A nuclear fusion power plant prototype is already being built outside Boston. How long until unlimited clean energy is real?
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In an unassuming industrial park 30 miles outside Boston, engineers are building a futuristic machine to replicate the energy of the stars. If all goes to plan, it could be the key to producing virtually unlimited, clean electricity in the United States in about a decade.
The donut-shaped machine Commonwealth Fusion Systems is assembling to generate this energy is simultaneously the hottest and coldest place in the entire solar system, according to the scientists who are building it.
It is inside that extreme environment in the so-called tokamak that they smash atoms together in 100-million-degree plasma. The nuclear fusion reaction is surrounded by a magnetic field more than 400,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s and chilled with cryogenic gases close to absolute zero.
The fusion reaction — forcing two atoms to merge — is what creates the energy of the sun. It is the exact opposite of what the world knows now as “nuclear power” — a fission reaction that splits atoms.
Nuclear fusion has far greater energy potential, with none of the safety concerns around radioactive waste.
SPARC is the tokamak Commonwealth says could forever change how the world gets its energy, generating 10 million times more than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from deuterium, found in seawater, and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no atomic waste involved.
The biggest hurdle is building a machine powerful and precise enough to harness the molten, hard-to-tame plasma, while also overcoming the net-energy issue – getting more energy out than you put into it.
“Basically, what everybody expects is when we build the next machine, we expect it to be a net-energy machine,” said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, a trade group representing fusion companies around the globe. “The question is, how fast can you build that machine?”
Commonwealth’s timeline is audacious: With over $2 billion raised in private capital, its goal is to build the world’s first fusion-fueled power plant by the early 2030s in Virginia.
“It’s like a race with the planet,” said Brandon Sorbom, Commonwealth’s chief science officer. Commonwealth is racing to find a solution for global warming, Sorbom said, but it’s also trying to keep up with new power-hungry technologies like artificial intelligence. “This factory here is a 24/7 factory,” he said. “We’re acutely aware of it every minute of every hour of every day.”