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The tokamak room at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems construction site is where the tokamak will go, company executives tell CNBC, to show off net power, a key milestone in achieving the merger.
Kat Clifford, CNBC
CEO, Commonwealth Fusion Systems Corporation Bob Momgard He is a student of the history of technology.
“If you go and look at what fusion looks like today, you’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s a bit like a flight in 1918,'” Mumgard told CNBC in a recent video interview.
In June 1919, two British airmen and war veterans She made the first non-stop transatlantic flight, departing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landing in County Galway, Ireland. A century later, transatlantic flights became so common, they weren’t even noteworthy.
Nuclear fusion is the way stars produce energy. a The fusion reaction releases more energy of nuclear fission, which is how nuclear reactors generate energy today. Similar to fission, fusion does not release any of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Unlike fission, it also does not generate long-term nuclear waste.
For all these reasons, it is often called amalgamation The Holy Grail of clean energy.
Find a device that can replicate fusion and keep it on Earth It dates back to the fifties of the last centurybut shows new progress, albeit unevenly. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced in May They were able to achieve the main melting point known as ignition, where more energy is generated from the reaction than goes into the reaction to start the reaction, but this was a brief flash. The fusion power plant has, until now, been firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction.
The Commonwealth is trying to change that, and has raised more than $2 billion in venture capital from the likes of Bill Gates, Gates’ climate investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Google, John Doerr, Kosla Ventures, Lower Carbon Capital, Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures and more. this More private capital than any other merged startupaccording to the Fusion Industry AssociationIndustry Trade Group.
The Commonwealth announced last week that it is one of eight companies He was selected by the US Department of Energy to receive a collective sum of $46 million in Finance where I achieved some predetermined milestones.
So why now?
Mumgaard is used to hearing all the reasons why the merger didn’t work.
“The suspicions are understandable,” Mumgard told CNBC. “It doesn’t bother us. We have to build things and show that they work.”
Historically, humans have been slow to change their understanding of technological possibility.
“Everyone has different thresholds for what they have to see to believe in something,” said Mumgard. “When the Wright Brothers were flying, you still had skeptics that airplanes couldn’t exist.”
But Mumgaard also demands a little optimism and curiosity, too. “You don’t have to believe us today. But you have to at least be interested in watching the story and following the story. It’s a race. We’re at the beginning of the race,” Mumgard told CNBC.
Bob Momgard, CEO, Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Image courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
You don’t need to be a nuclear physicist to follow this race. Mumgaard laid out the stages for merger watchers to look out for. First, fusion companies need to make plasma, which is the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas, and is the very fragile state necessary to sustain the fusion reaction. Next, the fusion companies need to make the plasma superheated. Next, the hot plasma must be confined and protected. In industry, this trio of conditions—density, temperature, and confinement or dielectric—is called the “triple product.”
Once fusion companies have this triple product, they will then start hitting the flash point, and then they will generate an abundance of clean, waste-free energy.
Or that’s the plan. Right now, that race is “accelerating,” Momgard says. “You see more arrivals; you see faster arrivals and away.”
Mumgaard says the demand for clean energy, advances in science and development in component technology needed to make a fusion device all come together right now to make this moment the turning point in the race to fusion.
The first factor is the increasingly urgent demand for new sources of energy that do not contribute to climate change.
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus is headquartered in Devens, Massachusetts, which is located between 35 miles and 40 miles outside of downtown Boston.
Kat Clifford, CNBC
Top climate scientists at the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would require Reaching net zero around 2050. Knowing that the world needs to go to net global emissions by 2050, Mumgaard says, is like being in the analog age and knowing exactly when the internet revolution will begin.
“The energy transition is the largest market shift in human history,” Mommgard told CNBC. This is more than just generating electricity. “How do we generate energy, how do we make our chemicals, how do we make steel, how do we make cement — you take all of that and rebuild it without carbon.”
Wind and solar power are already being deployed on a large scale, but fusion could serve to replace large primary energy requirements such as steel and cement manufacturing, industrial furnaces and urban centers. “This is a missing hole,” Mumgard told CNBC. “And it gets more intense the deeper you go into the transition.”
