For fusion to be competitive beyond 2040, costs will likely need to be at or below ∼$80–100/MWh at 2020 price. This will be hard to achieve for early fusion
Energy Research Subscription Biomanufacturing Specialty Chemicals Blue Hydrogen Production and Markets Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) Markets Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Carbon Dioxide Utilization Decarbonization of Cement Flexible Photovoltaics Market Fusion Energy Market Gas Separation Membranes Green Hydrogen Production & Electrolyzer Market Green Steel Hydrogen Economy Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engines Materials for Green Hydrogen Production Materials for PEM Fuel Cells Next-Generation Feedstocks for Sustainable Chemicals Nuclear Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) Perovskite Photovoltaic Market Solid-State Batteries Stationary Fuel Cell Markets Sustainability for Data Centers Sustainable Biofuels & E-Fuels Market Thermal Energy Storage See all reports on the topic. ## Commercial fusion market overview, fusion fuels, materials for fusion, 20-year timelines for the fusion industry, funding and roadmaps by player, benchmarking fusion approaches: tokamaks, stellarators, inertial confinement fusion, and more. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the commercial fusion energy market, including detailed timelines for the fusion industry and a benchmarking scheme for the 7 leading fusion approaches.
# U.S. DOE releases Roadmap for fusion energy commercialization. On October 16, 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) released a Fusion Science & Technology Roadmap (the “Roadmap”) outlining a national fusion energy strategy. To do so, the Roadmap structures the national fusion strategy around a three-pronged approach called “Build-Innovate-Grow:” build key infrastructure to test materials and technology; innovate fusion science with industry-informed research; and grow the U.S. fusion ecosystem on a regional, national, and international level. The Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee’s (“FESAC”) Long-Range Plan (2020) and the National Academies’ Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid (2021) identified additional ways DOE and industry could collaborate to realize fusion commercialization. In addition to these ten key actions, DOE identifies a multitude of technical metrics and milestones that must be met to commercialize fusion energy by the mid-2030s. Additionally, fusion energy needs a stable, predictable, and right-sized regulatory framework to become commercially viable—something Hogan Lovells’ own Amy Roma has championed over the years.
Near-term projections suggest the first commercial fusion power plants could begin operation between 2030-2035. Commonwealth Fusion Systems and
16 , https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/13371/chapter/1 .")This approach is used, for example, in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Department of Energy (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.20While the NIF is intended primarily for research to improve stewardship of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile (see "DOE Weapons Programs Research Related to Fusion"), it ha s also demonstrat ed fusion ignition several times, beginning i n December 2022.21 Although each ignition lasted for less than one nanosecond,these demonstrations ha ve increased interest in inertial confinement designs for future power plants.22According to some experts, for lasers to be used in a commercial power plant, they would need to be more efficient and have higher repetition rates than current models. For example, the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) also supports some fusion energy projects,54 , Power Generation: Nuclear Fusion , 2025 , https://arpa-e.energy.gov/programs-and-initiatives/search-all-projects/complexion-engineered-nanocrystalline-tungsten-alloy-plasma-facing-materials-long-pulse-tokamak-operation .") along with other projects across the full range of energy technologies.
The United States' magnetic fusion energy program started within the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) around 1951, and was declassified in 1957.
• Solution-Oriented Workflow for Integrated Fusion Technology in Plasma-Facing Components • Advancing Maturity of Liquid Metal Plasma-facing Materials and First Wall Concepts • Integrated Materials Program to Accelerate Chamber Technologies • Rapid high-fidelity bulk irradiated materials data generation to accelerate solutions for commercial fusion energy systems • Advanced Profile Prediction for Fusion Pilot Plant Design • Target Injector Nexus for Development Research • Fuel Cycle FIRE • Mitigating risks from abrupt confinement loss • Fusion Energy Data Ecosystem and Repository. The following decades were characterized by a focused development of increasingly powerful laser systems across institutions, such as LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and the University of Rochester (UR), allowing detailed investigation of target physics and precise control of implosion dynamics for inertial confinement, while investments in large-scale tokamak facilities, such as the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), enabled the U.S. program to reach near break-even conditions culminating in the operation of DT plasmas enabled by lithium vapor wall conditioning technology 41 .Since the early 1990s, building on decades of fusion energy R&D, the U.S. developed some of the world’s most sophisticated multi-physics computational codes validated with world-leading diagnostic tools 42, 43 on world-class domestic facilities such as DIII-D (a joint U.S.-Japan collaboration), NIF 44 and many others across the world.
$100 per MWh is $0.10 per KWh, which is well within the cost per KWh of fossil fuel generated electricity so I don't know why this rate is supposed to be seen