Vision and Strategy

On this page:

• Vision
• Strategic Focus Areas
• ADVANCE Act Implementation
• Actions and Schedules

Version Control

• Vision and Strategy, Revision 1 (ML25344A070) - January 7, 2026
• Vision and Strategy, Revision 0 (ML25069A706) - March 11, 2025

Vision

The U.S. fusion regulatory framework enables clear, efficient, independent, and reliable licensing and oversight through open processes.

The Principles of Good Regulation shape the approach to regulating the emerging fusion industry. Implementing this vision will yield a focused approach suitable for commercial-scale fusion technologies.

• Clear – The NRC's decision on how to regulate near-term fusion technologies provides important clarity to the emerging fusion industry. Agreement States have safely regulated fusion research and development systems under this framework for over 25 years, and the revised regulations and guidance will enable widespread implementation.
• Efficient – The byproduct materials framework enables a level of regulation that is commensurate with the hazards of a given application, while ensuring a high degree of technical competence to regulate fusion technologies. It is used to license technologies that range from portable gauges that measure the uniformity of highway pavement to major industrial facilities like irradiators for food and medical equipment. The National Materials Program (NMP), has demonstrated the flexibility to regulate emerging technologies such as cancer treatments and can do the same for diverse fusion technologies.
• Independent – In making independent decisions on fusion—both the development of regulations and guidance and when reviewing specific licensing applications—the U.S. regulatory community will openly seek all available facts and views. This includes coordination with other U.S. government agencies, Tribal governments, international regulators, academia, fusion companies, non-government organizations and the public.
• Reliable – Fusion must be regulated in a way that maintains risks at an acceptably low level, considering uncertainties in technology development for components and a diversity of fusion designs. The regulatory framework will be designed in a way that lends stability to the planning process for commercialization of fusion and provides consistent decision-making on key safety and security questions. The National Materials Program (NMP) has extensive experience applying compatible requirements and guidance nationwide and will apply those principles to the regulation of fusion.
• Open – Extensive outreach, consistent with NRC's rulemaking process, is planned as the NRC and Agreement States develop the regulatory framework. This outreach will help other interested parties understand the approach, solicit feedback, and encourage consistent implementation across the NMP.

Strategic Focus Areas

Three strategic focus areas are needed to achieve the vision for the fusion regulatory framework: (1) regulatory optimization, (2) technical readiness, and (3) partnership and coordination.

Regulatory Optimization

Fusion regulation must optimize competing priorities of flexibility and consistency.

The byproduct materials framework is designed to provide a flexible and scalable approach—high-level performance-based regulations with tailored guidance to address specific technologies. The NRC's decision to apply the byproduct materials framework to fusion machines was based on its understanding of the designs and hazards of the equipment most likely to be represented in near-term license applications. The changes to the regulations and proposed guidance will be structured to account for the known features of these designs. If new designs are developed that introduce new hazards, materials, or other safety and security concerns, the regulator can require additional information during licensing or impose licesning conditions ensure for adequate protection of public health and safety. If news designs are created that contain hazards that go sufficiently beyond the near-term technologies, then appropriate regulatory action would be recommend to the Commission.

The NRC's proposed requirements in Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR) Part 30 and guidance in current draft Volume 22 of NUREG-1556 will address scalability in situations when large quantities of tritium or activation products warrant additional actions in areas such as environmental reviews, emergency preparedness, and waste disposal.

Further, with the exception of those compatibility areas where programs should be essentially identical, through the Commission's Agreement State Program Policy Statement and NRC's compatibility model, Agreement State radiation control programs have flexibility in program implementation and administration to accommodate individual State preferences, State legislative direction, and local needs and conditions. The NRC will assess the compatibility of its fusion requirements and guidance as part of the rulemaking process.

