While the fusion industry has historically been “insular”, several companies are recruiting from other industries for expertise
On several occasions, The Fusion Report has run stories about the human side of the challenges of building a successful commercial fusion energy industry. The travails of recruiting and hiring physicists, engineers, and even trades such as machinists, plumbers, and electricians to the commercial fusion industry are well-known. Traditionally, the approach has been to hire from the outside, and then integrate (assimilate?) the new workers into the ‘fusion mindset’. But when does it make sense to do the reverse – to hire those from the outside and utilize their mindset and skills to drive new solutions? That question will be the subject of today’s article.
Why Did Inertia Hire Sam Crisafulli From ASML? Skills and Mindset
An example of a successful hiring mindset is Inertia’s recent hiring of Sam Crisafulli as their Chief Systems Engineer. While Sam’s resume is certainly impressive (BSEE, PhD in Systems Engineering, 29 years of senior/executive experience including 12 years with ASML’s Plasma Generation and Energy Control Group), he didn’t have experience in a national laboratory such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is where a number of Inertia’s founders worked. So why did Inertia hire Sam?
Inertia hired Sam as their Chief Systems Engineer because bringing a fusion power plant from demonstrated science to a deployable product requires tightly integrating complex physics, hardware, controls, manufacturing, and plant-level engineering. At ASML, Sam led a critical subsystem supporting the company’s extreme-ultraviolet lithography technology—an environment that demands exceptional systems engineering, reliability, precision, and coordination across highly interdependent technical disciplines. At Inertia, his role is to build the engineering architecture that connects the company’s science and technology into a commercial fusion power plant, helping turn individual technical advances into a machine that can be built, operated, maintained, and ultimately scaled.
What Skills Cross Over Into Fusion Companies Exceptionally Well?
Many of the capabilities needed for a successful commercial fusion energy company are already mature in adjacent industries. The limiting challenge for building a successful fusion energy company is not only achieving fusion conditions; it is combining a fusion core with dependable power conversion, fuel handling, maintenance, controls, manufacturing, and grid operation into a plant that can be built repeatedly and operated economically. That makes experience from semiconductor equipment, aerospace, fission and process industries, power systems, and high-volume advanced manufacturing highly transferable. Fusion organizations increasingly need systems engineers who can manage interfaces and requirements across mechanical, electrical, software, thermal, vacuum, cryogenic, and safety systems—not just plasma physicists. Some of those critical skills include the following:
The most valuable cross-industry capability is systems engineering: defining what each subsystem must do, managing interfaces, testing them against requirements, and designing the whole plant for reliability and maintainability. For example, a blanket, heat-extraction loop, tritium-processing system, magnets, vacuum vessel, pulsed-power equipment, diagnostics, controls, and turbine island may each work independently; systems engineering determines whether they can operate together safely and deliver net electricity at high availability. Fusion’s plant-engineering challenge explicitly extends “beyond the fusion engine” to integrating the complete facility. And those are exactly the skills that Sam Crisafulli brings to Inertia (as an example of skills crossover).
What Does That Mean For Fusion Energy Hiring Strategies?
As commercial fusion companies move from scientific and engineering demonstrations towards commercial deployment, their workforces should look less like physics-only research programs, and more like the complex industrial enterprises they aspire to be. That means growing demand for electrical, mechanical, materials, manufacturing, and controls engineers, as well as machinists, welders, electricians, supply-chain professionals, technicians, operators, and project managers. Even “soft” skills such as product management, product marketing, government relations, and regulatory affairs have important places in a company that plans to design and build commercial fusion energy power plants. And while partnering with engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) companies such as Bechtel, Fluor, Kiewit, and Black and Veatch (among others) is a smart strategy to reduce the massive skillsets (and capital) required to build power plants, a successful commercial fusion energy company still should end up looking a lot more like an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) such as GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, or Mitsubishi Power, and a lot less like a Department of Energy (DoE) national laboratory. In many ways that leap is at least as hard as the leap from conquering fusion in a laboratory to making fusion repeatable, because it means that the DNA of the company must change.
