[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                          FOSTERING A NEW ERA
                       OF FUSION ENERGY RESEARCH
                       AND TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

=======================================================================

                                                                         
                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                         SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY

                                 OF THE

                      COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE,
                             AND TECHNOLOGY

                                 OF THE

                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION
                               __________

                           NOVEMBER 17, 2021
                               __________

                           Serial No. 117-38
                               __________

 Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

                                     
                   [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]                                    
                                     
                                     
       Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
       
                              ___________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
                    
46-102PDF                  WASHINGTON : 2022   



              COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY

             HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
ZOE LOFGREN, California              FRANK LUCAS, Oklahoma, 
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon                 Ranking Member
AMI BERA, California                 MO BROOKS, Alabama
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan,             BILL POSEY, Florida
    Vice Chair                       RANDY WEBER, Texas
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey           BRIAN BABIN, Texas
JAMAAL BOWMAN, New York              ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
MELANIE A. STANSBURY, New Mexico     MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
BRAD SHERMAN, California             JAMES R. BAIRD, Indiana
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado              DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida
JERRY McNERNEY, California           MIKE GARCIA, California
PAUL TONKO, New York                 STEPHANIE I. BICE, Oklahoma
BILL FOSTER, Illinois                YOUNG KIM, California
DONALD NORCROSS, New Jersey          RANDY FEENSTRA, Iowa
DON BEYER, Virginia                  JAKE LaTURNER, Kansas
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida               CARLOS A. GIMENEZ, Florida
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois                JAY OBERNOLTE, California
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania             PETER MEIJER, Michigan
DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina         JAKE ELLZEY, TEXAS
GWEN MOORE, Wisconsin                VACANCY
DAN KILDEE, Michigan
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania
LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas
                                 ------                                

                         Subcommittee on Energy

                 HON. JAMAAL BOWMAN, New York, Chairman
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon             RANDY WEBER, Texas, 
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan                  Ranking Member
MELANIE A. STANSBURY, New Mexico     JIM BAIRD, Indiana
JERRY McNERNEY, California           MIKE GARCIA, California
DONALD NORCROSS, New Jersey          RANDY FEENSTRA, Iowa
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois                CARLOS A. GIMENEZ, Florida
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania             PETER MEIJER, Michigan
DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina
                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                           November 17, 2021

                                                                   Page

Hearing Charter..................................................     2

                           Opening Statements

Statement by Representative Jamaal Bowman, Chairman, Subcommittee 
  on Energy, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. 
  House of Representatives.......................................    10
    Written Statement............................................    11

Statement by Representative Randy Weber, Ranking Member, 
  Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, Space, and 
  Technology, U.S. House of Representatives......................    11
    Written Statement............................................    13

Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman, 
  Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of 
  Representatives................................................    13
    Written Statement............................................    14

Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member, 
  Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of 
  Representatives................................................    15
    Written Statement............................................    16

                               Witnesses:

Dr. Troy Carter, Director, Plasma Science and Technology 
  Institute, University of California, Los Angeles and Chair, 
  Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee Long Range Planning 
  Subcommittee
    Oral Statement...............................................    18
    Written Statement............................................    21

Dr. Tammy Ma, Program Element Leader for High Energy Density 
  Science, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
    Oral Statement...............................................    25
    Written Statement............................................    27

Dr. Robert Mumgaard, CEO, Commonwealth Fusion Systems
    Oral Statement...............................................    35
    Written Statement............................................    37

Dr. Kathryn McCarthy, Director, U.S. ITER Project Office
    Oral Statement...............................................    47
    Written Statement............................................    49

Dr. Steven Cowley, Director, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
    Oral Statement...............................................    58
    Written Statement............................................    60

Discussion 




              Appendix: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions

Dr. Robert Mumgaard, CEO, Commonwealth Fusion Systems............    92

Dr. Steven Cowley, Director, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.    96

 
                          FOSTERING A NEW ERA
                       OF FUSION ENERGY RESEARCH
                      AND TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

                              ----------                              


                      WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2021

                  House of Representatives,
                            Subcommittee on Energy,
               Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
                                                   Washington, D.C.

    The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 a.m., 
via Zoom, Hon. Jamaal Bowman [Chairman of the Subcommittee] 
presiding.

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    Chairman Bowman. Good morning, everyone. This hearing will 
come to order. Without objection, the Chairman is authorized to 
declare recess at any time.
    Before I deliver my opening remarks, I wanted to note that, 
today, the Committee is meeting virtually. I want to announce a 
couple of reminders to the Members about the conduct of this 
hearing. First, Members should keep their video feed on as long 
as they are present in the hearing. Members are responsible for 
their own microphones. Please also keep your microphones muted 
unless you are speaking. Finally, if Members have documents 
they wish to submit for the record, please email them to the 
Committee Clerk, whose email address was circulated prior to 
the hearing.
    Good morning, and thank you to this excellent panel of 
witnesses who are joining us virtually today to discuss recent 
breakthroughs and next steps for the Department of Energy's 
(DOE's) fusion energy research activities. As our witnesses 
will be able to discuss in much more detail, fusion is the 
process that powers the Sun and the stars. It is a simple fact 
that this fundamental phenomenon is essential to the existence 
of vital renewable energy sources like solar and wind energy, 
and indeed to life on Earth.
    For many decades, top scientists around the globe have 
worked to find ways to replicate the conditions enabled by the 
immense sheer gravity inside the core of a star to harness this 
potentially limitless source of clean energy more directly. 
There have been challenges and setbacks along the way, and 
significant challenges remaining on the path toward realizing 
this transformative goal. But we now have new reasons for hope, 
as well as comprehensive roadmaps driven by the research 
community to guide us on this path.
    On August 8th this past summer, the National Ignition 
Facility (NIF) at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 
(LLNL) produced the first so-called ``burning plasma'' in a 
manmade experiment. A burning plasma is a condition in which 
the fusion process itself provides the primary heat source to 
sustain the fuel's high temperatures that keep the fusion 
process going. The achievement of a burning plasma is a 
critical step for the development of any viable fusion energy 
system.
    And on September 5th, less than a month later, Commonwealth 
Fusion Systems (CFS) and its partners at MIT (Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology) achieved a successful test of a high-
temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet up to a field strength 
of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever 
created on Earth. Such a magnet could enable fusion systems 
that are significantly smaller, lower cost, and faster to build 
than what was previously thought possible.
    I am also pleased to highlight that the fusion research 
community has stepped up in recent years to produce a long-
range strategic plan, which this Committee had directed the 
Department of Energy to initiate in the DOE Research and 
Innovation Act that was enacted in 2018. It is important for us 
in Congress to have a far better understanding of how the 
community would prioritize research activities and facility 
construction plans under a range of plausible budget scenarios. 
I recognize that tough decisions were made by the community in 
carrying out this effort, and hope that this hard and thorough 
work is better recognized in DOE's forthcoming budget requests 
for these programs.
    Thank you all again, and I look forward to this discussion.
    [The prepared statement of Chairman Bowman follows:]

    Good morning, and thank you to this excellent panel of 
witnesses who are joining us virtually today to discuss recent 
breakthroughs and next steps for the Department of Energy's 
fusion energy research activities.
    As our witnesses will be able to discuss in much more 
detail, fusion is the process that powers the sun and the 
stars. It is a simple fact that this fundamental phenomenon is 
essential to existence of vital renewable energy sources like 
solar and wind energy, and indeed to life on earth. For many 
decades, top scientists around the globe have worked to find 
ways to replicate the conditions enabled by the immense, sheer 
gravity inside the core of a star to harness this potentially 
limitless source of clean energy more directly.
    There have been challenges and setbacks along the way, and 
significant challenges remain on the path toward realizing this 
transformative goal. But we now have new reasons for hope, as 
well as comprehensive roadmaps driven by the research community 
to guide us on this path. On August 8th this past summer, the 
National Ignition Facility at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National 
Laboratory produced the first so-called ``burning plasma'' in a 
man-made experiment. A burning plasma is a condition in which 
the fusion process itself provides the primary heat source to 
sustain the fuel's high temperatures that keep the fusion 
process going. The achievement of a burning plasma is a 
critical step for the development of any viable fusion energy 
system.
    And on September 5th, less than a month later, Commonwealth 
Fusion Systems and its partners at MIT achieved a successful 
test of a high-temperature, superconducting magnet up to a 
field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of 
its kind ever created on earth. Such a magnet could enable 
fusion systems that are significantly smaller, lower cost, and 
faster to build than what was previously thought possible.
    I am also pleased to highlight that the fusion research 
community has stepped up in recent years to produce a long-
range strategic plan, which this Committee had directed the 
Department of Energy to initiate in the DOE Research and 
Innovation Act that was enacted in 2018. It is important for us 
in Congress to have a far better understanding of how the 
community would prioritize research activities and facility 
construction plans under a range of plausible budget scenarios. 
I recognize that tough decisions were made by the community in 
carrying out this effort, and hope that this hard and thorough 
work is better recognized in DOE's forthcoming budget requests 
for these programs.
    Thank you all again, and I look forward to this discussion.

    Chairman Bowman. With that, I now recognize Mr. Weber for 
an opening statement.
    Mr. Weber. Thank you, Chairman Bowman, for holding this 
hearing, and thank you to our witness panel for joining us this 
morning. Today's topic is one that many of us are very familiar 
with, but we remain extremely intrigued by: fusion energy.
    In the most basic of terms, fusion energy aims to create 
the equivalent of a controlled Sun and harness it as a power 
source here on Earth. Easy enough, right? But as you might 
imagine, the extreme temperatures, pressures, and confinement 
conditions required to do this also require a highly 
specialized environment. This makes achieving fusion energy one 
of the greatest challenges in experimental physics today.
    The potential benefits of a fusion reactor are beyond 
calculation. The fuel is abundant and widely accessible, the 
carbon footprint is functionally zero, and the radioactive 
waste concerns are almost nonexistent. If we are serious about 
a clean energy future with low power sector emissions, there is 
no ambition that fits that bill better than fusion.
    The Department of Energy supports fusion R&D (research and 
development) primarily through its Fusion Energy Sciences, or 
FES, program. In Fiscal Year 2021, the FES received $672 
million, but the House-passed bipartisan bill that I was proud 
to cosponsor, the DOE Science for the Future Act, seeks to 
nearly double that by Fiscal Year 2026. This shows our 
overwhelming support for current research efforts and a 
bipartisan desire to leverage the untapped potential of fusion. 
I'd like to thank my colleague, Energy Subcommittee Chairman 
Bowman, as well as Ranking Member Lucas and Chairwoman Johnson, 
for their leadership on this bill.
    Domestically, DOE funds a diverse portfolio of fusion 
energy research through its world-leading national laboratory 
system and cutting-edge experimental facilities and resources, 
like the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade at 
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the National 
Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I 
look forward to hearing from esteemed representatives from 
these laboratories today.
    Internationally, DOE supports U.S. contributions to the 
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) 
project, which many of you know is a major international 
collaboration to design, build, and operate a first-of-a-kind 
research facility to achieve and maintain a successful fusion 
reaction in the lab. Although it is located in beautiful 
southern France, a significant percentage of total U.S. awards 
and obligations to ITER are carried out--pardon me--right here 
in the United States, funding research and component 
fabrication in American universities, national labs, and in 
industry. And while the United States contributes 13 percent of 
the cost of ITER, we will actually gain 100 percent of the 
scientific discoveries from this project. That's a good 
tradeoff, a good deal in my estimation.
    This is why funding for ITER is also included in the DOE 
Science for the Future Act. Upholding our end of this deal is 
imperative to the success of U.S. fusion energy and to 
America's standing and credibility as a global scientific 
collaborator, excuse me. I look forward to hearing more on this 
from Dr. Kathryn McCarthy, the Director of the U.S. ITER 
Project Office--as our lights go out here. If we get fusion on 
board quickly now, we won't have that problem. Did I mention we 
were working on that Chairman Bowman?
    Another necessary contributor to fusion research is, of 
course, the private sector. Due to robust DOE investment in 
this critical science, there are already 13 fusion energy 
companies here in the United States. Today, we will hear from 
one of these companies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup 
aimed at commercializing fusion energy and has collaborated 
with the National Labs through FES's Innovation Network for 
Fusion Energy, or the INFUSE program. Together, our witness 
panel represents unique areas of fusion energy research. They 
each have a story to tell on how we've progressed over the last 
decade and where we are headed in the next decade.
    No matter how you look at it, achieving commercial fusion 
energy technology is going to require strong U.S. leadership 
and consistent investment in discovery science. Meeting our 
goal of producing unlimited emission-free power through fusion 
energy will truly take all of you here today.
    I want to again thank again our witnesses for being here 
today and yield back the balance of my time, Mr. Chairman. 
Thank you.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Weber follows:]

    Thank you, Chairman Bowman for holding this hearing and 
thank you to our witness panel for joining us this morning. 
Today's topic is one that many of us are very familiar with, 
but we remain extremely intrigued by--fusion energy.
    In the most basic of terms, fusion energy aims to create 
the equivalent of a controlled sun and harness it as a power 
source here on earth. Easy enough, right? But as you might 
imagine, the extreme temperatures, pressures, and confinement 
conditions required to do this also require a highly 
specialized environment. This makes achieving fusion energy one 
of the greatest challenges in experimental physics today.
    The potential benefits of a fusion reactor are beyond 
calculation. The fuel is abundant and widely accessible, the 
carbon footprint is functionally zero, and the radioactive 
waste concerns are almost nonexistent. If we are serious about 
a clean energy future with lower power sector emissions, there 
is no ambition that fits the bill better than fusion.
    The Department of Energy supports fusion R&D primarily 
through its Fusion Energy Sciences program. In fiscal year 
2021, the FES received $672 million, but the House passed 
bipartisan bill I was proud to cosponsor, the DOE Science for 
the Future Act, seeks to nearly double that by fiscal year 
2026.
    This shows our overwhelming support for current research 
efforts and a bipartisan desire to leverage the untapped 
potential of fusion. I'd like to thank my colleague, Energy 
Subcommittee Chairman Bowman, as well as Ranking Member Lucas 
and Chairwoman Johnson for their leadership on this bill.
    Domestically, DOE funds a diverse portfolio of fusion 
energy research through its world- leading national laboratory 
system and cutting-edge experimental facilities and resources, 
like the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade at 
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the National Ignition 
Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I look 
forward to hearing from esteemed representatives from these 
laboratories today.
    Internationally, DOE supports U.S. contributions to the 
ITER project, which is a major international collaboration to 
design, build, and operate a first-of-a-kind research facility 
to achieve and maintain a successful fusion reaction in the 
lab. Although it is located in beautiful southern France, a 
significant percentage of total U.S. awards and obligations to 
ITER are carried out right here in the United States, funding 
research and component fabrication in American universities, 
national labs, and industry. And while the U.S. contributes 13 
percent of the costs of ITER, we gain 100 percent of the 
scientific discoveries from this project. That's a good deal!
    This is why full funding for ITER is also included in the 
DOE Science for the Future Act. Upholding our end of this deal 
is imperative to the success of U.S. fusion energy, and to 
America's standing and credibility as a global scientific 
collaborator. I look forward to hearing more on this from Dr. 
Kathryn McCarthy, the Director of U.S. ITER Project Office.
    Another necessary contributor to fusion research is, of 
course, the private sector. Due to robust DOE investment in 
this critical science, there are already 13 fusion energy 
companies are here in the U.S. Today we will hear from one of 
these companies--Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup aimed 
at commercializing fusion energy and has collaborated with the 
National Labs through FES's Innovation Network for Fusion 
Energy (INFUSE) program.
    Together, our witness panel represents unique areas of 
fusion energy research. They each have a story to tell on how 
we've progressed over the last decade and where we are headed 
in the next.
    No matter how you look at it, achieving commercial fusion 
energy technology will require strong U.S. leadership and 
consistent investment in discovery science. Meeting our goal of 
producing unlimited, emission free power through fusion energy 
will truly take all of you here today. I want to again thank 
all of our witnesses for being here and yield back the balance 
of my time, Mr. Chairman.

