FST JOURNAL

Fusion energy represents one of humanity’s most ambitious and transformative endeavours. Unlike any other energy source, it promises clean, abundant, and inherently safe power, capable of meeting long-term global demand without the carbon cost or fuel limitations of today’s systems. The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) programme delivered by STEP Fusion, the UK prototype fusion powerplant, stands at the forefront of this mission.

STEP’s goal is not only to demonstrate that net energy can be generated from fusion, but also to prove that it can be achieved commercially. To that end, the programme aims to design, construct, and operate a prototype spherical tokamak capable of delivering net energy from fusion – putting power on the national grid.

This goal is proof that the global fusion effort has now advanced beyond proving scientific feasibility. The challenge is no longer if fusion can be achieved, but how it can be built, assured, and operated at the speed and scale required for future commercial success.

While fusion’s technical challenges are substantial, one of the greatest tests of success will not be found in physics or materials science, but in governance. Building trust, across governments, industry, and the public requires frameworks that are mature enough to support a first-of-a-kind system within an energy landscape accustomed to proven technologies, long safety records, and established operational norms. Without trust in what we build, it may be impossible to use it.

Trust here is especially important in fusion, not only due to its first-of-a-kind nature, but because of the high epistemic uncertainty that surrounds the domain. There is no historical precedent to guide assumptions about plant reliability, no validated models that predict plasma behaviour in a spherical tokamak of this scale, and no established regulatory playbooks to define expectations for organisations entering this space.

STEP Fusion, therefore, presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to define the governance playbook, setting a precedent not just for this plant, but for the future of fusion itself. Done well, governance is not bureaucracy; it is the architecture that enables agility without compromising integrity.

It must be shaped not only by documentation, but by a deliberate mix of people, tools, and behaviours that together form a socio-technical system built for scale, learning, and credibility.

Aims

The STEP programme exists to deliver fusion within a multi-partner environment, providing the catalyst for UK industry to develop the talent, supply chains, and systems that will sustain fusion as a credible and competitive sector.

The programme is delivered by UK Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd (UKIFS), a lean organisation of direction-setters orchestrating a broad coalition of partners. UKIFS does not seek to deliver every element directly; its role is to create the framework that allows these partners to deliver successfully.

This orchestration extends across disciplines: scientists, engineers, project managers, and policy specialists working together to build not just a prototype, but a capability. The approach offers a rare opportunity to architect governance from the ground up, to define how a national endeavour of this magnitude operates responsibly and efficiently.

To achieve this, the STEP Fusion Governance Function has assembled a focused team of specialists in Engineering Lifecycle, Policy, and Risk with access to many more. Each discipline contributes a unique perspective, collectively defining the STEP Fusion approach to governance. The emphasis is on consistency of approach rather than prescription of methods; setting expectations and interfaces that enable delivery while preserving flexibility.

Paradoxically, we operate within a regime where we are developing a high-integrity systems, known for demanding rigour, but in this case fusion demands agility - two elements that are often known for friction. Governance must therefore be proportionate: ensuring strong traceability, predictability, and repeatability, without constraining innovation. Every team must understand what success looks like and how, when, and by whom it will be measured.

Turning Design Intent into Deliverable Reality

The governance function serves as the bridge between design intent and engineering execution. Its core responsibility is to ensure that the requirements of the Design Authority, the ultimate owner and certifier of the plant, are effectively translated into actionable and verifiable outputs within delivery teams.

The UKIFS Design Authority manages all Level Zero plant requirements. It ensures that the final plant is safe, secure, environmentally responsible, and operable. This authority must coexist with highly empowered, agile Integrated Project Teams (IPTs), each delivering components or systems derived from those top-level requirements.

Governance provides the ecosystem that allows IPTs to execute with autonomy while ensuring that the systems they produce meet the Design Authority’s strict criteria. The art lies in translating abstract design philosophy into tangible engineering deliverables; bridging the gap between aspiration and assurance.

The Governance Function’s key deliverables reflect this translation process:

• The Written Governance Set: The policies, procedures, and processes that define how a complex organisation of this scale operates with consistency and accountability.
• Digital Tool Integration: Embedding governance directly into digital systems so that the path of least resistance is also the compliant one. Wherever possible, ways of working are hard-coded into our tools, making governance inherent, not optional.
• The Engineering Lifecycle: A guiding framework that allows maximum flexibility in project delivery while ensuring that design reviews, verification steps, and cross-programme integration points maintain rigour and alignment with shared objectives.

