The role of government policy in advancing fusion, with TAE Policy & Global Affairs’ Matthew Lipka

Good Clean Energy is a podcast that tackles one of the most existential questions of our time: how to build a world with abundant, affordable, carbon-free electricity. Every episode, we’ll unpack all the things that TAE is working on to make fusion energy a reality.

In this episode, Matthew Lipka from TAE’s Policy & Global Affairs team explores how policy is shaping and accelerating the future of fusion energy in the United States. He shares his work educating policymakers on the trade-offs between different energy technologies—and why government leadership is essential to advancing next-generation solutions. Compared to fission, fusion is a cleaner, safer energy source and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has begun adapting its regulatory framework to reflect that lower risk. With rare bipartisan support, fusion is emerging not only as a climate solution, but as a pathway to energy security, economic growth and global leadership.

Jim McNiel: So what are you thinking about today? Are you thinking about the economy? The environment? Health care? Education? Talking about social policies? You know, So all these things are defined by policy in our nation. In fact, I think that policy and policymakers are kind of the unsung heroes of our political process. Without policy, we don’t have the laws. We don’t have the roads. We don’t have schools. We don’t have government. We don’t have national security. We don’t have any of the things that actually make this a great nation to live in. So, to learn more about how policy affects the fusion industry, I’m joined today by Matthew Lipka, who is the lead of policy in the United States for TAE Technologies. Matthew, welcome to Good Clean Energy.

Matthew Lipka: Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Jim.

Jim McNiel: I don’t know how many people get excited about policy, but I’m sure you’re going to explain to us why we should. So why don’t you jump right in and tell us what exactly does somebody who works for a private corporation do in regard to policy?

Matthew Lipka: Yeah, absolutely. It is exciting to me. The reason is that our government, our leaders are making decisions that will help us choose the future of our energy mix and fusion energy is an incredibly promising, exciting part of that. And so my job is to do basically three things: to get to know the right policymakers so that they have a grounding in who TAE Technologies is, to educate them about the reality of TAE’s and other fusion energy’s technology because there’s a lot of myths when it comes to fusion, and to advocate for the specific policies that will enable the fusion energy to grow and succeed in the United States.

Jim McNiel: Okay, so let’s start with education of policy and lawmakers. How many of the politicians or lawmakers you run into have a degree in nuclear physics?

Matthew Lipka: For the most part, they are coming to fusion new, but that’s true across every subject matter, even if you have a degree in nuclear physics, you’re going to still need to vote on the farm bill. So they’re used to getting up to speed quickly on new issues. And it’s my job and my colleagues’ jobs to explain it simply.

Jim McNiel: So a very large degree your job is to educate them on the areas that they may not have a lot of subject matter expertise so to speak.

Matthew Lipka: Exactly. Me, their staffs, and there’s an industry association that helps with this. And the Department of Energy in the U.S. government has a lot of expertise in-house that they can draw on.

Jim McNiel: Do they often throw fusion into the nuclear fission bucket? And if so, is that a problem?

Matthew Lipka: It is a common conflation. There are pros and cons. They are very different technologies and they’re very different in terms of their impacts especially. The things people are most concerned about with fission, like long-live waste, risk of a meltdown, and radiation exposure to workers and the public are not significant risks for fusion energy.

And so the promise of having something that has clean, firm, zero emission power but doesn’t have those downsides is extremely exciting once they understand it. The upside is that people are beginning to recognize that we need to have more sources of clean, firm power if we’re going to meet our goals for air pollution, for climate change.

Jim McNiel: So your job is to educate people about the differences between fusion and fission and other energy sources. Which aspect of fusion is the aha, raised eyebrow moment when you’re talking to lawmakers?

Matthew Lipka: I think that both parties are excited about it. But for maybe a little bit different reasons. The fundamental promise of fusion is exciting to all American policymakers because it promises to have abundant energy affordably. Energy is the source of so much conflict in the world. We think about wars related to oil. We think about competition for water. And if we could have abundant energy without the downsides of pollution, that is the dream. And so I think that fundamental promise appeals to every American. 

Democrats are especially excited about the climate benefits and Republicans are passionate about the firm power, the energy security and independence from other countries. But nonetheless there’s a united belief in the promise of having that abundant clean energy that also will be a boon to our economy because if we lead on fusion energy, it’ll lead to a lot more growth and exports.

Jim McNiel: Yeah. I would imagine that both parties have a keen interest in the long- term economic benefits that fusion power can bring to the country. 