    Chairman Bowman. Thank you, Mr. Weber.
    The Chair now recognizes the Chairwoman of the Full 
Committee, Ms. Johnson, for an opening statement.
    Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much, and good morning 
to all. I appreciate you holding this hearing on fusion energy 
activities carried out by the Department of Energy.
    There are many of us on the Science, Space, and Technology 
Committee on both sides of the aisle that strongly believe that 
the promise of fusion energy is worth pursuing, and for that 
matter, warrants far greater support than the Federal 
Government has provided to date. Fusion has been the potential 
to deliver clean and abundant energy to the world, all while 
producing essentially no greenhouse gas emissions.
    I have previously noted that a breakthrough in fusion 
energy research would be a major step in enabling our clean 
energy future. And in fact there has been a couple of 
significant breakthroughs within the last few months, so I am 
pleased that we have witnesses here today who will discuss 
those in detail. And though there is still more work that needs 
to be done, the policy decisions and research investments we 
make now could well enable the next key advancements to come 
much sooner.
    Fusion energy research has had a longstanding support from 
the Science Committee. I am proud to say that over the past few 
years, this Committee has advanced numerous bills that provide 
significant direction for fusion research activities supported 
by the Department of Energy. These include substantial 
provisions in the Department of Energy Research and Innovation 
Act as well as the Energy Act of 2020, both of which were 
signed into law.
    In June, the House passed the Department of Energy Science 
for the Future Act, a bill that I lead with Ranking Member 
Lucas and both Chairman Bowman and Ranking Member Weber of the 
Energy Subcommittee. This bill would expand upon previously 
authorized fusion energy activities, including strong 
authorization of appropriations for these programs. It includes 
full support for U.S. participation in ITER international 
fusion project. And I would say that Congressman Lucas and I 
have visited that project.
    And I would be remiss if I did not note that this Committee 
included $1.24 billion in total funding for fusion energy R&D 
and $1.6 billion in total support for fusion facility 
construction and equipment in the text that it advances for the 
Build Back Better Act.
    I was also pleased to see the recent reports released by 
both the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) and 
the National Academies. These reports outline strategic 
investments needed to enable a robust national fusion research 
program, including steps required to develop a pilot plant for 
fusion energy.
    Despite all of this progress made by Congress and the 
fusion research community, the Department of Energy has yet to 
implement much of the guidance provided by these external 
advisory reports, nor has DOE implemented much of the direction 
provided in law. We need to do better, especially at this time 
when there is so much more work to be done in this field.
    I very much look forward to the testimony today from this 
panel of distinguished witnesses. And with that, Mr. Chairman, 
I yield back.
    [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]

    Good morning and thank you, Chairman Bowman, for holding 
this hearing on fusion energy activities carried out by the 
Department of Energy. There are many of us on the Science, 
Space, and Technology Committee on both sides of the aisle that 
strongly believe that the promise of fusion energy is worth 
pursuing, and for that matter, warrants far greater support 
than the federal government has provided to date.
    Fusion has the potential to deliver clean, abundant energy 
to the world, all while producing essentially no greenhouse gas 
emissions. I have previously noted that a breakthrough in 
fusion energy research would be a major step in enabling our 
clean energy future. And in fact, there have been a couple of 
significant breakthroughs within the last few months, so I am 
pleased that we have witnesses here today who will discuss 
those in detail. And though there is still more work that needs 
to be done, the policy decisions and research investments we 
make now could well enable the next key advancements to come 
much sooner.
    Fusion energy research has had longstanding support from 
the Science Committee. I am proud to say that over the past few 
years, this Committee has advanced numerous bills that provide 
significant direction for fusion research activities supported 
by the Department of Energy. These include substantial 
provisions in the Department of Energy Research and Innovation 
Act as well as the Energy Act of 2020, both of which were 
signed into law.
    In June, the House passed the Department of Energy Science 
for the Future Act, a bill that I lead with Ranking Member 
Lucas and both Chairman Bowman and Ranking Member Weber of the 
Energy Subcommittee. This bill would expand upon previously 
authorized fusion energy activities, including strong 
authorization of appropriations for these programs. It includes 
full support for U.S. participation in the ITER international 
fusion project. And I would be remiss if I did not note that 
this Committee included $1.24 billion in total funding for 
fusion energy R&D and $1.6 billion in total support for fusion 
facility construction and equipment in the text that it 
advanced for the Build Back Better Act.
    I was also pleased to see the recent reports released by 
both the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and the 
National Academies. These reports outline strategic investments 
needed to enable a robust national fusion research program, 
including steps required to develop a pilot plant for fusion 
energy.
    Despite all of this progress made by Congress and the 
fusion research community, the Department of Energy has yet to 
implement much of the guidance provided by these external 
advisory reports, nor has DOE implemented much of the direction 
provided in law. We need to do better, especially at this time 
when there is so much more work to do in this field.
    I very much look forward to the testimony today from this 
panel of distinguished experts. With that, I yield back.

    Chairman Bowman. Thank you so much for your remarks, 
Chairwoman Johnson.
    The Chair now recognizes the Ranking Member of the Full 
Committee, Mr. Lucas, for an opening statement.
    Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairman Bowman.
    Today, we have an opportunity to examine the status of 
fusion energy research in the United States. I look forward to 
hearing more about how we can provide robust support for these 
high-priority research activities both internationally and here 
at home.
    Fusion R&D has long enjoyed bipartisan support on the 
Science Committee and for good reason. It is exactly the type 
of high-risk, high-reward basic research that expands our 
fundamental knowledge of science and technology and pushes the 
limits of what is possible. Fusion energy has the potential to 
produce discoveries that will transform our clean energy 
future, keeping America energy-independent and at the same time 
the cutting edge of technological progress.
    To realize the promise of fusion energy, we must take an 
all-of-the-above approach. We must support full funding for 
U.S. participation in ITER--the leading international research 
project for fusion energy--and we must make major investments 
in DOE national laboratories like Princeton's Plasma Physics 
Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore's National Laboratory, and we 
must support productive partnerships with the rapidly growing 
U.S. fusion energy industry.
    Last Congress, we passed the Energy Act of 2020, which 
includes significant authorizations of DOE's Fusion Energy 
Science activities, including an inertial fusion R&D program, 
fusion reactor system design activities, an Innovation Network 
for Fusion Energy, and explicit direction for U.S. 
participation in ITER.
    Our bill, H.R. 3593, the Department of Energy Science for 
the Future Act, will build on the success of the Energy Act. 
Like that bill, DOE Science for the Future Act is 
overwhelmingly bipartisan. It's the product of years of 
hearings and discussions with stakeholders. The DOE Science for 
the Future Act is the first comprehensive authorization of the 
DOE Science--Office of Science. This legislation will invest 
$50 billion over 5 years, giving the Office of Science and our 
National Laboratories the resources they need to continue to 
excel.
    This landmark legislation includes more than $5.6 billion 
for Fusion Energy Sciences, extending and supplementing 
authorizations in the Energy Act. But it's not simply an 
authorization of research dollars. This legislation provides 
essential policy direction and strategic guidance for U.S. 
fusion energy R&D based on extensive stakeholder feedback and 
reports from the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and 
the National Academies. This is a thoughtful, well-vetted, 
overwhelmingly bipartisan bill designed to significantly 
improve American research and development.
    The House approach to competitiveness legislation has been 
thoughtful, deliberate, and strategic. It makes smart 
investments to make continuous improvements to American 
research and development. So as discussions are starting about 
incorporating competitiveness legislation into the NDAA 
(National Defense Authorization Act), I believe it's critical 
our priorities are included.
    This Congress, we've seen a lot of multi-trillion-dollar 
spending proposals come and go. We've heard a lot about so-
called opportunities to cut corners and to heavily compromise 
on our shared principles. The best path forward for fusion 
energy legislation is the DOE Science for the Future Act. We 
can't afford to accept--let's just be blunt about it--the 
Senate's half-baked proposal, and we can't afford to accept a 
social engineering bill with a fraction of our fusion energy 
investments, stripped of policy direction and long-term 
planning.
    I appreciate Chairman Johnson and Chairman Bowman's 
commitment to our shared goal of strengthening our investment 
in fusion energy, and I look forward to working together to get 
this bill signed into law.
    I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony today and 
for outlining their plans to make fusion energy a reality for 
the next generation. I look forward to a productive discussion. 
And I thank you, Chairman Bowman, and I yield back the balance 
of my time.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]

    Thank you, Chairman Bowman.
    Today, we have an opportunity to examine the status of 
fusion energy research in the United States. I look forward to 
hearing more about how we can provide robust support for these 
high-priority research activities both internationally and here 
at home.
    Fusion R&D has long enjoyed bipartisan support on the 
Science Committee--and for good reason. It is exactly the type 
of high-risk, high-reward basic research that expands our 
fundamental knowledge of science and technology and pushes the 
limits of what's possible. Fusion energy has the potential to 
produce discoveries that will transform our clean energy 
future, keeping America energy independent and at the cutting 
edge of technological progress.
    To realize the promise of fusion energy, we must take an 
all-of-the-above approach. We must support full funding for 
U.S. participation in ITER--the leading international research 
project for fusion energy--and we must make major investments 
in DOE national laboratories like Princeton Plasma Physics 
Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and we 
must support productive partnerships with the rapidly growing 
U.S. fusion energy industry.
    Last Congress, we passed the Energy Act of 2020, which 
includes significant authorizations of DOE's fusion energy 
sciences activities, including an inertial fusion R&D program, 
fusion reactor system design activities, an innovation network 
for fusion energy, and explicit direction for U.S. 
participation in ITER.
    Our bill, H.R. 3593, the Department of Energy Science for 
the Future Act, will build on the success of the Energy Act. 
Like that bill, the DOE Science for the Future Act is 
overwhelmingly bipartisan. It's the product of years of 
hearings and discussions with stakeholders. The DOE Science for 
the Future Act is the first comprehensive authorization of the 
DOE Office of Science. This legislation will invest $50 billion 
over 5 years, giving the Office of Science and our National 
Labs the resources they need to continue to excel.
    This landmark legislation includes more than $5.6 billion 
for Fusion Energy Sciences, extending and supplementing 
authorizations in the Energy Act. But it's not simply an 
authorization of research dollars. This legislation provides 
essential policy direction and strategic guidance for U.S. 
fusion energy R&D based on extensive stakeholder feedback and 
reports from the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and 
the National Academies. This is a thoughtful, well-vetted, and 
overwhelmingly bipartisan bill, designed to significantly 
improve American research and development.
    The House approach to competitiveness legislation has been 
thoughtful, deliberate, and strategic. It makes smart 
investments to make continuous improvements to American 
research and development. So as discussions are starting about 
incorporating competitiveness legislation in the NDAA, I 
believe it's critical our priorities are included.
    This Congress, we've seen a lot of multi-trillion-dollar 
spending proposals come and go, and we've heard a lot about so-
called ``opportunities'' to cut corners and heavily compromise 
on our shared priorities. The best path forward for fusion 
energy legislation is the DOE Science for the Future Act. We 
can't afford to accept the Senate's half- baked proposal, and 
we can't afford to accept a social spending bill with a 
fraction of our fusion investments, stripped of policy 
direction and long-term planning.
    I appreciate Chairwoman Johnson's and Chairman Bowman's 
commitment to our shared goal of strengthening our investment 
in fusion energy and I look forward to working together to get 
this bill signed into law.
    I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony today, 
and for outlining their plans to make fusion energy a reality 
for the next generation. I look forward to a productive 
discussion. Thank you, Chairman Bowman, I yield back the 
balance of my time.

    Chairman Bowman. Thank you, Ranking Member Lucas, for your 
remarks.
    If there are Members who wish to submit additional opening 
statements, your statements will be added to the record at this 
point.
    At this time I would like to introduce our witnesses. Dr. 
Troy Carter is a Professor of Physics and the Director of the 
Plasma Science and Technology Institute at the University of 
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He chaired the long-range 
planning subcommittee of the DOE Office of Science's Fusion 
Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. Professor Carter is also 
the Director of the Basic Plasma Science Facility, a 
collaborative research facility for fundamental plasma science 
supported by DOE and NSF (National Science Foundation). His 
research focuses on experimental studies and magnetized 
plasmas.
    Dr. Tammy Ma is the Program Element Leader for High-
Intensity Laser High Energy Density Science at the National 
Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 
This group pioneered the use of the highest intensity lasers in 
the world to investigate novel states of matter, study 
laboratory astrophysics, and explore fusion physics.
    Dr. Robert Mumgaard is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of 
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS is a private commercial fusion 
company with the goal of commercializing a high magnetic field 
approach to fusion. Dr. Mumgaard performed his Ph.D. work at 
MIT where he substantially contributed to the development of 
this approach.
    Dr. Kathryn McCarthy is a U.S. ITER Project Director, as 
well as Associate Laboratory Director for Fusion and Fission 
Energy and Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She 
served on the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee from 
1999 to 2013 and on the U.S. ITER Technical Advisory Committee 
from 2010 to 2013 and has held numerous leadership positions in 
the American Nuclear Society. Dr. McCarthy joined Oak Ridge 
National Laboratory after 3 years at Laboratory Director--as 
laboratory Director for the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. She 
previously held a variety of engineering and leadership roles 
at Idaho National Laboratory.
    Dr. Steven Cowley is the seventh Director of the Princeton 
Plasma Physics Laboratory and a Princeton Professor of 
Astrophysical Sciences. Prior to joining PPPL, he was President 
of Corpus Christi College and a Professor of Physics at the 
University of Oxford. Dr. Cowley previously was Chief Executive 
Officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and head 
of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. From 2011 to 2017 he 
was a member of the U.K. Prime Minister's Council on Science 
and Technology and was even knighted by the Queen of England in 
2018. So we should actually call you Sir Dr. Steven Cowley, my 
apologies, sir.
    Thank you all for joining us today. As our witnesses should 
know, you will each have 5 minutes for your spoken testimony. 
Your written testimony will be included in the record for the 
hearing. When you all have completed your spoken testimony, we 
will begin with questions. Each Member will have 5 minutes to 
question the panel.
    We will start with Dr. Carter. Dr. Carter, please begin.

