Topic #: CW26-T20 · Branch: DOE · Status: Open
The Department of Energy's (DOE) Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program aims to resolve the scientific and technological gaps for a fusion pilot plant.
Posted: 10/30/2026 · Opens: 10/30/2026
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The Department of Energy's (DOE) Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program aims to resolve the scientific and technological gaps for a fusion pilot plant.
This topic targets innovations in the fusion fuel cycle and other cross-cutting enabling technologies that are critical for the sustainability, safety, and economic viability of future fusion energy systems. It is of paramount importance that applicants also assess how to optimally
implement nonproliferation, export control, waste disposal, accident scenarios, and community engagement for the fusion fuel cycle.
The scope encompasses the development of a safe, efficient, and reliable fusion fuel cycle, with a particular emphasis on deuterium-tritium (D-T) systems. This includes innovations in subcomponent technologies for fueling, exhaust processing, detritiation, material regeneration (e.g., getters, adsorbents), and tritium accountancy. These enabling technologies are crucial for accelerating the development of fusion systems and the supporting technologies required for eventual safe, economical operation.
Goals and Metrics • Fusion Fuel Cycle Innovation: Develop and demonstrate key fuel cycle subsystems. Metrics include technologies capable of handling fusion-relevant fuel throughputs (e.g., kg/day), efficient detritiation techniques, ideally informed by techno-economic studies demonstrating a viable path to economic scaling. Requirements for reliability, availability, maintainability, and inspectability (RAMI) are of paramount importance as well. Develop exhaust processing and detritiation techniques that will enable fusion energy production to scale economically. Explore methods for regeneration or recycling of fusion fuel cycle materials such as getters, and adsorbents as well as advancing water detritiation. • Integrated System Development: Foster the integration of fuel cycle, control, and computational technologies. Metrics include demonstrating how innovations in one area can enable or optimize cost-effective, safe performance in another, contributing to a holistic fusion system design. Modeling of the fuel cycle based on existing opensource software and relevant supporting technologies is also included under this goal.
Not of Interest • Topics mainly focused on physics (e.g., assembly, stability, confinement, heating, or sustainment) of fusion plasmas. • Predominantly facility or test-stand design and/or construction. • Concepts requiring net-energy-gain fusion and/or nuclear reactions at temperatures below 1 keV (aka “cold fusion” or “low-energy nuclear reactions”), except muoncatalyzed fusion. • Work scopes that are not suited for integration into future fusion systems. • Topics predominately focused on software development are specifically not of interest.
References 1. Electric Power Research Institute, 2024 Technical Update to the Fusion Fuel Cycles Research Objectives: Results from the 2023 Fusion Fuel Cycles Workshop, 3002029371, Palo Alto, CA, 2024, https://www.energy.gov/fusion/articles/epri-fusionfuel-cycles-report-2024. 2. Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap, U.S. Department of Energy, https://www.energy.gov/fusion/fusion-energy.