Meno di 10 anni? Commonwealth Fusion Systems presenta domanda per collegarsi alla rete elettrica negli anni '30

<p>Whenever the topic of fusion power comes up, someone will say it’s only 10 years away from commercialization in an excited tone, and someone older or more cynical will point out that it’s been 10 years away since Eisenhower was president. So it’s with a certain-sized crystal of sodium chloride that we share the news here that the US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is applying to feed 400MWe into the grid there by the early 2030s.</p><p>The early 2030s is, notably, *less* than ten years from now.</p><p>Commonwealth Fusion Systems isn’t a bunch of nobodies out to suck up venture capital; they’re a talented group of researchers from MIT’s well-known plasma laboratory out to suck up lots of venture capital *and* hopefully build reactors along the way. So far, the second part is going better than the first: they’ve raised a couple billion dollars, which has let them make great strides in building their SPARC reactor– like crafting the big magnet we told you about in 2021. As that article describes, SPARC is the precursor to the later, larger ARC reactor they hope to hook to the grid in *slightly* under a decade. Alas, SPARC remains under construction as of this writing. ARC is evidently in the final planning stages, with a physical location determined and grid-tie applied for at the “Fall Line Fusion Power Station” in Virginia.</p><p>CFS’s reactors are of the Tokamak type that has been favoured at universities since the 1970s. From China to Europe’s ITER who are also planning to produce power before another decade passes— though not, notably, into a power grid. While promising, Tokamaks aren’t the only game in town, either– steampunk startup General Fusion started making plasma last year, though while if it works it has some big advantages, that one is probably the traditional “ten years away” still.</p><p>What do you think? Will fusion power be in the grid before humans make it back to the moon? Add the flying-car potential of eVTOL and we might finally get close to the future we were promised.</p><p>SPARC, huh?</p><p>It’s a RISC-y investment, to be sure.</p><p>I got this joke! (I work for CFS but used wrote hundreds of articles about Sun Microsystems in my previous career as a journalist.)</p><p>Well it’s their “second Sun” project</p><p>In a 2023 podcast (http://alternativlos.org/51/ in German) the project leader of the German Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was asked how fast one could build a working fusion rector if one throws enough money at it. His answer was “5 years”.</p><p>AFAIR He thinks there are no unsolvable technical problems at the moment and if they find new problems they will solve them.</p><p>Once the first fusion power plant is working nobody will care if it was a few years and a factor over budget.</p><p>I once saw a graph of funding vs expected time before commercial fusion. It held constant at “never” for funding levels at to significantly higher than they were at the time and then got dramatically shorter.</p><p>polywell wanted to yolo it too with a full size reactor. of course their reactor would have been a lot cheaper than a stellarator. instead we got 10 years of computer simulations.</p><p>The problem with asking scientific project leaders is that they massively underestimate the logistics issues. The technical problems with generating plasma and maintaining it: there’s a ton of research into that. The radioactive material handling, breeder blanket management and tritium production? Yeah, much less so.</p><p>Turns out that applying for a spot on the grid is one of those things you also have to do along with the science. (I work for CFS.) We have a mature teams for supply chain, materials, etc.; a running magnet factory; and many engineers working on the practical aspects of delivering fusion energy. You’re absolutely right that a lot has to be done beyond the science, but we’ve been looking past the core science for years.</p><p>Oh, I’m just referring to the “throw enough money at it and we can do it in 5 years” – logistics (and regulatory!) issues are very often impervious to the amount of money you throw at them. Keep in mind that comment was from</p><p>2023– I don’t think any amount of money thrown at fusion would’ve gotten a reactor by 2028.I mean, the SPARC design was what, late 2010s if memory serves? Going from initial design to actual construction in under 10 years for a project of that scale is anything but slow.</p><p>Who knows maybe they will. I am really cynical about MIT commercialization lately. I’ve seen so many things where the school spins out a company. On paper it sounds great. Then you interact with it, or the people doing it, and it’s slimier than your average VC funded fly-by-nighter.</p><p>I get that schools want to make money, but it also perverts what schools and research are for. If the goal of research is to make money then let’s accelerate it. MIT should become a military contractor that does mass surveillance under the guise of social media, and perfect the cigarette. Keep having the students pay if course.</p><p>id rather schools fund fusion reactors than sociology departments. hard science for the win.</p><p>Funding a reactor is cool with me too. But the asymmetrical power relationship between grad students working for a company through a university and say a full time advanced researcher is insane. We are talking 30k a yr working 70-80hr weeks vs 300k a year working 45-50. Also you might do a lot of work you cannot publish because it’s a companies IP and you have to publish to graduate. I’ve heard horror stories about this. People living out of their car to work the same job someone who has a mansion works in the same rooms.</p><p>Interesting take.