INFUSE — the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy — is the U.S. Department of Energy program that pairs private 📝fusion companies with the expertise and facilities of national laboratories and universities.
Established in 2019 by the DOE Office of Science's Fusion Energy Sciences program and jointly led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, INFUSE exists to lower a specific barrier: decades of fusion capability — materials testing, diagnostics, modeling codes, magnet and 📝plasma expertise — live inside public institutions that private companies could not easily engage. Under INFUSE, a company proposes a focused technical collaboration and, if selected, the award funds the laboratory or university partner to do the work, with the company contributing a share of the cost. Awards are deliberately small and fast, typically in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars over one to two years.
The program is best distinguished from its near-neighbor, the DOE milestone program: INFUSE does not pay companies at all — it buys them access to public expertise — whereas the milestone program pays companies directly for hitting negotiated technical milestones on the way to a 📝fusion pilot plant (FPP). Together the two form the complementary halves of U.S. public-private fusion partnership: one shares capability, the other rewards delivery.