Fusion Research Receives $49 Million Boost

The longstanding quip about fusion—that it’s 50 years in the future and always will be—is looking less true every day. International collaborations such as ITER in southern France and startups like Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion are progressing toward building machines that can produce more energy than they consume, which is major milestone toward commercially viable power plants.

Even with this progress, much research still must be conducted. To enhance the focus on fusion energy research, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced in October 2024  that it will provide $49 million in funding for 19 projects in its Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program, which include foundational fusion materials, nuclear science, heating technology, magnet technology, blankets, fuel cycles, and first wall research.

“The development of fusion energy as a clean, safe, abundant energy source has become a global race,” said DOE deputy secretary David Turk in a press statement. “We will leverage the opportunities enabled by our world-leading public and private fusion leadership, including humanity’s first-ever demonstration of fusion ignition at our National Ignition Facility, as well as major new advances in technologies such as high-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy.”

The funding will be distributed to national research laboratories in an effort to “reorient” lab-based foundational and basic science research programs to better align with FES’s new “bold decadal vision for commercial fusion energy, which was announced in 2022.

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In a major change of focus, the projects will shift resources toward practical fusion power solutions, such as innovations in fusion reactor design, materials science, and plasma research that will hopefully bring fusion energy closer to commercialization. An ambitious FES goal is to partner with the private sector to develop an operable commercially relevant fusion pilot plant in the 2030s.

The FES has four strategic goals:

Magnetically confined plasmas—advance the knowledge of magnetically confined plasmas to develop the magnetically confined plasmas predictive capability needed for a sustainable fusion energy source

Burning plasma environment—develop the scientific understanding required to design and deploy the materials needed to support a burning plasma environment

High energy density plasma science—advance high energy density plasma science to better understand the universe and to enhance national security and economic competitiveness

Basic plasma science—increase the fundamental understanding of basic plasma science, including both burning plasma and low-temperature plasma science and engineering, to enhance economic competitiveness and to create opportunities for a broader range of science-based applications.

While the total funding amount, $49 million, was announced in October 2024, only $7 million was released in FY 2024. Subsequent funding will be contingent on Congressional appropriations, none of which are certain with a new administration coming into office this month.
 

The list of projects

The winning projects were selected by competitive peer review and are spread across 10 laboratories.
 

Argonne National Laboratory

• “Integration of Collisional and Thermal Effects for Predictive Modeling of Plasma-Induced Material Degradation and Dynamics of D/T Retention, Permeation, and Recycling”

Idaho National Laboratory

• “Foundational Research on Tritium Transport Phenomena in Liquid Breeder Blankets”
• “Foundational Research to Support Fusion Systems Safety Assessment”
• “Integrating Advanced Characterization into Modeling and Simulations to Predict Irradiation and Tritium Effects in Fusion Materials”
• “Transformational Research to Enable Reducing Tritium Inventory”

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

• “Critical HTS Magnet Technology to Enable and De-Risk High-Field Compact Fusion Concepts”

Los Alamos National Laboratory

• “Extrapolating the Lifetime of Fusion Materials”
• “A Comprehensive Approach to Fusion Fuel Cycle Readiness: Research, Technology, and Workforce Development”

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

• “Fuel Cycle and Related Enabling Technology Research to Expand Fundamental Knowledge Needed to Proceed to a Fusion Pilot Plant”
• “Development of High-Performance Materials for Enabling Fusion Energy”
• “Advancement of Plasma Material Interactions and Advanced Manufacturing for First Wall and RF Launcher Plasma Facing Components”
• “Foundational Research on Tritium Breeding Blankets and Fusion Nuclear Science”

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 

• “Novel Low-Activation DPT-W Composites and Ductile Refractory Multi–Principal-Element Alloys”

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

• “High Current Density HTS Cables and High Field Fast Ramp Solenoids in Compact Fusion”

Sandia National Laboratories

• “Understanding the Effect of Radiation on Hydrogen Permeation Barrier Coatings for Blanket Structural Materials”
• “Evaluating the Mechanisms underlying Surface Degradation and Hydrogen Isotope Transport for Next-Generation Fusion Materials Development”

Savannah River National Laboratory

• “Non-Aqueous 2-D Material Based Hydrogen Isotope Separation” 
• “Development and De-Risking of Li Electrolysis and CoRExt Process by Flow-Loop Integration”

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

• “Benchmarking Inter-Atomic Potentials to Enable Accurate Modeling of Fusion Materials”

More information on the U.S. fusion program is available at the Department of Energy website.

Mark Crawford is a technology writer in Corrales, N.M.