Establishing a Sociotechnical Approach to Fusion Energy Development

Program Areas – Responsible Innovation, Complex Socio-technical Systems, Education and Engagement

Project Objectives & Background:

No energy technology is perfectly equitable, and the deployment of any new technology – energy related or otherwise – entails a multidimensional, differential, and dynamic distribution of benefits and burdens in society. As such, this project – a joint effort between the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Arizona State University CSPO – is a preliminary exploration into societally informed sociotechnical development approaches for fusion energy systems. Evidence-based community engagement is vital for the sustainable development and deployment of fusion technologies sensitive to benefit and burden distributions. Utilizing and adapting elements of CSPO’s Participatory Technology Assessment open-framing methodology, the overall end goal is to inform the development of a design framework that centers energy equity and environmental justice that can extend to other clean energy technologies. The project will also serve as a foundation and compass for the development of larger scale research projects on the societally informed sociotechnical design of energy systems.