An ecology of participation for fusion energy development
Abstract
Decisions that will shape future fusion facilities, including the production of waste, the management of tritium, the achievement of safety, and impacts on land, water, and local communities, are increasingly becoming sociotechnical in nature. For prior energy technologies, fission among them, such decisions were made top-down and met sustained public opposition. Research shows such opposition is rarely a deficit of public understanding and is instead rooted in place-specific environmental, health, sociocultural, and economic concerns and in distrust of how technologies are selected and sited. We argue that fusion developers have an opportunity to design differently, and we propose an ecology of participation: multiple, complementary modalities of engagement sustained over time, replacing the one-off public consultations now typical of large infrastructure projects. We synthesize human- and environment-centered design frameworks and introduce a framework that reinterprets opposition as a divergence between communities and technology developers in values, norms, or design characteristics. We present six case studies from our work: participatory technology assessment focus groups, participatory design workshops, immersive virtual-reality models of a fusion facility, the Global Fusion Forum platform, the Imaginary Energies speculative design platform, and Heartbeat, an arts-based sound installation. Mapping these onto the values-norms-design framework shows how each interrogates or closes a different part of the expert-public gap, and exposes two limitations of fusion public engagement efforts writ large: developers are seldom asked to articulate their own values and norms, and the environment is represented only indirectly. We close with five guiding questions for fusion researchers building their own participatory engagements.
Related
- Retrospective on the Design and Implementation of the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program of the U.S. Department of Energy
- Human-in-the-Loop Meta Bayesian Optimization for Fusion Energy and Scientific Applications
- Professional Perspectives on Community and Public Engagement with Fusion Energy
- Maximization of nuclear fusion reactivity via optimal energy distributions
- Thresholdless IBW Emission and Alpha-to-Thermal-Ion Energy Channeling via Pole Resonance of Fusion-Product Ions
BibTeX
@misc{verma2026ecology,
title = {{An ecology of participation for fusion energy development}},
author = {Aditi Verma and Katie Snyder and Andrea Morales Coto and Nathan Kawamoto and Daniel Hoover and Ana Kova and Sara Eskandari and Stephanie O'Malley and Jared Owens and Mahmud Farooque and Gabrielle Hoelzle and Stephanie Diem and Kevin Daley},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.10914},
eprint = {2610.10914},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10914},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - An ecology of participation for fusion energy development
AU - Aditi Verma
AU - Katie Snyder
AU - Andrea Morales Coto
AU - Nathan Kawamoto
AU - Daniel Hoover
AU - Ana Kova
AU - Sara Eskandari
AU - Stephanie O'Malley
AU - Jared Owens
AU - Mahmud Farooque
AU - Gabrielle Hoelzle
AU - Stephanie Diem
AU - Kevin Daley
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.10914
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10914
AB - Decisions that will shape future fusion facilities, including the production of waste, the management of tritium, the achievement of safety, and impacts on land, water, and local communities, are increasingly becoming sociotechnical in nature. For prior energy technologies, fission among them, such decisions were made top-down and met sustained public opposition. Research shows such opposition is rarely a deficit of public understanding and is instead rooted in place-specific environmental, health, sociocultural, and economic concerns and in distrust of how technologies are selected and sited. We argue that fusion developers have an opportunity to design differently, and we propose an ecology of participation: multiple, complementary modalities of engagement sustained over time, replacing the one-off public consultations now typical of large infrastructure projects. We synthesize human- and environment-centered design frameworks and introduce a framework that reinterprets opposition as a divergence between communities and technology developers in values, norms, or design characteristics. We present six case studies from our work: participatory technology assessment focus groups, participatory design workshops, immersive virtual-reality models of a fusion facility, the Global Fusion Forum platform, the Imaginary Energies speculative design platform, and Heartbeat, an arts-based sound installation. Mapping these onto the values-norms-design framework shows how each interrogates or closes a different part of the expert-public gap, and exposes two limitations of fusion public engagement efforts writ large: developers are seldom asked to articulate their own values and norms, and the environment is represented only indirectly. We close with five guiding questions for fusion researchers building their own participatory engagements.
ER -