                 TESTIMONY OF DR. TROY CARTER,

       DIRECTOR, PLASMA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE,

       UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, AND CHAIR,

           FUSION ENERGY SCIENCES ADVISORY COMMITTEE

                LONG RANGE PLANNING SUBCOMMITTEE

    Dr. Carter. Thank you. Chairman Bowman, Ranking Member 
Weber of the Subcommittee, Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking 
Member Lucas of the Full Committee, and distinguished Members 
of the Committee, thank you for holding this hearing and for 
providing me and my colleagues with the opportunity to testify. 
My name is Troy Carter. I'm the Director of the Plasma Science 
and Technology Institute and Professor of Physics at UCLA. I 
serve on the DOE Office of Science's Fusion Energy Sciences 
Advisory Committee, or FESAC. I'm speaking today in my capacity 
as an academic researcher. I'm not here to formally represent 
UCLA or FESAC.
    As was already mentioned, I recently chaired a FESAC 
subcommittee that was charged with developing a long-range plan 
for fusion energy and plasma science research for DOE. The 
resulting consensus report, ``Powering the Future Fusion and 
Plasmas,'' was a result of a 2-year strategic planning process 
with strong engagement from the entire research community, 
including universities, national labs, and industry. The report 
represents a 10-year strategy for both fusion energy 
development and for advancing plasma science and related 
technologies. I'll focus my brief comments here on fusion 
energy strategy in that report. I'd be happy to take questions 
on broader plasma science and engineering.
    The main message I want you to take away from my remarks is 
that now is the time to move aggressively toward the 
development and deployment of fusion energy. Fusion will 
provide carbon-free, safe electricity generation that can 
substantially power society and mitigate climate change.
    Why are we confident that now is the right time? There's 
been important scientific and technological process, coupled 
with a strongly growing private sector, that positions us to 
realize a unique U.S. vision for economical fusion energy with 
the goal of an electricity-producing fusion pilot plant. This 
unique vision was first laid out in the 2019 National Academies 
report, ``A Strategic Plan for U.S. Burning Plasma Research,'' 
as endorsed by our FESAC report and also by the 2021 National 
Academies report ``Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid.'' The 
strong support for fusion energy research, including from this 
Committee and Congress--thank you--has enabled important recent 
scientific progress and breakthroughs. Several examples of this 
progress is outlined in our report, for example, advances in 
our understanding of fusion plasmas, achieving new performance 
records.
    They will also be brought up by Professor Cowley in this 
hearing. He'll offer a few highlights that have occurred since 
the report was published, and a couple of them have already 
been brought up in the opening remarks. First is the recent 
breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility just this past 
summer where record gain was achieved, and this was enabled by 
recently acquired scientific understanding. Dr. Ma will discuss 
this very important result.
    Second is the recent demonstration by Commonwealth Fusion 
Systems of a high-temperature superconducting or HTS magnet, 
the largest of its kind in the world, operating at 20 tesla 
that was mentioned earlier. Dr. Mumgaard will discuss this 
breakthrough that is really a gamechanger for fusion.
    Finally, there's been important progress with the 
international ITER project with the delivery of the first two 
magnet modules for the ITER central solenoid. This solenoid 
will be the largest low-temperature superconducting magnet in 
the world, and Dr. McCarthy will talk more about this 
achievement of the U.S. ITER Project Office that she leads and 
General Atomics.
    Alongside this technical promise--progress, we've seen 
rapid growth of private sector investment in fusion energy. The 
ultimate goal of fusion energy research in the United States is 
the development of a commercial fusion power industry, and that 
industry is already taking root. At the time of the writing of 
our report, about $2 billion had been invested worldwide in 
fusion energy development in the private sector, resulting in 
the largest of several startup fusion companies. There's been 
new investment since with just half--just in the last few weeks 
half a billion more announced, and more is coming. This 
investment has enabled the startup companies to make impressive 
progress on development of new fusion facilities and create 
enabling technologies such as the HTS magnet, as I mentioned 
earlier.
    The scientific progress and technical know-how developed 
through the Federal program enabled the founding of these 
companies, and we now have the opportunity to amplify Federal 
investment through partnering. Through this partnership, we can 
accelerate the timeline and reduce the cost to develop fusion 
electricity. If we look at our international colleagues, in the 
U.K. and China there's already a lot of money flowing through--
into such partnership programs, and they've successfully 
attracted private fusion companies through that investment. 
It's imperative that the United States develops and implements 
new models, strengthens existing ones for partnership between 
the public and private sectors.
    The consensus FESAC long-range planning report makes 
recommendations for actions that DOE should take to reorient 
the fusion program toward the rapid development of fusion 
energy. It enumerates and prioritizes urgently needed research 
programs and experimental facilities.
    This Committee and Congress had implored our community to 
come together and create a new strategic plan for fusion. We've 
now answered that charge and speak with one voice in support of 
the resulting strategic plan. Now is the time to act. We need 
to implement the plan.
    I want to thank this Committee for authorization language 
in the Science for the Future Act and in the current 
reconciliation bill that was well-aligned with priorities 
expressed in our report. We're ready to get to work on making 
fusion power a reality and look forward to DOE implementing our 
plan. I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you.
    [The prepared statement of Dr. Carter follows:]

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you, Dr. Carter.
    Dr. Ma, you're now recognized.

                   TESTIMONY OF DR. TAMMY MA,

                     PROGRAM ELEMENT LEADER

                FOR HIGH ENERGY DENSITY SCIENCE,

             LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

    Dr. Ma. Thank you. Chairman Bowman, Ranking Member Weber of 
the Subcommittee, Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas of 
the Full Committee, and all Members of the Committee, thank you 
for the opportunity to appear before you today to offer 
testimony on fostering a new era of fusion energy research.
    I'm the Program Element Leader for High Intensity Laser 
High Energy Density Science at the National Ignition Facility 
at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. I have submitted my 
full statement to the Committee, which I ask to be made part of 
the hearing record. If I may, I will now summarize in a brief 
opening statement.
    The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is the world's 
largest, most energetic laser housed in a football stadium-
sized facility. The 192 very energetic laser beams of NIF are 
focused onto a miniature capsule the size of a BB containing 
fusion fuel. The lasers heat and compress the fuel to 
conditions hotter and denser than those found at the center of 
the Sun. The goal is ignition, more energy out than we put in 
with the lasers.
    This past August, a breakthrough fusion yield of 1.35 
megajoules was achieved on the NIF, more than 2/3 of the 1.9 
megajoules of the laser energy going in. This equates to an 
energy gain of 70 percent of that needed for ignition and 
represents a 25X improvement over experiments from a year ago.
    The tremendous progress over previous results were made 
possible by numerous experiments, advances in diagnostics and 
targets, improved laser precision, overall better understanding 
of the fusion physics, and a very dedicated team of 
individuals. This result now places NIF on the threshold of 
fusion ignition in the laboratory for the first time and 
demonstrates the feasibility of laboratory-scale laser-driven 
inertial confinement fusion (ICF) to achieve high fusion yield 
conditions.
    While the central mission of the NIF is to provide 
experimental insight and data for the National Nuclear Security 
Administration's (NNSA's) science-based Stockpile Stewardship 
Program, these same fusion plasmas that we create for national 
security applications can also be exploited to be the basis of 
a future clean power source by inertial fusion energy (IFE).
    Developing an economically attractive approach to fusion 
energy is a grand scientific and engineering challenge. It is 
without a doubt a monumental undertaking, but the potential 
payoff is even greater: clean, limitless, reliable energy that 
can not only help address the urgent issue of climate change 
but can also provide energy sovereignty and security for the 
United States. The profound benefit to future humanity impels 
us to support a vigorous and sustained research program into 
fusion with a diverse portfolio that maximizes our potential 
pathways to success.
    Inertial fusion energy is one such innovative approach with 
significantly different technological risks to mainstream 
magnetic fusion energy research. With the recent game-changing 
results on the NIF and our decades of expertise in inertial 
fusion science and technology, the United States is well-poised 
to lead and capitalize on the potential of inertial fusion. 
However, there is currently no inertial fusion energy program 
in the United States, and it is not part of a long-term energy 
R&D portfolio but should be.
    A number of promising technologies key to eventual inertial 
fusion energy systems are already making steady progress. In 
particular, there have been exciting advances in high-energy 
rep.-rated laser and pulsed power technology in the United 
States, potentially lowering the cost for a future driver for a 
fusion energy system.
    Additive and advanced manufacturing are revolutionizing new 
materials and techniques critical to fusion energy. Artificial 
intelligence and machine learning are being deployed to train 
high-performance computational models and improve prediction--
predictive simulation capabilities. The National Academy of 
Sciences in 2013 released a report entitled ``An Assessment of 
the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy.'' Amongst the many 
excellent recommendations was that the appropriate time for the 
establishment of a national, coordinated, broad-based inertial 
fusion energy program within DOE would be when ignition is 
achieved. This is the time to begin as we stand at that 
threshold.
    Inertial fusion energy is a multi-decadal endeavor, and 
realizing it will not be easy. It will require the best minds 
and bold leadership. But it is a worthy challenge. And that is 
exactly where we as a nation excel. Now is the time to 
reestablish a vibrant national inertial fusion energy program 
and ignite a credible development path toward clean fusion 
energy.
    Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions.
    [The prepared statement of Dr. Ma follows:]

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you, Dr. Ma.
    Dr. Mumgaard, you are now recognized.

               TESTIMONY OF DR. ROBERT MUMGAARD,

                CEO, COMMONWEALTH FUSION SYSTEMS

    Dr. Mumgaard. Chairman Bowman, Ranking Member Weber, and 
other distinguished Members of the Subcommittee, my name is Bob 
Mumgaard. I'm appearing before you today as the CEO of 
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. I'm also a board member of the 
Fusion Industry Association. I'd like to thank the Subcommittee 
for this opportunity to provide an update on the status and 
prospects of commercial fusion energy.
    After years of study, we are now at the beginning of 
fusion's transition from a science to commercialization. 
Fortunately, we are building off of a strong base set by basic 
research funded by the government. Commercial fusion energy 
could be a gamechanger in the clean energy transition, and if 
fusion is to make an impact, it will necessarily create an 
entirely new industry of the scale of the semiconductor or 
aerospace industry with important companies like Boeing and 
Intel. The future of fusion industry will bring manufacturing, 
skilled jobs, and exports. And importantly, we get to decide 
how that industry will work. We can build in inclusion, 
diversity, equality at the outset of a technology that is 
inherently environmentally just.
    Unfortunately, as I look across the U.S. publicly funded 
program, it's no longer clear that the United States has broad 
world leadership. Much of the program in the United States 
today looks the way it looked 10 years ago. We risk stagnation 
at the time the rest of the world has aggressively moved 
forward. The U.K., Germany, Japan, Italy, they are building 
facilities first conceived by the United States. China is 
rapidly investing. The U.K. has a governmentwide goal to be 
first and is already siting their first plant.
    However, from where I sit I see three reasons why I'm very 
optimistic the United States can create a definitive lead in 
this new industry. First, the growth of the private sector. 
Over $2.4 billion in private capital has been invested in the 
fusion companies that now number nearly 30. This is a similar 
amount of capital as in nuclear fission small modular reactor 
companies. This is coming from a large range of investors 
across venture capitalists, to university endowments, to large 
energy companies. And they are putting capital at risk in 
fusion because they understand that the world needs a 
fundamentally new source of clean energy if we are going to 
meet our decarbonization goals. And these companies are highly 
ambitious with a recent survey stating that 84 percent of them 
believe that fusion will be on the grid in the 2030's or 
earlier. They are now building large facilities that over the 
next few years will be world-leading.
    And CFS is an example of such a company. We have benefited 
from public investment in fusion science whether history or--at 
MIT. Our approach is based on the scientifically proven 
tokamaks, similar to the design to ITER. But in our case we've 
used new technology, new developed and successfully 
demonstrated high temperature superconducting magnets that 
allow us to shrink that tokamak to 1/40 the size of ITER. And 
CFS is currently building the machine, SPARC, at a site in 
Devens, Massachusetts. And based on peer-reviewed publications, 
we have high confidence that SPARC will be a net energy fusion 
machine and will achieve burning plasmas, which we aim to do in 
2025, much earlier than people thought was possible. And after 
that we will proceed with the commercialization of our first 
fusion pilot plant called ARC. We hope to have that online in 
the early 2030's and are starting to engage customers who have 
interest. In fact, since the last House hearing on fusion, we 
have doubled six times over, and we will double again this 
year.
    We will not wait to make decisions. We are executing. And 
we are not alone. The other companies like TAE and General 
Fusion, Helion Energy, Tokamak Energy are looking at similar 
timeframes and experiencing similar growth. All of these 
companies are looking to see which governments are going to be 
the best partners. And unfortunately, we are already seeing 
defections with a major facility that could have been built in 
the United States instead being built in the U.K. It would be 
much better if the U.S. public program leveraged the private 
sector, aligning with the technical goals and timelines, to 
keep it happening here.
    The second reason I'm optimistic is that the public program 
has produced a consensus plan. Detailed in the National 
Academies and FESAC recommendations is a transition of the 
public-funded program toward the United States developing 
commercial energy. We need to stop some activities and 
transition to others, but the researchers are enthusiastic, and 
they are ready. We have a new generation of leaders at national 
laboratories and universities hungry to develop that 
technology. And that plan has been authorized but has not yet 
been implemented. In order to be a world leader, we need to 
implement that plan and increase its speed aggressively.
    The third reason I'm hopeful is the movement toward public-
private partnerships. And we know that when the public and 
private sectors work together and recognize what each side is 
good at, we create vibrant ecosystems. We saw this in 
commercial space with NASA (National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration) and SpaceX. We saw it even more recently with 
the COVID-19 vaccine. Working together, we can drastically 
reduce timelines to not just first-of-a-kind but large markets. 
And the recent Energy Act of 2020 passed into law has just such 
a milestone-based program for fusion, and that needs to be 
implemented.
    Commercial fusion energy is within our grasp as a viable 
source of clean energy led by the United States if we act now. 
I am very excited to have this panel and have this Committee 
take a look at this and open the discussion. Thank you.
    [The prepared statement of Dr. Mumgaard follows:]

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you, Dr. Mumgaard.
    Dr. McCarthy, you are now recognized.

               TESTIMONY OF DR. KATHRYN McCARTHY,

               DIRECTOR, U.S. ITER PROJECT OFFICE

    Dr. McCarthy. Thank you very much. Chairman Bowman and 
Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Weber and Ranking Member 
Lucas, and Members of the Committee, thank you for this 
opportunity to discuss fusion energy. My name is Kathy 
McCarthy. I'm the Associate Laboratory Director for Fusion and 
Fission Energy and Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and 
Director of the U.S. ITER project.
    The world is facing an urgent climate and energy crisis. 
Here in the United States we need a multipronged approach to 
meet our climate and energy goals. Today's nuclear energy from 
fission reactors provides abundant baseload carbon-free energy. 
Sustaining our current fleet is key to bridging to the near-
term option, which is advanced nuclear reactors. Both current 
and advanced nuclear reactors are supported by the recently 
passed infrastructure bill, and ORNL is proud to play key roles 
in each.
    But nuclear fusion is still the Holy Grail for energy. 
Fusion has the potential to provide abundant, safe, carbon-free 
energy for thousands of years and beyond. The path to fusion 
energy has benefited from a number of recent advances, 
including expanded scientific understanding of fusion plasma is 
key to preparing for ITER operations. ITER tokamak assembly and 
overall progress, the United States has already delivered the 
first two modules for the heart of ITER, the central solenoid 
magnet. Exciting results from the National Ignition Facility at 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, accelerated 
understanding of plasma performance thanks to high-performance 
computing, and progress in the fusion industry with signs of 
successful leveraging of national laboratory expertise. It's 
important to have multiple paths to fusion under development 
given how challenging it is. Having multiple approaches reduces 
risk. Our investment in ITER remains vital to U.S. fusion 
goals.
    The recent National Academies of Science, Engineering, and 
Medicine report, ``Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid,'' states 
that, ``Technology and research results for U.S. investments in 
ITER, coupled with a strong foundation of research funded by 
the Department of Energy, positioned the United States to begin 
planning for its first fusion pilot plant. Much of the 
experience gained through the ITER process is relevant to a 
pilot plant regardless of its configuration.''
    Already the challenge of designing, fabricating, 
delivering, and assembling first-of-a-kind components into the 
ITER tokamak is yielding practical fusion reactor experience. 
Domestic supply chains are being developed, fabrication 
challenges are being resolved, and integration issues are being 
addressed, all to assemble the world's first nuclear-certified 
fusion reactor.
    In addition, the U.S. work force and fusion leadership is 
being maintained and further developed. For about 9 percent 
toward construction costs and 13 percent toward operation 
costs, the United States receives 100 percent of ITER's 
science, technology, and associated intellectual property.
    Recent reports from the scientific and engineering 
community have shown that the United States is now ready to add 
significant attention to fusion technology to develop a 
practical path to a fusion pilot plant. I was a member of the 
National Academies Committee that authored the report on 
``Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid.'' Our report emphasizes the 
need for investment in several areas to put the United States 
on a competitive path for a future fusion energy industry. Our 
final report states that, ``Successful operation of a pilot 
plant in the 2025 to 2040 timeframe requires urgent investments 
by DOE and private industry. Both resolve the remaining 
technical and scientific issues and to design, construct, and 
commission a pilot plant.
    In addition to what we gain from ITER, a path to a pilot 
plant demands operations of facilities such as the DIII-D 
tokamak at General Atomics in California and the Material 
Plasma Exposure eXperiment, MPEX, now under construction at Oak 
Ridge National Laboratory. Additional technology testing 
facilities and innovations are needed, as outlined in the 
report, such as a prototypic neutron source for testing of 
advanced structural and functional materials; integrated first 
wall and blanket testing to advance fuel producing technology 
readiness; and innovations in boundary plasma science, fueling 
technologies, and gas processing. All of these efforts will 
help fusion reach commercial viability.
    U.S. ITER, Oak Ridge, and many of our other national 
laboratories are making crucial contributions to advance fusion 
science and technology and are engaged with industry to solve 
these challenges. These efforts, with an increased focus on 
technology, position our Nation to include nuclear fusion in 
our long-term carbon-free energy portfolio.
    Thank you for your interest and your time today. I welcome 
any questions that you may have.
    [The prepared statement of Dr. McCarthy follows:]

