Fusion energy has moved from research and development to full commercialization plans, with grid connection and energy production timelines set. Promising to change the energy industry, fusion technologies and the wider supply chain are advancing.

In this report, I interview Thomas Sunn Pedersen, Ph.D ., and CTO of Type One Energy , the first fusion company in the United States to receive a first-of-its-kind fusion commercialization government-issued license.

From Government License to Advanced Stellarators and Digital Twins: How Fusion Is Advancing

On August 31, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee joined the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to announce the issuing of the first-ever fusion-specific byproduct material license to Type One Energy as the company prepares the commercialization of a fusion power plant at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) former Bull Run fossil plant site in Clinton, Tennessee.

Q: How important is this license?

Dr. Pedersen : The importance of this milestone cannot be overstated. For the first time, a fusion power plant-specific licensing process has been developed and then used to grant a license to operate a fusion machine, consistent with a national regulatory framework for fusion energy.

Other states have issued permits to fusion startups based on legacy frameworks designed for other medical and industrial applications, but only Tennessee has developed an entirely new framework for fusion machines. Tennessee’s licensing process is now the international benchmark for how to ensure fusion power plant ‘safety by design’ in a manner that can unlock the compelling economics of this transformational power generation technology.

Q: At what stage is Type One’s Tennessee fusion plant, what advances have been made, and what is next?

Dr. Pedersen : Type One Energy is working with the Tennessee Valley Authority to begin construction on Project Infinity this year. We aim to have our prototype stellarator and engineering testbed, Infinity One, up and running by 2029.

We are also currently designing the Infinity Two stellarator, a 400 MWe fusion power plant. The power plant design has gone through two successful design reviews, most recently one that counts as an official milestone in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fusion Milestone Program, and the complete physics basis for the power plant was developed and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Plasma Physics , with the editors noting that it set the gold standard.

Q: Can you walk readers through Type One’s advanced stellarator and what you learned or are still learning thanks to the digital twin simulations done at Knoxville, Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with the supercomputer Frontier?

Dr. Pedersen : Our Infinity Two stellarator will produce 400 MW of net electricity, 24/7, to be sold to consumers. It will be confining plasma whose central temperature will be about 100 million degrees Celcisus in a true steady state, heated by its own self-generated fusion power. It will be fueled by deuterium and tritium in the form of frozen pellets that are injected into the plasma repeatedly at high speed with an exhaust system that continually removes the helium that is produced in the fusion process in its core.

Its exact shape and optimization, which, to our knowledge, will make it the most advanced stellarator ever designed, were calculated using state-of-the-art fusion simulation codes running on some of the world’s most powerful computers, most importantly ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer.

These high-fidelity calculations have guided our designs toward the configuration we now have, which the codes predict will have outstanding performance. It was picked from more than 300,000 candidate stellarator configurations which have gone through this detailed vetting and optimization.

Q: The Queued Up: 2026 Edition of Berkeley Lab’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that new energy projects that amount to roughly 2,061 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in the U.S. are actively seeking interconnection. On average, energy projects built in 2025 took 61 months to go from interconnection requests to commercial operations.

Can you briefly describe how this affects fusion projects, and what would you tell energy executives on how to deal with queues?

Dr. Pedersen : Grid interconnection is an issue with every energy technology, but Type One Energy is building the Infinity Two fusion power plant on the site of a retired coal power plant, which means all the necessary interconnection infrastructure is already in place. For subsequent power plants, they can either be placed similarly at retiring power plants, or the grid interconnection can be managed with some forward planning.

The Fusion Supply Chain Business Opportunities Opening Up

In mid-2026, the Fusion Industry Supply Chain 2026 report from the Fusion Industry Association found that fusion’s supply chain spending rose 25% to $538 million in 2025. While the report highlights challenges ranging from specialist materials for extreme conditions to heat management and fuel systems, it also noted that 75% of fusion suppliers made investments to expand fusion capacity in the last year.

Q: Can you talk about the fusion supply chain and the opportunities that are emerging, whether it be in R&D, development, construction, or operations?

