There’s an old bit of doggerel about a man who is approaching a goal; each step he takes reduces the distance between himself and his goal by one-half. So if he starts 10 feet away, one step puts him at five feet, then two-and-a-half… The upshot, of course, is that he can never cut the distance to zero. He can never achieve his goal.
That’s a lot like what the attempts at practical, grid-scale fusion reactors have been like. We seem to always be getting closer and closer, but somehow can never reach the goal. Oh, yes, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp – but fusion power researchers have been reaching for quite a while now.
But in Virginia, one company is making plans to build the first production-scale fusion power plant.
The world’s largest private fusion company has announced that it has chosen Chesterfield, Virginia, as the site of the world’s first grid-scale commercial fusion power plant, which will also be its first power plant.
Founded in Massachusetts as a result of decades of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is at the forefront of efforts to “build a full-fledged fusion energy industry” that aims to help meet the energy demands of the future without relying on fossil fuels.
“ARC, the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, will mark the start of the fusion age,” according to the company. “To the grid, it’ll look just like the 2,000 natural gas plants already built in the U.S. — except that ARC won’t release any carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.”
Well, that would be great, if they can make it work. Fusion promises cheap, abundant power, and solves the energy-density problem that advocates of wind and solar alternatives don’t seem to know how to deal with. But does Commonwealth have a practical reactor design?
The company has already created the world’s “strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet,” integral to the development of commercial fusion energy. It is working on a smaller-scale test version of ARC called SPARC. SPARC will be the world’s first “commercially relevant fusion energy machine” to produce net energy, or “more energy from fusion than it needs to power the process.”
SPARC is expected to produce net power in 2027, and ARC “is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.”
If “early 2030s” can be taken to mean “before 2035,” that means that Commonwealth Fusion Systems could be generating electricity from their fusion plant within 10 years.
That would be, as someone once said, a “big furshlugginer deal.” Fusion, if someone can make it work, could solve a whole lot of the world’s energy woes; and as for the reactors, building that first practical fusion reactor will be the work of geniuses standing on the shoulders of geniuses. Once there is a working prototype, however, it becomes a matter of engineering – and we can expect the reactors to become cheaper, more efficient, and reliable over time. That’s generally how technology works, and if you don’t believe me, just look at your smartphone.
Still, we don’t have that prototype yet. Fusion energy researchers are still trying to close that gap to zero, and they’ve been cutting the distance by half with each step for nearly 50 years. Where fusion power is concerned, great as it would be, you can count me in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp.
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It remains to be seen if Commonwealth Fusion Systems can make all this work. But if they can… Well, as the late, great Elmer Keith was fond of saying, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
