How to Make Fusion Great Again and Beat China

T he U.S. and China are setting up for a race to fusion power . . . and that’s a race America must win with the power of free enterprise.

Both countries have been making nuclear strides. Chinese scientists recently made a worrying breakthrough in nuclear fusion power, which is widely regarded as the most promising source of clean and limitless energy. The Chinese team was able to exceed a major previous constraint to building fusion reactors, following decades of serious investment by the Communist regime. This follows America’s October announcement of a Roadmap to Fusion after a series of well-publicized breakthroughs and the parent company of President Donald Trump’s Truth Social media platform merging into the fusion business with the goal of powering artificial intelligence.

A bit of technical background: Fission and fusion are both nuclear reactions releasing vast amounts of energy, but they work in fundamentally opposite ways. Fission involves splitting a heavy atomic nucleus, releasing energy to power today’s nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. It provides nearly 20 percent of U.S. electricity today, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). By contrast, fusion combines two light atomic nuclei into something heavier, releasing far greater energy per amount of mass. Fusion is the energy that powers our sun and has vast potential to be a transformative solution capable of making electricity “too cheap to meter.” Since 1800, the average energy available for an average human has increased by a factor of 3.5, a number which will likely almost double by the end of this century. But even with this energy availability increase, it’s exceeded by a rising demand that America and China are racing to meet.

Despite China’s recent successes, U.S. nuclear fusion and fission start-ups are winning this race, but they need deregulation and incentives to reach the finish line. All that’s holding America back is bureaucracy and a comparative lack of positive incentives.

Progress on fusion and fission in the U.S. has come largely from start-ups, not the massive Department of Energy bureaucracy. Valar Atomics announced in late December it had achieved “cold criticality,” a critical proof of concept for the first nuclear start-up to sustain a controlled fission reaction in much smaller reactors. Fusion start-ups like the MIT-linked Commonwealth Fusion Systems have raised roughly $3 billion and plan to build a small 400-megawatt commercial reactor near Richmond, Virginia, by the early 2030s.

But as I’ve previously written, government red tape has hobbled fission reactors, leading to soaring costs and has the potential to stop the fusion renaissance as well. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Department of Energy (DOE) have also piled on endless reviews that take years to complete and intend to apply the same failed framework which has undermined fission reactors to fusion ones. These ridiculous rules lead to utter absurdities, such as what should be a simple pipe repair job costing $10,000 ballooning into a $30 million expense due to bureaucratic insanity.

This could easily be fixed with a simple executive order directing the NRC to create a dedicated, streamlined licensing pathway for fusion, treating it separately from fission with a clear deadline. This order could mandate 18-month maximum approvals for prototype testing and pilot plants while permitting testing of early fusion machines on federal lands including DOE sites, or allowing pro-fusion states like Texas and Tennessee to write regulations. This alone will save companies years of bureaucratic compliance work and billions of dollars, letting innovative start-up companies keep America competitive in the fusion race.

But we can do more to encourage the creativity needed to meet our growing energy demand. The best way to encourage fusion innovation is via a prize system, which has a long history of encouraging innovation. When Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean, he was doing it in pursuit of a private prize. Great Britain essentially created modern navigation with a series of fairly inexpensive public prizes created by the Longitude Act, the expense of which was dwarfed by the benefits of the new technology.

A similar series of prizes could be created for fusion milestones made in America for intermediate scientific and engineering achievements leading the fusion, culminating in large grand prizes for demonstration of net energy and commercial viability. This would encourage private sector innovation by American entities and would be fairly inexpensive by government standards. Just setting aside $25 billion would be a drop in the bucket of America’s $7 trillion 2025 budget, a mere fraction of just one year’s federal spending. And the money wouldn’t need to be spent until success was assured — exactly the opposite of how most federal contracting occurs.

For example, the government could issue a prize of $1 billion for 10 sustained minutes of burning plasma, enough to prove basic net energy production. Another step-prize could be $2 billion for an hour with evidence of heat extraction, which is roughly equivalent to the goals of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). There could be a big $15 billion prize for true engineering breakeven grid-ready power, with a remaining $2 billion saved for side quests like materials endurance, tritium breeding, or potential high-temperature superconductors.

Since in a prize system, the money definitionally wouldn’t be spent unless the milestone was achieved, multiple teams could claim lower tiers if achieved independently.

A prize system wouldn’t have to favor one particular method of solving a problem, which is a huge issue with existing contracting systems that result in the government picking winners and losers for political reasons, even if that’s not the best way to solve an engineering problem. Such a system would galvanize American innovation, attract talent and investment, and provide clear, measurable paths to fusion power transforming a decades-long bureaucracy hellscape of research into a competitive race toward abundant energy . . . and taxpayers wouldn’t pay a cent until it was proven successful. The prize could be paid for by reducing the nonsensical handouts the energy industry received from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which cost taxpayers $780 billion in special tax credits and awards for politically favored technologies like wind and solar.

America’s fusion program had a significant but overrated government-run breakthrough in 2022, achieving modest net energy gain from an experiment. The DOE’s fusion research program has long emphasized bureaucratic compliance and international collaborations over actual outcomes. This approach delayed commercialization and has prevented the development of cost-effective technologies while slowing innovation.

If America wants to win the fusion race with China and “make fusion great again,” we need the kind of innovation only the free market can bring.