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you, Dr. McCarthy.
    At this time we will begin our first round of questions. I 
now recognize myself for 5 minutes.
    Dr. Carter, thank you for your testimony. You stated that 
the overarching message that you want to convey today is that 
now is the time to move aggressively toward the development and 
deployment of fusion energy. Can you say more about what is 
unique about this particular moment in the course of fusion 
energy development in comparison to, say, 5 years ago or 20 
years ago? And can we really expect fusion to make a real 
contribution to climate action in the United States, for 
example, given how quickly we need to get to a zero carbon 
grid?
    Dr. Carter. Thanks for the question. I would say this. The 
landscape has changed dramatically over the last decade. I will 
reiterate what I said in my brief remarks. There are really 
three reasons for why the time is now. The scientific and 
technical progress that I outlined that positions us to make 
the next step, the growth of the private sector, that is 
tremendously important. It puts into place interest from the 
private sector and pushing commercialization.
    And another thing that's very important that we lacked even 
5 years ago was a vision and a strategy within the U.S. program 
to execute and develop fusion energy. To elaborate more 
briefly, we've advanced significantly in our predictive 
capabilities for fusion plasmas. We've used these to reach 
record magnetically confined pressure in tokamaks, for example, 
used that understanding to enable the record NIF shot that I 
mentioned, reiterate the CFS result. And, again, this is really 
a gamechanger for fusion, as Bob pointed out, opening up the 
operating space for fusion energy.
    Again, this--to reiterate the strategy, we haven't 
developed a new strategy since maybe the early 2000's. The 
program had been receiving--as a science program, we didn't 
really have a vision for where to go. With the National 
Academies' report in 2019 and the recent report by FESAC and by 
the National Academies to bring fusion to the U.S. grid, we now 
have a consensus vision for when--where fusion energy 
development needs to go in the United States, and this is 
incredibly important.
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you. Dr. McCarthy, you discuss how 
fusion energy is a natural progression in the development of 
nuclear energy technology. I'm wondering if you can elaborate 
on why fusion energy is the next step beyond advanced fission. 
What are the potential benefits of fusion compared to fission, 
including with respect to safety concerns and the challenges 
associated with radioactive waste?
    Dr. McCarthy. So absolutely. First of all--and you heard a 
little bit about this already. Fusion has the potential to 
provide practically limitless energy. The fuel is readily 
available, and the byproducts of the fuel, byproducts of the 
reaction are neutrons and helium for a traditional deuterium-
tritium fuel cycle, which themselves are not radioactive but do 
produce some radioactivity when neutrons, for example, are 
absorbed by structural materials. But that radioactivity that 
results from the fusion operation does not have to be isolated 
for the long periods of time that fission reactor waste needs 
to be isolated, so that would be one of the advantages.
    With respect to safety, fusion reactors are naturally safe 
in terms of shutting themselves down and don't pose the hazard 
of widespread release of radioactivity.
    And I think, you know, one of the important things--and I 
think it might have been Troy or Tammy that touched on this a 
little bit--is energy justice. This fuel, as I said earlier, is 
readily available and broadly available both nationally and 
internationally. So I think those are a few of the reasons why 
it's the natural progression beyond fission.
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you very much. And my apologies to 
everyone. I seem to have skipped Sir Dr. Steven Cowley's 
testimony, my bad. Someone on my team will be fired today.
    Dr. Cowley, please provide your testimony. I am so sorry, 
sir. I will send you flowers. Please forgive me.

                TESTIMONY OF DR. STEVEN COWLEY,

         DIRECTOR, PRINCETON PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY

    Dr. Cowley. The flowers are not necessary, sir.
    Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, Subcommittee 
Chairman Bowman, Ranking Member Weber, and Committee Members, 
thank you very much for the invitation to testify today. I am 
the Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a 
Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University, which 
manages PPPL, the lead national laboratory for fusion and 
plasma physics. The entire fusion community is deeply grateful 
to this Committee for its long-standing commitment to the 
development of fusion energy. It is an honor indeed to appear 
before you.
    We've heard from several people that fusion is very 
desirable, but do we need fusion? The short answer is yes. 
Reaching net zero by midcentury will require hundreds of 
gigawatts of zero-carbon firm electrical generating capacity. 
Firm means sources that are not dependent on the Sun or wind 
and can be switched on and off at will. As my Princeton 
colleague Jesse Jenkins emphasized at a recent PCAST hearing, a 
truly sustainable, firm energy source is needed. Fusion is one 
of the very few options and perhaps the best to meet that need 
and is therefore essential that we move to realize fusion 
electricity production as fast as possible.
    I am more optimistic than at any time during my career that 
we are on the home stretch to fusion electricity. Why? This 
hasn't really been mentioned. The last decade has seen a huge 
change in our scientific understanding of fusion systems. In 
particular, the advances in theory, algorithms, and high-
performance computing have finally made it possible to predict 
the turbulence that dominates all fusion experiments and has 
frankly frustrated progress. This is a fiendishly difficult 
problem, and its solution is a triumph of the DOE-funded 
program.
    But it's more than an intellectual breakthrough. For the 
first time it is now possible to design and optimize fusion 
systems on the computer. Current fusion reactor designs all 
require innovations to make them viable candidates for the 
first generation of fusion plants. The Princeton Plasma Physics 
Laboratory with industry and university partners is addressing 
the need by combining model virtual engineering and the latest 
fusion science to innovate computation. This modern methodology 
has been remarkably successful in industry from the new space 
industry to the automobile industry. And it's a powerful new 
tool to shorten the time to fusion electricity.
    So what should we do now to hasten the arrival of fusion 
electricity? Dr. McCarthy has emphasized the central importance 
of ITER, and Dr. Carter has described the community consensus 
plan, which the leadership of this Committee has wisely 
requested. I will highlight some aspects of the plan.
    The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 
earlier this year published a report ``Bringing Fusion to the 
U.S. Grid.'' That report has two recommendations. And the first 
one is a very clear, ambitious goal. The Department of Energy 
and the private sector should produce net electricity in a 
fusion plant in the United States in the 2035, 2040 timeframe.
    The first step toward this goal is contained in the 
author's second recommendation. DOE should move forward now to 
foster the creation of national teams, including public-private 
partnerships, that will develop conceptual pilot plant designs 
and technology roadmaps that will lead us to an engineering 
design of a pilot plant that will bring fusion to commercial 
viability. This is the key. We must urgently form these teams 
and develop these conceptual designs. It is critical if we are 
to deliver fusion fast that several conceptual designs are 
developed. We need to let the ideas compete. By driving design 
choices in a modern virtual environment, we can work backward 
to determine what must be done now.
    Attractive pilot plants demand high confinement. Thus the 
promise of superior confinement on the national spheric tokamak 
experiment upgrade under construction at Princeton and the 
remarkably high performance of the DIII tokamak at General 
Atomics, really the highest performing tokamak in the world in 
terms of per-unit mass if you like must be cornerstones of the 
U.S. program, cornerstones that will help ITER succeed and 
reduce the cost and scale of fusion pilot plants.
    Finally, we need to accelerate, first, the development of 
fusion materials for a fusion power plant; second, the 
technology for making electricity from fusion heat; and third, 
the systems to breed and separate the fusion fuel tritium in 
the plant. These issues are being set aside while we develop 
the plasma confinement systems. If we are to speed fusion 
electricity delivery, these issues can and should be addressed 
in parallel with enhancing confinement and the designs of pilot 
plants.
    This Committee had the wisdom to authorize the activities 
described above in the Energy Act of 2020 and more recently the 
Department of Energy's Science for the Future Act. We look 
forward to full implementation and funding of these activities, 
which will indeed accelerate the arrival of fusion electricity.
    Thank you again for your support, and I look forward to 
your questions.
    [The prepared statement of Dr. Cowley follows:]

