Commonwealth Fusion Systems

SPARC’s fusion operation is a carefully choreographed dance of power, heat, and data. At the heart of it all is Tokamak Hall, but we need more than the tokamak itself to produce fusion power. Here's a closer look at what’ll go in and out of each part of our SPARC facility: 1️⃣ The radio frequency (RF) heating building generates powerful radio waves that piped into the tokamak. That helps heat its plasma to temperatures over 100 million degrees Celsius, triggering and sustaining the fusion process. 2️⃣ In the power building, advanced power supplies will supply some of SPARC’s magnets with the pulses of electricity that drive the fusion process. 3️⃣ Opposite the RF building, the utility building draws heat out. This building’s cryogenic system uses helium to keep SPARC and its magnets cool, in particular after a pulse of fusion energy warms them up. 4️⃣ The operations building’s labs gather the data that flows out of SPARC and nearby diagnostic equipment. Specialized scientific instruments measure what’s happening inside the plasma within SPARC, which helps us understand how to control and optimize the fusion reactions and to plan ARC, the power plant successor to SPARC. Together, these buildings create an integrated flow of energy and information that will make fusion energy possible. Want to see a full tour of the SPARC facility? Watch here: https://bit.ly/3yMWjrY

This month, CFS received a broad-scope radioactive materials license from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for our SPARC fusion machine. By showing we’ve equipped ourselves with the people and procedures to safely handle and store these materials, we’ve taken a big step ahead on the path toward operating SPARC. The license also shows our ability to tackle the broad range of real-world requirements to get SPARC working. Although our effort started with fusion’s science and engineering challenges, it’s extended much farther to jobs like scaling manufacturing, building supply chains, and selecting sites. All that expertise will extend from today’s SPARC project to our work on its power plant successor, ARC. https://lnkd.in/eykCGY5V

Everyone deserves abundant energy and a clean planet. That’s what we believe, and that’s what keeps us focused on putting fusion energy on the grid in the early 2030s. By using the same process that powers the stars, our ARC fusion power plant will revolutionize energy with a firm and carbon-free energy source that brings energy independence to the world’s nations. It’s a technology that can be built soon and scaled globally. We’re honored to be included with the many other like-minded and stellar organizations around the globe in this year’s State of the Transition report from Breakthrough Energy . All of us are working hard to build a brighter future for humans and the Earth. Click to find out more how fusion is helping to change the world: https://bit.ly/3U6UVrF #FusionEnergy #ClimateChange #CleanEnergy

In the fusion energy world, the APS DPP conference is a big deal. Historically, researchers from universities and national labs attended this event, but as fusion gets steadily closer to commercial application, there’s an increasing industry presence — like ours. CFS and our academic collaborators headed to Atlanta for this year’s meeting to detail cutting-edge research involving our first two fusion devices, SPARC and ARC. APS DPP (the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics) focuses on plasmas, the complex and highly energetic state of matter that underpins our work to build fusion energy power plants. Some highlights from CFS: • CFS and affiliated outside researchers presented dozens of posters and presentations about SPARC, the tokamak we’re building now to demonstrate our approach by generating net fusion energy. • We began detailing some of our work on ARC, the power plant successor to SPARC. ARC design has begun in earnest, and we plan to detail its core behavior by publishing papers on the ARC physics basis in 2025. • CFS open-source software efforts like GSPulse, cfspopcon, and HEAT are gaining momentum across a wide group of users, improving tokamak design and understanding while spurring adoption from other fusion efforts. • We detailed some of our work using digital twins — virtual versions to real-world equipment — to speed up prototyping. Future digital twin work will also help us operate SPARC and then learn from a fleet of ARC power plants. • We’re using machine learning to distill high-fidelity physics into faster models capable of real-time responsiveness. One such application that’s shown promising results is a machine learning model to protect the tokamak's walls from overheating. The growing presence of fusion energy businesses at APS DPP is a healthy sign for the industry. Sharing this work publicly — from CFS and others in the community — is how we ensure we’re on the right track and advance as fast as possible.

At CFS, we envision a future of abundant energy for all. Right now, we’re doing the hard work to actually make that possible. If you want to see some of that nuts-and-bolts work in our magnet factory, take a look at the new issue of the Positive Sum from Emerson Collective: https://lnkd.in/eVgnyQNn 

Here’s a photo you could call a match made in heaven. The aurora borealis usually is confined to Earth’s north polar region, but this week's Northern Lights reached enough south to appear over our tokamak building in Devens, Massachusetts — the orange structure in this photo. Here’s why this is cool: aurorae are triggered by a plasma from the sun smacking into the plasma far up in the Earth’s atmosphere, and our tokamak will have a plasma of its own. When you heat a gas enough, the atoms become so energetic that their electrons are ripped away from their nuclei. Those charged particles form a state of matter called a plasma. In our SPARC tokamak, we’ll heat forms of hydrogen into a plasma. Powerful magnetic fields will confine the plasma to a donut-shaped region, spurring the hydrogen nuclei to combine and release fast-moving neutrons. Our later ARC power plant will capture those neutrons, converting their energy into heat that generates electrical power.

