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.”
Courtesy of Climate Central
