Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills at a quantum laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, on Wednesday to accelerate the development of fusion energy in California, along with a $30 million budget act for quantum and deep space research, [The Daily Californian reported](<https://dailycal.org/news/campus/newsom-signs-legislation-at-uc-berkeley-to-accelerate-fusion-energy-grants-30m-for-quantum-research/article_9c0a8e0c-1793-4d8e-bb72-8a6f1a0351a1.html>).
The first measure, Senate Bill 925 by State Senator Jerry McNerney, directs the California Energy Commission to draw up a strategic plan for fusion energy in the state. The second, Assembly Bill 2647 by Assemblymember Lisa Calderon, requires the commission to “prepare a comprehensive assessment of the potential role for advanced nuclear technologies in supporting critical infrastructure in California,” the commission said in an email. New nuclear plants would also have to show they can meet statewide energy demands in a cost-effective way.
Berkeley was chosen as the signing site because it leads the National Science Foundation’s Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation, a research center spanning universities across the state, the energy commission said. The foundation has just renewed its support for the institute with $37.5 million over the next five years. The commission said it is still evaluating how the state money will be distributed to maximize its effect.
“UC is poised to lead in quantum and fusion energy research,” Omar Rodriguez, a spokesman for the University of California Office of the President, said in an email. “This statewide investment will keep California at the forefront of this field by growing California’s future workforce, accelerating scientific discovery and advancing clean energy.”
Shimon Kolkowitz, the institute’s director and an experimental atomic physicist, said he wants people to know the advances are not just “a lot of hype.” The institute is building a quantum computer, technology that exists but is “not useful yet,” he said, and it is nearing error-protected machines large enough to model chemical reactions and the structures of molecules. “It’s just the early stage, but there’s a huge amount of promise here,” Mr. Kolkowitz said. “There’s a whole range of new computational problems that we can hopefully very soon be able to solve, (problems) that were intractable before, that couldn’t be done on classical computers.”
Raluca Scarlat, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at Berkeley, said the fusion bill is meant to “help industry do what they’re doing a little faster” and to open the field to students across disciplines. “It’s a really important signal that California is sending to say, ‘we care about investing in infrastructure that will help bring this technology to fruition,’” she said. “It says: California values clean energy, abundant energy, affordable energy (and) available energy, and we need all of the disciplines to help with this endeavor.”
Ms. Scarlat said the promise of nuclear power is already established; what remains is “scaling it up, and making it an industrial facility that’s economical.” “It’s not like we’re going to wait for the next 50 years,” she said. “Things are happening right now.”