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    Chairman Bowman. Thank you so much, Dr. Cowley.
    I now recognize Mr. Weber for 5 minutes of questions.
    Mr. Weber. Well, thank you, Chairman.
    Gosh, I don't--pardon me--quite know where to start. I'll 
start backward, I guess, with Dr. Crowley, although you said 
he's been knighted, so we're supposed to call him ``Sir.'' What 
I want to know from Dr. Crowley is whenever he testifies, does 
he get like a surcharge? That's what I want to know.
    Dr. Crowley, you said something very interesting. You 
actually put a timeframe on it, a 2035 to 2040 timeframe. Are 
supercomputers going to be needed to hit that timeframe?
    Dr. Cowley. Absolutely. That's the big advantage we have 
now that we didn't have, you know, 25 years ago, and it's what 
the Department of Energy has spent a great deal of time 
developing, yes. If you look at the way engineering is 
developed in the new space industry and in----
    Mr. Weber. My pods are about to die. I'm sorry, go ahead.
    Dr. Cowley. Sorry. And also in the new development of new 
nuclear reactors. It's the use of the computer to shorten the 
development time is absolutely critical.
    Mr. Weber. Well, thank you for that. I'm getting a note 
that my AirPods here are low on battery, so let me jump over to 
Dr. Carter if I may.
    Well, first of all, let me say it's no secret U.S. 
leadership in fusion research is being threatened by large 
investments made by other nations. Luckily, I'm of the 
opinion--I think we would all agree--that the United States has 
the advantage of extensive public-private partnerships. In 
fact, one of the witnesses said that. This makes it easy for 
companies wanting to pursue fusion energy to utilize DOE's 
world-class facilities and research. The more players in the 
game, the higher the likelihood someone succeeds. And in fact, 
Dr. Crowley, you--or Sir Dr. Crowley, you said that several 
critical designs needed to be developed and then work backward 
to pick the best one, so I'm encouraged that we're all kind of 
on that same wavelength.
    But I want to go to Dr. Carter. Dr. Carter, based on your 
work chairing the FES Long-Range Planning Subcommittee can you 
give us a sense of what level of investment is required to 
compete with these international investments, please?
    Dr. Carter. Well, I can just comment on what we're seeing 
in the landscape elsewhere. One important program that's been 
brought up already, the U.K., is the STEP (Spherical Tokamak 
for Energy Production) program. That investment over the next 
few years is on the order of half a million dollars--half a 
billion, sorry, dollars. To really get--kick that program off, 
it's also been--that level of funding has helped attract 
companies, so, as was already mentioned, General Fusion decided 
to site their program at Culham Labs because of that, the 
resources provided, and the ability to be there.
    If you look more broadly beyond that one program, the 
United States is falling behind. The level of investment that 
was, you know, authorized by this Committee is the level of 
investment that will put us on the right path, that accelerated 
path, and put us in line more with what the investment is 
across the world. You look at China, the investment there is 
also tremendous both from the public and private sector, and, 
you know, they're basically building one of everything is their 
approach to try and--those devices they're building are devices 
that are ideas that have come out of the U.S. program. In a 
sense, U.K. and China are beating us to the punch on our own 
plan for fusion energy development.
    Mr. Weber. Well, so with that in mind--thank you--this is 
for all witnesses, but I don't have a clock in front of me. How 
much--Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have left?
    Chairman Bowman. One minute, 25 seconds.
    Mr. Weber. OK. If we cannot match other nations dollar for 
dollar, what steps if any can we take to maximize the 
investment of dollars do we have? And, Dr. McCarthy, I'll go 
back to you.
    Dr. McCarthy. So I think it's really important--this has 
been brought up--is these public-private partnerships. And I'll 
emphasize the national teams that Dr. Cowley talked about 
because each of these members of these teams brings in a 
different sort of perspective. Industry has the goal-driven 
point. National laboratories have a breadth of expertise that 
doesn't exist elsewhere. Universities have the broad--or the 
deep research expertise. You put all of that together, a 
diverse team that looks at things from different angles, that's 
what's got to happen because these are very challenging 
problems to solve. Each of these areas has very challenging 
problems to solve. So I would say that is the place to go, 
programs like INFUSE, which already exist, but potentially a 
larger INFUSE program.
    Mr. Weber. OK. Thank you for that. Dr. Mumgaard, same 
question for you.
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, I echo the other panelists, that for the 
United States to succeed, we're not going to be able to just 
match, you know, China dollar for dollar. We're going to have 
to leverage what we're really good at. And what we're really 
good at in the United States is really at the intersection of 
different fields and different types of enterprises. So 
entrepreneurship has shown over and over again that it can pick 
winners and that can take risks and move very, very quickly. At 
the same time, it's not going to do what the national labs do 
in terms of deep expertise. It's not going to replace 
universities. So if you put them together, you get a really, 
really powerful combination. And we've seen that in 
pharmaceuticals with NIH (National Institutes of Health) 
working with the pharmaceutical companies. We've seen that in 
aerospace. We've seen that over and over again that that's how 
you produce really the fastest least-resource-intensive path to 
a solution, and particularly a solution that can win the 
market. It's not good enough just to build a pilot plant. We 
need to build a pilot plant that people want to buy. And then 
we need to make a pilot plant that people can build many, many 
of. And so you need that whole spectrum all in one spot, and 
the United States is historically very good at that.
    Mr. Weber. Well, good. I appreciate that, and, Mr. 
Chairman, I yield back. Thank you.
    Staff. Ms. Stevens is recognized.
    Ms. Stevens. Great, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and 
thank you to panelists for just a great hearing.
    Obviously, in your testimonies you touched on and cited 
legislation by this Committee to better guide the Department of 
Energy's fusion research activities. This obviously includes 
the Committee's DOE Science for the Future Act, which our Chair 
discussed, as well as significant investments in fusion R&D and 
facility construction that we included in the contribution to 
the Build Back Better Act.
    Just wanted to take a scope from, you know, a handful of 
you, Dr. Ma, Dr. Mumgaard, Dr. Carter, and Dr. Crowley. You 
know, what might we be missing from legislation at this point, 
gaps in the laws that we should be considering to address at 
this point? Dr. Ma, go ahead.
    Dr. Ma. Thank you for the question. I'll just start by 
saying we're very, very appreciative of the support of the 
House and in particular this Committee for both the long-term 
sustained funding for the NIF and for your commitment to 
establishing an inertial fusion energy program.
    There are a few areas that I know the fusion community 
would like a little more support on. I'll actually hand it over 
to Dr. Carter to touch on.
    Dr. Carter. I can take it from there. I mean, I'll add my 
thanks. I think these laws align very well and bills with what 
the priorities are expressed are important and extremely 
helpful. Where we may need more help--and I think this I'll 
pass to Dr. Mumgaard to expand on--I think we need ways to 
expand and improve and better ways to partner with the private 
sector to really get this done, so any help we can get to 
improve that within the DOE would be helpful.
    The other issue I'll raise is to accelerate the timeline, 
we need to find ways to speed up development of needed 
facilities, experimental and testing facilities. So currently, 
you know, we can look at a decade or more to get an important 
facility built in the current framework. We need to speed that 
up. And likely the answer there, too, is finding ways to 
partner with private--the private sector. So any assistance in 
those two issues would be very helpful.
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, I'd agree the legislation has been 
extremely helpful. It's given clear directives. It's set the 
United States on a strategy and it's authorized new facilities, 
but we haven't implemented it yet. So if you actually look at 
what is in the DOE budget proposal, it's not aligned with the 
legislation, so we've got to get that fixed. I know that's not 
the role here, but it is something that we're very excited to 
see happen.
    Additionally, there are some elements that have been 
proposed that we need to maybe tune a little bit, so, for 
instance, the public-private partnerships. There's multiple 
ways to do that, and we've seen that get tried across the DOE, 
NASA, and if we think creatively about how to do that, things 
like other transaction authorities, things like new temporary 
types of offices--or programs inside the DOE, we can probably 
tune these pretty well to get really the best of both worlds 
and the key challenge being that this is new to the DOE Office 
of Fusion Energy Sciences, that this is----
    Ms. Stevens. Yes.
    Dr. Mumgaard [continuing]. Not what we've done previously, 
so we have to learn new skills. But we can pull those skills in 
from, say, ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency--Energy), 
which the legislation did say go work with ARPA-E and NE 
(Office of Nuclear Energy). So those types of expansive, 
collaborative, new types of thinking about how to set up 
programs, that's very, very helpful.
    Ms. Stevens. Yes. And the clock's back. OK, let's see. I've 
got 1:20. It's hard to tell where I am on the time. But I guess 
my follow up question to all this--and thank you, really 
helpful feedback there and always interesting when we try and 
engage in the, you know, directive of the public-private 
partnership space. But I'm curious about that last point that 
you were making, Dr. Mumgaard about costs and materials and 
particularly, as Dr. Crowley, you know, just answered a 
question related to high-performance computing, you know, 
supercomputing is very expensive. What else do we need to know 
about the accessibility of materials, cost, storage, access 
points, you know, multistate collaborations, things along those 
lines?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, I--I'll jump in there.
    Ms. Stevens. Yes.
    Dr. Mumgaard. You know, fundamentally, fusion is intriguing 
because the--you know, the materials that a fusion machine are 
made out of are steel and concrete. And so in the long run it 
should be economic. It's--if we get better----
    Ms. Stevens. Well, steel is expensive now though, you know, 
Dr. Mumgaard.
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, but per unit--if you think about it in 
terms of per-unit of----
    Ms. Stevens. Yes.
    Dr. Mumgaard [continuing]. Energy produced, it's much lower 
than even a fossil industry building in terms of the capital. 
So you have an advantage over the long run. And over the near 
term, though, reiterating what Dr. Cowley said, the advances in 
computing mean that--you don't have to build as many machines 
upfront, which you can do many, many more experiments in the 
computer than you can in real life, and that's a big time-saver 
and a big cost-saver even though----
    Ms. Stevens. Yes.
    Dr. Mumgaard [continuing]. It might be a case that 
supercomputing----
    Ms. Stevens. Well, the access might be expensive, but I'm 
out of time. Thank you, Dr. Mumgaard, really looking forward to 
the rest of the questions today.
    With that, Mr. Chair, I'll yield back.
    Staff. Mr. Lucas is recognized.
    Mr. Garcia is recognized.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the 
witnesses, very interesting, intriguing technologies, and I 
think many of you are hitting it right on the head, a very 
hopeful era in our Nation's path to clean energy--sustainable 
clean energy.
    Dr. Ma, I wanted to touch on what you are doing, this gain 
of energy of .7, 70 percent that you have achieved. Can you 
talk to sort of what are the next incremental goals that your 
team is looking to achieve? And then also, can you talk to--
this is a record that's tied a previous achievement out of the 
U.K., right, but they did this back in, what, 1997. So can you 
kind of give us a lay of the land as where are--I'll call them 
competitor nations are in this progress? What led to the U.K. 
effectively stalling out at .7 and not achieving higher, or 
have they in other forms, in other technologies? And what do we 
need to do either differently or in addition to what's already 
been done in order to get to ignition? Just kind of give us an 
overview of the roadmap to at least 100 percent ignition.
    Dr. Ma. Thank you, Representative Garcia, for the question. 
This achievement that we've achieved of a gain of .7 means that 
we've effectively gotten close to the same amount of energy out 
of the target that we put in with the laser. And from a physics 
perspective what that means is we have been able to start the--
use a flame front to basically start the ignition of a piece of 
wood to burn. So effectively we are there.
    And the next steps for us here on the NIF are we are 
repeating the shot now to demonstrate robustness, 
repeatability, make sure that we understand the physics 
performance and the key metrics to--that affect that 
performance. And we do believe that with the NIF we will be 
able to demonstrate much higher gains coming up. And in fact 
this is part of our NNSA mission to achieve very high fusion 
yields for those missions.
    You're right that this does compare to a result out of the 
U.K. back in 1997 on a tokamak. However, our results on the NIF 
is the first time that we have had what we call a burning 
plasma where the energy coming out of the plasma exceeds the 
thermal heating that went in. And now the burn is very robust. 
And so it's like that flame on that piece of wood is growing.
    I will have to defer to my colleagues to explain why that 
result has stalled on the tokamaks. I'm not completely clear. 
But I think we all know that with the current progress that 
we've had in emerging technologies, computation, as Dr. 
Mumgaard has referred to, where we're poised to make a lot of 
great progress soon.
    Mr. Garcia. Is it fair to say that 200 percent or so is a 
rough target to effectively offset some of the efficiency 
losses through the process for actually having greater energy 
out versus in or is that not fair and, Sir Cowley, I see you 
there looking to speak. Go ahead, sir.
    Dr. Cowley. Oh, I guess I should speak up for the U.K. 
result. I used to run that facility. And the--it was of course 
an immense result in 1997. But the results on NIF is actually 
very interesting because the heat from the fusion is 
contributing to the gain whereas that wasn't true in the 
European facility in 1997. And that's what we mean by burning. 
And so if this can be improved at NIF, they will be making most 
of the fusion happen because they made fusion happen. And that 
is--that's the goal that we really want to do.
    Now, what happened in the U.K. program was that those 
results resulted in the design of ITER because ITER is--that 
machine is called JET, the Joint European Torus, and ITER is 
just two times JET.
    Mr. Garcia. OK.
    Dr. Cowley. That shape and that design is, you know, at 
higher field, for instance, is roughly what SPARC is. That's 
the most common configuration at that time. And it's really 
been sparked by those 1997 results on JET.
    Mr. Garcia. Great, OK. So we are leveraging it and 
synergizing.
    I'm out of time, Mr. Chair. I'll yield back.
    Staff. Mr. McNerney is recognized.
    Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chair, and I thank the 
witnesses. I've been a longtime and enthusiastic supporter of 
fusion energy starting with work at Los Alamos National lab 
when I was a grad student. And I believe fusion development is 
moving quickly and that, once commercially available, will be 
an important contributor to our baseload power needs.
    The national labs, higher educational institutes, private 
companies in the United States are performing some of the most 
critical and groundbreaking technology in fusion in the world. 
So in testimony today we've heard about two of the U.S.-based 
magnetic fusion facilities. I was fortunate earlier this year 
to visit the DIII-D in San Diego and witnessed some impressive 
research.
    Dr. Cowley, in your testimony you mentioned the promise of 
DIII-D, tokamak, and the work at Princeton. How important is 
the continued improvement of both of these facilities to the 
nascent U.S. fusion enterprise, and what scale investments you 
think are necessary?
    Dr. Cowley. The DIII-D tokamak pound for pound is the 
highest performing machine in the world. And that's because 
U.S. scientific leadership has allowed us to understand how to 
optimize the situation. And one of the things that we need to 
understand is that fusion will be cheaper if we can make 
confinement better. And that's really being pushed forward 
immensely by General Atomics. The machine we're building at 
Princeton is to try and leverage that in a more compact 
configuration so that we can make smaller, cheaper, faster 
fusion devices. It's true that we may have enough confinement 
now to go all the way to fusion, but if we get more 
confinement, it'll be a better fusion reactor when we get 
there. And so it's very critical to keep the confinement 
program going because that way we'll get the best out of ITER 
and we'll get the best out of our pilot plants.
    Mr. McNerney. Thank you. Do you think there's any policy 
change that would facilitate the DIII-D program?
    Dr. Cowley. Well, I think that it would be good to see 
DIII-D get an upgrade because I think that the team that works 
there has had some of the most amazing breakthroughs in the 
science. And, you know, this is not my team so I can say it 
from a distance. And to keep that going as we're approaching 
ITER operation by giving, you know, some kind of upgrade to 
that device would be--I think would greatly improve our chances 
of getting the best out of ITER, for instance, and the best out 
of SPARC and the best out of the pilot plant.
    Mr. McNerney. Sure. Sure, thank you.
    Dr. Ma, it's good to see you this morning. I visited the 
NIF on multiple occasions starting in 2007 and was more than 
excited to hear about the breakthrough this August. In your 
testimony you commented on how the mission at the Lawrence 
Livermore National Lab imposes limits on what research can be 
pursued at the lab. Do you have recommendations for how LLNL 
and other national lab sites can translate breakthroughs like 
the one at Livermore this August into long-term fusion energy?
    Dr. Ma. Thank you for the question. Yes, so the result that 
we recently had on the NIF demonstrates the basic scientific 
feasibility of laser-driven inertial fusion. And with that we 
can now start to also validate our simulation codes in this 
regime of very high neutron yields. And it gives us a great 
amount of confidence that we can now use our codes to further 
scale to different ignition designs and test out alternative 
concepts.
    Now, the NIF is currently the leading experimental 
capability for studying these ignition schemes relevant to 
inertial fusion energy at near to full-scale, and so because of 
that, it's very valuable and we should absolutely use it to 
test out other experimental concepts that can help advance our 
overall physics understanding and continue to validate our 
simulation codes.
    Mr. McNerney. So how is artificial intelligence being used?
    Dr. Ma. That is a wonderful question. Our experiments are 
so incredibly complex. There's sometimes 10,000 different 
physics parameters that might go into defining a particular 
experiment. So we absolutely need to use high-performance 
computing to help us to do the best experiment possible and use 
artificial intelligence and machine learning to get a better 
handle on all of those different physics parameters and use 
that also for advanced capabilities such as multimodal data 
understanding, so taking in all our different types of 
information and building a more complete picture. And then 
also, as we do experiments on these new facilities, subscale 
facilities coming up where we can do experiments much, much 
faster, we can match that to machine learning to extract 
greater insights.
    Mr. McNerney. Too many dimensions for the human mind maybe. 
Thank you very much, and I yield back.
    Staff. Ranking Member Lucas is recognized.
    Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I mentioned in my 
opening comment, I'm a strong advocate for investing in U.S.--
the U.S. contributions to ITER, the world's leading 
international research collaboration on fusion energy, which 
received continued bipartisan support from this Committee. In 
your testimony you note that while the ITER project is 
physically located in France and much of our contribution to 
the project are in fact used to support research, but much of 
our contributions are used to focus on research here at home. 
Dr. McCarthy, can you please expand on these comments and 