Consistency is also important. In addition to Agreement State compatibility, current byproduct material approaches that provide consistency include safety evaluations that are shared across jurisdictions and nationwide registration of approved sealed sources and devices. The NRC will be exploring ways to provide consistent, predictable decision-making for fusion designs across the various NMP jurisdictions to share design approvals of fusion machines designs for commercial distribution. This becomes especially important during the broader adoption as the NMP fusion regulatory program matures. This approach also supports jurisdictions whose regulators have not achieved their desired level of technical readiness.

Technical Readiness

Regulators need to strengthen fusion expertise as technology develops.

Currently, the wide variety of designs being considered in the marketplace and the lack of available design details at this early stage make it difficult for regulators to develop a deep understanding of all designs. This challenge will be alleviated to some extent as specific designs are proven and become more widely adopted. The NRC and Agreement States will hire and train staff to ensure they have the needed expertise to continue to license and inspect fusion technologies as they evolve. The NRC will partner with the Department of Energy (DOE), industry, academia, and international regulatory agencies to provide training to NRC and Agreement State staff on fusion confinement methods, fusion reactions, operation types, and design-specific safety considerations. Additional training by vendors will help provide a general baseline of understanding. The NRC anticipates taking the lead in offering licensing and inspection training, as is currently done for a variety of byproduct materials technologies, which will alleviate resource constraints on States and promote consistency. In addition, the NRC is evaluating the need for research on novel issues, especially those for materials effects, waste disposal and recycling, and computer codes for shielding calculations and offsite dose evaluations.

Partnership and Coordination

New designs cannot be regulated in a vacuum.

The NRC will continue close coordination with Agreement State partners to develop regulations, licensing guidance, inspection guidance, implementation strategies, and training. This includes State regulators' participation in working groups, discussions in government-to-government meetings, and formal comments on draft documents. To support continued engagement on fusion with the States, the staff chartered a standing committee on fusion oversight that is made up of NRC and Agreement State staff (ML25183A025). This committee will serve an advisory role in the NRC's fusion program by developing and sharing lessons learned and best practices, providing technical assistance on licensing and inspection issues, tracking the status of commercial fusion technology development, and providing input on qualification and refresher training for licensing reviewers, inspectors, and standard device designs reviewers. In addition to providing training and regulatory infrastructure to enable States to review fusion applications, the NRC has established processes to directly support States in technical reviews through information sharing, user group, and technical assistance requests. The Integrated Materials Performance Evaluation Program enables the NRC and Agreement States to evaluate each other's technical readiness and implementation of fusion, as well as to offer best practices and insights for improvement.

The NRC will continue coordination with other Federal agencies with interests in fusion, including:

• DOE – DOE's Offices of Fusion and Fusion Energy Sciences supports significant research activities related to fusion, and the NRC can leverage these research activities to inform its regulatory approach. DOE, as it already does on advanced reactor issues, can partner with the NRC on outreach to interested parties, including environmental justice communities and Tribes, on the technology and regulatory approach.
• National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) – NNSA has interests in fusion associated with its nuclear nonproliferation mission. The NRC will continue to partner on appropriate regulatory requirements as well as design techniques and industry initiatives to address nonproliferation.
• Department of Commerce – The NRC is not proposing any changes to the current framework for export controls on tritium or other fusion associated isotopes. Under the current framework, the NRC coordinates with the Department of Commerce for export of materials under its jurisdiction.

The NRC is also committed to bilateral and multilateral cooperation with international regulatory counterparts. All programs benefit when regulators who are taking a similar byproduct materials approach to fusion share design and hazard insights, guidance documents, and operating experience. These efforts are already underway with the United Kingdom and Canada and are likely to expand. The G7 has created a fusion energy working group to promote international collaborations to accelerate the demonstration of fusion potential, encourage private investment and public engagement, promote harmonization of fusion regulations, and share best practices. The International Atomic Energy Agency is also supporting the development of fusion technical reports and safety reports, as well as key elements for an overall fusion regulatory framework. The NRC is engaged in these workshops and conferences at both the staff and management levels.

