For long-time followers of fusion energy, Tokamak Hall is the high-water mark after decades of ups and downs. From an observation deck on the side, the surgically-clean, hospital-white room feels both like a cathedral and yet somehow too tiny for its lofty purpose. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the company building it, says the room will soon hold a tokamak, the central donut-shaped device necessary for one approach to nuclear fusion. In the tokamak, scientists will heat up deuterium and tritium to 100 million degrees Celsius and fuse them together—producing heat that can be converted to electricity in the process.
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But as impressive as Tokamak Hall may be, I left the company’s campus more taken by the factory floor in the building next door. There, employees are hard at work manufacturing the company’s key innovation: giant magnets made of high-temperature, superconducting tape to be used in the tokamak. The magnets keep the superheated fuel in place and stable enough for the fusion process to occur. In the facility, they’re churning out magnets for the pilot project—and, eventually, to build a fleet of fusion power plants. It’s a testament not just to fusion’s technological potential but the commercial possibilities as well.
“The power industry is a very large market, and so you have, inherently, a huge potential for financial return,” Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard told me after my tour in March. “If you built something that can produce 1% of energy, you’ve built the largest company in the world.”
The U.S. energy system is in the middle of an all-out revolution. Growing electricity demand has contributed to a massive build out of any power source that utilities can get their hands on—often gas and solar power, typically the two cheapest options these days. Meanwhile, the country has cemented its place as a superpower in fossil fuel production. Fusion energy, which has for decades been considered as distant and almost like science fiction, has the potential to reshape all of these trends. And it could happen sooner than many energy practitioners realize.
“I think we are showing promise for being able to demonstrate fusion conditions in this decade, and this decade has only five years left,” says Ernest Moniz, the former U.S. energy secretary who now serves on the board of TAE Technologies, a fusion company. “Eventually, it could become the dominant source.”
There’s no question that the pathway to a grid dominated by fusion is long and windy. For decades, it’s been dismissed as too fantastical to consider seriously. Yet, now, it increasingly looks like fusion may soon be commercial—and policymakers and business executives around the world have done little to prepare for the wide-reaching consequences.
In February, a leading renewable energy trade group gathered industry luminaries for a summit on the future of the U.S. power sector. In the middle of the discussion, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, now a partner at law firm Holland & Hart, rejected the possibility of fusion becoming commercial in the next 20 years. Even if there are advances, the regulatory process will take too long, he said. Moniz jumped in to correct: in 2023, federal authorities announced a streamlined process that will make fusion energy easier to deploy than old-school nuclear fission.
“Very few people know that that’s already something in the cards,” Moniz told me later about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to regulate fusion reactors more like particle accelerators, which are inherently less risky than fission reactors. The decision was later solidified with a federal law.
In casual chats with energy watchers over the last six months, I’ve had a version of the same conversation over and over again: a policymaker, investor, or academic rejects the possibility of commercial fusion but their opinion reflects outdated information or lacks awareness of the current state of the technology.
There are good reasons for the misperceptions. Fusion first appeared on the energy sector’s radar in the 1950s with a lot of hype. Nuclear weapons had proven the destructive power of nuclear technologies in World War II, and federal officials were keen to find ways to use nuclear energy—fusion and fission—to make vast amounts of electricity to power the post-war economy. In a 1953 speech at the United Nations, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called for nuclear development as part of an “atoms for peace” agenda. Scientists confidently predicted that they could make quick advances with fusion just as they had with fission.
So, for decades, governments have funded a wide range of approaches and experiments aimed at advancing fusion power. Billions of dollars poured into research facilities like the Joint European Torus in England and the still-under-construction ITER project in France. Yet the technology has remained stubbornly elusive, with fusion reactions consuming more energy than they generated, leading to the running joke that fusion was always “20 years away.” By the 1990s, many in the energy industry had written off fusion as a scientific curiosity rather than a viable power source.
In 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved a game-changing breakthrough: a fusion reaction that produced more energy than required to start it. Buoyed in part by that announcement, private companies and financiers have aggressively entered the race in recent years—flipping the fusion game on its head. For decades, fusion spending had primarily come from governments, leading to a vast body of knowledge about the technology but minimal pressure to commercialize.
