and Asia. On Wednesday, the industry trade group Fusion Industry Association (FIA) hosts the U.S. Fusion Forum in Washington, D.C., with leaders from government, academia and the private sector. In Chengdu, China, the International Atomic Energy Agency just concluded its 30th Fusion Energy Conference.
“This is no longer just a science project,” Charles Boakye, the lead on energy transition for the Americas at the investment banking and capital market firm Jeffries told Newsweek. Boakye tracks the budding fusion industry closely and said the growth in companies and the diversity of funding behind them are helping to shrink the timeline toward commercial development through a range of technological approaches.
“We've seen a sort of Cambrian explosion of these companies,” Boakye said. “The private sector has picked up the baton, I would say, earlier than you have seen in other energy technologies.”
When the FIA issued its first report nearly five years ago it counted 23 fusion companies. Today that number has grown to 53 fusion companies around the world. The FIA report also found growth in public-private partnerships on fusion, the development of supply chains and rising investor confidence as companies hit technological milestones.
“It's certainly unrecognizable from where it was five years ago,” Bob Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), said of the fusion industry. Energy Secretary Wright recently visited the CFS Massachusetts prototype facility as the DOE validated the company’s performance test of a key piece of its technology, unlocking further government funding.
“We’ve got steel in the ground,” Mumgaard told Newsweek. “It's much further along than people think.”
CFS even signed a power purchase agreement with Google earlier this year for the first electricity the company produces, which Mumgaard expects to happen sometime in the mid-2030s.
That’s a much longer timeline compared to most power agreements. Industry observer Melanie Windridge said it is evidence that the tech industry’s surging appetite for power is helping to push along commercial development of fusion.
“There's a lot of drive to get fusion on the grid soon enough that it actually makes an impact soon enough to matter,” Windridge told Newsweek. Windridge is a plasma physicist and writer who started Fusion Energy Insights to keep people up to date on the industry.
“We’re seeing an increase in the amount of investment,” Windridge said. “The rise of the private companies has completely changed the game.”
The FIA found the investment that fusion companies attracted has surged from just under $2 billion five years ago to about $9.7 billion this year.
The group’s survey asked fusion company leaders when they thought the first commercial power might be produced. A handful of respondents said they are pushing for commercial power before 2030. But the bulk of the companies surveyed (35 of the 45 respondents) predicted a commercially viable pilot plant would come sometime between 2030 and 2035—in other words, about a decade away.
That forecast might sound suspiciously familiar to skeptics who have seen such decadal predictions come and go in the past. So how can fusion companies clear up confusion and counter skepticism about their technology?
“You counter it with the science,” Chris Wendel, president and CFO of Focused Energy, told Newsweek.
Unlike nuclear fission which splits atoms of heavy elements, fusion combines two light atomic nuclei, releasing a large amount of energy with much less radioactive waste. But triggering fusion requires machines that can mimic the extreme temperatures and pressures that occur in stars.
Before 2022, Wendel said, the fusion skeptics had a good argument, “because nobody had ever gotten anywhere with actually creating a stable plasma that shows energy gain.”
That changed on December 5, 2022. That was when the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and its National Ignition Facility (NIF) reached a historic milestone called scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the energy needed to power the lasers that made the fusion reaction happen.
“When this happened, it was a big deal,” Wendel said. NIF has repeated that process several times since then, getting more power and adding to the scientific understanding of fusion.
However, the laser-based fusion that NIF used is only one of several ways that companies are working on to develop commercial-scale fusion energy.
A closer look at the science behind two fusion companies—laser-based Focused Energy on the West Coast and magnet-based CFS on the East Coast—reveals some pros and cons of their competing approaches and offers some insight into what it might take to finally achieve bring the power of the stars down to earth.
Commonwealth Fusion’s Magnetic Attraction
CFS got its start in 2018 as a spin-off from lab advances at MIT where Mumgaard was a researcher. MIT has a long tradition of developing tech that makes a mark on society, from radar detection and navigation to the iRobot floor cleaners, and in the case of fusion the MIT breakthrough was a new way to build a tokamak. The tokamak, a Soviet-era Russian invention, uses a powerful magnetic field to hold the hot plasma where fusion occurs.
“We invented a technology that allowed us to make those tokamaks much smaller and faster to build and at lower cost,” Mumgaard said.
CFS has since raised just under $3 billion making it “the heavyweight in the industry,” Mumgaard said. He said the company’s SPARC facility under construction in Devens, Massachusetts, is on track to be operational “sometime in 2027.” SPARC will test the tokamak and supportive technology and serve as a model for ARC, a commercial plant to be constructed in Virginia, where regional power company Dominion Energy plans to bring the power CFS produces online.
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Dominion serves the northern Virginia region known as “data center alley,” the world’s largest concentration of data centers, and the company is wrestling with a surge in demand for electricity as AI data centers gobble up gigawatts of power.
While laser-driven fusion enabled the historic breakthrough at NIF, the tokamak and other magnetic approaches to fusion have won the most private investment and government research interest. (A massive international, cooperative project called ITER is constructing a tokamak in southern France to advance science and share fusion technology among the participating countries.)
Mumgaard laid out the argument for magnets and cast a bit of shade on the laser approach. He said the use of laser fusion for commercial-scale energy would require rapid and repeated compression of fuel pellets.
“Right now, you do it like once a day,” he said, and the pellets are now prohibitively costly. “So, you see you have some major challenges.”
