How Close Are We to Commercial Fusion? Maybe Closer Than You Think…

A perennial (or even more often) question that you hear in this field of endeavor is “how close are we to having commercial fusion energy?” Last week, The Fusion Report (TFR) ran a story entitled “Is Fusion Energy Development Stalling?” in which we discussed approaches to determine if fusion energy is really making progress towards commercialization (we said that we believe fusion energy is progressing towards commercialization). This included looking at attributes such as capital availability, technological risks/supply chain constraints, fulfillment chain creation, regulatory environments, and investors with patience.

In this article, let’s look at both the public-facing side of things (recent announcements, press releases, etc.), as well as looking at fusion progress from a theoretical standpoint. In particular, we will look at how various approaches to fusion such as magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), inertial confinement fusion (ICF), and hybrid approaches are doing in approaching and exceeding Q=1. Let’s start with that area.

How Are We Doing In the Race for Q>1?

The chart above shows the current state of the art of various approaches to achieving (or exceeding) the temperature, pressure, and time criteria that would lead to achieving a Q greater than 1 (this is from a paper published on 8 May 2025 by Sam Wurzel and S.C. Hsu at Fusion Energy Base (FEB); there is a nice over-time animation of this here). As can be seen above, NIF’s ICF experiments are as of today the only ones which have exceeded Q>1 (NIF reached Q=1.5 on December 5, 2022. There are some notable things about the chart above:

• The highest yield achieved at NIF is now 3.88 MJ of fusion output vs 2.05 MH of energy into the target. This occurred on a fusion shot on July 30, 2023.
• The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER; pictured below) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) SPARC machine (first picture in the article) are both expected to exceed Q=1, with SPARC in 2027 and ITER in 2039.
  
• There are a lot of reactors that are not listed on this chart, or where no recent data is available. Examples of this include the following:
  1. The latest fusion test for China’s EAST tokamak was on January 20, 2025. Yet, the latest data point on this chart for EAST is in 2018.
  2. There is no data from several privately-funded fusion companies included on this chart, such as Helion, TAE, and others, though there have been numerous press releases with claims of breakthroughs.

On this matter, TFR spoke with Sam Wurzel of Fusion Energy Base (FEB) to understand what is driving this phenomenon. FEB has two criteria for including the results of an experiment (or planned experiment) into their chart: a) the results have to be published in a peer-reviewed journal; and b) the results have to be from experiments across all three factors: pressure, temperature, and confinement time. As Sam put it, “a cup of water is very dense, and a hot cup of coffee has a great thermal confinement time”, but neither are particularly related to real progress in fusion.

While these limitations may seem “conservative” or “arbitrary”, they make considerable sense –after all, FEB is not a compendium of press releases. Note that there are several privately-owned fusion companies whose efforts are represented on the chart, so it is not simply an issue of “private companies versus public research activities.” On the flip-side, note that there are a number of “public” research accomplishments that have not published results in a peer-reviewed journal either. While the chart above may under-represent the progress being made towards commercial fusion, it constitutes an accurate picture of actual fusion-related accomplishments.

Public-Facing News on Fusion Energy Progress

Publicly, there has been a lot of news recently on the progress of fusion energy towards commercialization, including the following:

1. CNN ran an article last week on CFS’s progress on building their SPARC reactor in Devins, MA (sorry for the paywall!).
2. Scientists from the University of Texas Austin, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Type One Energy (a stellarator company) published results in Physical Review Letters on a method to speed up the design of magnetic confinement systems.
3. TAE Technologies announced an approach to magnetic confinement using field-reversed configuration (FRC). Such a reactor (TAE’s “Norm” machine is pictured here) con significantly reduce the size and cost of a practical fusion machine by up to 50%. Moreover, this approach can “burn” proton-boron fuel, resulting in aneutronic fusion.
4. Several new investments in fusion energy have been made in 2025, including a $425M Series F investment in Helion, a $54M investment in Marvel Fusion, and $107M award to six companies (including General Atomics) under the US Department of Energy (DoE) Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) program.
5. China’s state-sponsored media outlet Xinhua announced that the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST), China’s intermediate step between the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) and the “nearly-commercialized” Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), is expected to be commissioned in 2027 (only a year behind when CFS’s SPARC reactor will go online).
6. Helion maintains that the 50 megawatt (MW) prototype plant it is building for Microsoft will still be ready by 2028 (they have $1 billion to get there). If accurate, this would put commercial fusion power roughly three years away.

Conclusion: Fusion Energy Is On It’s Way Shortly; The Question is “How Short is Short”?

We have all seen a number of technologies that were “imminent”, but for whatever reason never achieved commercial success. Does anyone remember “bubble memory” (largely made obsolete by flash storage), the Reagan-era “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI) program for ballistic missile defense, the flying cars expected in the 1960s/1970s, or man-portable laser/directed energy rifles (like those in the 1984 movie The Terminator)? 

All were expected years (or decades) ago, and (in some cases) are just emerging today. Fusion energy, which is at least as hard as these technologies, continues to make progress. Whether we will see it in the next year or two lies in the answers to a number of difficult questions, but for certain commercial fusion energy in the next ten years seems highly likely, even if only at a handful of plants. Personally, I would be more likely to put my money on fusion energy commercialization winning the race than on the achievement (if it is one) of a “Blade Runner-esque” sky filled with flying cars 😊!