The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Fusion Science & Technology (FS&T) Roadmap (“the Roadmap”) intends to usher in a burgeoning fusion private sector industry in the U.S. toward maturity on the most rapid timeline possible. By leveraging investments from both the public and private sectors with prudent and strategic processes, the Roadmap calls on the forces of the public and private sectors to close gaps on the critical path toward fusion energy. The Roadmap maps actions and milestones out to the mid-2030s, providing the scientific and technological foundation to support a competitive U.S. fusion energy industry. The U.S. strategy for fusion energy development is based on three primary drivers to Build, Innovate and Grow a leading, competitive and robust American-driven fusion energy industry. While the U.S. private sector is investing more than nine billion dollars to demonstrate sustaining burning plasma on the path to fusion power plants, there remain critical science, materials and technology gaps, such as the breeding and handling of fusion fuels, that must be closed. These critical gaps require innovation and collaboration of public and private sectors. The goal of the Roadmap is to create the public infrastructure that supports the fusion private sector scale-up in the 2030s. The U.S. will build key infrastructure to address critical fusion materials and technology (FM&T) gaps, innovate and advance the science and engineering of fusion and grow the U.S. fusion ecosystem through domestic and international public-private partnerships which will foster new regional consortia, build research FS&T infrastructure and supply chains and fusion manufacturing networks. Build-Innovate-Grow is DOE’s new strategy to support fusion energy commercialization in the U.S. and its main tool is the Roadmap. The Roadmap is solidly aligned with the 2020 Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) Long-Range Plan (LRP). The Roadmap merges the FESAC LRP critical science drivers with a revamped FES public program in the DoE Office of Science (SC) to define a new era of U.S. fusion energy leadership. This era is characterized by close alignment between the public sector roadmap and the private sector’s stated ambitions to deliver fusion power on an aggressive timeline and is increasingly enabled and accelerated by the revolutionary potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is being referred to “fusion convergence”. The Roadmap defines Key Actions to be executed in the near-term (next two-three years), mid-term (three-five years) and long-term (five-ten years), aligned with the Build-Innovate-Grow strategy and to the LRP science drivers. DoE will create FS&T infrastructure and the AI-Fusion digital convergence platform. DoE will innovate through transformative research and move toward cost competitive power plants. DoE will expand the U.S. fusion enterprise through public-private partnerships and by supporting development of supply chains, workforce pathways, synergies with advanced nuclear and enabling fusion energy adoption and commercialization. The roadmap also maps the DoE plan for delivering FS&T infrastructure along with the same near-mid-long term schedule, that will be critical for the development of an FPP on industry timeline. In combination, the delivery of Key Actions and infrastructure will enable U.S. progress on closing S&T gaps on the critical path to fusion energy across six core challenge areas, tracked with technical 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 Roadmap establishes the path for strategic actions and capability delivery necessary to support a world leading U.S. fusion ecosystem. This includes nuclear metrics to track progress and to ensure these actions are aligned with solving critical scientific and technical challenges and rapidly progressing toward realizing abundant commercial fusion in the U.S. The Roadmap is a dynamic tool for DoE that is designed to evolve with continual input from the public and private sector fusion community. The goal of the Roadmap is to deliver the public infrastructure that supports the fusion private sector necessary scale up in the 2030s.

U.S. Department of Energy’s Fusion Science & Technology Roadmap