These mechanisms together form the guardrails of STEP Fusion’s delivery environment, connecting the aspirations of governance with the practicalities of engineering.

Guardrails here are the preferred means of governing, specifying goals and terms which support this guided empowerment of design teams as they work through a problem space with a high degree of uncertainty.

Strong governance offers compound benefits over classical prescriptive approaches by finding, tracking and addressing uncertainty. The use of digital tools to capture options, decisions and outstanding questions allows us to objectively assess uncertainty as it arises and to later look back at the provenance of the decisions which sought to manage it. This data-informed approach is supported by classic systems-thinking approaches to verification and validation, ensuring that for each option that exists, a strong means of understanding and testing potential solutions exists.

This means balancing classical linear development models with those suited to highly iterative development, allowing Engineers to confidently move through simulation, probabilistic analyses and incremental design, knowing they are working within the policy remit, and that when the time comes, a clear pathway exists to transition their concept design into the increasingly rigorous final plant baseline.

Cultural Governance

Even the most elegant governance framework will fail if it is not adopted at scale. True governance operates not through documentation alone, but through culture,  through the collective habits, expectations, and behaviours that guide how people make decisions. Engineering governance, therefore, must be as much about mindset as it is about method.

Processes can be well intended and well written, but embedding them across organisations, disciplines, and even national boundaries requires trust. Governance must, therefore, shape how people think, collaborate, and resolve problems; especially when operating in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) environments.

From trust flows empowerment. There can be no doubt that in projects of this complexity and scale, engineers closest to the problem are those best placed to solve it. Governance must not suppress this agility, but enable it. The role of governance is to create the conditions where expertise can flourish safely, where those with the knowledge and proximity to act are empowered to do so, within a framework that maintains traceability and integrity.

This is not open-loop autonomy in every area- it is guided empowerment. Specifically, the system must ensure that empowered individuals are supported by clear structures, transparent accountabilities, and tools that make good decisions visible. Training, mentoring, and accessible digital systems provide the guiderails that keep empowerment aligned with organisational purpose.

As the boundaries blur between rigid processes and the adaptive ingenuity of human teams, governance becomes the medium through which both coexist, structure without stagnation, agility without anarchy.

Design for Replication

While UKIFS leads the STEP programme, its ambition extends beyond the construction of a single prototype. The greater goal is to establish the benchmark for how fusion will be delivered in the future, technically, operationally, and institutionally; to effectively create the blueprint for delivering again at scale.

Throughout the whole plant lifecycle, the artefacts and decisions produced will not only describe the plant itself; they will capture how we arrived at the final design. Effectively; the history of governance, assurance, and integration that led to its creation.

Every model, rationale, and decision forms part of an auditable narrative. The richer this narrative, the better equipped the next generation of fusion developers will be to build upon it. In this sense, governance becomes the golden thread of progress, carrying forward knowledge, lessons learned, and proof of integrity.

The success of any future replication depends on clarity - how well the governance models, lifecycle frameworks, and cultural lessons from STEP Fusion can be translated into future contexts. If we build governance with transparency and foresight, we build not just a plant but a platform for the industry to grow upon.

What Success Looks Like

Effective governance is without doubt a journey, a sequence of incremental steps linked by learning, reflection and evolution. As the organisation matures in its technical capability, our governance must evolve alongside it.

Done well, governance allows innovation to thrive responsibly; It ensures that time, budget, and decision-making are applied proportionately, balancing creativity with control. It facilitates an environment where failure is encouraged, used to learn, but without compromising safety or integrity.

When formal lifecycles are established, they will provide the means to make binding commitments to the final engineered baseline all linked by a golden thread of traceability. The objective is simple but demanding: to balance governance while preserving space to safely explore new ideas, without inertia.

That balance is rarely achieved in established industries, where legacy systems and regulatory expectations can slow change and therefore innovation itself. Fusion, by contrast, offers a clean slate, an ability to co-develop with partners and regulators, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to design governance as a facilitator rather than an impediment.

In Closing

Governance is the unseen enabler of engineering; get it right and no one should notice, getting it wrong can, and has led to some truly catastrophic programme failures.

The governance regime we aspire to balances the pace of delivery with the assurance of integrity, ensuring that confidence in what we build is equal to the brilliance of how we build it.

As the first components of the STEP prototype are designed, manufactured, and eventually operated, the governance suite will stand as an equal artefact, a socio-technical narrative documenting how trust was engineered alongside technology.

Ultimately, technology does not exist without governance, and in fusion, perhaps more than in any other field, trust is both the product and the prerequisite of progress.