Regulators also coordinate with designers and applicants to understand designs, hazards, schedules, and other aspects critical to informing both strategy and actions. In addition, industry groups and standards organization are likely to provide valuable guidance to designers, as is already done in other byproduct materials areas (e.g., industry standards for irradiator design). Adherence to these third-party certifications may streamline the regulatory review process. As the NRC increases its resources applied to fusion regulation, it expects to increase this coordination.

ADVANCE Act Implementation

The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2024 (ADVANCE Act) was passed with bipartisan support and signed into law in July 2024. Section 205 of the ADVANCE Act addresses the regulation of fusion machines.

Statutory Changes

Section 205 of the ADVANCE Act codified the definition of "fusion machine" to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and incorporated "fusion machine" into the definition of byproduct material. In response, NRC staff incorporated the new and amended definitions into the draft proposed fusion rule submitted to the Commission on December 11, 2024. Once final, these conforming changes will codify these definitions into NRC regulations to provide regulatory clarity for the fusion industry and other external stakeholders.

Regulatory Framework Study

Section 205 also tasked the NRC with performing a study on risk-informed, performance-based, regulatory frameworks to support mass-production of fusion machines and to submit a report to Congress summarizing the results. The NRC established a project team with Agreement State members that reviewed several existing design certification and licensing processes that may be leveraged in developing a licensing framework for fusion machine designs intended for mass-production. Consistent with the Act, NRC staff conducted this study in consultation with the Agreement States, the private fusion sector, the public, and other Federal agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration. The NRC issued a report to Congress summarizing the results of this study on July 10, 2025 (ML25120A080). As noted in the report and outlined in Section 4 of this document, staff will continue to pursue several NRC program actions in response to the Act to enable scaled deployment of commercial fusion machines within the United States.

Path to Commercialization

In addition to studying existing regulatory processes for applicability to fusion machines, the ADVANCE Act tasked the NRC with the development of a timeline for issuance of guidance or regulations that would establish an efficient licensing framework for mass-manufactured fusion machines. As referenced in the Section 205 report, the NRC, in consultation with external stakeholders, developed a set of milestone indicators of industry readiness for establishing such a framework. These milestones have been integrated into an action matrix that includes each milestone's measurement indicator, measurement method, and associated follow-up actions once the milestone is achieved. This action matrix is documented in Appendix B.

The NRC will use the lessons learned from the Section 205 study to develop a design certification framework for fusion machines that will increase the efficiency of site-specific licensing of the possession, use, and production of byproduct material associated with fusion machines. By conducting comprehensive up-front safety reviews of designs intended for replication and large-scale deployment, the NMP can streamline the licensing process. These reviews and certifications will provide a technical basis for NRC and Agreement State staff evaluating license applications to use certified designs.

The NRC's draft proposed fusion rule and ADVANCE Act implementation efforts are vital activities to secure regulatory certainty for fusion machines. Looking forward, the path to successful scaled deployment of commercial fusion machines will require both technical achievements from the industry and the development of efficient, technology-neutral regulatory processes to certify and license designs intended for mass production. The NRC developed and released a Fusion Program Roadmap (ML25301A006) to visualize this path to commercial fusion machine deployment.

Actions and Schedules

To achieve this vision, specific actions are needed related to each of the focus areas. These actions depend on the stage of maturity of the designs and associated regulatory needs. In each stage, actions are grouped into four objectives that drive NMP activities. These include:

• Objective 1: Establish regulations and guidance to ensure that fusion machines operate in a safe and secure manner;
• Objective 2: Develop a framework to license standard fusion machine designs for commercial deployment across the NMP;
• Objective 3: Prepare NRC and Agreement State staff for efficient and effective fusion machine oversight and develop public trust in regulatory oversight of fusion machines; and
• Objective 4: Harmonize international efforts to embrace a risk-informed, scalable approach for fusion regulatory oversight.

The tables below show the schedule and sequence for actions in each stage, including overlaps driven by industry.

Stage 1: Early Regulatory Preparedness

Stage 2: Prototypes, Demonstrations, and Other Single-Site Projects

Stage 3: Broader Commercial Adoption