The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) announced its largest ever investment in fusion of $135m – more than it has invested in fusion over the past 12 years combined. ARPA-E has invested approximately $134m in commercial fusion since it began funding fusion projects with the launch of its ALPHA programme in 2014.
The new funding will be spread over multiple programmes, targeting fusion’s toughest technical barriers. ARPA-E cited efficient, lower-cost plasma heating and driver systems, advanced fuels and novel fueling techniques, next-generation pulsed power and power conversion systems, and novel power plant designs and components as key focus areas. The aim is to reduce plant costs, boost power output, simplify the fusion fuel cycle, decrease plant footprints, and improve the durability and economic competitiveness of power plant designs and components.
“The question is no longer whether fusion is possible. The question is how fast we get fusion-generated power on the grid and whether America leads that achievement,” said ARPA-E director Conner Prochaska. “ARPA-E helped build America’s fusion power industry by taking risks on radical ideas and building an innovative supply chain. Today’s announcement is how we press our advantage. We are going after the hardest technical bottlenecks standing between fusion power and a commercially viable system, because that’s what this moment demands.”
ARPA-E aims to support the development of unproven technologies that will go on to attract private investment. Zap Energy, Realta Fusion, Thea Energy, and Type One Energy are among the fusion companies to have emerged from ARPA-E–funded projects. The agency said its fusion investments have attracted more than $1.5bn in private follow-on funding.
“Private capital scales what it can already see; ARPA-E funds what the market can’t yet price or predict,” Prochaska told Latitude Media. “Venture capital funds companies to build a product, not to solve the fundamental science challenges needed to reach those milestones.”
However, in what the American Nuclear Society describes as “mixed messages” ARPA-E’s announcement follows proposed cuts in the White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget, which requests a $50m (6%) cut in the DOE Office of Science’s fusion energy sciences initiatives budget. To have one bureau increasing funding while another is cutting is no way to beat China to commercial fusion,” Andrew Holland, the head of the Fusion Industry Association, told Axios, referring to the at least $6.5bn China is reported to be spending on fusion.
The budget also requests a $150m (43%) cut in ARPA-E’s overall budget, and a $151m (9%) cut in the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy’s budget. However, it does request $10m for the new Office of Fusion to support activities advancing fusion. This office “will lead the Department in advancing a set of national priorities that establishes a national strategy to build, innovate, and grow a leading, competitive, and robust American-driven fusion energy industry, to close scientific and technological gaps on the critical path toward commercializing fusion energy,” according to the DOE budget brief.
