For Fusion Energy, the Time is Now. The Place is California

More than 200 leaders from government, industry, national labs and academia gathered at the University of California San Diego on Nov. 13, 2025 for the first statewide convening to accelerate California’s fusion energy economy.

The collective messages were clear:

• Now is the time to double down and solve the remaining challenges holding back abundant fusion energy — and California is extremely well positioned to do this.
Working together, California can make the promise of abundant, stable, clean energy from fusion a commercial reality for the nation and the world.

These messages permeated the event, which engaged individuals from the highest levels of the state and federal government, leadership from across California’s robust higher education ecosystem, the directors of four national laboratories in the region, fusion startup founders, and major fusion industry players like General Atomics.

“We want to make fusion part of everyday life, integrating it into our state’s energy planning, workforce development and of course our economic strategy,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom in a video recorded for the convening. “Reliable, zero carbon energy that stabilizes our grid, creates world class jobs, and offers the opportunity to build the next great energy industry right here in our home state. This is how we view California — on the cutting edge.”

The event, called Accelerating California’s Fusion Energy Economy, marked California’s first statewide convening dedicated to advancing research, development, demonstration, and deployment of fusion energy. It was hosted by UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and General Atomics, with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, the California Energy Commission, and the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development.

“There’s a reason California is the fourth largest economy in the world. We have decades of demonstrated experience in showing partnerships between our strong universities — both public and private — and our community colleges to work with industry and create new industries such as Silicon Valley in the semiconductor area, biotech, and we will be the fusion leader of the world,” said Theresa Maldonado, Vice President for Research and Innovation for the University of California system, in her remarks at the event.

“It was a great honor to hold California’s first statewide fusion energy summit at the University of California San Diego,” said Javer E. Garay, the inaugural director of the UC San Diego Fusion Engineering Institute. “With the public and private sectors pulling in the same direction all across the State, we have huge opportunities to solve the remaining roadblocks and scale up the production of fusion energy here in California and across the country.”

Why Fusion

A fusion energy power plant would harness the same reaction that powers the sun and stars to provide a virtually limitless source of zero-carbon, affordable, and inherently safe baseload energy. There are two main methods to achieve fusion energy: one uses lasers (inertial confinement), and one uses magnets (magnetic confinement) to release vast amounts of energy from fuel in the form of deuterium and tritium isotopes.

In 2022, researchers at the inertial confinement National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California were the first to reach a milestone called ignition, when a fusion target produced more fusion energy than the lasers delivered to it. Since 2022, ignition has been achieved nine more times, with increasing levels of power generated. At the same time, significant strides have also been made using magnetic-confinement fusion, including maintaining a plasma for a record-breaking 22 minutes.

The private sector has taken note of the rapidly advancing science. More than $10B of private VC investment has gone into creating a network of startup companies, with more than $2B of that going to fusion startup companies in California. The federal government also sees the promise of fusion, and the Department of Energy has allocated $800 million of funding for fusion energy research and development in 2026.

The science has proven that fusion is possible, but much engineering, scaling and supply chain work is still needed to solve the final challenges required to develop commercially viable fusion energy.

“Here in DC at the Department of Energy, we’re thrilled to see the state of California step up in this way,” said Jean Paul Allain, Associate Director of the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in his remarks at the event, delivered remotely.

Why California

In many ways, California already leads the United States in fusion research and development. The state is home to two of the world’s most advanced fusion facilities: The DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, operated by General Atomics for the U.S. Department of Energy, currently the nation’s only operational tokamak user facility; and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which became the first in the world to achieve and repeat fusion ignition.

“Scientists have been working for decades to realize the dream of fusion energy. And California has played an important role — California over the years has emerged as the epicenter of fusion R&D, again because of all of the great work that’s been going on in our universities, our national labs and our national test facilities,” said Anantha Krishnan, senior vice president of the General Atomics Energy Group. “But the important thing to realize today is that fusion is no longer just a scientific endeavor. Today we have many private startup companies that are racing to demonstrate viable fusion energy within the next 10 years,” said Anantha Krishnan, senior vice president of the General Atomics Energy Group.

To facilitate this shift from lab to commercialization, California has also garnered growing support from the state legislature. In the last year alone, California advanced three bills that will support and promote fusion energy in the state:

• SB80: with an initial $5 million, creates and funds the Fusion Research and Development Innovation Hub Program, managed by the California Energy Commission.
• SCR25: sets an ambitious goal for siting a pilot fusion power plant in California.
• SB96: expands the California Energy Advanced Transportation Financing Authority sales tax exemptions to include fusion energy companies, and extends the program through 2028.

In addition to this existing world class infrastructure and a supportive regulatory climate, California offers an unparalleled higher education system, which provides unique opportunities for industry-university fusion R&D partnerships as well as a robust fusion workforce at all levels, from plasma physicists to electrical, mechanical, computer and systems engineers, to a wide range of mission-critical technician roles.

The University of California system is routinely ranked the best public university in the nation, and many of its 10 campuses have their own strong roots in fusion energy. UC San Diego, for example, is a leader in both inertial confinement and magnetic confinement fusion research and technology development; in the development and testing of fusion materials; and in a wide range of areas in public policy and the social sciences that are critical for building public understanding and support for fusion energy at scale. UC San Diego is also home to the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS). The Supercomputer Center plays a key role in the Fusion Data Science and Digital Engineering Center stood up jointly by General Atomics and UC San Diego. In 2024, UC San Diego took another bold step and launched a Fusion Engineering Institute, focused specifically on solving the engineering challenges that must be addressed for commercially attractive fusion.

“California is where the future of fusion energy will be shaped,” said Tammy Ma, director of Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an alumna of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. “As the home of fusion ignition, LLNL is pushing the forefront in novel science and technology, as well as forging private-public private partnerships to move this ecosystem forward.”

In addition, California is home to 16 core fusion companies — more than one-third of all U.S.-based fusion companies — and has captured more than $2.2 billion in cumulative private and public funding. The strong venture capital environment in the state gives California yet another competitive edge to cement itself as the nation’s leading fusion hub.

But many technical, regulatory, supply-chain, and public-perception challenges remain. The message at this inaugural convening was clear: now is the time for everyone in California’s fusion innovation ecosystem to find ever more effective ways to work together to solve the remaining challenges holding back cost-effective fusion energy at scale.

“Fusion is having its Silicon Valley moment. What happens in the next three to five years will decide whether California owns the industry or watches it leave," said Mike Campbell, mechanical engineering professor of practice, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Definitions:

• Fusion: Fusion reactions power the Sun and other stars. In fusion, two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. The process releases energy because the total mass of the resulting single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei. The leftover mass becomes energy. Researchers working on fusion energy applications are especially interested in deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion. In a potential future fusion power plant, neutrons from DT reactions would generate power for our use.
• Tokamak: A tokamak is a machine that confines a plasma using magnetic fields in a donut shape. In a tokamak, magnetic field coils confine plasma particles to allow the plasma to achieve the conditions necessary for fusion.
• Deuterium and tritium: Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Deuterium and tritium are promising fuels for producing energy in future power plants based on fusion energy. While all isotopes of hydrogen have one proton, deuterium also has one neutron and tritium has two, so their ion masses are heavier than protium, the isotope of hydrogen with no neutrons.
• Plasma: Plasma is one of the four states of matter, along with gases, liquids, and solids. Most people don’t think about plasma in their daily lives the way they think about other states of matter, but it makes up 99% of the visible matter in the universe. Much of this is astrophysical plasma—the plasma that exists in outer space (for example, in nebula) and that is contained within stars including the Sun.