Партнерство Лаборатории Лоуренса и стартапа ускорит создание термоядерной энергии

The Tri-Valley has been fortunate to have the two federal research laboratories — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Sandia National Laboratories — as major employers. Together, they’ve been a magnet first for a highly educated workforce, then as a magnet for more businesses wanting to tap into that intellectual capital. We’re seeing the results of that with LLNL’s partnership with a local company, Inertia Enterprise Inc., to develop technology that will lead to practical fusion power — marked by the announcement last week that they had developed a way to dramatically speed up the production of fuel pellets. It’s a major milestone in science, even if it’s still just one of many steps that will have to be taken before a company gets to commercial-scale fusion power feeding our electrical grid. The importance of the partnership — a research-focused laboratory and a private startup company — provides not just a union of talent and business acumen, but also a bit of stability in an increasingly uncertain environment for science in the United States. Science has long ceased to be the purview of lone, white-coated researchers in high-tech laboratories. Science, especially today, is a collaborative process, as scientists seek out publications and peers in their narrow specialized fields to help refine their own research. International conferences present opportunities for both learning and networking, and serendipitous connections made there have led to many a collaborative publication or project. This has been changing at a rapid pace since President Donald J. Trump was returned to office in 2025. The U.S. has never had such an anti-science administration, marked not just by the president’s ignorance, but by a cabinet actively hostile to science that produces research that contradicts the president’s political message. It’s easy to look at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the epitome of this anti-science culture, with his hostility to vaccinations posing a real danger to the lives of Americans. But the anti-science sentiment runs deep. According to the National Science Foundation, about 42% of Ph.D.-holding scientists work in universities, 37% work in private for-profit businesses, and 15% work at nonprofit or government agencies. The U.S. Department of Energy’s network of 17 national laboratories alone employs approximately 75,000 full-time staff members, which doesn’t include post-doctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students and other staff. Nor does it include the approximately 30,000 outside researchers who make use of the labs’ specialty facilities, such as the National Ignition Facility at LLNL. This system of cooperation was largely established during World War II as the U.S. poured all of its resources into the war effort, including the Manhattan Project at what would become the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The system made the U.S. the preeminent nation for scientific research for decades, drawing students and scientists from all over the world. Since the beginning of 2025, the Trump administration has been dismantling all that. Initially, Trump pulled the U.S. out of international climate treaties and ceased cooperating with decarbonization programs, canceling several projects that were already under way. There were orders out of Washington, D.C., to downplay work on climate change in public communications, for example, by prohibiting or limiting the use of certain phrases, such as “climate science,” “climate crisis,” and “pollution,” in addition to terminology at the center of the administration’s culture war. But the efforts have accelerated. Scientific American has reported that in 2025, the National Science Foundation fired 10% of its staff and terminated $1 billion in grants. The same situation played out at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 5 percent of its staff was fired and more than $1.8 billion in grants was canceled. According to Science magazine, 10,000 people with Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (a.k.a. STEM) had lost their jobs by the beginning of 2026 — about 14% of the overall federal scientific workforce in place at the end of the Biden administration. In May of this year, NIH and NASA put unprecedented restrictions on staff seeking to publish scientific articles with co-authors from outside the U.S. According to Science, the NIH privately told grantees that they had to request permission in advance to work with non-U.S. collaborators, and NASA has told some grantees who co-authored papers with Chinese researchers that they may have violated the agency’s rules. That’s having a chilling effect on scientific collaboration; an estimated 30% of all papers produced with NIH funding in 2017 had both U.S. and non-U.S. co-authors. The real risk is that the U.S. is losing not just its leadership position in global scientific research, but that there’s a significant brain drain under way. The NIH alone lost 1,100 STEM Ph.D.s in 2025, more than double the 421 who left in 2024. Science magazine found that pattern was repeated across all 14 federal agencies that it surveyed. Hiring at those agencies also dropped precipitously. The Department of Energy, which manages the national laboratories, was not immune, but it “only” lost 150 Ph.D.s in 2025. Most of these departures are the result of attrition: retirements, quitting, and not layoffs (except for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which fired 16% of its researchers). But the number of scientists departing rose — more than doubling in many cases — because many fear being fired, are being lured with a buyout offer, or they disagree with administration policies. At the same time, other countries are stepping up their recruiting of top scientific talent. An increasing number of U.S. scientists are departing for jobs in Canada, Europe, India and even China. Many early-career scientists and postdocs are considering moving abroad. One poll by Nature in March 2025 found about three-quarters of early-career scientists were considering such a move. Among those heading for the exit is Ben Santer, the former LLNL climate scientist (he retired in 2021), who in January was given a five-year visa to the United Kingdom to work at the University of East Anglia. This only compounds the existing problem of one-quarter of U.S.-trained scientists eventually leaving the U.S. And this was before Trump returned to office. Now, with the gutting of the existing system that supports science in the U.S., political interference in funding decisions, and high-profile arrests and deportations of students who find themselves in the administration’s crosshairs, not only are we looking at a potential exodus of talent, but also foreign students may simply stop coming. This can be changed. Universities are looking at new collaborations with businesses and other sources of funding to replace the lack of grants, or political strings attached to government grants. Business-government collaboration may still provide a layer of security, especially if the collaboration is producing science close to the government’s interests, such as energy independence. Fusion falls into that category, as do other projects from the Department of Energy, which, along with Defense, has been seen as integral to national security. We are still years out from a commercial rollout of fusion reactors, however. So in the meantime, we’ll need to be creative about how we as a society support science and research. We’ll need to make sure we can keep the lights on at least until 2028, and work to ensure that the next administration won’t be so driven to destroy the U.S.’s scientific prowess.