When I started graduate school in plasma physics, the landscape of fusion research was almost entirely public. The experiments were at national laboratories and universities; the funding came from DOE and its international equivalents; and the timeline for commercial fusion was measured in decades — long enough that the question of who would eventually build a power plant felt comfortably abstract.

That landscape has changed dramatically. The private fusion sector has now raised over $6 billion in investment, and companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, Helion, and others are working toward demonstration devices on five- to ten-year timescales. This is unambiguously good news for the field. But it also raises a question that I think academic researchers need to answer clearly: what is our role in this new ecosystem, and what do we offer that industry cannot?

My own research sits at the interface of public and private fusion programs more explicitly than most. I currently serve as project lead or principal collaborator at five private fusion companies — CFS, Tokamak Energy, Next Step Fusion, Maritime Fusion, and Kyoto Fusioneering — while simultaneously holding DOE grants for basic plasma physics research at DIII-D. This position has given me a clear view of why the boundary between academic and industrial fusion research matters, and why maintaining it productively requires effort from both sides.

What industry needs from academic researchers is not primarily publications. It is independent physics judgment — the ability to say “your assumption about the pedestal pressure gradient is probably wrong, and here is why” without a commercial stake in the answer. Industry also needs a steady supply of trained scientists. Private fusion companies are growing fast, and they are hiring graduates who can move immediately into research leadership roles. The students and postdocs coming out of academic groups are the pipeline.

A cross-section of the ARC tokamak design, developed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Academic plasma physics groups contribute fundamental physics validation and independent analysis to designs like this.

What academic groups gain from close industry collaboration is equally important: we gain research questions that are anchored in real engineering constraints. There is a long tradition in fusion research of studying plasma phenomena in parameter regimes that are scientifically interesting but not necessarily relevant to any device that will ever be built. Industry partners force us to ask whether the physics we care about actually matters for the machines we are trying to build, and to answer that question quantitatively. Some of the most productive work in my group has come from an industry partner asking a specific question that we could answer because of our basic research — but that we would never have asked ourselves.

Perhaps the most important thing academic groups can do in this era is publish. Industry research is often proprietary; academic research is open. A computational method developed in my group for optimizing NT configurations is available to every researcher in the world the moment the paper appears. The open literature is the commons of the fusion enterprise, and maintaining it is an academic responsibility that cannot be outsourced to companies whose first obligation is to their investors.

The relationship between academic and private fusion programs is still finding its shape. I believe strongly that the outcome will be better if academic researchers engage with it deliberately rather than passively — working closely with industry partners while protecting the things that make academic science valuable: independence, openness, and the freedom to be wrong in public.

Selected publications on this subject:

First Access to ELM-free Negative Triangularity at Low Aspect Ratio
Nelson, A. O., Vincent, C., Anand, H., Lovell, J., Parisi, J. F., Wilson, H. S., Imada, K., Wehner, W. P., Kochan, M., Blackmore, G., McArdle, G., Guizzo, S., Rondini, L., Freiberger, S. & Paz-Soldan, C., Nuclear Fusion 64, 124004 (2024).

Implications of vertical stability control on the SPARC tokamak
Nelson, A. O., Garnier, D. T., Battaglia, D. J., Paz-Soldan, C., Stewart, I., Reinke, M., Creely, A. J. & Wai, J., Nuclear Fusion 64, 086040 (2024).

Assessment of vertical stability for negative triangularity pilot plants
Guizzo, S., Nelson, A. O., Hansen, C., Logak, F. & Paz-Soldan, C., Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion 66, 065018 (2024).