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Everyone asks the same question about fusion energy: when?
The question worth asking is this: What will it take to make fusion work in the real world — under real economic pressures, real regulatory requirements, and real customer expectations?
That’s the conversation we’re bringing to SXSW 2026.
On March 16, our founder and CEO Greg Piefer joins a live panel at the JW Marriott for The Great Fusion Debate: How Far Away Are We Really? – a session designed to define how fusion energy progress should be judged.
Why fusion's timeline has become a planning problem
Fusion energy promises abundant, carbon-free power by harnessing the same reactions that fuel the sun. Its potential has driven decades of scientific effort and billions of dollars in investment. But as companies race to build AI data centers, governments revisit climate timelines, and investors weigh long-horizon bets, the tension between fusion's promise and its near-term feasibility has become harder to ignore.
Companies building energy-intensive infrastructure are making bets on when fusion could factor into their power strategy. Governments writing climate policy are deciding how much weight fusion deserves in the near term. Investors are pricing long-horizon risk against a technology that keeps moving the goalpost.
The gap between fusion’s promise and its near-term realities is growing – and it’s shaping decisions in boardrooms and legislatures, not just research labs. How you judge fusion progress – what counts, what doesn’t, and why – has become as consequential as the underlying physics.
What Greg brings to the fusion energy debate
Greg’s perspective is grounded in something most fusion voices don’t have: the experience of deploying fusion technology in active commercial markets today.
We operate fusion systems for neutron testing. We produce medical isotopes. And we're developing capabilities for used nuclear fuel recycling. That means our systems must perform reliably, hold up under regulatory scrutiny, and make economic sense – every day, not in a future projection.
That experience shapes how Greg thinks about the path forward.
"The physics works," Greg says. "The economics are getting closer."
SXSW Fusion Energy Panel
Moderated by Jacob Goldstein, host of What's Your Problem?, this SXSW 2026 panel on fusion energy brings together different vantage points on one of the harder questions in energy today.
What the session is designed to do
This session is about sharpening judgment on a question that’s already influencing real decisions.
The conversation is useful beyond fusion, too. Whether you're allocating capital, building infrastructure, or just trying to make sense of competing technology claims, the ability to distinguish genuine progress from optimistic framing is increasingly valuable.
That's the practical upside of this session — a more disciplined framework for evaluating ambitious technology at the moment it starts to matter. Not just for fusion, but for any deep tech category where timelines shape decisions before the technology arrives.
Session Details
