Fusion is Environmentally-Friendly Nuclear Power — Saying It Could Even Make It Happen
Chris Billingham
In this think piece, fusion engineer Chris Billingham discusses the importance of shared fusion narratives and the influence of political ideology. He argues for a new narrative tackling lived experiences of electricity prices and the fragility of supply chains that moves beyond a self-destructing promise of clean and inexhaustible energy.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Open Fusion Collective.
Engraved on wall of the recently re-named Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace is a line attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt:
‘It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.’
The same sentiment applies to fusion.
Like peace, fusion is a challenging and tantalizing goal with the potential for social change and economic disruption. Like peace, it requires sustained dedication as an overarching goal by governments, and broad acceptance by their respective polities as a positive element in a shared narrative.
Shared Narrative and Public Understanding
This does not require the public to understand plasma confinement times or tritium breeding ratios. The public does need to understand fusion as a solution to social and economic problems. Assuming government policies are rooted in, and accountable to, public opinion, then the manner in which a government couches its words vis-à-vis a new technology can inspire support — or provoke revulsion. Yet, even as fusion researchers publicize progressively significant milestones, it would be naïve to presume that proffering technical details will inspire endorsement.
Due to antipathy toward fission and its perennial role as a thematic punchline in techno-utopian fantasy, fusion does not carry broad understanding among the public. This lack of acceptance is partially a consequence of fusion’s technical nature. To describe advances in fusion in terms of tokamaks or hohlraums is to proffer information — and information is not truth. This becomes more difficult considering political polarization, combined with algorithmic media, has turned truth and facts into subjective concepts open to partisan and self-interested definition.
To take innovation seriously as a force for change is to infuse it with value and politics. This is bidirectional. Our present politics affect the technologies we develop and the technologies we develop shape the politics we create. Politics requires a story; the world survives on the stories it tells itself. Right now, our narratives have lost power and a political vacuum is opening. Leaders and laymen are looking for coherence and purpose. This is the moment when fusion can emerge as a positive role in a new political story.
This is harder than it sounds.
As suggested by the media critic Neil Postman, technology is not neutral regarding social change; without just policies and institutions, new technologies could easily accelerate inequality and despair. To have no program for harnessing a technology in service of constructive change is myopic. As governments commit to research and investment, a major question arises: how can the language invoked by public institutions promulgate a social license for fusion?
The Enabling Environment: Growth, State Capacity, and a Future Worth Building
Let’s accept, without moral panic, that we live in a capitalist society where economic growth, however imperfectly measured, still functions as a proxy for material progress. Said growth requires an enabling environment, the lion’s share of which is created, one way or another, by deliberate government action.
Whether our post-neoliberal era calls such action dirigisme, supply-side progressivism, or the abundance agenda, the rough mechanism is familiar: productive development policies drive growth by investing in skills and infrastructure, ensuring access to key raw materials, and building a regulatory structure that rewards utility and curiosity rather than mere rent-seeking. The state advances scientific research; markets scale what works; innovations supplant established industries.
Genuine innovation means conceiving of new ideas and encoding them into novel industrial processes. This zeitgeist of creativity insists that those who believe in a fairer, more sustainable world have a stake in nurturing the technologies that would make that world possible.
What is fusion’s role in this future? In a world where most people accept the scientific consensus on climate change, the only way for humanity to limit the effects of global warming while curtailing poverty is to invent clean energy that is plentiful and cheap — and spend enough to deploy it. In that light, fusion is a means to forestall economic and societal collapse.
Trust, Climate, and the Politics of Imagination
Social license for fusion research requires willingness to defer to expert knowledge and a belief in effective institutions. Unfortunately, in many countries which drive fusion research, public discourse is attached to a narrative of cultural and economic decline centered around ideological disagreement. Such dissatisfaction both drives support for populist political movements across the industrialized world and reflects shortcomings of previous policies. We can look back at the many longer-term causes of these trends — deindustrialization, immigration, diversification, technological change, inability of establishment parties to implement durable broad-based solutions — and surmise that industrial policies implemented without deep public consent risk foundering. To the extent that support for reactionary populism becomes, for many, a psychological coping mechanism to systemic failure, it is clear that successful industrial policies must foster social cohesion.
Fusion is a means to a firm decarbonized energy industry; its implementation will require large-scale construction of new infrastructure. Governments that successfully facilitate this infrastructure will both drive economic momentum and create a sense of optimism for the future. They must earn public trust by effectively managing their affairs to direct and encourage technological growth.
Alas, a low-trust era is the present operating environment. Fusion is a long-horizon partnership among universities, national laboratories and private firms that demands continuity and credibility — precisely what collapses when people believe government cannot meaningfully improve their lives. At the same time, the public is not blind to compounding crises. People acknowledge that climate change and resource disparity are genuine problems that will get worse unless addressed; a late-2025 Yale/George Mason poll found 65% of registered U.S. voters believe global warming is increasing the cost of living. Yet technocratic preoccupation with process and consensus — even in the face of energy and health crises — has fostered a sense of public-sector incompetence that has eroded trust in the US government from nearly 80% in the 1980s to only 22% in 2025.
Consider the outcome of the 2024 United States presidential election; in voting out a center-left establishment for a right-wing populist administration, American voters signaled a broader dissatisfaction with technocratic liberalism and an appetite for a state that claims it can act decisively.
Under this administration’s campaign of energy dominance pursuant to artificial intelligence via the Genesis Mission, the US Department of Energy’s new Office of Fusion may continue to fund research pending Congressional appropriation. Is this a vindication of the French cliché: the left thinks while the right governs? Well… not so fast.
Given the new administration’s questioning of environmental stewardship and demonstrable opposition to decarbonization, fusion plays an unclear role in its populist narrative. If policies don’t acknowledge fusion as a firm of source of nuclear energy without carbon emissions, long-term radioactive waste, or the potential for weaponization, what justifies billions of dollars in research funding as yet unproven technology?
Moving beyond rhetorical self-sabotage
A narrative that extolls the utility of fusion cannot be evasive as to its physical basis as both a form of nuclear energy and a solution to the negative externalities of fossil fuels. If the promise of fusion is bound up with its environmental benefits — cheap, abundant, carbon-free energy — then omitting climate language is not neutral. It is rhetorical self-sabotage. A serious fusion story has to touch lived experience: the price of electricity, the fragility of supply chains, the affordability of modern life, and the sense that a better future is not merely a slogan.
We treat the current U.S. moment as a case study: how the rhetoric around fusion shifts when a climate-forward, process-heavy center-left gives way to a populist right that promises action, dominance, and disruption — and what that social license and long-term public investment fusion will require.
Chris Billingham is Research Scientist Engineer (RSE) in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He holds an MSc in Fusion Energy from The University of York, an MS in Computer Science from Tufts University, and is presently pursuing an MS in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning for Engineering through the University of Washington. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, his research focuses on coaxial helicity injection in spherical tokamaks.
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