Commonwealth Fusion Systems marked a major milestone on Tuesday morning and announced the installation of key components of the SPARC demonstration reactor.
The new part is a 24-foot wide 75-ton stainless steel circle that forms the basis of the tokamak, the donut-shaped heart of the fusion reactor that is the first to expect to produce more power than CFS consumes. Called the Cryostat base, it was built in Italy and shipped to the CFS site in Devens, Massachusetts, midway through the world.
“This is the first part of a real fusion machine,” Alex Crely, director of CFS’ Tokamak Operations, told TechCrunch. Work on the site has been in progress for more than three years as the company is building buildings and machinery to support the core of the reactor.
“That’s a big deal for us, because it means we’re moving to a new phase of a project that doesn’t build industrial facilities. We’re still doing a little, but now we’re building the actual tokamak itself,” he said.
CFS is one of many startups that have emerged in recent years to pursue fusion power, and has committed to supplying gigawatts of pollution-free electricity from hydrogen fuels derived from seawater. Investors are relying on technology to meet future electricity needs as heavy users such as electric vehicles and data centers are rapidly increasing.
Supported by a groundbreaking energy venture among other Bill Gates investors, the company is widely considered to be one of the best prospects to prove whether its fusion power is commercially viable. In December, the company announced that its first commercial-scale reactor would be located outside Richmond, Virginia.
SPARC is expected to go online in 2027, and if it works as expected by CFS, it could be the first tokamac to produce more power than it does. So far, only the Ministry of Energy’s National Ignition Facility was able to take what is called a scientific break even in a series of successful experiments.
However, NIF reactors differ greatly from CFS, using lasers to compress fuel pellets into fusion conditions. CFS’ Tokamak uses magnets to cluster 100 million C plasmas into tight donut shapes and confines them and compresses them until fusion occurs.
Tokamaks uses superconducting magnets to generate the powerful magnetic fields needed to turn plasma into corals. These magnets should be cooled to -253°C using liquid helium. Cryostats help to maintain their frigid state and behave like a thermos when insulated from ambient temperature. “The base of a cryostat is basically similar to the bottom of a thermos,” Creeley said.
Just like anyone who received the Amazon package, CFS had to open the box and inspect it before removing and installing the cryostat base. However, unlike the e-commerce package that takes seconds to open, the CFS team took several days to remove the transport material, and another week “to make sure nothing was damaged during shipping.”
The CFS team then moved the cryostat base to Tokamac Hall. There, bolts protruding from the concrete base waiting for the stainless steel disc were precisely placed. “Then you grout it,” he said.
Along the Cryostat base, work on Tokamak’s other three main pieces continues. This will be assembled simultaneously into the final configuration later this year or early next year. The CFS then ensures that all pieces work together as planned. This is a process known as a commissioning that takes several months.
“This is the first,” Creeley said. “It’s not like an on button, it’s turned on.”
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