explain--providing specific examples if you can--ways in which 
U.S. contributions to the ITER program have directly 
contributed to scientific discoveries and successes in the U.S. 
fusion community? And along with that, what would it mean to 
the U.S. research community if we were to fail to meet our 
commitments to the ITER program?
    Dr. McCarthy. OK. Thank you very much for that question. So 
one of the things that the recent National Academies report 
looked at was specifically how ITER is contributing and will 
continue to contribute to fusion development broadly. And let's 
talk, for example, about magnet technologies. We heard about 
Commonwealth Fusion's recent accomplishment. This is a great 
step toward being able to have more compact and more cost-
effective devices.
    The research that was done specifically for the 
superconducting magnets for ITER is directly providing the base 
for those sorts of accomplishments. And one of the things I 
think it's really important to point out is as you actually 
build things, as you scale things up--because ITER was designed 
based on known technologies all demonstrated at some scale, 
sometimes at a much smaller scale, you learn things when you 
scale up. You learn things that you wouldn't expect. And so 
there's a lot of engineering challenges. And we tend to, in the 
fusion program, talk about the plasma, but that is not all 
there is. Now, we've got to look at the bigger picture. It 
includes things like magnets but also includes things like 
blanket technologies materials and things like that.
    Other examples, another one is fuel cycle and continuous 
fueling because ITER will run on a deuterium-tritium fuel 
cycle, and there's a lot of work that's being done there in 
terms of the fueling, disruption mitigation, how do you 
dissipate the heat in and off normal event? That research is 
being done for ITER. And there are many other things as well. 
Plasma heating, that is another area.
    But it's really important in that practical application, 
writing specifications that industry then can develop this 
hardware that meets these very exacting specifications that fit 
into this machine. That's preparing our U.S. industry for a 
future fusion industry.
    Mr. Lucas. Thank you. And I guess I address my next couple 
questions to whoever on the panel would like to touch it. Given 
the panel's various experiences of DOE's Office of Science's 
Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, do you have any 
recommendations on how the Fusion Energy Sciences program could 
be more--could more effectively engage with other relevant 
programs within the Office of Science and, for that matter, the 
rest of the Department if necessary?
    I maybe--may--could I just go to Dr. Ma first, and I'd like 
to hear your thoughts on that, and then turn to Dr. Carter with 
the same question. After that, whoever else would like to touch 
it.
    Are you muted, Dr. Ma, or am I muted?
    Staff. Dr. Ma, your audio is out.
    Dr. Ma. Apologies. How's this? Can you hear me?
    Staff. Yes.
    Mr. Lucas. Yes.
    Dr. Ma. OK. Yes.
    Staff. OK.
    Dr. Ma. Apologies. Yes, I would say that there--a 
recommendation of the report and a feeling amongst the 
community is there are many great opportunities for our 
different agencies to work more closely together. There are 
some great examples now of Fusion Energy Sciences doing joint 
calls for proposals with NSF or with the NNSA, and that has--
those have been hugely valuable and fruitful for the academic 
community. We can also work more closely with ARPA-E to harness 
public-private partnerships as well. And so this is something 
that we have not fully realized within Fusion Energy Sciences, 
and it's a very economical way as well to grow the overall 
research portfolio.
    Mr. Lucas. And if the Chairman would humor me, could I ask 
Dr. Carter that same question?
    Dr. Carter. Yes, I'll just amplify----
    Staff. Yes, sir.
    Dr. Carter [continuing]. What--oh, sorry. I'll just amplify 
what Dr. Ma said. I think that the--we brought up already the 
need to do better in the sector--interacting with the private 
sector. ARPA-E does that well, and there's already a 
collaboration with FES. I think that needs to be amplified. We 
also look for help from other agencies that are doing this 
already, so look at Office of Nuclear Energy within DOE, look 
at NASA. There are other programs that we can learn from. We'll 
need unique ideas for Fusion Energy Sciences, but we can learn 
from those programs and try to implement them within DOE.
    Mr. Lucas. Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield 
back.
    Staff. Mr. Casten is recognized.
    Mr. Casten. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks so much to all our 
witnesses here.
    Dr. Mumgaard, in your testimony you mentioned that if--I 
guess you expressed a concern that if the United States doesn't 
act now, we run the risk of private companies investing and 
constructing their fusion power plants elsewhere in the world 
and that Congress and DOE should move quickly to fully fund and 
implement milestone-based cost-shared development programs to 
ensure that the first fusion power plant is built in the United 
States.
    Based on the recommendations from National Academies and 
FESAC's long-range planning, do you believe that the Department 
of Energy is at a point to support these commercialization 
plans?
    Dr. Mumgaard. The legislation lays out a really good 
pathway, but we've not yet seen the activity from the 
Department itself, so, for instance, there was a request for 
information about the--how to maybe implement a cost-share 
program, what various private entities thought would be 
helpful. That was submitted almost a year ago, and we've not 
yet seen, you know, any sort of calls or establishment of an 
office to try to enact those things.
    And so, you know, right now, it's--the signals are not 
great. And I think that, you know, had a strong contributing 
factor for people looking elsewhere. You know, is the United 
States' fusion program going to enact these and put in these 
new programs and these new facilities, or do you go with 
someone like the U.K. who's got steel in the ground and 
programs that are open and taking applications?
    Mr. Casten. And just to be clear you're talking about, you 
know, the N equals 1 commercial plant, right? I mean----
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes.
    Mr. Casten [continuing]. You know, I--in another lifetime I 
did a lot of stuff on technology deployment and, you know, the 
escrow for power generation is always about 20 years from N 
equals 1 to 50 percent penetration. That was true for air 
derivative gas turbines, combined cycles, the wind turbines 
that my friend Mr. McNerney was involved in. Are we--assuming 
we got to N equals 1 first, are we doing enough to actually 
make sure that we ramp up that curve if we are in fact going to 
be a meaningful part of decarbonizing by 2050?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, it's a great question. And you're 
exactly right. You know, N equals 1, it gets you, you know, 
only started. You also have to the policies in place to be able 
to scale that once you have success. And so in the United 
States we have a strong history across other energy 
technologies of things like the Loan Guarantee Office, for 
instance. You know, how do we get fusion when it's ready ready 
for the Loan Guarantee Office? We also need to ensure that we 
have the right regulatory treatment. The U.K. has leaned 
heavily into that and produced a preliminary report on how they 
intend to do it, and the United States' NRC (Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission) is also taking a look at that in part of a public 
hearing process.
    So I'd say that, you know, the longer term view is we're 
well-positioned, but this intermediate-term view is a bit 
uncertain.
    Mr. Casten. OK, thank you. Dr. Carter, I want to get your 
thoughts on the same topic. You--you know, you made some 
similar comments in your testimony that a consensus FESAC's 
planning made recommendations for DOE action to reorient the 
U.S. fusion program. Do you have any recommendations, Dr. 
Carter, for ways that the Office of Science can improve its 
management of Fusion Energy Sciences going forward?
    Dr. Carter. Yes, well, we have a--we now have a vision that 
needs to be embraced. We need DOE to implement that plan and 
work with us in this direction that we know is necessary to 
realize fusion energy on an aggressive timeline. I think that 
there's likely need for change in the structure of the FES 
program. I already mentioned the need to grow. We have programs 
like INFUSE that are doing good things, but it's a very small 
program now. We need to look for other mechanisms to do 
private-public partnership, and that needs to be developed 
quickly.
    Mr. Casten. OK. Well, thank you both very much. Huge 
amounts of support for what you're doing, and I'm a big fan of 
the Loan Program Office. And if there's anything we can do to 
help make sure that that's structured to get that ramp up once 
we get to that first commercialization, please let us know and 
keep in touch. Thank you both, and I'll yield back.
    Staff. Mr. Feenstra is recognized.
    Mr. Feenstra. Thank you, Chairman Bowman and Ranking Member 
Weber. Thank you to each of the witnesses for their testimony 
and sharing their extensive research and experience with us.
    You know, the field of fusion energy holds incredible 
potential for our energy grid, and I'm so excited about it. The 
breakthroughs made since DOE's Research and Innovation Act in 
2018 and especially just this past year are just incredible and 
outstanding.
    The DOE's Ames Laboratory back in my home district is a 
world leader in materials science innovation. Several of our 
witnesses today mentioned in their written testimony the 
importance of developing new materials that can withstand the 
extreme condition of fusion reactors.
    So my question is to Dr. Crowley and then also Dr. 
McCarthy, if you could answer the same thing after Dr. Crowley. 
Do you have any recommendations on how to improve coordination 
with materials science experts and accelerate the development 
of these materials? How could the DOE and its national 
laboratories be more--or more effectively contribute to this 
effort?
    Dr. Cowley. So, I mean, this is a very interesting problem 
because we've done a bunch of very low-level studies on the 
materials as they're damaged in--by the neutrons that come out 
of fusion, but we've never had a test facility to be able to 
produce the data in which we can normalize our models onto 
that. And DOE has started a process to produce what's called a 
point neutron source to actually test materials. If you want to 
attract scientists to come into this field and help us solve 
the problem of getting optimum materials for fusion, some data 
would be fantastic. So getting that point neutron source going, 
right, which I believe could be done in a matter of a few 
years, right, and getting some data from them so that we 
finally know whether our projections of the lifetime of the raw 
material in the fusion reactor are good or not, that's an easy 
no-brainer to speed fusion forward.
    Mr. Feenstra. And, Dr. McCarthy, your thoughts on that?
    Dr. McCarthy. Yes, I absolutely agree with Dr. Cowley. And 
I want to talk a little bit more about why we need this. So if 
you look at the fusion reaction, the deuterium-tritium 
reaction, you get neutrons, very energetic, 14 MeV. You can 
compare that with the energy of a fission neutron when it's 
born, and that's 2 MeVs. So you can just think about how that 
14 MeV neutron is going to do more damage to the material.
    So we do a lot of testing in fission reactors, but we're 
limited--we can do testing in spallation sources as well, but 
we're limited because the energy, the spectrum isn't 
prototypic. So when you look at actually developing practical, 
deployable fusion energy, competitive fusion energy, you've got 
to make sure that you don't have to keep changing out the first 
wall, for example. You don't have to keep changing out 
different components. Fission reactors operate on over 90 
percent availability, and that is because they have optimized 
things. They're down very, very rarely. We have to be the same 
way. So developing these materials is important, and bringing--
for example, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we bring in our 
materials experts who are not necessarily nuclear materials 
experts because they provide a different sort of perspective. 
And I go back to these diverse teams. So bring them together, 
agree with Dr. Cowley on this fusion prototypic neutron source. 
That is going to be key to taking everything that's being done 
now and getting to practical, competitive fusion energy.
    Mr. Feenstra. Well, thank you for that, those comments. So, 
Dr. McCarthy, one more thing. So you're the Director of the 
U.S. Project Office of ITER, but ITER's central team is made up 
of seven core countries, and an ITER staff has scientists, 
engineers, and staff from all across the globe. I assume each 
of these countries have different incentives to drive research 
into fusion energy, as well as barriers to expanding the 
research. So what do you see? What are some barriers that we 
have here in Congress that we can look forward to or look at 
removing, you know, through new policies? Or which new policies 
would possibly help?
    Dr. McCarthy. So, first of all, what's fascinating is when 
you work in an international project like this--and I've been 
involved in fusion for half of my career starting with graduate 
school--scientists and engineers want to do the same thing. 
We're all focused on the same sorts of goals. Now, all of us do 
have different politics that we have to deal with. They're 
actually shockingly similar. And I can tell you my 3 years in 
Canada told me that, huh, their government is a little 
different but it's not that different.
    So one of the challenges that we in the United States face 
is--I think as everybody is aware--appropriations have been 
lower than what was baseline for the ITER project. And so in 
some areas we had to prioritize things that were on critical 
path and delay some other things. Recent appropriations have 
allowed us to do some catchup, and that has been very much 
appreciated, but we're still $97 million behind. So we're 
looking at how do we ramp up? How do we be a good partner in 
ITER? And how do we really maximize the benefit from being a 
partner in ITER? So I would say that that--that certainly is 
one of the areas.
    There are also complexities around any sort of 
international project having people--we want to have people in 
the United States when ITER operates, and there is just 
practical considerations in how you do that from a tax 
perspective and things like that, so really a big range of 
things.
    Mr. Feenstra. Thank you so much for your comments, and I 
yield back.
    Staff. Mr. Lamb is recognized.
    Mr. Lamb. Thank you, and thank you to all of our witnesses 
for joining us.
    Dr. Mumgaard, I want to say congratulations like many 
others have, I'm sure, about the successful test this summer. 
And I just wanted to ask about--your testimony touched on the 
importance of the cost-share milestone-based approach that was 
reflected in our Energy Act at the end of last year. And I was 
wondering if you could just say a few words about why that's 
important and what it's--what is important for us to make sure 
that DOE does going forward consistent with that approach?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, so that approach is from the NASA COTS 
(Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program. Also, it 
has elements that come from the advanced reactor program. The 
key thing here is that you want private industry to do what it 
does really well, which is to focus on goal-oriented execution, 
so, you know, put goals down, execute to those goals as fast as 
possible. And private industry is, you know, willing to do that 
and take the risks that are part of doing such a milestone-
based approach as long as that, you know, when it gets there, 
it knows it's part of an ecosystem that's going to help it get 
to the next step.
    And so in that cost-share program the key things are, you 
know, don't have the public program dictate exactly where to go 
or exactly how to get there but do have the public program be 
alongside so that when you do get there, you--or if you run 
into problems along the way in terms of the science and 
engineering, you get some help. And so it's really not just 
about money, it's not just about help. It's really about how to 
tie those together in a way that really frees up the private 
sector to do what it's really good at without duplicating the 
work the public side is doing while still bringing the public 
side along so that the public side can also then reap the 
rewards of having those new types of facilities. And, you know, 
that worked to very, very good effect in low-Earth orbit, 
which, you know, had a higher TRL (technology readiness level) 
level of than fusion does today, but the principles are still 
really applicable.
    Mr. Lamb. And going forward, what is the sort of important 
thing to make sure that DOE kind of stays on track or puts the 
money in the right pots, or how would you say we should be 
thinking about this for like the next 5 years?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, so thinking about it as--we want to be 
sure that we do a portfolio, so this is not just pick one. This 
is do a portfolio approach and run a process that doesn't just 
look at, say, only the scientific piece or only the piece 
that's really related to what DOE already does. Instead, run a 
process that looks holistically. Does this get to a point that 
does--that has some commercial validation in it? Are the people 
that are reactor developers, are they interested in this? Is 
the--are the utilities interested in this? And make sure we 
have that viewpoint so that it's not just is the science 
interesting or is the engineering interesting. We need to be 
able to balance those views. And the best way to do that, of 
course, is a portfolio where everyone comes, lays their cards 
at the table, and we look at the different profiles of economic 
and technical and scientific risk, and we choose a few that 
really span that. And that'll give us a good shot at this.
    Mr. Lamb. Great, thank you. That kind of leads a little bit 
into my next question, which is about what the manufacturing 
needs and the manufacturing footprint could look like later. My 
State Pennsylvania I think is the biggest State for 
manufacturing in the traditional fission pipeline when it comes 
to civilian reactors and Navy work. We're certainly up there. 
And one of the things I want to make sure of is that we are 
well-positioned for both, you know, whatever is coming in the 
advanced nuclear fission world and in the fusion world. Do you 
have any thoughts on the way that the current supply chain 
could prepare itself for, you know, being a fusion supply chain 
in the future?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, it's a great question, and it's 
something that we as industry think a lot about because for us 
to be successful, it means we have to build many, many, many 
power plants. Now, if you want to decarbonize, you're always 
talking about thousands of power plants independent of what 
technology you choose, and so you have to be sure that you're 
able to fulfill that in the long run, so you can't make choices 
that aren't manufacturable.
    Fortunately, fusion has a couple of things going for it. 
You know, it--one, you know, you make a few things and, you 
know, you make thousands, not billions. And those things are 
high-value and they take skilled laborers in many ways similar 
to like an aerospace endeavor. And in fact you see a lot of 
crossover in the private sector between aerospace investors and 
staff into fusion companies for that exact reason, which also 
means that the manufacturing exercises are things like building 
turbines or building aircraft components where they are, you 
know, manufacturing in terms of milling and forging metals. And 
also an area that you can really take advantage of, advanced 
manufacturing techniques that are up-and-coming, 3-D printing, 
better heat transfer materials by design. All of that impacts 
fusion in the same ways it impacts any other sort of mechanical 
engineering, structural engineering, thermal engineering, heavy 
type of industry. And so we see a lot of crossover there.
    Mr. Lamb. Any other witnesses want to address that? I 
thought Dr. McCarthy kind of touched on the manufacturing piece 
as well, but I didn't know if you had any specific ideas about, 
you know, either government programs or things that sort of 
traditional nuclear companies could do to get ready for this 
era or to take advantage of it when it's here.
    Dr. McCarthy. Yes, absolutely. So, first of all----
    Chairman Bowman. If you can be as brief as possible.
    Dr. McCarthy. Absolutely.
    Mr. Lamb. Go ahead, sorry.
    Dr. McCarthy. So, first of all, there's a lot of similarity 
in components and the specifications and the need to meet the 
QA (quality assurance) between fission and fusion. And so if 
you look at ITER, for example--and we do have procurements 
placed in your State of Pennsylvania--those sorts of activities 
are getting the industry ready. There's a lot of crossover. 
It's a small percentage of it that is really specialized that 
would take additional training.
    Mr. Lamb. Glad to hear it. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield 
