Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that started the project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology research center, announced plans this week to unveil what it calls “the world’s first fusion power plant.” The plant, which is expected to come online sometime in the early 2030s, according to the company, will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
The plan is certainly ambitious, starting with how the energy will be produced. Nuclear fusion is a very complex process that involves combining the nuclei of two light atoms into one heavy one, resulting in the release of a large amount of energy—it is estimated that four times more energy is produced than in nuclear fission reactions. The reaction produced by nuclear fusion is the same type of reaction that powers the sun.
It’s not hard to imagine why someone would want to be able to use solar energy. It’s really hard, you know, to do that, though. So far, nuclear fusion seems unlikely—at least not in a way that would produce usable energy. In 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved nuclear “ignition” for the first time, meaning they successfully produced a large amount of energy from the reaction. Before that, it has been repeated, it took more energy to produce a reaction than energy to come from it.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has not yet completed the mission of generating additional energy, per Futurism. In fact, the company has yet to finish construction on its small reactor that was designed to serve as a proof-of-concept for a future large-scale plant. That project will continue, but it seems that the startup has decided to start working ahead of time under the assumption that everything will go well rather than checking the boxes first.
The company promises that when the reactor comes online in Virginia, it will generate 400 megawatts of electricity—enough to power about 150,000 homes. That would be great! It also seems ambitious based on the 0 megawatts currently being generated from the system.
There’s a reason that nuclear fusion has seemed impossible so far, but perhaps with the seal broken on ignition, progress in space will come quickly and steadily. With a reported $2 billion behind it, Commonwealth Fusion Systems has as good an image as you can get. And if it can, maybe it can find a way to use energy to burn all that money.
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