Commonwealth Fusion Systems chose its first commercial location, in part because of its proximity to Washington, D.C
Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that it will build the first commercial-scale power plant outside of Richmond, Virginia, with the goal of connecting it to the grid in the early 2030s.
It has long been ridiculed that nuclear fusion power is still decades away, but the new milestone posits the possibility of commercial operation within the next decade. This confidence has been echoed by many in the field after the National Ignition Facility Showed two years ago Controlled fusion reactions can generate more energy than is needed for ignition.
Commonwealth merger regulations (CFS) triggered More money than its competitorsIt is widely seen as having the best chance of bringing commercial fusion energy to fruition in the next decade.
The commercial power plant, known as ARC, is expected to generate the equivalent of 400 megawatts of electricity. While many new power plants are designed to directly feed large-scale data centers — which is often a faster path to market — CFS is working with Dominion Energy to connect Arc to the grid.
“For our first power plant, it was important for us to get power to the grid,” Christine Cullen, CFS vice president of global policy and public affairs, told TechCrunch.
The company settled on the Virginia location after considering several other possibilities. “A lot of sites could have worked for this,” Cullen said. “We looked at locations globally, really focusing on the United States after the unanimous Security Council resolution [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] To structure the merger in a way that we felt was appropriate for the industry.
Once the field was narrowed down, Cullen said the team looked for locations with strong transportation networks to support the construction project. They also wanted to be near an existing power station, for easy connection to the grid and access to an industry-knowledgeable labor pool.
But part of what helped push Virginia ahead of the rest was its proximity to Washington, D.C. “It’s the world’s first fusion power plant,” Cullen said. “We want to have a lot of people here. We want to do tours through. We will want to show the energy ministers and different heads of state what nuclear fusion is.”
CFS leases the land to Arc from Dominion, although apart from that, no money changes hands between the two partners. CFS expects Dominion will be able to help the startup secure permits and connect the power plant to the grid, and in return, the facility will be one of the first, if not the first, utility to gain experience working with a fusion power plant.
“They’re very interested in dipping their toes in the water here and understanding what it means to bring fusion energy to the grid,” Rick Needham, chief commercial officer at CFS, told TechCrunch.
CFS follows a type of fusion known as magnetic confinement, in which powerful magnets compress and confine extremely hot plasma. There are many shapes that plasma can take, but CFS traps it in what is known as a tokamak, a kind of donut shape that is one of the best-studied methods of magnetic confinement. Inside a tokamak, when the plasma is compressed, supercharged particles will likely collide with each other so hard that atomic nuclei fuse, unleashing massive amounts of energy.
The tokamak’s wall will be made of molten salt which will capture heat and transfer it to a steam turbine used to generate electricity. The molten salt blanket will also absorb harmful neutrons and use them to generate tritium, one of the two hydrogen isotopes that the reactor will operate on. The other type, deuterium, can be obtained from seawater.
Ark will not be CFS’s first facility. The company is currently building Sparc, a pilot plant, in Devens, Massachusetts. It plans to start up Sparc later in 2025 and, in 2026, achieve “first plasma” – an industry term referring to when a nuclear fusion reactor is first turned on.
“We will have a net energy gain shortly after that,” Needham said. If the company succeeds, it will be the first time a tokamak has reached this milestone. Until now, only the National Ignition Facility was capable of producing a positive, controlled nuclear fusion reaction.
To build an arc, the company will need to Raise new money. Raising a new round of equity is a likely path, although Needham said the company is also exploring “other sources of capital,” 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 has its eyes on Sparc and Arc today, Needham said the company is already starting to think about what comes next. “Because of all the work we’ve done, we’ve found a lot of great locations,” Needham said. “Our goal as a company is not to build a fusion power plant. It is to build thousands.”