back.
    Staff. Mr. Meijer is recognized.
    Mr. Meijer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all 
of our witnesses here for joining and sharing. This has been a 
really interesting conversation. And I think we're all 
incredibly excited at the potential here, you know, for fusion. 
You know, we see the news articles from time to time and having 
a layman's understanding, it can be hard to get a little bit of 
that perspective of scale and potential and when that future is 
realizable, so the possibility that we can have generation in 
the 2030's could be--I think it's personally incredibly 
thrilling.
    But I want to piggyback on what my colleague Mr. Lamb had 
asked about in terms of staff and talent in order to support 
this growing field and industry moving forward so that if we 
are reaching that point where there is commercially viable on-
the-grid sources of fusion energy, how do we make sure that, as 
we scale that up, that we have the requisite talent in order to 
do so.
    So, you know, I'm proud to represent Michigan, specifically 
west Michigan but just outside of our district is Michigan 
State University's FRIB, the Facility for Rare Isotopes, which 
supports the nuclear physics mission at the Office of Science 
within the Department of Energy. The facility draws talent from 
across the country and also across the world in order to 
advance discoveries of both rare isotopes, nuclear 
astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and applications for 
society, whether it's in medicine, homeland security, industry, 
or, in this case, leading toward energy production as well. So 
how can we expand the existing fusion R&D facilities so we're 
able to attract talent from across the country and across the 
world and also prepare that for the next generation?
    Dr. Cowley. One of the--that's a very good question, and I 
think what we've discovered in the last few years at 
Princeton--and I know at MIT they've discovered the same thing 
and at UCLA--is that there's a flood of young people coming 
into the field because they recognize that this is going to be 
needed to do something absolutely amazing for the planet. And 
so we have, you know, tripled our applications to our Ph.D. 
program.
    The other thing that the national lab has done--we've done 
at Princeton is to initiate an apprenticeship program because 
to make fusion systems work is not just about having, you know, 
Ph.D.-level physicists or whatever but you've got to have 
people who think with their hands and are able to construct 
anything and make anything work, right? And we've been running 
out of technicians at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab as they age 
out, and so we started an apprenticeship program with the State 
of New Jersey and started to train, you know, apprentices on a 
high level, engineering skills that are needed to do this. This 
is the kind of work force that we need to make fusion actually 
happen.
    Mr. Meijer. And I want to open that question up to any of 
the other panelists but just very quick on that front, I also 
want to add in--and maybe this is a brief follow up and could 
be incorporated with the others--who are we competing with the 
most? We mentioned the U.K. earlier as somebody who seems to be 
taking a slight step ahead, and obviously we have, you know, 
great competition with China on this front and many others. But 
on the talent front specifically, who are our greatest 
competitors?
    Dr. Mumgaard. So on the first question around the pipeline, 
I think it's really important to recognize that, as we make 
investments into these types of facilities that are recommended 
in the report, the prototypic neutron source and some of the 
material science elements, those are going to produce fusion 
generalists that are going to be Ph.D.'s and master's that come 
out of there, and they're going to come out from all over the 
world and from all over the United States in terms of 
universities that participate in those programs, and that's 
really the feedstock that someone like I as an industry wants 
to see happen because those people then can enter into, you 
know, our growing industry and train other people, people that 
we pull from the aerospace industry or from the traditional 
nuclear sector, train them up on what fusion is like and the 
different principles. And so it's not just the, you know, 
Ph.D.-level scientists. It's the whole spectrum that needs to 
grow if this is going to take off.
    In terms of where we're competing, you know, we're 
obviously competing just across all of STEM (science, 
technology, engineering, and mathematics) with other areas and 
other fields, and so fusion is very, very attractive, but 
there's lots of other fields that are very attractive, too, so 
more STEM is better across the board.
    Internationally, the--we find the, you know, the Germans, 
the Italians, and the U.K., those programs are growing new 
facilities. And those new facilities are very attractive to 
bright researchers. And so we have to have those, you know, 
competing facilities in the United States if we want to attract 
them.
    Dr. Cowley. There's a very interesting development coming 
up very, very fast in fusion. And that came out of the German 
program. For a long time we've known that three-dimensional 
devices, which are--don't have an intrinsic symmetry, might 
make very good fusion reactors but they're very complicated. 
And it wasn't until we got supercomputers to optimize those 
configurations--and this happened in the German program--and 
start to use machine learning techniques to optimize the shape 
of the coils, et cetera, that we're getting machines that 
produce fusion-level performance. And the Wendelstein machine, 
which is on the Baltic coast of Germany, has been producing 
fusion-level performance in one of these three-dimensional 
machines.
    And now we're starting to have to compete with, you know, 
the tech companies for their machine learning experts and, you 
know, their computer programming experts and stuff. I'm very 
excited by this because this is just almost pure thought 
happening. And we have a collaboration with the Simons 
Institute and the Simons Fund in New York to develop some of 
these ideas about optimizing three-dimensional machines that 
might make the best option for the future in fusion.
    Mr. Meijer. Well, thank you. And my time's expired, but I 
share the excitement over that multidisciplinary possibilities 
between the additive manufacturing, machine learning, fusion 
technology. The way that all of that is coming together is 
truly exciting.
    And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Staff. Ms. Bonamici is recognized.
    Ms. Bonamici. Thank you so much to the Chair and Ranking 
Member and to our impressive panel. I very much appreciate this 
discussion that we're having about the need for a skilled work 
force both as we rebuild infrastructure but also as we 
transition to a clean energy economy. And it's something that I 
work on frequently as a Member of the Committee on Education 
and the Workforce.
    And, Dr. Cowley, thank you for mentioning apprenticeship. 
It happens to be National Apprenticeship Week. But it really is 
a key to--you know, as we're looking at these policies and 
going forward, we need to have people with the skills to do the 
work.
    And so, Dr. Mumgaard, in your testimony you reference the 
growth of the renewable energy sector over the past decade and 
how in 2019 renewable energy consumption surpassed coal for the 
first time in more than 100 years. But how does the development 
of fusion energy compare with that sort of advent and the 
proliferation of other zero-carbon technologies like solar and 
wind, and what can we learn from the U.S. Government's efforts 
to support wind and solar? And how can we apply those lessons 
in fusion?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, it's been very interesting to watch 
fusion, you know, at this very early stage execute what looks 
like a traditional scaleup the way we saw wind and solar, the 
way that we've seen nuclear back in the 1950's, and the way 
that we see other technologies outside of energy where you 
start with a few, you know, few people that are pathfinding 
based on the basic science that then sort of pick up momentum, 
and the more people join the field. They join at all different 
stages of their careers. And hopefully we could get enough 
foresight to be able to build the programs that are going to 
train the next generation of people that we're going to need.
    And if you look at renewables in particular, you know, 
renewables had to train everyone from the people that maintain 
wind turbines to the people that manufacture solar panels to 
the people that figure out where is the best place to build one 
and where is the best place to hook it up to the grid. And so 
you have to think holistically about that whole chain of going 
from the--you know, not just the science but also the feedstock 
materials all the way to the point of operating, repairing, and 
interconnecting those machines.
    And I think fusion has a big advantage. So, one, it looks a 
lot like the energy sources that have been done before in terms 
that it's a power plant that you go out and you build. In fact, 
you could even think about repowering coal power plants----
    Ms. Bonamici. Right, right.
    Dr. Mumgaard [continuing]. And that would have a lot of the 
same people involved, a lot of the same skills. And so we can 
possibly do this quicker than what renewables did because it's 
a less drastic change and because renewables have paved such a 
good roadway for us.
    Ms. Bonamici. That's really helpful. Thank you so much.
    So, Dr. Cowley, you, I know, have overseen fusion efforts 
in the U.K. and now in the U.S., thank you for your work at the 
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. So how do the efforts in the 
United States on fusion energy compare to the U.K.'s efforts, 
and what should this Committee consider when we're crafting 
policies to help promote U.S. leadership in fusion?
    Dr. Cowley. For many, many years the United States has been 
focused on just the science of fusion. And in that it's been 
enormously successful. The ability now to actually calculate 
what goes on in the science and the understanding, and the 
DOE's Office of Science has done a wonderful job in doing that. 
But it has remained divorced from the idea of actually 
producing an energy source, and that was never true in any of 
the European programs. It--and certainly not true in the 
Chinese program. The Chinese program is--has got their plan and 
they're going to deliver on it. It's a very conservative plan 
actually with not much risk in it. But the U.S. program has 
developed the science for the world, right, and it's been--
that--I came here to graduate school and went back to the U.K., 
and we've all learned from the U.S. program. But it's curious 
in that the U.S. program has had as its goal fusion science, 
not fusion energy.
    Ms. Bonamici. And are you seeing a shift? And if so, is it 
enough of a shift to have that--the focus beyond fusion energy, 
not just fusion science?
    Dr. Cowley. I think the United States is uniquely capable 
of doing this. I mean, NE, the Nuclear Energy part of DOE, is a 
good place to start drawing resources from to be able to design 
and construct a program that'll go for energy. And I think what 
you've seen from the FESAC plan is that people want to do that. 
And we have the industrial base in order to do that. It's--you 
know, the--we're working, for instance, with a wonderful 
engineering company called Holtec out of Camden, New Jersey, 
and out of Pittsburgh on constructing pieces for this. It's 
precision engineering the United States can really do. I don't 
see any reason why the United States couldn't vault into the 
lead in a very short amount of time.
    Ms. Bonamici. That's very encouraging, and of course PPPL 
and our national labs I expect will be playing a significant 
role in bringing this transformative technology to market.
    And it looks at my time is expired. I yield back. Thank 
you, Mr. Chairman.
    Staff. Mr. Gimenez is recognized.
    Mr. Gimenez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. From some of the 
things I've read about fusion technology, the problem seems to 
be the containment vessel, you know, itself. And I think we 
spoke about it a little bit. And, Dr. McCarthy, could you talk 
about that little bit more, the containment vessel, the 
destructive aspects of the fusion reaction itself on the vessel 
that's trying to--you know, that's trying to contain it? That 
seems to be the big issue with fusion reactors. And how close 
are we to finding some kind of solution to that?
    Dr. McCarthy. So I think that's certainly one of the 
important issues. I talked about what we call the first wall. 
That is the wall that faces the plasma. It sees the high heat 
flux. It sees the neutron flux. And developing materials to 
withstand that are extremely important, and that's why we need, 
for example, a prototypic neutron source. But the other piece 
that we need--and it's tied to that but it's not--well, it's 
tied to it but a little different--is that whole blanket 
technology. How do we take the energy that comes out of the 
plasma, turn it into usable electricity, for example, or 
processing if that's what you want to use it for, in an 
efficient way? And you also have to produce fuel so that it's 
self-sustaining in terms of the fuel cycle. So it's a bit 
bigger than just that first wall.
    The other thing we have to look at is the neutron flux on 
magnets, on superconducting magnets. That has an impact on 
their performance. So there's a large set of things that have 
to be looked at. But I would say that a lot of those tie to 
materials, and then that goes back to what Dr. Cowley was 
talking about and actually several people here on the panel in 
terms of the need to invest in materials that will perform over 
long periods of time.
    Mr. Gimenez. Well, I mean, if you don't have a containment 
vessel that actually can contain the reaction, everything else 
is moot, right?
    Dr. McCarthy. Yes, but so within the--in a fusion machine, 
we're actually using the magnetic fields to contain the plasma 
and keep it away from that first wall, but you still do get 
particles, you get heat flux that the first wall sees. So it's 
not exactly the idea of containment like you see in a fission 
reactor, right?
    Mr. Gimenez. And you haven't solved that problem yet?
    Dr. McCarthy. We don't yet have materials that would work 
in a commercial plant that would have--that would be able to 
sustain that environment--perform in that environment for long 
enough periods of time, but there's a lot of good work that's 
going toward that.
    Dr. Cowley. I would actually----
    Mr. Gimenez. Are there fuels that will--are there fuels 
that are better than others in order to--in other words, that 
they don't emit the same kind of harmful radiation and 
destructive radiation that for materials--is there some kind of 
fuel that we'd be looking for that could do that, so a 
combination of fuel and materials?
    Dr. McCarthy. Yes, so there are other potential fuels. 
Deuterium-tritium is considered the easiest because it requires 
the lowest temperatures, still temperatures about an order of 
magnitude hotter than the center of the sun. Other reactions, 
for example, deuterium-deuterium produce much fewer neutrons. 
They require higher temperatures in terms of heating the 
plasma. So what I would say is that when you look at fusion, 
the different configuration options, the different fuels, 
there's--none of them is the silver bullet that everything is 
easier. And what we have to understand is what are the 
tradeoffs? What are the problems that we can solve? And that 
takes you down a path of do you go for something that requires 
higher temperatures? Do you go for something that requires 
these materials? And that's where these technology roadmaps 
that we talked about earlier are important.
    Dr. Cowley. Can I just raise something? Because I think 
there's a slight misconception here. We do have materials that 
we think will probably work in a fusion reactor. The question 
is the lifetime of the wall, right?
    Dr. McCarthy. That's right.
    Dr. Cowley. The lifetime will be long enough. We do have 
materials, but we've never tested them, so we don't know that 
for sure. And taking the risk of pushing them in a future 
fusion reactor before we've ever tested them doesn't sound like 
a very pragmatic thing to do. So it's not like we don't have a 
solution to this problem. We think we do, but we need to test 
it.
    Mr. Gimenez. What do you need from us in order to make that 
happen?
    Dr. Cowley. I think the first thing is that--what they call 
a prototypical neutron source, right, and actually make some 
neutrons that are like the fission neutrons. When that neutron 
hits a steel--you know, an iron nucleus inside the thing, the 
iron nucleus recoils and it makes a little melt spot in the 
steel. And the important thing is you get steels that when they 
resolidify after that little melt spot, all the atoms go back 
into the right place. And we think we have steels that do that, 
but we have to demonstrate that we do.
    Mr. Gimenez. My time is up. Thank you so much, and I yield 
my time back. Thank you, I appreciate it.
    Staff. Ms. Ross is recognized.
    Ms. Ross. Thank you very much, and thank you very much to 
Chairman Bowman for holding this important meeting. And I want 
to thank all the panelists for joining us today.
    As we all know, climate change is an immediate and 
existential threat, particularly in coastal States like North 
Carolina (NC), and that's where I represent. That's why I've 
consistently supported investments in clean energy like wind 
and solar. But of course there are amazing potential out there 
in emerging clean energy technology like fusion, which is not 
intermittent and can serve as that kind of baseload potential 
and be good for the environment and for the future of our 
energy establishment here in the United States.
    And the development that we've seen and that you've told us 
about have been remarkable. But the long-term success is going 
to be dependent on a robust cooperation among government, the 
private sector, and academia. And I represent NC State 
University, which is an engineering and STEM university in 
North Carolina.
    And so, Dr. Carter, NC State's nuclear engineering 
department is the only nuclear engineering department in North 
Carolina and a premier department in the country. And the 
fusion energy industry can only be successful if we maintain a 
pipeline of graduates equipped to work in this field. And so I 
have questions about whether or not our U.S. universities are 
prepared to meet the labor demands in fusion energy and whether 
you have any suggestions for what our universities can do to 
ramp up.
    Dr. Carter. Thanks for that question. First of all, I'm a 
product of NC State University, so I----
    Ms. Ross. Yay.
    Dr. Carter [continuing]. Grew up in North Carolina. I'm 
very glad to hear you bring that up. Yes, I mean, as we've 
already brought up, we--you--the universities are seeing an 
influx of students at the undergraduate level, the graduate 
level that are really interested in fusion energy, more than we 
can handle. What we need to do is to strengthen the programs 
across the board in fusion energy, and this can be--this needs 
action at the university level. It needs action at DOE level to 
make it happen. We need programs that stimulate this. We need 
to give leadership opportunities to universities to lead 
programs. You heard about FRIB earlier. And these kind of 
programs where the universities really get visibility and 
leadership draws new faculty and resources from the university. 
So finding ways to do that I think is very important. We stand 
ready to do that. The universities that participate in this 
planning process are ready to roll up our sleeves and get to 
work. We could use some help, though, from the Federal 
Government and from other university systems to push for this 
change.
    Ms. Ross. All right. Does anybody else have anything to add 
before I ask my next question? OK.
    So my next question is related to the infrastructure law 
that we just had the President sign this week. And we are going 
to be updating our electric grid, and we've--we're doing it 
because of storm damage, we're doing it because we want to put 
more renewable energy on the grid, and we've seen difficulties 
with getting that energy on the grid. Are there changes to our 
electric grid that we are going to need for fusion energy? And 
how can we prepare for that now?
    Dr. Mumgaard. Yes, so we've looked at that pretty 
extensively, and we have--CFS has investors who are in the 
energy industry. And one of the big advantages is that the 
fusion product--and independent of how we get there and what 
the configuration looks like, the fusion product is a very, 
very flexible energy source. And it comes in a unit size that's 
about the right unit size for the way that we build grids 
worldwide. So it's not too big, but it's also not so small. And 
you can turn it on, you can turn it off. There's--the things 
inside the actual plant don't really care that much about their 
history. And so that means that, you know, independent of how 
we do the electrical grid, we're going to have a spot for 
fusion in it, whether that is repowering existing sites that 
interconnect or even building out new infrastructure or new 
grids to support electrification. You know, fusion is a broad-
based support for that.
    Ms. Ross. Well, great. Thank you very much, and I yield 