Matthew Lipka: Absolutely. That is a key issue.You know, we’ve seen in other technologies where the United States has developed the core technology — invented solar panels, for example, or electric vehicle batteries and yet hasn’t gotten the economic benefits. Those benefits have gone primarily to the manufacturing countries in Asia and other places and we of course get the benefits of using these technologies but haven’t realized the full economic benefit. So here they see an opportunity to do it right, to ensure that the United States both leads on the invention and realizing the economic benefits of it.

Jim McNiel: So while fusion and fission are very, very different approaches to producing clean energy, they’re both in the nuclear category. So technically they’re covered under the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. What progress have you made in educating the NRC that fusion should be treated differently?

Matthew Lipka: This is actually a great tailwind to fusion, because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided that fusion should be treated as under what they call their byproduct material framework. Instead of treating it as a fission plant, which has all those risks around waste, around meltdown, around high levels of radiation, they recognized that the issues associated with fusion are not nothing.

There’s still some radioactivity, at least in some approaches, but they can be managed through this existing framework called byproduct materials. And so what that means is there are, this framework is not a strict every plant must meet exactly this level. It’s if your level of risk is just so high, then the rules are adapted to meet that level of risk.

So it’s a technology-neutral risk appropriate framework. And it’s actually the framework we’ve been working under for decades at TAE because it is actually implemented by the states. So we’re based in California and the California Department of Public Health has been regulating fusion under this framework.

This set of rules, all of our research devices for more than two decades. And so that means that we have a lot of experience operating under this and that decision by the NRC to recognize fusion is not fission. We are going to have a new rules that are under development right now. That is going to give a lot of confidence to investors, to commercial partners, and to developers that we’re not going to face the big hangups that the fission industry has faced where they are seeing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing costs, not to mention additional equipment that they need to implement that may not be appropriate for the level of risk that a fusion company is presenting.

Jim McNiel: Is it true that fusion is going to be governed in much the same way as nuclear medicine is managed today in America?

Matthew Lipka: TAE has a particularly low level of radiation in our approach, but we are most similar under the current law to a dental x-ray machine. So it’s very different from a fusion plant. My dentist’s office is in the basement of an apartment building. So you can have these devices close to populations with, of course, appropriate shielding and appropriate safety measures, but basically anywhere you could put a hospital with an MRI machine, you could put a fusion machine. 

And so that is the regulatory system that is most similar to how fusion machines are going to be regulated. And new rules and guidance are underway right now from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that will spell that out very specifically and then each state will go about enforcing and implementing that.

Jim McNiel: So you could put a fusion plant underneath the Empire State Building in the densely populated New York City area under these rules?

Matthew Lipka: That that certainly would be possible. I don’t know that would be my first choice, but it’s certainly possible. I think basically wherever you’d put a hospital, you could put one of these.

Jim McNiel: Yeah. Well, there’s a bunch of hospitals in Manhattan so that could certainly be the case And is it true? I mean obviously as you mentioned TAE has a different approach to fusion than other parties and so I imagine the boron camp is going to be treated differently than the tritium and deuterium camp.

Matthew Lipka: That’s right. That’s one of the big advantages of this byproduct material approach because the rules can be adapted for each plant. So what will happen is you will submit an application and say, here are the risks specific to my plant, and here is how I’m addressing them. And that will be reviewed by the licensors, by the, by the licensed authorities.

And so the risks that are presented from TAE’s technology are different from a facility that will store tritium on site. They’re both much, much lower than fission, but they’re just different risks. And so you can have an application that says we will have shielding that’s appropriate to our actual risk. And that’s important because one of the challenges that fission has faced is requirements that are not necessarily perfectly risk calibrated to each individual plant and that has driven up costs. And so we need to have a low capital construction cost while maximizing safety in order to be economic and avoiding unnecessary regulation or unnecessary equipment is critical to achieving that. So we’ll have all the necessary equipment and we’ll justify that and they’ll review it and approve it. But it will not be a sort of one-size-fits-all approach.

Jim McNiel: So I think it’s important to make the distinction that we have nuclear fission, which, as you said, has a risk of meltdown and radioactive waste. We have nuclear fusion, which kind of comes in two major flavors right now, which is the deuterium tritium crowd, which produces neutrons and has very, very modest radioactive waste.

