A conversation with Rachel Bielajew, Head of Research at Rutherford Energy Ventures, and Riley Moeykins, Associate Technical Analyst there — Rutherford is a fusion-focused consulting firm, apparently the first of its kind — is where this one actually came from. Most of the conversation was about capital: their pitch is that financing structure, not physics, is one of the biggest levers determining which fusion bets actually make it to a commercial plant, and they specifically suggested this comparison — how differently the US, UK, and Europe handle that lever. The short version: they aren’t just racing toward fusion at different speeds, they’re running the race through three genuinely different institutional playbooks for who supplies the capital, and on what terms.
Where the 56 fusion companies are headquartered
Private vs. public capital raised, all-time
Company count and the private/public split are both from the Fusion Industry Association's 2026 survey of these same 56 private companies — the public share is government money raised by them (grants, cost-share awards), not spending on national megaprojects like ITER or the UK's STEP, which are separate government programs, not private fundraising.
The three bets, compressed
What the US is betting on: private capital picks the winners, and government’s job is to hand out small, catalytic checks and get out of the way. What it costs: almost no direct government stake in a demonstration plant — if the model’s wrong, there’s no public backstop.
What the UK is betting on: build a government-owned demonstration plant, give early regulatory certainty, and let private companies run in parallel. What it costs: a much bigger public bill up front, regardless of whether the private bets pay off too.
What Europe is betting on: decades of public research infrastructure is the on-ramp, and industry money is a recent addition, not the starting model. What it costs: starting the private-capital experiment years behind the US and UK.
The US: cheap seed money and one very consequential regulatory decision
Private capital simply dominates the American fusion industry: 28 of the 56 fusion companies the Fusion Industry Association tracked in its 2026 survey are US-based, and every single one of the five companies that has raised over $1 billion — Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, Helion Energy, Pacific Fusion, and SHINE — is American. Government’s role, by comparison, is narrow and specifically catalytic rather than a driving buyer or builder.
The clearest example is the DOE’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, first authorized in the Energy Act of 2020 and expanded through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, with up to $415 million available through fiscal year 2027. It selected eight companies in May 2023 — Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Focused Energy, Realta Fusion, Thea Energy, Tokamak Energy, Type One Energy, Xcimer Energy, and Zap Energy — and paid them to hit technical milestones rather than funding a government-run reactor. The first 18 months obligated just $46 million. Those eight companies have since raised more than $350 million in private capital on top of it: more than $7.60 of private money for every $1 of federal seed. For context on how small that seed really is, DOE’s entire Fusion Energy Sciences budget for FY2026 is about $806 million, the large majority of which funds basic research and national-lab facilities, not company milestones.
The other lever is regulatory, and it matters more than the dollar figures. On April 13, 2023, all five NRC commissioners voted to regulate fusion under 10 CFR Part 30 — the same lightweight framework used for medical and industrial radioactive materials — rather than Part 50, the full utilization-facility licensing regime built for fission reactors. The commission’s own reasoning was that fusion’s actual hazards (tritium fuel, activated structural material) fit the materials framework, and that a byproduct-material license is a fundamentally easier bar to clear than a full reactor license. That single vote removed a multi-year, open-ended licensing timeline as a startup risk, which is arguably worth more to a venture investor than most grants would be.
The UK: build it yourself, and hedge
The UK isn’t just seeding private companies, it’s building its own demonstration plant. STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) is government-funded and government-led: £2.5 billion committed over five years in the UK’s 2026 Fusion Strategy, of which £1.3 billion goes to UK Fusion Energy — a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UK Atomic Energy Authority — to deliver a prototype plant at West Burton, a former coal power station site in Nottinghamshire. Construction is targeted to start around 2030, with the plant operating by 2040. The rest of the £2.5 billion includes supporting infrastructure (£740m for magnetic and inertial confinement facilities), a lithium-breeding facility (£180m), and an AI-and-supercomputing cluster at Culham (£125m). Structurally, it’s explicitly a public-private partnership: UKAEA is the “fusion partner,” with separately contracted engineering and construction partners doing the actual build.