back.
    Staff. Mr. Obernolte is recognized.
    Mr. Obernolte. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank 
you to our witnesses. This has been an incredibly fascinating 
hearing.
    My first question is for Dr. Ma. I'd like to continue a 
line of questioning that Congressman Garcia had started. 
Congratulations on your achievement in August there at the NIF. 
That's an amazing breakthrough. You were testifying about the 
fact that--in response to Congressman Garcia's question, the 
fact that you've achieved about 70 percent of the energy input 
in terms of output from the fusion reaction. And he was asking 
about the pathway to get to breakeven, which, you know, as we 
all know is really what's going to be required for power 
generation. Also, as I understand it, you--we're not yet at a 
level where that reaction is self-sustaining. So I wonder if 
you could talk a little bit more about the pathway from what 
you've achieved in August to getting to something that's both 
exceeding breakeven and self-sustaining.
    Dr. Ma. Yes, thank you. And, first of all, let me 
acknowledge the enormous team that made this result happen and 
the decades of giants on whose shoulders we stand on and all of 
your support over the years.
    Well, first of all, the NIF is a scientific demonstration 
facility for high yield, and it was never meant to be energy 
production. And so even when we achieve gain on the NIF, it 
does not mean there's--there will be enough energy coming out 
that you could economically run a power system. What needs to 
happen is a coordinated inertial fusion energy program in the 
United States, which does not exist right now, a program that 
could bring together the best minds and develop the 
technologies that need to occur to make IFE happen. And some of 
those technologies include drivers, i.e., lasers or pulse power 
or heavy ions that are economical. We need targets that can be 
built robustly and cheaply and mass-produced. We also need a 
better understanding of the overall physics. So all of those 
things need to come together.
    In terms of what our next steps can be as a country now, we 
need to develop that framework for an inertial fusion program 
and figure out how we can also best leverage public-private 
partnerships. We need to develop a roadmap that is credible and 
feasible and pulls in our latest understanding with emerging 
technologies. And then we need to explore alternative schemes 
as well. There are very innovative ideas out there that could 
get us to those very high gains that we might need to build a 
power plant.
    Mr. Obernolte. Well, great, thank you very much. That's 
very helpful. We hope to work with you to achieve those goals.
    My next question is for Dr. McCarthy. You were talking 
about the path to commercial fusion powered energy generation 
in the United States. And one of the things I--that you said 
that I thought was very pertinent was you were talking about 
the lower failure modes that we have in fusion energy 
production than we have in fission energy production. And I 
think that that's going to be critical because we have kind of 
a political problem with nuclear energy in general where some 
of the failures of the past are coloring public perception of 
fusion energy in the future. And so I wonder if you could talk 
a little bit more about those failure modes and about how once 
a reactor is self-sustaining, how a fission reactor has lower 
failure modes than a--I'm sorry, a fusion reactor has lower 
failure modes than a fission reactor because I think that that 
articulation is going to be very critical to gaining the 
widespread public acceptance that we're going to need to make 
this technology feasible.
    Dr. McCarthy. So, first of all, I'll start out by saying 
fission reactors are safe. They are highly regulated. They have 
all those systems in place so that--to mitigate any abnormal 
events.
    Now, if we look at a fusion reactor, there are some 
inherent differences. And one of them that I talked about has 
to do with the radioactive waste that's produced. So there are 
technical solutions to isolation of radioactive waste. 
They're--politically, they've not been successful, so we 
haven't moved forward really with long-term disposal for 
fission waste. We don't have the same issues with fusion 
because we don't have that waste that requires long-term 
geologic isolation. That's a big one from the perspective of 
public perception.
    And then with respect to safety, what we in the industry 
call the source term, that's the stuff that could potentially 
be mobilized and scattered, the source term in a fusion reactor 
is much, much, much smaller than what's in a fission reactor. 
And what you have to look at is the combination of source term 
plus energy to disperse it. That's kind of how you look at 
safety from the big picture. So fusion has some advantages from 
that perspective.
    But there's a lot that we can learn from fission and a lot 
that is applicable from fission to fusion when it comes to how 
we do things. Keeping things simple is very important. Fission 
is a relatively simple technology. This is one of the fusion 
challenges. So where we can simplify things and where we can--
and I think it was Dr. Mumgaard who talked about how important 
it is to have the industry connection as we're doing this to 
understand what they want. That's one of the things we did in 
the National Academies report. The scientist's dream is not 
necessarily the utility's dream, and so that connection is 
important. And I apologize. I think I've gone over.
    Mr. Obernolte. Great. Well, thank you very much. We look 
forward to working with you to further the public perception 
there.
    Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    Staff. Ms. Lofgren is recognized.
    Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I just want 
to thank you and Chairwoman Johnson, the Ranking Members for 
this important hearing today. And I wanted to extend a special 
welcome and thanks to Dr. Ma for being with us and for the work 
that she has done in representing the other scientists who 
worked over these many years at the National Ignition Facility.
    You know, I was there--this has been a bipartisan effort. I 
was--I remember former Congressman Bill Baker leading the 
charge. I didn't agree with Bill on a lot of things, but we 
agreed on this. And then Ellen Tauscher, who took up the cudgel 
and generations of fighting for this. I remember when Ed Moses 
was the Director of the lab, and I asked him how will we know 
when we get burning plasma, and he said, well, you'll see the 
scientists doing handstands. So I was really pleased to be 
advised of the handstands right after August 8th by the 
Director of the lab, and I--it's a marvelous achievement and I 
appreciate it greatly.
    You know, the NIF has played an important role, but 
you're--as you've mentioned, you're the science piece. You're 
not going to be the energy production piece. But you've got 
some more things to do. And so here's a question--a direct 
question--you don't need to agree with me because--or I know 
it's true. There have been fights with NNSA over the years 
about the NIF's science experiments versus the nuclear 
stockpile mission, which is a primary mission. I don't want--I 
mean, there were those over the years who thought that you 
could do science on a schedule, you know, and you can't. But 
you have achieved what we--I thought would be happening in a 
few years when I was at the groundbreaking and then the opening 
of the facility. You've achieved the burning plasma now. I want 
to make sure that you are getting what you need from NNSA in 
terms of the capacity to proceed on the further experiments 
because obviously we need the stockpile. Maintenance is a very 
important element of our security posture.
    But our security posture is also dependent on limitless 
clean energy. We need to be able to remove carbon from the 
atmosphere because of climate change. We're going to need to do 
desalination, which is going to require a limitless pollution-
free energy source because of the droughts that we are having 
in the West. So fusion is an essential element of our national 
security.
    So are you able to say what you would need by way of 
support from your governing agency NNSA in order to optimize 
the science that still needs to go on at the NIF?
    Dr. Ma. So thank you for your comments and your continued 
support over the years. The NNSA has been a very good sponsor 
for us, and I think on the NIF we have demonstrated the success 
of the science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program. Very 
recently, we've done experiments on plutonium aging that have 
been very important for the NNSA mission, equation of State 
experiments, et cetera.
    You are completely hitting the nail on the head to say that 
energy security and energy sovereignty are an important part of 
national security. And, as such, NNSA would--and they recognize 
that energy security is an important part of that. We are very 
focused right now of course on meeting certain milestones, and 
we're under pressure, so that is understandable. What would be 
very important for us is sustained and robust funding to ensure 
that we can continue to have strong scientific experiments on 
the NIF, to have a robust what we call discovery science 
program where we open up the facility to academics----
    Ms. Lofgren. Right.
    Dr. Ma [continuing]. Worldwide, and a little bit of 
flexibility to see the dual use purposes of the inertial 
confinement fusion research that we do on the NIF.
    Ms. Lofgren. Well, I thank you very much for that very 
skillful and diplomatic answer, and I look forward to--you 
know, there was a time when NNSA wanted to shut down all of the 
science projects a few decades ago, and the Congress rallied 
around in a day to put a stop to that. So I'm sure that we will 
have a bipartisan effort to make sure that the science gets 
done.
    Let me yield back with thanks to Dr. Foster for letting me 
jump ahead of him.
    Staff. Dr. Foster is recognized.
    Mr. Foster. Hello. Am I audible and visible here?
    Staff. Yes.
    Mr. Foster. Great. Well, first, I'd like to echo my 
appreciation to the Chairwoman and Ranking Member for their 
work on the DOE Science for the Future Act and specifically to 
the Ranking Member for his polite restraint in his description 
of the Senate counterproposal, and to the scientific community 
for their enthusiastic embrace of the House proposal.
    Now, Dr. Ma--well, first off, congratulations to you and 
the whole NIF team. You know, I understand there was a fairly 
celebratory mood at the DPP (Division of Plasma Physics) plasma 
physics meeting in Pittsburgh earlier this month, and so say hi 
to everyone that I know there, some mutual friends.
    You know, one of my pet peeves when I was a practicing 
scientist was congressional micromanaging of science, and so 
now hereby I get my revenge. Now, I understand that following 
your record-breaking 1.3 megajoule shot, there have been a 
couple of subsequent shots with more yields in the range of a 
half a megajoule, so what is the current best understanding of 
what's going to be required first for reproducible yields and 
eventually further yield improvements? You know, is there sort 
of a detailed roadmap or a flowchart of future shots that might 
be provided to us to track progress against?
    Dr. Ma. Absolutely, yes. So we--like you said, we have 
recently done a few repeat shots, and we did our best to try to 
replicate the target, the laser performance, et cetera. 
However, we know that when we built the NIF with the 1.92 
megajoules of laser energy that the laser has, we were just 
right at the hairy edge of what we would need for ignition. So 
every little detail counts here. Every bump, every dip, every 
speck of dust. Oh, I take that back. We don't even have specks 
of dust on our targets. But they all play a role in the physics 
performance that we see.
    So with those repeat shots, we--the yields were a little 
bit lower, and that is because there were some more 
imperfections in the target. The laser delivery was not quite 
as good. And we're now doing the analyses, and we will go 
through the scientific peer-review process to ensure the 
community agrees with us. But we are trying to understand those 
sensitivities of those different parameters.
    Now, going forward, we will continue to test by pushing to 
slightly higher velocities, which for us equates to kinetic 
energy into the system. And we are testing slightly different 
target designs that should give us a little bit higher 
coupling. And those experiments will take several years to do. 
Because our experiments are so complex, each one takes several 
months to actually set up. So stay tuned, but that's what the 
roadmap looks like going forward.
    Mr. Foster. OK. You also mentioned that heavy ion 
accelerators as a potential energy efficient fusion driver at 
least for the compression maybe to follow with fast ignition or 
something like that. You know, as you may know, I served on the 
DOE Heavy Ion Fusion Advisory Board back in the day. And so is 
this an effort that's likely to be reenergized following the 
NIF yields?
    Dr. Ma. We will certainly be looking into heavy ion fusion. 
The advantage of heavy ion fusion is you can get much higher 
coupling efficiencies of driver energies into the targets.
    Mr. Foster. Yes.
    Dr. Ma. The heavy ion fusion program was shut down in the 
mid-2010's because it was recognized that to do those 
experiments you really have to do them at scale. And you need 
very----
    Mr. Foster. Oh, yes. No, I'm aware of the challenges. I was 
just wondering if that's something that people are going to--
you know, and there was a rather demoralizing decade for 
inertial fusion generally because of the frustration over NIF 
that has now evaporated.
    Also at about a decade ago Livermore and the ICF community 
put a lot of effort into what was called the LIFE (Laser 
Inertial Fusion Energy) project. And this is a fusion-fission 
hybrid which uses the fusion base there as a source of neutrons 
and the energy produced mainly in a fissile blanket around it. 
And potentially that can be used to burn spent nuclear fuel, 
burn excess weapons-grade plutonium, all sorts of other side 
benefits. Is this an effort that's also maybe worth reviving 
now that you're getting the yields that you planned to a decade 
ago?
    Dr. Ma. So, as a community, we absolutely hope to build off 
the good technical work that was done on LIFE, which was a full 
systems engineering and looking at all the different 
components. However, that is a decision that will need to be 
made by DOE, and we will also be holding a basic research needs 
for IFE in the next year where we will lay out what the 
priority research directions are. And I expect that 
continuation of the LIFE work will be a component of that.
    Mr. Foster. OK. And now I have used up all my time and 
maybe 1 percent of the questions I have. Congratulations to 
everyone.
    Staff. Mr. Beyer is recognized.
    Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much. And Chairman Bowman, thanks 
very much for holding this hearing. This is the most exciting 
hearing I've seen in 2021 in terms of the potential.
    I keep talking about, you know, we have a little more than 
$1 billion for fusion energy coming out of a--blessed by the 
Science Committee and included in Build Back Better, and in a 
bill that could be approaching $2 trillion, this is the stuff 
that's most transformational, so I'm really excited that you 
guys are leading on this.
    Dr. Ma, you talked again and again about inertial fusion 
energy. Is that a different idea than what Dr. Mumgaard is 
doing at Commonwealth Fusion? Is this a different approach to 
fusion energy?
    Dr. Ma. Yes, it is. The idea behind inertial fusion is you 
use the inertia of the target itself to do the compression and 
holding together the plasma long enough for fusion reactions to 
occur. With magnetic fusion, you use magnetic fields on a much 
lower density plasma to hold that together for actually longer 
amounts of time to get that to fuse.
    There are pros and cons and advantages to both schemes. 
With inertial confinement, one of the major advantages is that 
you get to actually separate the target from the driver itself, 
so it--whether it's lasers, pulse power, heavy ions, you can 
deliver that laser energy separately from the target design. 
And so you--it allows for flexibility in how you test out those 
two schemes.
    There are a lot of overlaps in terms of reactor building, 
the materials challenges that we would have, so we do hope to 
work together and learn from each other.
    Mr. Beyer. Thank you. Sir Dr. Cowley, you know, you talked 
a little bit about the National Academies survey, and--which is 
pretty optimistic, not as optimistic as the private sector is, 
Commonwealth Fusion and Helion and others. Are there specific--
is it possible to lay out the series of specific benchmarks in 
technology and science that have to be met in order to get to 
commercially available fusion?
    Dr. Cowley. Well, first, you fought a war so that you 
didn't have to call me sir.
    Mr. Beyer. It's still pretty cool.
    Dr. Cowley. Yes, that's actually one of the things that I 
think we need to really settle in and do after the FESAC plan, 
which is a technology roadmap, the kind of technology roadmap 
that tech companies put forward when they want a new product or 
a chip company puts forward when it wants a new product because 
there are lots of little details that could fall through the 
cracks and then delay, you know, the delivery process. So the 
idea of having fusion pilot plant designs done in this next--
really, we should get started today--is that, as we get those 
designs, we can work back from them and say we need to solve 
this problem by, you know, 2022, this problem by 2024, you 
know, and that kind of technology roadmap. So it's critical at 
the moment, yes.
    Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much.
    Dr. Mumgaard, I've been telling everybody that, you know, 
the old DOE was 2060, and then the Academies move it up to 
2040, and you guys are saying maybe 2030. Can I say that with 
credibility?
    Dr. Mumgaard. So, you know, the survey of all the fusion 
companies says--the majority say 2030's. And why do we think 
that's possible? We think that's possible because it's a 
confluence of various technologies that are all happening at 
once plus the capital and sort of human infrastructure both on 
the stakeholder side and simply on the employees' and 
engineers' side that allows us to try things. So, you know, for 
instance, when we went to the National Academies in 2018 and 
said we want to develop a high temperature superconducting 
magnet, you know, the view was maybe that would take 10, 20 
years and we did it in 3, and we were able to do that not 
because we're smarter than everybody or anything like that, but 
we are able to do that because we can apply lessons learned in 
how you do really fast iteration of build, try, break, build, 
try, break very, very quickly. And some parts of fusion are 
conducive to that where you don't necessarily need a 
centralized plan that's very, very serial. You can break it 
into modular pieces that you can try out, break, and integrate 
only when you absolutely need to do that.
    And so if you look across the companies, that's a defining 
factor of many of them is how do you make problems into things 
that you can separate? How do you make problems into things you 
can try? How do you get iteration into the loop? And then how 
do you couple that with people that are very, very good at 
building things very, very quickly?
    And so, you know, we think that it is feasible to get these 
types of systems online in the '30's. And perhaps more 
importantly, the timeline is, you know, set by the climate and 
by the energy transition, so there is a huge amount of pull to 
go faster. You know, if we all got to choose what is the path 
to get there and what is the right time to get there, we make 
different choices than what carbon is choosing to force us to 
do. And so that impacts, you know, our planet, CFS every single 
day, that timeline, how do we make technical decisions that 
could enable that timeline. And it's really a good thing for 
this Committee today because, you know, we're talking about 
what are the investments we need to make now that would give us 
a better shot at that, not just CFS but also the pilot program 
and also the other companies.
    Mr. Beyer. Well, thank you. Yes, I get discouraged by how 
slowly we move here, so my new legislative strategy is build, 
try, break.
    Chairman Bowman. Well, once again, thank you to all of our 
witnesses for being here. This was an amazing hearing about a 
topic that, you know, I think will take our economy and 
humanity into the future, so this is really exciting.
    The record will remain open for 2 weeks for additional 
statements from the Members and for any additional questions 
the Committee may ask of the witnesses. The witnesses are now 
excused. The hearing is now adjourned. Thank you again so much.
    [Whereupon, at 12:20 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

                                Appendix

                              ----------                              


                   Answers to Post-Hearing Questions




                   Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Responses by Dr. Robert Mumgaard

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

Responses by Dr. Steven Cowley

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                 [all]