21 hours Ago By Victor Tangermann
Energy startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced that it will begin construction of the "world's first grid-scale" nuclear fusion power plant near Richmond, Virginia. The MIT spinout announced this week that it was "one step closer" to making fusion energy — fusing atoms together inside a reactor, like the process that powers stars in the night sky — a reality with a multibillion-dollar investment in the facility. The goal is to produce a considerable 400 megawatts, enough to power 150,000 homes, the company claims.
The company hopes to build the Virginia plant by the "early 2030s," according to an MIT press release . Needless to say, it's a highly ambitious plan — and one that warrants plenty of skepticism, since it would require many future breakthroughs to realize, even with sufficient funding. CFS has yet even to demonstrate that its facilities are capable of producing more energy than is required to kickstart the process, or net fusion energy.
That's something that has proven incredibly difficult , particularly at scale — despite almost a century of fusion research. The company hasn't even finished the construction of its much, much smaller reactor called SPARC near Devens, Massachusetts, designed to demonstrate such a feat. Illustrating exactly how speculative the whole thing is: a 2023 image featured in reporting by CNN about this week's announcement shows construction workers marveling at what appears to be an aspirational, full-scale mural plastered to the back wall of a cavernous and largely empty facility.
Despite the countless hurdles still ahead, the company's executives didn't hold back. "This will be a watershed moment for fusion," said CFS cofounder and MIT engineering professor Dennis Whyte in a statement. "It sets the pace in the race toward commercial fusion power plants.
The ambition is to build thousands of these power plants and to change the world." But the technicalities haven't passed over any heads, either. "Nothing occurs overnight in fusion," company CEO Bob Mumgaard told CNN , claiming that the company was "deep into" constructing a tokamak capable of demonstrating net fusion energy.
Mumgaard claims the company is hoping to produce first plasma in 2026, shortly followed by producing a net amount of power using its SPARC reactor. The much larger grid-scale facility in Virginia will then be the "next act." "In the early 2030s, all eyes will be on the Richmond region.
.. as the birthplace of commercial fusion energy," Mumgaard told CNN .
The company wouldn't be the first to claim to have achieved net fusion energy. In 2022, scientists at the government-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said they had achieved such a breakthrough using the " world's largest and highest energy laser system ." They claimed the reactor produced 2.
5 megajoules of energy, a 20 percent net gain over what they needed to start the reaction — which is roughly enough power to boil about two to three kettles . Scaling up the concept is proving even more difficult, particularly when it comes to a far more commonly-used reactor type called a tokamak, like CFS, which is a donut-shaped machine that confines super-heated and super-pressurized plasma. But with a whopping $2 billion in funding, CFS just might have a shot of taking a significant step forward, turning lofty promises into cold-hard science and actual results.
"There will be bumps in the road and things won’t change overnight," Mumgaard told CNN . But "the designers and planners can now go from a general notion to a specific location for the next chapter in the fusion journey." More on fusion: Scientists Say Secret to Fusion May Lie in Hellmann's Mayonnaise Share This Article.
