Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI) has conditionally selected four domestic private-sector companies to receive a combined JPY60bn ($400m) in subsidies to 2028. This initiative directly executes commitments from Japan’s national nuclear fusion strategy. The programme intends to test the commercial viability and technical scalability of diverse confinement concepts to achieve practical grid power generation in the 2030s.
Funding will be distributed through a milestone-based framework, under which progress is evaluated against defined technical and commercialisation objectives. Allocations to February 2029 will be tied strictly to technical benchmarks, such as high-temperature superconducting magnet performance and tritium fuel cycle management. The awardees span laser, tokamak, and stellarator approaches. They include:
- EX-Fusion: (Inertial Confinement) – A continuous-operation demonstration project integrating core technologies for laser fusion power generation, in consortium with Hamamatsu Photonics. Technology involves high-repetition, continuous-operation target injection and scaling up core optical and commercial pellet tracking systems.
- Helical Fusion: (Magnetic confinement) – Development and demonstration of fusion power generation using the stellarator approach. Technology involves intrinsically steady-state plasma without current disruptions. Helical is building the Helix HARUKA test device ahead of the Helix KANATA pilot plant.
- LINEA Innovation: (Magnetic confinement – Compact Spherical Tokamak) – Development of a demonstration platform using a beam-supported field-reversed configuration (FRC) approach. Technology involves high beta-efficiency in a significantly smaller physical footprint optimising economic scalability for commercial industrial applications.
- Starlight Engine: (Magnetic confinement) – A high-temperature superconducting tokamak power generation demonstration project, in consortium with Kyoto Fusioneering. Technology leverages the global fusion community’s most established database and siting a private demonstration plant via a nationwide search for candidate sites.
EX-Fusion, Helical Fusion and Kyoto Fusioneering are members of the Fusion Industry Alliance. The selections are conditional rather than final awards. Each project has been notified of conditions that must be addressed before the review committee confirms formal adoption and a grant decision. Individual funding allocations have not yet been finalised.
Startups such as Starlight Engine are explicitly partnered with local supply-chain heavyweights such as Kyoto Fusioneering to build out necessary sub-systems like blanket divertors and liquid lithium loops.
Helical, founded in 2021, is the only one of the four companies that issued a separate press release on their selection for the award. Helical is building on research conducted by the National Institute for Fusion Science on the Helical Stellarator design. It aims to achieve “the world’s first practical power generation using fusion energy” through the Helix Programme, which aims to commercialise fusion energy using Japan’s unique “helical fusion reactor”. The programme aims to complete individual demonstrations of the high-temperature superconducting magnet and the blanket/divertor by the mid-2020s. In the 2030s, the programme plans to conduct integrated demonstrations using the Helix HARUKA, and achieve the world’s first practical fusion power generation device, the Helix KANATA.
Takaya Taguchi, CEO of Helical, said: “This subsidy programme aims to determine which technologies are realistic for realising power plants, and Helical Fusion has selected and developed technologies based solely on this criterion. I am confident that the helical system, with its characteristics suitable for power plants – high power generation efficiency, steady-state operation, and maintainability – will undoubtedly become a strength for Japan in the international competition surrounding fusion energy.”
