Fusion Leaders Urge EU Strategy to Secure Energy Sovereignty

A dozen fusion and industrial company leaders used an open letter on April 29 to press the European Commission for an EU Fusion Strategy, arguing that Europe is treating a near-term industrial race like a long-term lab exercise. Their case is simple and blunt: fusion needs to move from research policy into industrial policy if Europe wants the first commercial plants built on its own soil, not somewhere else.

The timing is not accidental. Europe is still living with an energy shock, and the signatories framed fusion as part of a broader answer to structural dependence on imported energy and technology. They want Brussels to treat fusion as a strategic priority tied to energy security, technological sovereignty and supply-chain resilience, not as a niche science file that can wait for another funding round.

What makes the letter more than a generic lobbying note is how concrete it gets. The companies pointed to sites already identified in Germany, the UK and Sweden, and said Europe should be planning for commercial fusion power plants in the 2030s. That puts the argument squarely in the policy-to-capital gap: the hardware is not the whole problem. The real bottlenecks are whether governments create bankable funding, fast permitting and a regulatory path investors can actually price.

The signatories called for milestone-based funding, a model that pays for progress instead of writing blank checks. That matters because fusion is still capital-hungry and schedule-sensitive, and private money tends to stay on the sidelines when public support looks episodic or purely scientific. They also want a predictable regulatory framework that treats fusion differently from fission, because they argue the risk profile is fundamentally lower. If regulators do not draw that distinction cleanly, the sector could end up stuck in a licensing box built for a different technology.

The pitch is also industrial, not just political. The letter says fusion can be reproduced on Earth and could deliver up to ten million times more energy than fossil-fuel combustion without carbon dioxide emissions, meltdown risk or chain reactions. It also leans on the fuel story: deuterium is available from seawater, while tritium can be bred in closed cycles from lithium.

For Europe, the uncomfortable subtext is that the competition is already moving. The letter says the United States, China, Japan and Canada are all increasing public support and private investment. If Brussels wants Europe’s fusion base to become a deployment base, it has to do more than praise the science. It has to clear the path for funding, permits, procurement and grid access before the first serious projects and the money behind them migrate elsewhere.