Future Prospects

In this section, you will learn the journey fusion takes from the stage of being able to burn plasma in a laboratory to becoming an actual power plant that sells electricity. The goal is to gently grasp the overall picture of the order in which the research frontier moves closer to commercialization.

What You Will Learn in This Section

Realizing fusion power does not happen in a single leap. First, we must show scientifically that we can extract energy; next, we must demonstrate in engineering terms that we can run it as a power plant; and finally, we advance to the economic stage of being able to sell the electricity. This build-up broadly follows two paths.

One is the public path that national governments advance through international cooperation. It proceeds in stages: confirming scientific feasibility with the experimental reactor ITER, then demonstrating power generation with the prototype reactor DEMO, and beyond that placing the commercial reactor. The other is the accelerated path, in which private companies raise venture capital and try to compress these stages all at once.

Start with the Big Picture (High School)

To use a cooking analogy, the public path is an approach that carefully verifies the recipe one step at a time. With a large experimental reactor called ITER, the world cooperates to confirm that mixing the ingredients does indeed light a fire (scientific demonstration); next, with a prototype reactor called DEMO, it shows that this fire can actually boil water to make electricity (engineering demonstration); and finally, with a commercial reactor, it advances to the stage of being able to serve dishes every day as a restaurant (establishing economic viability).

ITER’s goal is to obtain a fusion output ten times the energy put in from outside, in other words to achieve an energy gain of $Q \geq 10$. However, ITER itself does not generate electricity; it is purely a scientific and engineering experimental device. Actually turning a generator to produce electricity is the role of the next stage, DEMO.

Private ventures, on the other hand, try to skip these cautious stages. If you create a strong magnetic field with a new technology called high-temperature superconductor (HTS) magnets, you can make the device much smaller. If it is small, construction is fast and cheap, and even if it fails you can quickly rebuild it. In this way, by challenging small, fast, and many times over, some companies have emerged that aim to generate power in the 2030s.

The Boost of National Strategy

Advancing along this journey requires long years and enormous funding. For this reason, each country is backing fusion development by setting out national strategies. In Japan, the Fusion Energy Innovation Strategy was formulated in 2023, laying out policies such as promoting research and development with an eye toward industrialization, supporting the entry of private companies, and developing human resources. It is characterized by renaming fusion as fusion energy and by an attitude of nurturing it as a future industry. Around the same time, the United States, the United Kingdom, and others rolled out their own fusion strategies, and worldwide there is a growing movement to combine the public and private paths to speed up practical realization.

Reading Order

For the child pages of this section, we recommend reading them in the following order.

• Prototype Reactor DEMO: The power-generation demonstration reactor that comes after ITER. It explains what role the prototype reactor bridging experimental and commercial reactors plays, and what plans Japan and Europe are advancing.
• Private Fusion Ventures: This introduces the efforts of private companies trying to accelerate the public path. It covers diverse approaches and the flow of funding, including high-temperature superconductor magnets and confinement schemes other than the tokamak.

Pages to Read as Prerequisites

To understand future prospects more deeply, it helps to look through the following sections first.

• Fundamentals of Fusion: You can learn the most basic ideas, such as fusion reactions and how energy is extracted.
• Confinement Schemes: Knowing confinement schemes such as the tokamak makes the difference between the public and private paths much clearer.