And then we had the boron crowd, which TAE leads, which is an aneutronic process, which does not produce free neutrons. So these are all going to be treated differently based on how they approach the problem. To kind of be clear on the tailwinds for fusion, you do have definitive progress in terms of laws, right? This framework has been signed into law by Congress.

Matthew Lipka: That’s right. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made this decision, but a future commission could reverse it, or a judge could say that that decision was not the correct interpretation of the law. So Congress decided to codify in statute permanently the decision of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to regulate fusion as particle accelerators and use this byproduct material framework.  So that gives us a lot of certainty that when we build our machines, they will be treated, uh, under this new regulatory system and that it won’t change just because a new regulatory commission comes on the commission. And that’s important because five, 10 years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was leaning towards treating fusion as a fission plant.

So actually moving it all the way to this point of we’ve got in law that we know we’re going to be a byproduct material that is giving us a lot of certainty that will help us go and raise the capital and build the designs that will meet those rules.

Jim McNiel: So obviously this certainty derisks investment in the fusion sector. And I think this is a good illustration of what you do, which is to educate and influence policymakers to pass laws that make all this stuff possible.

Matthew Lipka: Yeah, that’s right. The commissioners have actually spoken about how, not just TAE, but the 25 American companies that are part of the Fusion Industry Association, as well as international companies interested in operating in the United States, that these companies coming in and explaining their approach, our CEO Michl Binderbauer presenting to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about what is the actual risk that we’ve calculated could come from one of these plants and it’s so much lower than everything they’re used to. Those things they’ve pointed to and said, this actually helped us understand how to regulate fusion. One of the things that’s particularly remarkable here is that there’s not yet a fusion power plant, and yet they’ve already gone through this process to start updating the rules to enable it. You don’t usually see regulators getting this far ahead and going through the process before the last possible minute. So a really forward-thinking commission that is enabling these new technologies.

Jim McNiel: I think that’s a function of the fact that the physics are really well understood and that fusion is so hard to do because if you have anything that meddles with the perfect environment that you need to maintain fusion, the whole system just stops working. 

Matthew Lipka: Yeah, that’s right. It’s so hard to do fusion, but its failure mode is it just stops. It doesn’t melt down.

Jim McNiel: It doesn’t continue to operate.

Matthew Lipka: Exactly. So failure is you stop making power and money, not injuries. So that’s a very good baseline. And as you say, we’ve been doing this a long time, we’ve been working on fusion for a long time as a society.

Jim McNiel: So moving on past that great victory of getting a law passed, what are some of the things you guys are thinking about in the future? What do you have to focus on to hasten the delivery of fusion to the market?

Matthew Lipka: So I think a couple of things to highlight. The first is funding. There’s been a long history of government funding for a public program, public facilities of fusion. But we’ve seen, of course, starting with the emergence of TAE in 1998 as the first private fusion company, and now in the last 27 years, we’ve seen more than 40 companies emerge working on fusion.

We’ve seen a huge growth in the private commercial fusion industry. And so what that has necessitated is more public private partnerships to fund the final stages of research and the construction of new plants. One of the challenges with any new energy technology, when you build a first of a kind, it is by definition not proven in a commercial environment, right?

It’s the first and that is not the kind of thing that you can go to your local bank and get a loan for and these are expensive, hundreds of millions or billion dollar investments. And so there is a role for the government to help fund these programs. They stood up a program called the Milestone Based Program, which is based off of the program that launched SpaceX, which was the NASA COTS program.

And the idea there is, certain companies will get, will apply for this and if they hit certain milestones, they will get funding from the government that will ultimately lead to a pilot plant. That program is in its very early stages. It’s one example of how you could do this. There are other things that the government could do, but funding that and ensuring that there’s a diversity of technologies, the diversity of fuels so we’re not kind of betting it our entire fusion on one concentrated risk. That’s the kind of thing that the government can do to help enable these new technologies. And of course that is matched and accompanied by private funding, right? So it is a good investment for the government because they’re not footing the whole bill. So that’s one area where the government can step up.

Jim McNiel: So in regards to private funding, if you’re an investor and your charter is clean energy, and you’re looking at nuclear, in the terms of small modular reactors, which is the next generation of nuclear fission solutions. And then you’re looking at fusion solutions. What is the horizon look like from a regulatory standpoint? If all things being equal, if it’s, you know, you’re seven or eight years out from finishing the work on building an SMR, which is a similar timeline to getting fusion operating. How should you think about these two different approaches?

