Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced Tuesday that it will build its first commercial-scale power plant outside Richmond, Virginia, with the goal of connecting it to the power grid in the early 2030s.
Fusion power has long been touted as being decades away, but the new milestone envisions the possibility of commercial operation within the next decade. That confidence has been echoed by many in the field since the National Ignition Facility demonstrated two years ago that controlled fusion reactions can generate more electricity than is needed to ignite a fire.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has raised more funding than its competitors and is widely considered to have the best chance of delivering commercial fusion power over the next decade.
The commercial power plant, known as the Ark, is expected to generate 400 megawatts of electricity. While many new power plants are designed to power hyperscale data centers directly, often a faster route to market, CFS is working with utility company Dominion Energy to bring Arc to the grid. is connected to.
“For our first power plant, it was important to get power into the grid,” Kristen Cullen, vice president of global policy and public affairs at CFS, told TechCrunch.
The company settled on the Virginia location after considering many other possibilities. “Many sites could have worked for this,” Karen said. “We looked at sites at a global level and focused specifically on the United States following the unanimous decision by the United Nations. [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] It's about regulating fusion in a way that the industry sees fit. ”
Cullen said once the field narrowed, the team looked for a location with a strong transportation network to support the construction project. It also wanted to be near existing power plants for easier connection to the grid and access to an industry-savvy workforce.
But one factor that has helped Virginia stay ahead of other states is its proximity to Washington, DC. “This is the world's first fusion power plant,” Cullen said. “We want to get a lot of people here. We want to go on tours. We want to show different energy ministers and heads of state what fusion is. I want to show that.”
CFS leases land for Ark from Dominion, but other than that, no money is exchanged between the two partners. CFS expects Dominion to be able to help the startup secure permits and connect power plants to the grid, and in return, the utility will become one of, if not the first, It will be one of the first companies to gain experience working at power plants. .
“They're really interested in getting their feet wet here and understanding what it means to bring fusion power into the grid,” said CFS Chief Commercial Officer one Rick Needham told TechCrunch.
CFS is pursuing a type of fusion known as “magnetic confinement,” in which powerful magnets compress and confine superheated plasma. Plasmas come in many shapes, but CFS confines them into a shape known as a tokamak. A tokamak is a kind of donut shape that is one of the most well-studied approaches to magnetic confinement. Inside a tokamak, when the plasma is compressed, supercharged particles tend to collide with each other with such force that atomic nuclei fuse, releasing vast amounts of energy.
The tokamak's walls are made of molten salt, which captures heat and transfers it to a steam turbine used to generate electricity. The molten salt blanket also absorbs harmful neutrons and is used to produce tritium, one of the two hydrogen isotopes on which nuclear reactors operate. Another type of deuterium can be obtained from seawater.
The Ark is not CFS' first facility. The company is currently building a demonstration plant, Sparc, in Devens, Massachusetts. The company plans to begin commissioning Sparc in late 2025 and achieve “first plasma” (industry term for the first time a fusion reactor ignites) in 2026.
“We'll reach a net energy increase shortly after that,” Needham said. If the company is successful, it would be the first tokamak to reach that milestone. To date, the National Ignition Facility is the only facility capable of producing a net positive controlled fusion reaction.
To build Arc, the company will need to raise new funding. While raising money through a new equity round is the likely path forward, Needham said the company is also considering “other sources of funding,” including debt and government grants. In June, CFS received $15 million from the Department of Energy through the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program.
While CFS is currently focused on Sparc and Arc, Needham said the company has already started thinking about what comes after them. “Because of all the work we’ve done, we’ve found a lot of great sites,” Needham said. “Our purpose as a company is not to build fusion power plants. It's to build thousands of people.”