MIT scientists say fusion overcoming energy challenges
By
Duggan Flanakin
|
May 2nd, 2026
Just as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, was announcing that its mission to build a compact fusion power plant (the SPARC) based on the ARC tokamak design was nearing completion, a team of engineers from ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) were throwing cold water on the idea that fusion power plants (FPPs) can be cost-competitive in future net-zero energy systems.
Tobias Schmidt, founding director of the Albert Einstein School of Public Policy at ETH Zurich, lead author Lingzi Tang, and two others published their findings in Nature Energy on March 23. They concluded that the large unit size, extraordinary complexity, and intermediate need for customization of FPPs are empirically linked to experience rates (cost reductions for additional units) of 2% to 8% rather than the industry’s estimates of 8% to 20% – and that, paired with expected high initial capital costs, spells financial doom for the fledgling industry.
Schmidt told Techxplore.com that, after hearing promises from “some actors in the fusion space” of extremely low levelized costs for FPPs, his team applied to fusion an ETH framework that analyzes why some technologies learn with higher experience rates than others. The team compared magnetic fusion (which prompts fusion by confining hot plasma using powerful magnetic fields) and inertial fusion (which works by compressing fuel using lasers).
https://www.cfact.org/2026/05/02/mit-scientists-say-fusion-overcoming-energy-challenges/