Matthew Lipka: It’s a great question because the reality is that they’re basically on the same timeline. There was one small modular reactor, basically a new generation of fission reactor that was licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That cost probably 10 to a hundred times what it’ll cost a fusion plant to go through the licensing process. And it took seven, eight, nine years to get through. By the time that completed, the interest rates had changed, the demand and price of energy had changed and that plant was no longer economically viable. We are hopeful that there will be other fission plants that will make it, other new designs and make it through licensing. But if you’re looking at that long of a timeline to get a license, and you’re not yet in  that pipeline as an SMR, then there’s a very good chance that a fusion plant will be built before you. TAE for example is targeting the early 2030s, something like, I think it’s 85 percent of all fusion companies that have been surveyed think that they will have a plant by the middle of next decade, a pilot plant.

So you could very easily see fusion coming online at the same time as fission. And you have, basically you don’t have regulatory risk and you have lower cost in certain areas around safety, around public engagement around regulatory, but you obviously do have lower scientific risk because fission has been done before at commercial scale and fusion has not. So as an investor, you’re trading off one set of risks for another and different investors prioritize each of those risks differently.

Jim McNiel: You focus primarily on domestic policy, but I imagine you have an eye on the international stage. How do you think the U. S. is doing in terms of creating an environment that is receptive to fusion versus other places? Are we going to have an environment that accepts a fusion plant here faster than in another nation?

Matthew Lipka: Well, there’s really a global recognition of the need for fusion energy, and so many countries are racing to put in place the regulatory frameworks, the funding in order to do it. In the U S we were the second country following the UK to adopt this byproduct-material type regulatory framework. It’s risk-based and technology neutral.

So the UK and the U S are clearly in the lead from that perspective, but you also see a lot of other countries investing heavily in financing for fusion. We’re seeing hundreds of millions of dollars being invested from Germany, obviously the UK, but also especially China. China had the highest investment in the world last year in fusion and so I think that we’re going to see a lot of countries that are looking to compete. The U.S. is no doubt in the pole position. We have the most innovative companies. We have a long history of research. We’ve got the lion’s share of private investment in commercially focused fusion companies and we have the right regulatory environment. So I think that is all helpful. But we are not investing as much [public money] as other countries are in fusion. And we could do more to adopt a technology-neutral approach. The U.K. has taken explicitly that goal of having a technology-neutral approach. The U.S. program wants to head in that direction, but it does prioritize the majority of its funding for particular technologies.

Jim McNiel: So I think it’s safe to say that China is outspending the U.S. government by two to one, but the U.S. fusion effort, which includes private industry, is still outpacing the rest of the world, both in capital invested as well as in technology leadership.

Matthew Lipka: That’s definitely true. Although in the last two years, they were neck and neck or ahead. So I do think that China is investing heavily here. They’re also building facilities. But there is an advantage the U.S. has that the Chinese don’t, which is they are fully focused on open source technologies. Basically the technology that they’re building in the international collaboration called ITER, which is the tokamak with deuterium and tritium fuel. In the U.S. we have a huge diversity of technologies. 

Of course, you have TAE with a different fuel source and this different configuration, which is a linear configuration which is very efficient. You’ve got other companies with that same linear configuration but other fuel sources. And then you have the stellarator, which goes in all crazy-looking different directions. So you’ve got all these different technologies that are being developed here, and we’re not all bet on one thing. And so there are concentrated risks from doing just a tokamak with deuterium and tritium and having a diversity is helpful. So let me give you an example. Tritium is not widely available on Earth. Basically our only source right now is Canadian fission reactors that are near the end of their life. They produce it as a byproduct, and so instead of it being a pollutant, it’s used in fusion. Great, but it’s not enough to build a fusion power sector.

Jim McNiel: What do you mean, Matt? There’s like 25 kilograms of tritium available in the open market at a mere 30,000 a gram. I mean, that seems perfectly reasonable.

Matthew Lipka: So, it is a challenge for deuterium and tritium plants to make that work. The way they want to solve it is through breeding it in the reactors. Lots of people are hopeful it can be done. It has not yet been done. So that’s one risk that you are taking on if you go to that approach. If you just were to invest only in TAE, you have to get to a billion degrees. That’s never been done. It’s much hotter than other approaches. So there’s different risks associated with each technology. The point, if you’re taking kind of a government perspective, is don’t buy one risk. You want to have diversification by supporting different ones. And that’s something that we have in the U.S. that isn’t as common outside of the United States.

