LLNL Receives Energy Department Funding for Fusion Energy Research

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $134 million in funding for two programs designed to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation: The Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives and Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program. This adds to the initial funding for FIRE Collaboratives announced in January.

According to DOE, “these investments are part of DOE’s broader mission to unleash American energy, science, and innovation, ensuring the technologies that define the future of fusion power are developed here in the United States.”

“This funding represents a major step toward establishing commercial fusion energy as a singular competitive advantage for the nation,” said Tammy Ma, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology.

LLNL has a prominent role in these projects. As the home of fusion ignition, LLNL is uniquely positioned to help translate the physics breakthrough into a viable source of commercial fusion energy. LLNL first achieved fusion ignition in a 2022 National Ignition Facility experiment and has since repeated the achievement multiple times.

The FIRE collaboratives will receive $128 million, awarded to seven teams focused on creating a fusion energy science and technology innovation ecosystem by forming virtual, centrally managed teams. The selected teams aim to bridge the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences program’s basic science research and growing fusion industries. 

LLNL staff are involved with three of the FIRE collaboratives:

• Catherine Percher: Fusion Neutrons for Integrated Blanket Technology Development Through Advanced Testing and Design, led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This collaborative will address a crucial gap in the development of fusion pilot plants: the development and validation of integrated blanket technology in prototypical environments, particularly under the irradiation of 14 MeV D-T neutrons and with high-magnetic fields to demonstrate representative performance of key components and systems.

• Kelli Humbird and Derek Mariscal: Fusion Energy Data Ecosystem and Repository (FEDER), led by General Atomics. This collaborative will create a centralized, federated platform that integrates data from experiments, materials science, and modeling, supporting both magnetic and inertial fusion research. The project aims to standardize data formats and provide advanced tools for data discovery, analysis and visualization, enhancing collaboration, and accelerating progress toward practical fusion energy.

• Vlad Soukhanovskii: Advancing the maturity of liquid metal plasma-facing materials and first-wall concepts, led by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. This collaborative will solve key technical problems with liquid metal plasma-facing materials and wall concepts so that liquid metals can be considered for fusion pilot plant designs. Research will include four main challenges: testing protective materials, understanding material properties, studying how liquid metals behave in magnetic fields, and developing new metal alloys.

The INFUSE program will receive $6.1 million. With this funding, DOE selected 20 projects that accelerate private-sector fusion energy development by reducing barriers to collaboration between businesses and national laboratories or universities. LLNL’s Matt Selwood is leading the national laboratory effort collaborating with Pacific Fusion to investigate coded apertures for pulsed magnetic fusion neutron imaging.