</p><p>I worked as an undergrad researcher nominally doing same work as professional researchers on the bench next to me. I had a job with flexible hours and some extra gas and date night money. Was paid a bit over minimum wage and that was fine with me. When I graduated they hired me on the spot, gave me a raise and full benefits. Was probably still getting half of some of the other PhD staff, but again paid my rent on my own with a bit left over. It didn’t feel like exploitation even though I worked about 2-3x more hours when I went full time (~20hrs a week to 80+). That got old and I moved on.</p><p>Grad students get to pick their PI and project. Since they are doing it, they (like me) are clearly getting something out of that they see as beneficial. I’m not saying there aren’t predatory grad programs (specifically foreign grad students are very exploited and I’ve personally witnessed that) but I personally had no problems with the relationships and pay etc I’ve had over the years. And if I did, I walked.</p><p>Amen to that</p><p>MIT seems to excel at press releases if nothing else these days, I’ve seen so many groundbreaking technology stories coming out of MIT or spin-offs from MIT that get picked up by all the usual sci/tech reporters and repeated verbatim.</p><p>I’m sure MIT is full of smart people doing cool things but they do seem to be very quick to toot their own horn quite loudly.</p><p>Let me know when they actually HAVE something to plug in. Submitting applications is not the hard part.</p><p>Submitting applications isn’t the hardest part, but it is hard — lots of engineering and modeling work that goes far beyond just filling out a form — and you have to do it well in advance if you want to get your power plant on the grid on time. It takes about 4–6 years between application and power plant on the grid. (I work for CFS.)</p><p>Obviously, we have plenty of other work to do as well. We’re about 3/4 done building our fusion demonstration machine, SPARC, and expect to turn it on next year. (It won’t generate electricity, if that’s your threshold for checking back in, but I think many steps on the path to net electricity are pretty important, too.)</p><p>Hey, eventually one of those “15 years from plugging your electric razor into a fusion reactor” predictions has to be the one that is actually correct. Don’t succumb to cynicism completely</p><p>No mention of the W7X? They’ve been smashing records all over the place, from plasma time to confinement time without resorting to pulsed fusion.</p><p>The W7-X is a plasma research device: it can’t actually burn anything (it wasn’t designed for actual fusion). Making it so that it’s compatible with a tritium-burning plasma takes research which is still ongoing. Long-term it could be a better approach, but a lot of the tokamak design and technology is more mature.</p><p>Also, the entire point of the ARC design was that high temp superconductors are mature and available enough now that you can build smaller scale tokamaks and iterate faster. It’s a little harder to iterate faster with stellarators because the magnets are so integral to the design (W7-X made this a lot easier, though).</p><p>This isn’t trying to dismiss stellarators at all: the equivalent of CFS for stellarators is Proxima Fusion, and their timeline is a little behind CFS’s.</p><p>It has literally done fusion already in 2023. Being a research device doesn’t matter. ALL the fusion reactors that exist are research devices.</p><p>I’m not so sure that iteration will buy anything on a class of reactor that has the fundamental handicap of being unable to perform continuous fusion.</p><p>Sigh, I hate fusion media stuff.</p><p>W7X has never fused anything. It’s plasma physics. It has no mechanism to inject D-T into the plasma.</p><p>I don’t know what you’re thinking of, but it wasn’t that. In 2023 they entered the third phase where they pushed the triple product higher. Actually fusing things requires injecting D/T, and doing that is expensive (tritium is megabucks).</p><p>It’s not a knock on W7X that they didn’t fuse anything. Again, it’s a plasma machine, it’s entire point was plasma science.</p><p>There is small canadian startup that aims to accomplish similar goals with what looks like Z-pinch variant using rather genius ideas how to tame inevitable spillover of the Xray bursts. The scale of the project is nimble in comparison, but if they manage to make it modular (they aim to have entire enchilada to be compact enough to be hauled around on average rental truck), then we have a clear winner on a smaller budget.</p><p>I don’t want to see ANOTHER mega-project needing mega-managers with their mega-salaries and mega-bureaucracy that usually mega-accompanies both. I want to see municipal level reactor that stays put and works safely until the fuel runs out, period. Simple and reliable enough so any municipality can afford owning few dozens, placed strategically where they are needed, and replaced with better/later versions once fuel runs out. Low maintenance, reliable, simple.</p><p>Small, simple, low maintenance, cheap, reliable fusion.</p><p>I have no doubt that some mega-company (or government entity?) will buy the technology and kill it.</p><p>That type of energy has the power to change society (pun intended). Which is not what the NWO wants….</p><p>We have that already with solar, and they also don’t like it.</p><p>im still curious if that will be long term sustainable. the entire life cycle needs to be considered. what happens when all the current installations reach their mtbf. will we have panel recycling solved by then? will we have new cell chemistries with a wider bandgap? will we ever get low cost solar coatings that we can apply to every surface that faces sunlight? i suspect solar technology will solve its problems and improve with use. but that doesn’t mean we need to put all our eggs in one basket.</p><p>Exactly. That’s why I am omitting the name and hope Carney keeps it away from the deadly clutches of the US corporations (not an easy task, btw).</p><p>_(testo troncato)_</p>