‘Birth’ of commercial nuclear fusion declared as plans for grid-scale Virginia plant announced

COMMERCIAL nuclear fusion moved a step closer after a US company announced plans to build a plant that will deliver electricity to the grid by early next decade.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) claims to be the world’s first company to develop plans to build a grid-scale fusion plant. The generator will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia, which the company’s CEO Bob Mumgaard called the “birthplace of commercial fusion energy”.

CFS says their reactor, known as ARC, will generate around 400 MW of electricity for the grid, enough to power 150,000 homes. The company expects to generate at this capacity by the early 2030s.

Mumgaard described the announcement as a “historic moment”. He added: “In the early 2030s, all eyes will be on…Chesterfield County, Virginia, as the birthplace of commercial fusion energy.

“Virginia emerged as a strong partner as they look to implement innovative solutions for both reliable electricity and clean forms of power.”

The ARC reactor will be built on land owned by Virginia energy company Dominion, while CFS will finance, build, and operate the plant. Dominion president, Edward H Baine, said: “Our customers’ growing needs for reliable carbon-free power benefits from as diverse a menu of power generation options as possible, and in that spirit, we are delighted to assist CFS in their efforts.”

Fusion aims

Nuclear fusion has the potential to generate vast amounts of power from very little resources. All existing nuclear power stations in the world use nuclear fission, which generates radioactive waste that requires highly complex management. Fusion reactors, in contrast, produce no radioactive waste.  

The biggest challenge to making nuclear fusion commercially viable is producing “net energy”, which is generating more energy than is required for the reactor to operate.

Net energy was first achieved in 2022 at California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Their success has only been repeated in a handful of facilities around the world, including at the Joint European Tours (JET) research facility at the Culham Centre in Oxfordshire, UK, which ceased experiments in December 2023.

There is also the difficulty of sustaining fusion reactions to deliver a constant power supply. The current world record is held by China’s “artificial sun” facility, which achieved constant fusion reactions for 17 minutes in 2022.

CFS says it will achieve sustained net energy and expects its prototype reactor to be operational by 2026. The reactor will use superconductors to drive powerful magnets which CFS said could produce twice as much energy as it requires.

Luke Crampton, chair of IChemE’s nuclear technology special interest group, told TCE: “This is a significant development in fusion design. It is really promising that there is now investment in a wide range of nuclear technologies that pave the way to a more sustainable future.”

Crampton added that CFS’s reactors “present a huge opportunity for chemical engineers globally” and that they are “critical to making these applications a reality”.  

Private fusion

CFS is a private company that spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. To date, it has raised over US$2bn, which includes major backing from Italian oil giant Eni.

CFS and Wisconsin-based Realta Fusion are the only two private enterprises in the world with viable plans to produce net energy from fusion in the near future, according to the Fusion Industry Association’s latest report.

The UK Atomic Energy Agency signed a five-year collaboration deal with CFS in 2022, while the UK Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has recently signed a US$52m deal with the US Department of Energy in a bid to motivate collaboration in developing fusion technology.