fusion pilot plant (FPP) is a first-of-a-kind power plant intended to demonstrate net electricity from 📝fusion at modest scale — the bridge between experimental machines and commercially competitive power plants.
The term is best understood against its near-neighbor, DEMO: the demonstration reactor that public fusion roadmaps place after 📝ITER. DEMO designs are typically gigawatt-scale, government-led, and scheduled for mid-century; a pilot plant is deliberately smaller — hundreds of megawatts or less — and aims to reach the grid a decade or more sooner, usually under private leadership with public support. A pilot plant is also not yet a commercial plant: its job is to prove that the full system works together — 📝plasma performance, 📝tritium breeding, heat extraction, power conversion, and maintainability — not to win on cost of electricity.
In the United States the concept was anchored by the National Academies' 2021 report Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid, which recommended that the country commit to a pilot plant producing net electricity in the 2035–2040 timeframe and urged public-private teams to carry the designs. That recommendation reshaped federal fusion policy, shifting funding toward programs that pay private companies to mature pilot-plant designs against negotiated technical milestones. The pilot plant has since become the organizing goal of the U.S. fusion enterprise: the machine whose successful operation would convert fusion from a scientific achievement into an energy industry.