Jim McNiel: Well, and if you’re an investor, do you want to invest in a company that’s using open source technology and competing directly with China or a company that has proprietary configuration and is standalone, focused on aneutronic fusion. I mean I may be biased and I know I am, but that’s kind of how I look at it.

Matthew Lipka: That’s certainly our thesis. And we think there’s advantages commercially as well, because aneutronic fusion has the best potential we believe to be economic because that lower radiation level doesn’t just improve safety, it also means that you don’t have to shut down your whole plant every year and a half or so in order to replace a lot of materials, which leads to downtime, which is costly and material costs.

So there’s economic benefits if you can get hydrogen boron to work but we haven’t gotten to a billion degrees yet. So there’s still challenges ahead for this approach. And so some investors might say, Hey, I want the technology with the greatest economic promise and the greatest environmental or radiologically safety promise. And so those might go for a technology that’s aneutronic and doesn’t produce any neutrons in their primary reaction.

Jim McNiel: So it seems to me that if anyone’s questioning now what a policy person does, it’s just what you’ve been doing on this podcast. You’ve been educating people about the pros and cons of different approaches to energy and why our government should get behind helping to lead the charge.

Matthew Lipka: Absolutely. And it’s to identify ways where government could do programs that are helpful. You know, that example of the milestone program. There was not a milestone program before that existed. And so people had to do research on what are the different ways that government has kicked off new industries with new technologies that have never existed before.

And there’s a lot of different ways you could do that. And so people need to do that research and give options to government so that if government does want to take that step, that they can do it. And then the results, at least in the case of commercial space travel, is they don’t need those same levels of subsidies anymore. They are profitable. And so that is the hope here is that you can have that lift over the hump of that first-of-a-kind that JP Morgan is not used to financing and get to the commercial scale.

Jim McNiel: Okay. So what’s next? I mean, you’ve got this framework in place. Your job is done, right? I mean, is there anything else to worry about?

Matthew Lipka: Well, the rules still need to be written. We have not yet gotten a proposed rule that follows this new framework on the regulatory side. And then you have all these financing challenges. And then as we get towards commercialization, we’re going to see a whole bunch of new challenges. We’re going to need a workforce that is able to work in these plants.

We’re already short of engineers that are capable of working in all the power plants we have today, but energy demand is growing. We’re going to need more for fusion. We’re going to need public acceptance. We need to inform people that fusion doesn’t present the same risks as fission. It is not something that the average person thinks about on their day to day basis.

And when they hear nuclear, they may lump fusion and fission together. So we’re going to need to do a lot of public engagement and education in order to get people comfortable with having this in their communities and understanding that it’s a risk no greater than having a hospital in your community, but without the traffic. So I think there’s a lot of work ahead in the years to come. I’m not out of a job yet.

We saw the Biden administration put forward a budget of over a billion dollars for fusion for the first time a couple of years ago. And while the Congress wasn’t able to fully fund that, they did increase the budget for fusion while everything else was going down.

So we’re certainly in an environment right now where spending is not going up rapidly, but there is a real need for the government to make choices and what they’re going to fund and finance. And the promise of fusion merits a big investment

Jim McNiel: Well, I would say if the fusion caucus is listening, 10 billion dollars a year over 10 years allocated across the 10 most promising US fusion companies would definitely accelerate the delivery of commercial fusion in my mind.

Matthew Lipka: Done.

Jim McNiel: Done. Let’s get that done. Matthew, anything else we should cover today?

Matthew Lipka: Jim, I just want to say, I think that fusion has such tremendous promise for clean, zero-emission, firm and reliable energy that doesn’t require any resources that are not already in the United States There’s a town in California called Boron where we can get a lot of boron from. Hydrogen comes from water. So I think that we have a huge opportunity to deliver on so many of our goals, whether it’s climate, energy security, national security, economic growth and public safety and meet the demand for energy from AI and clean manufacturing that is only going up. So I think fusion presents a potential solution to so many of those policy priorities that are shared by both parties. And now it’s just a matter of putting the last push behind it to get it to commercial scale.

Jim McNiel: Well, Matthew, thank you for the work that you do. And also thank you for kind of reminding me of how integral policy is in governing our country and making it a better place to live. I think we take it for granted and I appreciate that you brought it to our attention.

Matthew Lipka: Thanks so much for having me on, Jim. This was great.