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Now we just need a working commercial reactor.
After decades of research and billions of dollars in funding, nuclear fusion has produced “net energy” (more energy coming out of a reaction than was necessary to start it) in exactly two places in our solar system: Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the sun. Even the scientists who did it on Earth say that using the technology for real-world energy generation is still a “very distant” prospect.
On the bright side, however, the regulatory path for fusion energy has gotten a lot clearer.
The ADVANCE Act, signed by President Biden last week, contained language that will simplify the path to deployment for fusion, should it ever reach commercialization. The Fusion Energy Act, contained within the ADVANCE Act (which itself was stapled onto Fire Grants and Safety Act), confirmed a decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 separating the regulatory apparatus for fusion and fission projects. Fission — the only process used to produce nuclear energy commercially today — can lead to runaway nuclear reactions and inevitably creates radioactive waste, and going through the complex regulatory process can take years. Fusion, by contrast, doesn’t have those risks.
In a 2023 memo, the NRC approved its staff decision to “to license and regulate fusion energy systems under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s byproduct material framework,” i.e. the process used to approve things like particle accelerators and medical applications. That change had been prompted by an earlier nuclear bill, 2019’s Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act.
Still, both lawmakers and the industry were wary that might not hold up should the Supreme Court decide to overturn a decades-old precedent giving deference to agencies to interpret their own mandates — a world “anybody who’s in Washington saw coming,” Andrew Holland, head of the industry group Fusion Industry Association, told me. “If there’s any ambiguity about what Congress said, then that creates this regulatory uncertainty. So this is Congress saying, what the NRC did is what we wanted.”
That is a big relief for fusion investors. “There was a lot of angst among investors that, well, fusion is going to be regulated just like nuclear fission,” Holland said, referring to the period before the NRC’s decision in 2023. “So why shouldn’t I invest in the thing that I know works, versus the thing that’s technologically hard?”
About that technology: Fusion is often described as the “holy grail” of energy generation, both because of its immense promise (the fuel for fusion literally comes from seawater) with which it could generates immense carbon free power without the waste and risks associated with fission and because, like the grail, no one has been able to attain it.
Fusion has become something like the Brazil of energy research, with a working reactor always 20 (or 30) years away. ITER, a giant international fusion project that has been around in some form or another since the late 1970s, announced recently that it had pushed back the timeline for starting its machine from 2025 to 2034.
The private fusion industry, meanwhile, has raised over $7 billion in total, with about $6 billion coming since 2021, according to Fusion Industry Association data. About $2 billion of that of that has gone to Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which spun off from MIT in 2018.
The Massachusetts-based company is working on a fusion device that promises to be cheaper, faster, and easier to build that the unwieldy ITER model. In 2021, Commonwealth and MIT researchers were able to generate a magnetic field with a strength of 20 tesla, hailed by researchers as a meaningful step towards building a working fusion device.
At the same time, however, many industry figures and researchers think there’s more to be done on the funding side. The philanthropist John Arnold has called for explicit cost-sharing between the federal government and fusion companies based on achieving technological milestones, where fusion companies could certify that they achieved some kind of pre-established technological or commercial breakthrough and thus unlock government grants to defray their expenses. The Department of Energy has a program to fund fusion companies based on their achievements, but the funding has been in the tens of millions, which Arnold has described as “WAY TOO SMALL” and “barely worth the company’s time spent on the application.”
This isn’t just idle musing by a philanthropist with a Twitter account: Julien Barber, a climate investor at Emerson Collective, which has put money into Commonwealth, tends to agree. “We’re not allocating enough resources to actually make this a reality given the potential of it,” he told me. “We have to make hard decisions about funding and allocation as we move towards commercial fusion.”
The ADVANCE Act’s cements fusion — and the nuclear industry more broadly — as one of the favored energy technologies on Capitol Hill. The bill also builds on legislation passed and signed during the Trump administration and had the backing of a bipartisan group of senators.
“Fusion energy is a promising clean and safe power source that could help address America’s growing energy demands,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and one of the Fusion Energy Act’s co-sponsors, said in a statement after the bill was passed. “This legislation will advance fusion technology in pursuit of increased U.S. energy independence, and I am grateful to my Senate colleagues for supporting it.”
“The Fusion Act is a pretty critical piece of what the fusion industry has been working towards,” Barber said. “There are two big barriers towards commercialization: We need enough funding to develop technology, and we need to have regulatory pathways.”
Holland, of the Fusion Industry Association, is optimistic that whoever is running Washington in 2025 will remain receptive to fusion — a position will almost certainly not be the case for other forms of non-carbon-emitting energy.
“You have Democrats who care because it’s the best form of renewable energy, and Republicans who care because it’s an updated form of nuclear energy,” he told me. “There’s been remarkably strong bipartisanship. And I would expect that does not change in a new administration, whoever leads the new administration.”
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Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.
They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.
This week, since this edition of The Fight was so heavy, I tried something a little different: I interviewed one of my readers, Heiko Burow, an attorney with Baker & Mackenzie based in Dallas, Texas. Burow doesn’t work in energy specifically – he’s an intellectual property lawyer – but he’s read many of my scoops over the past few weeks about attacks on renewable energy and had legitimate criticism! Namely, as a lawyer who is passionate about the rule of law, he wanted to send a message to any developers and energy wonks reading me to use the legal system more often as a tool against attacks on their field.
The following conversation has been abridged for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So Heiko, you reached out to me after my latest scoop about how the Trump administration is now trying to create national land use restrictions on wind projects through the Department of Transportation. In your email, you said the Trump administration “cannot invent a setback requirement by executive fiat.” What does this mean?
Something you need to understand from my point of view is, there’s all these things coming out of the White House, the executive. Like the setback requirement: If the law says they have the right to do that, then okay. But the viewpoints of the administration do not replace the law.
There’s no requirement in the law that the Secretary of Transportation can require a setback. He can’t just come in and say here’s a required setback. The government can only do what the law allows a government to do.
For example, a CEO can’t come into a company and say all the contracts are null and void. The president, in the same way, can’t say everything that’s legally binding is no longer legally binding. There are two ways that creates a problem: one is that it is a breach of contract, and the courts will say there’s a different remedy for that. But there’s also a constitutional problem with that.
Why did you reach out to me about this story, in particular?
I’m just concerned about the environment, and our country, and our democracy.
As someone who works with corporations navigating the legal system under Trump, why do you think companies – like renewable developers – aren’t suing left and right in this moment?
I think they’re timid.
It’s not just companies – it’s stakeholders in general. In 2017, there was pushback on Trump. That is missing. Look at the tech industry – and a lot of investments in renewable energy come from the tech area – and how they lined up with Trump on Inauguration Day.
That is fear. I’d say other stakeholders too are now ruled by fear.
As someone who advises companies in other areas of law, what posture do you think renewable energy companies should take?
Band together. Renewable energy companies, you don’t have much to lose. He’s persecuting you.
I know people stay under the radar, like community solar entities that he could have forgotten about. But he didn’t forget about them. So they need to band together and fight.
Everybody’s just lying low and being afraid. But how much more can renewable energy companies lose? Right now they’re still surviving, because the business case for renewable energy works and states are supporting it. But they’re quiet about it on the national level.
If people start believing what Trump says is the force of law, then it’ll just be that way. And I don’t see a coordinated response to that.