Magnetic fusion, by contrast, holds the plasma in place for longer periods, he said.
“It just sits there, sort of levitated,” Mumgaard said. “You sort of make this thing that feels like a coal power plant with a fire inside of it, except it's not burning any coal.”
That promise of constant energy output is a good fit with traditional power plant engineering, he argued, explaining the attraction of the magnetic fusion approach.
Laser Focused on Fusion
Focused Energy is based in the San Francisco Bay area, but Wendel said it is best described as a “dual national company.” Focused Energy has both qualified for DOE funding and has forged strategic partnerships with the German government’s Ministry of Research and the German multinational energy company RWE.
Company founder Marcus Roth had worked as a laser scientist in Germany and also worked at Lawrence Livermore. Following NIF’s groundbreaking work, Focused Energy used its contacts at Lawrence Livermore to attract top talent.
“There are probably 400 people in the world that know how to do laser fusion,” Wendel said. “We've got 40 of them on our headcount already, including the three who did it” at NIF, he said.
The major challenge now is not a matter of scientific breakthroughs but rather one of engineering progress, Wendelf said.
“I need guys who can say, okay, this is how you actually design this,” Wendel said. He wants to drive down the production costs for the lasers at the heart of the Focused Energy approach.
“They’re built by hand in the clean room like a satellite,” Wendel said. “They need to come off a production line, cost much less and be very robust.”
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Just as Mumgaard made the argument for magnetic fusion, Wendel laid out the reasoning behind his company’s laser focus, explaining why he thinks that the technology readiness level (TRL) of lasers is better.
“Laser fusion is pretty new because it really grew up in its R&D behind a top-secret wall as part of the weapons program funded by your and my taxpayer dollars,” Wendel said of the work at NIF. He compared it to the government’s development of the early internet.
“It's the same idea, right?” Wendel said. “The government was actually quite useful in building a base for companies to then build on top of, and that's what's happening now.”
Wendel pointed to a recent report by consulting and research company Arthur D. Little that pointed to possible roadblocks for magnetic fusion compared to lasers.
A magnetic technology such as CFS’s tokamak will likely require a single, integrated building that tests the entire operation, the report found. However, the laser-based approach allows for different parts to be built and tested in isolation, potentially speeding along commercial-scale development of crucial aspects of technology.
“The TRL is actually higher than the magnetic,” Wendel said.
Ready When Society Needs It?
With each executive talking up their company’s approach to fusion and taking slight jabs at other technologies, it is tempting to cast this as cutthroat competition, a sort of physics version of an East Coast vs West Coast rap battle.
But Mumgaard and Wendel are quick to dispel that notion, and both have praise for the other companies pursuing fusion energy.
“We hope that there are multiple ways to skin this cat because you want the industry to be large,” Wendel said.
“The reality is that we need to show these things work,” Mumgaard said. “And until they work, you know, no one really has a product, so what are you competing over?”
Industry observers Boakye and Windridge said it’s too early to tell which approach to fusion might eventually win out and the timeline remains the biggest question. Boakye said predictions that fusion facilities will be operating within a decade are mostly projections about pilot plants, not full-scale commercial facilities.
“You can have a pilot plant which is stuck together with duct tape, which is proof of concept that it more or less works but really is not commercial,” Boakye said. “And I think that nuance is being missed.”
Two other factors could speed fusion’s development, however. One is the rise of AI which is both providing investment dollars from tech companies who want fusion power and some powerful new tools to solve engineering problems.
“I think AI will be a tremendous enabling technology for fusion,” Wright said at the event on Tuesday.
The other factor in fusion’s favor is the far simpler regulatory pathway fusion projects will have compared to traditional nuclear power.
Because safety and hazardous waste concerns are less pressing with fusion compared to fission, fusion projects in the U.S. will be regulated in a manner like the regime used to regulate particle accelerators.
Wendel said his controversial view is that the regulatory landscape favors fusion over the Small Modular Reactors (SMR) for nuclear power.
“I think fusion reactors on the grid are on the same timeline as an SMR,” Wendel said, “because the regulatory framework is so different.”
The timeline for fusion energy will also determine what role it plays in a clean energy transition away from fossil fuels. Some climate policy experts have argued that as climate impacts become more severe fusion energy is largely beside the point because it will not arrive in time to reduce emissions within the critical window that climate scientists have identified to avoid the most catastrophic warming.
Worse, some say, the shining promise of fusion in the future could sap investment and delay deployment of clean renewable energy sources already available today. But Mumgaard said that should not be a reason to avoid fusion research.
“I think it's a false dichotomy,” Mumgaard said. “You have to keep innovating. The tools that we have available at scale today are only there because we innovated 30 years ago.”
Boakye said energy investors "can walk and chew gum at the same time" when it comes to putting money into both renewables and fusion. He said that while fusion will “not meaningfully contribute to meeting short-term climate targets,” it could be important for dealing with the nearly inevitable overshoot by helping to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
“We have other technologies such as direct air capture, which are hugely energy intensive, which we haven't quite figured out how to power,” he said. “Fusion could play a role there, most likely.”
Windridge said discussions about fusion’s future and possible arrival always remind her of a quote attributed to the Russian physicist Lev Artsimovich, an early fusion pioneer.
“He once said, ‘Fusion will be ready when society needs it,’” Windridge said. “I feel that maybe things are getting at that point now.”
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