The Department of Energy issued in October a 40-page Fusion Energy Science and Technology Roadmap. The vision of the program is quite extensive and obviously progress has been made in the US fusion program over the last few years in the private sector. A Department of Fusion Energy has recently been established in the Department of Energy as something of a coordination organ for the program as a whole. There has reportedly been around $9 billion invested by private companies and the level of government money going into the program is still not determined. Previously there were calls from some in the fusion community for the government to invest $10 billion in fusion in order to move the program forward, but there seems to be no consensus among lawmakers to make that kind of investment.
Some of the program builds on the so-called Fusion-AI combination which the Assistant Secretary of Energy, Dario Gil, claims could lead to a doubling of the effect of any investment, which remains to be seen. Gil testified to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Committee on December 10, claiming that the introduction of AI would increase productivity in research to such an extent that any investment would be double in its effect, a rather overstretch in the estimate of a technology that still remains something of a question mark in its capabilities.