Dr. Pedersen : Scaling up a fleet of fusion machines will require a robust supply chain and industrial-scale manufacturing of components and new materials. Today, many fusion-relevant components are still low-maturity, bespoke, or not yet available at industrial scale.

Type One Energy designs its power plants to use standardized components wherever possible and uses pilot manufacturing, long-lead procurement, and supplier qualification projects to manage supply-chain risk.

There are still supply chains that must be built out for fusion-bespoke technologies. While the recent influx of funding and activities in private fusion companies is already starting to give supply chain companies incentives to scale up, it is important that this growth in demand continues and that supply follows.

Companies like Type One Energy are engaging with strategic suppliers early.

Q: Is there demand and business opportunities for any specific vendor in the fusion supply chain? If so, what sector(s), tech, or service(s)?

Dr. Pedersen : The supply chain for high-temperature superconducting materials, magnets, and plasma-facing materials, fusion-grade structural steels, microwave heating systems, and diagnostics are all areas where growth is needed, and there are significant business opportunities for those who can supply these components. Clear supply chain growth is visible now in many of these areas – but more will be needed.

The Obstacles to Fusion Energy Commercialization

Q: What are the obstacles to the commercialization of fusion, and how are industry leaders advancing to overcome these obstacles?

Dr. Pedersen : There are technical, financial, and supply chain challenges. Many fusion companies have chosen approaches that have existential risks or speculative solutions on the technical or scientific side, but – at least on paper – a path to lower cost.

The Type One Energy stellarator approach is one that strikes a balance between technical, financial, and supply-chain risk, finding the ‘goldilock’ zone for the first-of-a-kind power plant that has a clear and robust technical path, customer pull, and a viable supply chain. While each of the three has associated risks, they are all manageable.

The technical approach is conservative and has been vetted by external reviewers both from industry and academia in two separate design reviews, and the publication in the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics of the physics basis for the T1E power plants – one which was hailed as setting the gold standard by its editors.

Financial feasibility is evidenced in the close relationship with the Tennessee Valley Authority in the U.S. and Type One Energy’s participation in the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) in the United Kingdom.

Supply chain risk is managed as described in our previous answer.

Type One Energy designs its power plants to use standardized components wherever possible and uses pilot manufacturing, long-lead procurement, and supplier qualification projects to manage supply chain risk.

There are still supply chains that must be built for fusion-bespoke technologies. One example of a technical decision that lowers supply-chain risk for a fusion-bespoke technology – plasma heating – is the use of microwave heating systems, gyrotrons, needed to heat the plasma to self-sustained fusion burn. Choosing microwave frequencies that are available commercially now or in the next few years allows access to a supply chain which already is rapidly growing and maturing, and using the stellarator self-heated fusion burn for steady-state operation without the need for microwave heating except for a few minutes during power plant startup retires risk related to the durability or reliability of such gyrotrons.

Q: How will the second or third generation of nuclear fusion plants be different from first-generation nuclear fusion plants?

Dr. Pedersen : Fusion energy will be technically credible and affordable, financeable, and competitive compared to other clean power options. First-of-a-kind (FOAK) power plants inevitably cost more than Nth-of-a-kind (NOAK) plants. This is true for any new energy technology, including fusion.

One reason is that our FOAK fusion power plant will be designed with very conservative margins to ensure successful operation despite it potentially being the first-ever fusion power plant to produce large amounts of net electricity continuously for months and years. Operational experience over time will show where those conservative margins can be reduced – reducing NOAK project cost while maintaining or even enhancing fusion performance.

Given the currently nascent fusion supply chain, it is highly likely that significant cost savings will be found between FOAK and NOAK fusion power plants as the fusion industry and its ecosystem of suppliers grow.

For the first few power plants, aiming at a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) competitive with nuclear fission is feasible, and on a longer time scale, LCOE comparable to fossil fuels could be possible.

Unlike fossil power plants, fusion power plants will have negligible running fuel costs. For fusion, the cost is dominated by amortizing the investment of building and running the power plant and maintenance costs – all costs that will decrease as fusion technology keeps improving and the supply chain keeps maturing.