Nuclear fission may be this type of primary energy, but as Germany recently demonstrated, some residents oppose fission because of the waste and the risk of nuclear accidents similar to those that occurred at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
“We don’t want to limit our options to either imposing something people don’t want, or hoping we can convince people of something to fight against,” Mumgard told CNBC.
In addition to the growing demand, a host of scientific and technological developments are driving fusion forward.
“We’ve continually gotten better at fusion, even though we’re an outsider, we haven’t gone too far by creating a fusion power plant,” Momgard told CNBC. “We’ve just gathered an enormous amount of science in the same way that we’re collecting an enormous amount of science about genetic sequencing, about the genome.”
Large supercomputers are now good enough to simulate what happens inside fusion devices and technological developments such as machine learning and Quick triggers It is being applied to making fusion devices in new ways.
What matters most to the Commonwealth is that the ability to build super strong magnets is now better than it ever was.
The Commonwealth uses these magnets to hold the plasma in place, and five years ago they didn’t exist, Mumgaard told CNBC, because the materials used to make them didn’t exist in the quantities needed.
The advanced manufacturing facility located on the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, is where the magnets are manufactured.
Image courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
This material is a high temperature superconducting tape. A breakthrough in the manufacture of a high-temperature superconducting material was made in the 1980s, and Two physicists won the Nobel Prize in 1987 to discover them. Mumgard says it took a long time and a lot of science before these materials could be made outside of a lab.
What does spending $2 billion to build a fusion machine look like?
In the race for integration, the Commonwealth is in the lead.
“Since its founding just five years ago, growth at Commonwealth Fusion Systems has been groundbreaking. Its growth is not based on speculation or idle promises, but on results,” Andrew HollandChief Executive Officer Fusion Industry Association, a trade group, according to CNBC. “Their leadership role in helping to regulate the merger industry has lifted the entire industry toward a vision of commercialization on an aggressive schedule.”
At the 50-acre Commonwealth headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts, about 40 miles from Boston, the chief scientific officer Brandon Sorbhum He told CNBC that the company has a large procurement team that manages the supply chain needed to build the tokamak, the donut-shaped fusion device at the heart of the company’s system, as well as an extensive team to manufacture the parts on site.
The SPARC facility is under construction at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts.
Kat Clifford, CNBC
For now, the Commonwealth is focused on building a tokamak, called SPARC, with the goal of putting it into operation in 2025. Shortly thereafter, Sorbohm told CNBC.
After building a SPARC, the Commonwealth’s next goal is to build an ARC, which is a more mature version of the fusion device that will provide electricity to the grid, Sorbohm told CNBC. Sorbohm added that the ARC, due to be completed in the early 2030s, will collect heat from the fusion reaction in molten salt and use that heat to drive a turbine generator to generate electricity.
Showcasing SPARC Commonwealth Fusion systems are built to show pure power.
Kat Clifford, CNBC
early on, the Commonwealth will develop and become a part-owner of fusion power plants, Ally YostAnd you will make money as other power generators do: by selling electricity,” the chief of staff told CNBC.
But in the end, the Commonwealth will operate more like Boeing does in the aerospace industry.
“They are the designers and intellectual property owners of aircraft designs. They are the manufacturers of key components.” The Commonwealth may also have a service component to its business and customers are likely to be energy-hungry utility companies, industrial companies or technology companies, Yost told CNBC.
Reporter Kat Clifford in the Commonwealth Fusion Systems tokamak room where she will be showcasing the SPARC Net Energy facility.
Kat Clifford, CNBC
But for now, the focus is on getting the pilot plant, SPARC, operational.
The facility that will house the SPARC has five forks, and in the center is the room that houses the tokamak, Alex CreeleyThe tokamak’s president of operations told CNBC during a tour of the facility. It will be 25 feet long and about 25 feet in diameter, and the ARC tokamak will be almost twice its size.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC facility is under construction in Devens, Massachusetts.
Kat Clifford, CNBC
Although the Commonwealth is still only building its first experimental reactor, Mumgard sees the dawning of the fusion era as inevitable.
“Knowing that it’s not just scientifically feasible, but industrially feasible, commercially feasible, that there’s momentum to turn that into a product and take that heat and turn it into electricity, that’s a big deal,” Momgard told CNBC. “Once you know you have that choice, how do you change this larger story about climate?”
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