“We’re not just building a fusion power plant or company. We’re building a fusion power industry.” That’s what our Chief Commercial Officer Rick Needham had to say at the Tough Tech Summit in Boston about our work at CFS to upgrade the world’s power grid with clean, abundant energy. That’s most definitely a tough tech challenge, combining breakthrough science with multidisciplinary R&D and advanced engineering. But what Rick was talking about is building a broader movement beyond physicists and engineers. Others like universities, welders, suppliers, policymakers, and power companies also have a role to play. Even companies competing with CFS to deliver fusion energy are also our partners in building this industry. And when we build our first ARC power plant, that’s only the beginning of the journey. It’ll take many of them to tackle climate change. No one said tough tech was easy. Thanks to The Engine Accelerator and Engine Ventures for hosting an energizing conversation around fusion and our quest for energy abundance. #Energy #Climate #ToughTech

You might think we lured a UFO into Commonwealth Fusion Systems headquarters. But this overhead photo actually shows a big step we’ve taken toward building our first fusion energy machine, SPARC. This is our first superconducting magnet coil, packaged within a temporary D-shaped "briefcase" and nestled within the larger circular test stand. Around that are some of the hundreds of people at CFS and beyond who designed and built it all. It’s progress along our path to deliver fusion power to the grid in time to help fight climate change and meet rising energy demand. We’re gearing our manufacturing program to scale beyond SPARC to dozens, hundreds, then thousands of power plants afterward. Testing as we go means we learn what’s working and avoid surprises. Stay tuned for results! This type of magnetic coil is the foundation for our 18 toroidal field (TF) magnets that’ll help confine and control plasma within SPARC, the donut-shaped tokamak fusion machine we’re building right now. The test stand is called a cryostat: a chamber that cools the magnet down to the very cold temperature of 20 degrees above absolute zero. To keep it cold, we pump all the air out of the cryostat to form a vacuum. That’s like a really big version of a Thermos bottle that’ll keep your hot drinks hot or your cold drinks cold. This custom-built cryostat test stand, one of two on our magnet factory floor, ensures the magnet can handle the extremely high electrical currents we use to generate SPARC’s extremely strong magnetic fields. Work on this magnet started with research at MIT, continued through years of design and computer modeling, passed a major validation test in 2021. Now we're manufacturing them at our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. Hundreds of people have had their actual or virtual hands on it. To make each TF magnet, we start with a D-shaped metal plate. Thousands of meters of high-temperature superconducting tape are carefully laid down into a spiral channel on the plate’s face. We then add copper caps and solder each plate to form a solid “pancake.” Sixteen pancakes are stacked up into a single coil. For this intermediate stage of the manufacturing and testing process, they’re housed inside a briefcase, but for use in SPARC, they’ll be welded into a steel case. Eighteen of those make up SPARC’s whole TF magnet system. Step by step, a big team of people is all pulling in the same direction to bring the world’s energy system into the future. #Fusion #Energy

Sorry, Molly Wood, we don’t have any “star in a bottle” T-shirts for you, but we hope our CEO Bob Mumgaard’s assessment of the fusion energy business was at least as valuable. This podcast from your recent fireside chat with Bob offers a great look at subjects like financing fusion startups, building a fusion ecosystem extending all the way to insurance companies, and the competition with China and other fusion companies. It’s a big realm to explore. Fusion’s potential to modernize the energy industry extends far beyond lighting our homes and charging our cars. The limitless, clean, and consistent energy provided by fusion could desalinate water and decarbonize heavy industries like steel and cement production. If you want to fully appreciate fusion energy, you can move beyond the gee-whiz physics and start learning deeper details with this podcast. https://lnkd.in/e969ynQv #Fusion #Energy #FusionEnergy

We’re back to work in CFS headquarters in Massachusetts after a hopping #ClimateWeekNYC. We spent the week talking to and learning from industry pioneers, changemakers, and advocates. And we shared our inside look at how fusion will shape our future at several of the 900 Climate Week events that 100,000 people attended: 🔔 Kicking off the week at Nasdaq's opening bell with Emerson Collective and Galvanize Climate Solutions ✅ Participating in conversations with Deloitte on scaling up fusion and working through the energy transition 📈 Discussing the importance of creative capital in fusion with the Fusion Industry Association ⚛️ Building toy tokamaks with kids at Emerson Collective’s Climate Science Fair to make fusion tangible 🎆 Hosting investors, journalists, and policymakers to grasp the significance of fusion energy Thanks to everyone who welcomed us and joined the conversations. The momentum for change is undeniable. It's time to move now. Move smart. Move together. #Fusion #Energy #Climate