The UK also moved early and decisively on regulation. After a consultation that closed in December 2021, the government confirmed on June 20, 2022 that fusion facilities would keep being regulated by the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive, not folded into the Office for Nuclear Regulation’s fission framework — the same basic move the US made about ten months later, just reached faster and by a different route.
Tokamak Energy, the UK’s flagship private fusion company and a UKAEA spin-out from 2009, shows how thoroughly the UK model blends the two tracks: of its $335 million raised to date, $275 million is private and $60 million came from government — and it’s not just the UK government. Tokamak Energy is also one of the eight companies in the US DOE’s Milestone program, meaning a British company is drawing seed capital from both national programs at once.
Europe: the public-research giant learning to court private capital
Europe’s starting position is the opposite of both: decades of public research infrastructure with, until very recently, almost no line item for private industry at all. EUROfusion, the 30-member consortium that coordinates fusion research across Europe (the 25 EU member states plus the UK, Switzerland, and Ukraine), ran on roughly €1 billion total over 2021-2025 (€549.4 million from Euratom plus about €450 million matched by member states) — all of it research funding, not industry investment. The EU’s biggest fusion commitment by far is as ITER’s host: it covers 45% of the project’s cost, €5.61 billion for the 2021-2027 period alone.
That’s starting to shift. The European Commission’s proposed Euratom research budget for 2028-2032 is €6.7 billion, with €5.4 billion earmarked for fusion — €4 billion of that still going to ITER, but €1.3 billion explicitly for “European fusion research, innovation, and industry development.” That’s the first meaningfully-sized slice aimed at private companies rather than pure research, and it’s arriving years after the US’s DOE Milestone program or the UK’s STEP.
Germany is where that shift shows up first and most concretely, though it’s a work in progress, not a done deal. In February 2026, Bavaria, the utility RWE, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, and Proxima Fusion signed a memorandum of understanding to build a stellarator power plant called Alpha at Garching, budgeted at roughly €2 billion total. RWE’s committed contribution so far is operational, not financial — its own plant-construction expertise, industrial network, and a former power-plant site — and the MOU only says it has “signaled willingness” to put in money too. The rest of the funding stack is similarly partial: Proxima is aiming to cover about 20% from private investors, which its €411 million raise roughly covers; Bavaria has promised up to €400 million in co-financing, conditional on that private funding actually closing; and the remaining roughly €1.2 billion is meant to come from a federal “magnetic fusion hub” program the German research ministry (BMFTR) has put out to tender — an application the partners still have to submit, let alone get funded. Germany now hosts 4 of the world’s 56 fusion companies, and the FIA’s own 2026 report singles it out as the source of “the greatest excitement” in the past year, precisely because both federal and state governments are now moving to put real money behind private partnerships rather than only funding university and national-lab research — even if, in Alpha’s case, most of that money is still a plan rather than a wire transfer.
Still three open bets
None of these has actually produced commercial fusion power yet, so none of them is provably right. The US is betting that cheap capital and a clear regulatory runway are enough to let private companies outrun any government-built demonstration plant. The UK is betting that building one itself, in parallel with private companies, hedges against the private bets not paying off in time. Europe is betting that its research depth is worth more once it finally gets paired with real industry money — a bet it’s only just started placing. Whoever’s model gets a commercial plant running first will have made the case for everyone else’s next fusion strategy.
Sources: Fusion Industry Association, “The Global Fusion Industry 2026” · FIA, “Fusion Industry Attracts Record Annual Funding of $4.48bn” · DOE, New Awards to Support Acceleration of Commercial Fusion Energy · NRC, Regulatory Framework for Fusion Systems, Federal Register · Fusion Industry Association, “NRC Decision Separates Fusion Energy Regulation from Nuclear Fission” · GOV.UK, “Britain to lead fusion energy race to deliver energy security” · UKAEA, STEP · UK Government, “Towards Fusion Energy” regulatory decision (2021) · Tokamak Energy, $125m raise announcement · EUROfusion · IEA, Euratom / EU financing of ITER · Fusion Industry Association, “European Commission Proposes Record €6.7 Billion Euratom Budget” · Proxima Fusion, €411M funding announcement · Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Alpha MOU funding structure · ANS/Nuclear Newswire on the Proxima/Bavaria/RWE/IPP Alpha agreement