(Science|Business) Europe’s fusion industry calls for help to commercialise

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Europe should throw its weight behind nuclear fusion power and push now to make it a commercial reality, according to companies active in the sector and their backers in the European Parliament. 

In a joint call published on January 27, MEPs and representatives of the fusion industry urged the EU to make fusion a political priority. The European Commission is already drafting a fusion strategy, but this should be followed by an action plan, they say, that defines enabling conditions and establishes a predictable, innovation-friendly regulatory framework. They also want to see a credible risk sharing and funding tools set up, to attract more private investment to the sector.

“Considering that we are still five to 10 years away from making a commercial power plant, the race to industrialisation starts now,” said Sam Guillaumé, chief executive of French start-up Renaissance Fusion, at a press conference on January 26. 

“Fusion is no longer only a science project. It is becoming an industrial opportunity for Europe,” said Pascal Arimont, an MEP with the European People’s Party, who hosted a hearing on fusion in the Parliament on January 27. “Fusion could help us reach three goals at the same time: first, clean energy; second, secure supply; and third, a strong European industry,” he added. “And at a moment when Europe is talking a lot about competitiveness, about staying strong in tech, fusion deserves a place on that list.”

The Commission is broadly on the same page. Speaking about the forthcoming fusion strategy, research Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva said that the ambition was to come up with implementable actions and not general promises. 

“The goal is already set in the proposed ‘moonshot’ on fusion for the next Horizon Europe programme: for Europe to be the first to take fusion from research to deployment and to put fusion on the grid,” she told the hearing. “Fusion is our ticket to energy independence.”

She recalled that €240 million had already been set aside for fusion research over the next two years under the Euratom work programme, and €40 million set aside by the European Innovation Council to scale up fusion start-ups. The €75-million pilot phase of a public-private partnership dedicated to fusion will run until 2027. Meanwhile, the European Innovation Act is expected to remove regulatory barriers.

According to Elena Righi Steele, head of unit for Euratom research, what remains to be discussed is the detail of how the commercial transition is to be achieved. “How [do] we go from a purely scientific endeavour to a technology-driven programme that will solve the last technology gaps, [solutions] that are needed to deliver a blueprint for a pilot plant, the last step before a first-of-a-kind power plant?” At the same time, she added, it would be necessary to building on the supply chain.

Closer than you think

While the fusion community has been promising to revolutionise energy for decades, it insists that this time practical power generation is within reach.

For example, in the 1980s researchers had to put 10,000 times more energy into their fusion machines than they got out of them. According to Peter Roos, chief executive of Swedish fusion company Novatron, recent calculations put that energy gap at 30 times more. “So, we need to become approximately 30 times better than we are today,” he said. “You understand that we are not far away.”

For Saskia Horsch, director of corporate affairs at German company Marvel Fusion, now is the moment to think about the infrastructure for fusion energy. “All our peers are now moving towards different stages of infrastructure projects, tech demonstrators, and maybe in between scaling facilities,” she said at the press briefing. “There will always be continuing research and development and questions to be solved, but we have come a long way and we’re building on the breakthroughs that we’ve seen.”

“The challenges we see ahead of us, they don’t look like sci-fi at all,” Guillaumé added. “They look like deep tech.”

Investors assemble

These arguments have convinced some investors, with fusion companies attracting €13 billion in finance as of end-2025. Of this amount, €6.9 billion went to 42 fusion companies in the US, €4.4 billion flowed to China’s eight companies. This left Europe’s eight companies with €712 million, or less than 5% of total funding. 

The largest sums were invested in Marvel Fusion and Proxima Fusion, both based in Germany. The country has pledged to invest over €2 billion by 2029 to support fusion and plans to establish specialised hubs for magnetic and laser fusion research.

“We need to be able to unlock the same multi-billion-euro investments in the private sector that are unlocked in the US and in China,” Lucio Milanese, co-founder and chief operating officer of Proxima Fusion, told the Parliament. He suggested that around €10 billion would be needed over the next EU budgetary cycle, up to 70% of which would come from private players. 

But there is “a strong dependency” between public and private financing, Guillaumé said. “We are all looking to have more public money, so that we can also attract private financing.”

According to Horsch, one useful model might be the fusion development programme set up by the US in 2022, which provides funding once companies have hit pre-agreed technological milestones. “It will attract private capital, because investors will see that states are committed and will not stop funding until we actually reach the end goal,” she said. At the same time, it is important that financing risks are manageable, shared and limited.

“When we get into more infrastructure-heavy investments, then we can work with loans that are backed by state guarantees,” she added. While the European Investment Bank could chip in, she said that most financial instruments were not yet sufficiently tailored to fusion company needs. “They’re a little bit too difficult to reach, application requirements are too high, and they don’t allow early-stage projects like ours to apply.”

Regulatory reorganisation

One of the industry’s big asks is for nuclear fusion to be regulated separately from conventional nuclear power, with its long, costly licensing procedures. European fusion start-ups are “not looking for a free pass,” Guillaumé said, but a suitable solution.

Eszter Kantor, head of international policy at Proxima Fusion, would like to see fusion placed in a subcategory of its own under the Net Zero Industry Act, rather than be bracketed with other nuclear technologies. The same goes for the EU taxonomy, a classification system that signals alignment with the bloc’s net-zero goals, where fusion could benefit from a standalone classification. “Fusion is not competing with renewables,” she said.

Questions also remain about secure supply chains. Most fusion projects require enriched lithium, which is primarily supplied by China and Russia, because most other countries have dropped enrichment efforts due to the toxicity of the mercury-based process involved. According to Guillaumé, most start-ups are now seeking to breed lithium to generate their own fuel.

This problem is also an opportunity. If Renaissance Fusion can make its own high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, for example, it can also sell them to others in the fusion industry. “And not only the fusion industry, by the way, because you can have applications of HTS [magnets] in medical imaging, energy transportation, etc,” Guillaumé said.