An article in The National Interest by Andrew Follett [https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-chinas-nuclear-obfuscation-could-end-world-bw-011026] moots a policy for the “free market system” of the United States to “win the race” with China in developing fusion energy. He makes the claim that in spite of China’ “recent successes” in fusion, U.S. nuclear fusion and fission start-ups are winning this race. This in spite of the fact that Bob Mumgaard, the head of Commonwealth Fusion, the company at the center of US fusion development, said the United States is simply “struggling to keep pace” with China. The article goes further than that in asserting that a “free market” system will win the race against the state-directed Chinese model. “All that’s holding America back is bureaucracy and a comparative lack of positive incentives,” Follett writes. “Progress on fusion and fission in the U.S. has come largely from start-ups, not the massive Department of Energy bureaucracy.”
He fails to note that that same Department of Energy failed in the attempt to develop fusion in the United States by the year 2000, as the result of the “free market” opposition in the Reagan Administration to the government spending the money to realize that goal, estimated in 1980, the date for the passage of fusion legislation, the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act, to be $10 billion a year for 20 years. That legislation was passed by both houses and was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, but the funding was never appropriated.
“For example,” Follett continues, “the government could issue a prize of $1 billion for 10 sustained minutes of burning plasma, enough to prove basic net energy production” or “$2 billion for an hour with evidence of heat extraction,” he says. “A prize system wouldn’t have to favor one particular method of solving a problem,” he claims, “which is a huge issue with existing contracting systems that result in the government picking winners and losers for political reasons, even if that’s not the best way to solve an engineering problem.” Follett says that this would “galvanize American innovation, attract talent and investment, and provide clear, measurable paths to fusion power transforming a decades-long bureaucracy hellscape of a research into a competitive race toward abundant energy…and taxpayers wouldn’t pay a cent until it was proven successful.”
