The World’s First Commercial Fusion Power Plant Nears Completion
Why are we wasting billions on windfarms that can’t provide reliable power, when we have new technologies coming through?
THE GIST
American nuclear fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems has many wins. Adding to that: CEO Bob Mumgaard said that the company’s, and the country’s, first commercial fusion power plant is nearing completion.
WHAT HAPPENED
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) was spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 with one goal: To build a compact fusion power plant based on the ARC tokamak design. The company raised $1.8 billion in a Series B round in 2021, funding construction of SPARC, its demonstration tokamak in Devens, Massachusetts.
And by January of this year, CFS had installed the first of 18 magnets in the SPARC reactor. When complete, the magnets will form a doughnut shape creating a powerful magnetic field to confine and compress superheated plasma, the conditions required for fusion.
Mumgaard said the remaining magnets would be installed throughout the first half of the year. SPARC is expected to produce the first plasma this year and demonstrate net fusion energy, producing more power than it consumes, shortly after.
The commercial plant, ARC, is scheduled to start generating power to the grid in the early 2030s, with construction beginning after state, local, and federal permits are secured. It would cost more than $2.5 billion and be sited at the James River Industrial Center in Chesterfield County, on land leased from Dominion Energy.
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Herb Rose
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Why waste billions on windmills that can’t provide reliable power when you can waste billions on a project that will never produce power.
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very old white guy
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Why? The words you are looking for is we are stupid.
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Curious George
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“expected to produce the first plasma this year and demonstrate net fusion energy, producing more power than it consumes, shortly after.”
Did they buy a steam turbine and generator already?
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Andy Rowlands
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I honestly can’t see this producing more power than it consumes. It is only half the size of the British JET project, which barely managed to break even. I still think the ITER machine is the way forwards, but even that, at four times the size of SPARC, will not be able to produce electricity for the grid, nor is it intended to. It is the second-generation test machine, to see if plasma reactions can be maintained for minutes and eventually hours, rather than the seconds JET achieved.
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