This donut-shaped machine could generate near-limitless clean power in a decade and it is being built outside Boston
The Holy Grail of energy production, nuclear fusion, is making rapid advances and one experimental reactor in the United States is nearing its first tests.
A clean power source that could produce near limitless energy, which has been only a mere decade away for about the past 50 years, may finally be just around the corner. A number of recent breakthroughs in producing fusion reactions, the type that powers the Sun, have been announced by researchers around the world.
One project that is getting in on the race to develop power harnessing fusion is being developed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their experimental reactor outside Boston is expected to begin producing its first plasma sometime in 2026 and shortly after generate more power than it consumes.
With any luck, Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC reactor will pave the way for a planned second facility, ARC, that would generate 400 megawatts of power and would be connected to the grid in the early 2030s. The startup has already raised more than $2 billion in private capital to build what could be the world’s first operating fusion power plant in Virginia.
Typical power plants generate between 100 to 500 megawatts in the US, but a typical nuclear power plant produces a gigawatt, about 2.5 times what ARC would generate. However, researchers think that they could get up to 1,000 megawatts from a single facility using the SPARC fusion technology.
Tokamak: the donut-shaped machine that could generate near-limitless clean power
Fusion power is produced by smashing two atoms together to become one, unlike fission, which we use in nuclear reactor nowadays, that splits atoms. In both cases tremendous energy is released.
There are two main competing forms of producing fusion power, inertial confinement and magnetic confinement.
The former is the type that is being tested at the National Ignition Facility in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experimental nuclear fusion reactor in California. It uses 192 lasers to compress a capsule of heavy hydrogen to create fusion ignition. China is working on an inertia confinement reactor twice as big as its American counterpart.
SPARC will use the latter form with a tokamak, in technical terms a torus, which is a doughnut-shaped chamber that uses powerful magnetic fields to condense heavy forms of hydrogen gas, deuterium and tritium, into an incredibly hot plasma triggering fusion inside. This is the same technology that is being used at the colossal ITER experimental reactor in France.
In order to get the atoms of deuterium and tritium to fuse and release energy they will need to be heated to around 180 and 270 million degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, the pressure inside the tokamak will have to reach five to 10 atmospheres at the point of reaction.
Major benefits of fusion power: its clean and safe
Unlike fission nuclear power plants, fusion power plants can pretty much be turned off at the flip of a switch and there is no risk of a runaway chain reaction.
“If you were to blow a breath of air onto the plasma, you would kill it,” Brandon Sorbom, Commonwealth’s chief science officer told CNN. “A meteor hits the plant and ruptures the vacuum vessel, everything just shuts down. It’s not like you have something like Fukushima or Chernobyl where there’s this runaway chain reaction.”
Also there is no radioactive waste byproduct that needs to be stored like there is with fission nuclear power plants. Furthermore, the deuterium and tritium necessary for fusion reactions are obtained from seawater and lithium, respectively.
However, while seawater may be plentiful, the latter may be a problem as lithium is in high demand around the world and nations are racing to secure access to them.
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