A new Department of Energy strategy seeks to accelerate progress toward the long-sought, long-elusive goal of commercially viable nuclear fusion power.

The “Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap” seeks to coordinate and align public and private efforts and is part of the Trump administration’s broader energy dominance initiative.

The roadmap identifies research, materials and technology gaps that must be bridged before a fusion pilot plant can be built. It sets out three primary ways to accomplish this that boil down to build, innovate and grow: construction of critical infrastructure; innovation through advanced research, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence; and growth of a fusion ecosystem incorporating public-private partnerships, regional manufacturing hubs and workforce development.

The roadmap identifies six core challenge areas to be tracked with milestones and metrics: structural materials; plasma-facing components and plasma-material interactions; confinement approaches; the fuel cycle; blankets; and fusion plant engineering and system integration.

The goal is to build the public infrastructure needed to support the scale-up of private-sector fusion generation in the 2030s.

DOE formally announced the roadmap Oct. 16, after it was unveiled earlier in the week during events centered on fusion energy in D.C.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright spoke enthusiastically about fusion and the new roadmap at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Fusion Summit in D.C. on Oct. 14.

“We’re going to get the fusion ball moving,” he said. “I think we will see more progress in the next five or 10 years, much more progress than in all of the history before on fusion. We’re finally going to see the reality of fusion come, first in the electricity grid, ultimately in industrial process heat to make things, and hopefully we can rapidly scale that up.”

The new roadmap is aligned closely with and builds off the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Long-Range Plan, issued in 2020. The roadmap combines the earlier plan’s science drivers with a revamped Fusion Energy Science public program in DOE’s Office of Science in hopes of bringing to fruition what has been a very lengthy effort.

As skeptics like to point out, fusion research and development efforts have not yet lived up to the hope and hype surrounding them. A running joke is that the world has been 20 years away from perfecting commercial fusion for 50 years.

Wright addressed this at the Oct. 14 summit: “I worked on it 40 years ago. It isn’t that we’ve gotten nowhere in 40 years. It’s just a hard problem to replicate the sun on Earth. … We’ve made progress over the last 40 years, and we’re about there.”

What is different now, Wright said, is that artificial intelligence presents the need for large amounts of new electrical generation capacity, such as through fusion, and a tool to help develop fusion generation; fusion R&D is attracting private capital, which is less patient than public funding; and the U.S. wants to lead the world on fusion, rather than see the leadership role go to China, which is making massive investments to do just that.

“What China doesn’t have is the commercial sector we have,” Wright said. “We have billions of dollars of private money in different companies, backing different strategies, with different biases. We’re going to naturally get a broader choice.”

DOE’s network of national laboratories can complement these private-sector R&D efforts in key areas such as developing the materials needed to withstand the intense environment of a fusion reactor, he said.

Wright said one of the obstacles facing this initiative is budget cuts. While he agrees with President Donald Trump’s push to reduce spending, he said cuts should be targeted at subsidies for existing technologies, not directed broad stroke at everything in DOE’s budget.

“And I’ve had the political challenge to sell ‘not everything,’” he said. “In fact, there’s things we spend money on today that we should spend more on, not less on, even though we have a big budget deficit, and basic fundamental science is absolutely one of those.”

The U.S. needs to come closer to matching China’s investment of state funds in AI, Wright said: “My God, the upside of it is just — it’s hard to imagine. So we need to continue to bring confidence and private money into it, but we need to bring more government money into it.”

DOE in its roadmap notes the billions of dollars of private-sector investment pouring into fusion.

The Fusion Industry Association reported in July that the 53 fusion companies it surveyed had raised a combined $9.77 billion in funding, a fivefold increase over their total four years earlier. More than $2.5 billion of that was secured just in the past year, it added. The great majority of the capital has been private, with not even $800 million in public finding reported.

But 83% of companies said they still consider investment a major challenge, and their estimates of funds needed to bring their first pilot plants online were a combined $77 billion.

They remain optimistic, however: 84% expect to deliver power to the grid before 2040 and 53% by 2035.

Twenty-nine of the 53 companies surveyed for the association’s 2025 “Global Fusion Industry Report” are based in the U.S., and all three of the companies reporting more than $1 billion in funds raised are based here as well.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems of Massachusetts has claimed a leadership position in the pack, with nearly $3 billion raised as of late August, or approximately 30% of the total reported by private fusion companies worldwide. It has announced plans to build what it promotes as the world’s first grid-scale fusion plant in Virginia in partnership with Dominion Energy, and has announced power purchase agreements with Google and Eni that would account for more than half of the facility’s planned 400-MW nameplate capacity.

DOE previously supported Commonwealth’s work through funding streams including INFUSE, the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program and ARPA-E.