New frontiers

There may have been no more fitting place to gather for a conversation about the future of nuclear energy than Colorado.

For the nuclear community, Colorado carries a special resonance. About an hour north of Denver stands Fort St. Vrain. Today, it is a garden-variety natural gas power plant. But there was a time it was an ambitious nuclear reactor-a high-temperature gas reactor with helium coolant and a uranium-thorium fuel cycle. It was ahead of its time in many ways and imperfect in execution, but unmistakably part of the long story of nuclear innovation in America.

Colorado is a state shaped by frontiers. We, too, are standing at a frontier, which brings me to this year's conference theme: "Net Out, Power Up." We chose this theme to reflect the complementary challenges facing two parts of our community. "Net Out" reflects fusion's challenge: proving you can get more energy out than you put in. "Power Up" reflects fission's challenge: scaling advanced nuclear technologies quickly enough to meet rising demand.

At first glance, it sounds straightforward. But it also captures something profound about the moment we are in. Today, our challenge is to build an energy system capable of sustaining a modern-and peaceful-civilization, to expand human opportunity across the globe without sacrificing the livability of our planet in the process.

For years, much of the energy conversation focused on limits: how to consume less, emit less, conserve more. Those goals remain important. But increasingly, we are confronting a different reality. Electricity demand is growing. Industrial demand is growing. Demand from AI and advanced computing is growing. And demand for reliable, resilient, secure energy is growing.

The question before us is not whether we need more power. We do. The question is whether we can provide enough clean, firm, scalable power to meet that challenge. That is where fission and fusion enter the picture-not just as future energy options among many, but as essential capabilities to be grown and nurtured.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we are not one nuclear story right now. The fission community is focused on near-term deployment: building supply chains, fuels, workforce development, licensing, and moving technologies from pie in the sky to concrete in the ground. The fusion community is focused on demonstrating technical feasibility-proving that we can create, sustain, and ultimately harvest energy from fusion reactions in ways that are commercially meaningful and potentially limitless.

These are different challenges and sometimes different cultures. Fusion people sometimes look at fission and wonder why, after four decades, it still can't dispose of its wastes. Fission people sometimes look back and say, "Call me when there's a power plant."

That tension exists, but we are at our best when we stop thinking of ourselves as competing camps and start recognizing that we are part of the same larger project. Because whether you are building an advanced fission reactor or a fusion machine, you still need extraordinary engineering and exquisite materials science, neutronics, thermal hydraulics, modeling, simulation, manufacturing capacity, and a trained workforce at scales we simply do not yet have.

Neither the fission nor fusion communities can afford the luxury of tribalism right now. Fission is focused on scaling technologies we once knew how to build. Fusion is focused on proving technologies we still need to master. Those are different missions, but they are not opposing missions. This is not fission versus fusion; it is fission and fusion-sometimes moving at different speeds, sometimes solving different problems, but always moving toward the same destination. And that destination matters, because the world is counting on us, whether it knows it or not.

This column was adapted from Piercy's remarks during the opening plenary at the 2026 ANS Annual Conference in Denver.