Private companies take a different approach, trying to make money as soon as possible with fast-paced, commercially-oriented innovation. Today, the Fusion Industry Association counts at least 45 private companies globally working to develop commercial fusion; in total those companies have raised more than $7 billion—largely from private backers.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is leading the pack. The company has raised over $2 billion—more than any competitor—and plans to put power on the grid in the early 2030s. The scientific press has paid significant attention to CFS’s technological innovation: using a high-temperature super conducting tape that can create strong magnetic fields. But the company’s success is the result of a combination of that technical innovation and a focus on commercial speed. To get past labor shortages, its leaders have hired from a cross section of related fields rather than focusing solely on PhD physicists. And it has adapted its blue prints and supply chains to accommodate easily adaptable products that are already on the market rather than trying to build from scratch.
“We wanted to make the technology work as soon as possible,” says Brandon Sorbom, the company’s chief science officer. “Everything else is subordinate to that.”
The company’s SPARC facility—where I visited the under-construction tokamak—is scheduled to deliver first net energy production in 2027. Late last year, the company said it would build its first commercial power plant in Virginia with the goal of delivering power to the grid in the early 2030s.
Assuming CFS’s plant works as planned, a big question remains unanswered: how much will the electricity it produces cost?
In theory, the economics of successful fusion should be favorable. The fuel sources—tritium and deuterium—come from easily accessible sources, namely seawater and lithium, and should be cheap to produce compared to fossil fuels. Like many renewable energy sources, the main cost will come from financing the necessary infrastructure. And, while the executives at CFS are exceedingly confident that their approach to fusion will put electrons on the grid, they are less certain about how the cost will first pencil out. At $100 per megawatt hour they anticipate good business; at $50 per megawatt hour fusion takes over the world. “What becomes interesting is if you get fusion soon to a power price that’s relatively competitive, but you have a path to something that’s really competitive,” says Rick Needham, the company’s chief commercial officer.
Until the plant enters operation, it’s hard to know where the numbers will fall. But we do know that costs tend to decrease over time with any technology as builders become more knowledgeable and efficient. The question is who will put up the money to make it happen? To scale, CFS and its competitors will need to raise billions more to finance individual projects—knowing that returns for early investments will not be as good as they might come to be in the future.
Fusion has perhaps received the most attention—and increasingly sourced its capital—from the so-called hyperscalers, big tech companies looking wherever they can to find power sources for their A.I. data centers. And both Microsoft and Google have reached agreements to buy fusion power when plants are up in running, including a June deal between Google and CFS.
“The hyperscalers, and any energy-intensive sort of industrial user of power, are starting to wake up,” says Michl Binderbauer, the CEO of nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies, which counts Google as investor. Whether these big tech players will open their wallets to finance the build out remains to be seen, even as the early signs are encouraging.
It’s easy to be drawn in by the utopian vision of what fusion energy can do for the world. Fully realized, the technology can provide cheap, infinite clean energy across the globe. Given how energy, and fossil fuels in particular, shapes geopolitics, proponents of fusion say the power source could alleviate conflict and create a more peaceful world. And it would dramatically aid the fight against climate change—not just transforming today’s power sector but leading to a rethink of how we use energy in industry and transportation.
But technological shifts are rarely so simple. New energy sources have historically disrupted existing power structures, created winners and losers, and generated unforeseen consequences that ripple across industries and nations.
Indeed, one place where people are paying attention is in China, which is racing to build its own state-backed fusion companies. If China does a better job of commercializing fusion, it would significantly alter geopolitical dynamics. “China is a country of extraordinary initiative. In domain after domain, China invests early,” Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who is also the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, told me at a fusion event in February.
Even for those who are paying attention to fusion, it remains almost impossible to plan for its commercial emergence. Demand for electricity is rising everywhere, including the U.S., and utilities need to ensure that the grid is well supplied with technologies that exist today. For an industry that plans in decades-long time scales, the timing is challenging. Many places, including the U.S., are experiencing a surge in demand—and will build a whole lot of energy infrastructure—just before commercial fusion, potentially, comes online.
That timing could prove costly. Power plants built in the next decade might become stranded assets if cheap fusion electricity arrives. Grid infrastructure designed for today’s energy mix may need expensive retrofitting. And regulatory frameworks built around fossil fuels and traditional renewables will require fundamental rethinking.
“The downside is that it’s not here right now,” says Needham. But in energy markets, there is a fine line between a technology being too futuristic and becoming the next big thing. We may be approaching that line now.
This story is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. TIME is solely responsible for the content.