Congress and President Joe Biden are right: We need to focus on rebuilding infrastructure. To be ready for the challenges of the 21st century, America can create the industries of the future while meeting the clean energy challenge to address climate change. In this decade, fusion energy will show that it’s ready to move from scientific labs to commercial development.
Over the last several months, many member companies of the Fusion Industry Association, of which I am the CEO, have made major announcements about their fundraising, scientific results, and next steps. Commonwealth Fusion Systems began building its demonstration facility in Devens, Massachusetts. TAE technologies announced a successful scientific campaign and new fundraising of over $280 million to build its next experiment. Helion Energy revealed the results of its successful scientific campaign, reaching 100 million degrees Celsius. And General Fusion announced plans to build a fusion demonstration plant in the United Kingdom.
Over two years ago, as this remarkable progress toward fusion energy was coming into sight, the American fusion science program began a community planning process to organize itself to support the move toward fusion energy. Over two years of consensus-building across the public sector, private industry, and universities, American fusion scientists came to a consensus around their plans to move toward a pilot fusion power plant.
Congress responded to that program by passing a law that created new programs in the Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, including public-private partnerships, that would accelerate fusion energy research and development. The National Academies of Sciences, the gold standard for American science, said that a fusion pilot plant could be built by 2035 but that planning work to create national teams consisting of the public and the private sector must start now. The FIA’s member companies are aiming to move even faster.
Months later, though, the Biden administration has ignored these reports. The administration’s 2022 budget does not include enough funding for fusion to begin the move toward commercial fusion energy. Even worse, the budget did nothing to create the new programs and partnerships called for by Congress or scientists.
The clear call to government action by scientists is being taken up by America’s competitors. Across the Atlantic in the U.K., the government has announced its intention to create a pilot fusion power plant by 2040. Earlier this month, the Canadian company General Fusion, a member of the FIA, announced that it would build its fusion demonstration plant in the U.K., in partnership with the U.K. government. Importantly, the U.K. is also building a regulatory environment that will enable innovation, predictability, and public safety in fusion.
While the U.K. may be the early leader in the race to commercialize fusion energy, soon, an adversary could make the breakthroughs that would catalyze a new industry. China is investing billions of dollars into fusion energy, and it’s seeing results. This year, their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in Heifei set a world record for plasma confinement time and temperature by maintaining a temperature above 120 million degrees Celsius for over 100 seconds. The U.S. scientific program has no fusion facilities of comparable power. Additionally, a private Chinese company called ENN has rapidly made sizable investments into commercializing fusion energy.
If the U.S. loses this race to fusion power, it will have lost a new industry.
But supporting fusion energy is not just an investment in the future. Investing in fusion will create new, good jobs today as we build the facilities that will prove the science of fusion. It will create the high-tech industrial base that spawns spinoffs and a new era of prosperity.
The Congressional Fusion Energy Caucus, led by Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, is leading the charge in Congress to accelerate fusion commercialization. As Congress considers infrastructure legislation, fusion energy must be included. The FIA has proposed a $1 billion public-private partnership program that would accelerate fusion commercialization by investing in building new scientific demonstration plants here in the U.S. New funding should also be directed toward building new scientific facilities that are the best in the world. This spending would be leveraged with private dollars to catalyze a new industry that can lead the world.
When Biden introduced his infrastructure plan in March, he said: “If we act now, in 50 years, people are going to look back and say: ‘This was the moment that America won the future.’” The economy of the future will be powered by clean, safe, sustainable fusion energy. Let’s make the investment now to ensure that fusion is also “Made in America.”
Andrew Holland is the chief executive officer of the Fusion Industry Association. The FIA has 22 members working to develop fusion energy.
