The Commonwealth Fusion System marked a major milestone Tuesday morning, announcing the installation of a key component of its SPARC demonstration reactor.
The new section is a 24-foot wide 75-ton stainless steel circle that forms the basis of Tokamak, the Doughnut centroid of the Fusion reactor, and CFS hopes this will be the first of its kind to produce more power than it consumes. It is known as the cryostat base and is made in Italy and shipped midway around the world to the CFS website in Devins, Massachusetts.
“This is the first part of the actual fusion machine,” said Tokamak Operations Director Alex Crely. CFStell TechCrunch. Work on the site has been going on for more than three years as the company builds buildings and machinery that will support the core of the reactor.
“It’s a big deal for us because it means we’re transitioning to a new phase of the project, where we’re not building industrial facilities – we’re still doing something – but we’re also building the actual Tokamak itself now, too.”
CFS is one of many startups that have emerged in recent years Fusion capabilityit is expected to deliver pollution-free electricity from hydrogen fuel derived from seawater. Investors have been relying on this technology to meet future electricity demands, which are soaring as heavy users such as electric vehicles and data centers.
The company, Supported by Bill Gates’ breakthrough energy companies Among other investors, it is widely regarded as one of the best prospects to prove that convergence capabilities are commercially viable. The company announced in December The first commercial-scale reactor Will be located outside Richmond, Virginia.
SPARC is expected to go live in 2027, and if it works the way CFS expects it will probably be the first tokamak to produce more power than it does to run. So far, only the Ministry of Energy’s national ignition facility has been able to encounter the so-called scientific rupture in a series of successful experiments, i.e. first It happened in December 2022.
However, the reactor of NIF is significantly different from that of CFS, using lasers to compress the fuel precipitation to fusion conditions. CFS’s Tokamak uses magnets to place 100 million C plasmas into a tight donut shape, limiting and compressing them until fusion occurs.
Tokamaks uses superconducting magnets to generate the powerful magnetic fields required for coral plasma. Those magnets It is necessary to cool it to –253 degrees using liquid helium. A cryostat can maintain those cold conditions by insulating the ambient temperature, just like a thermos. “The cryostat is basically like the bottom of a thermos bottle,” Criley said.
Just like those who receive Amazon packages, CFS has to be taken apart and checked for the cryostat foundation before installation. But unlike a few seconds for an e-commerce package, it took the CFS team several days to remove the shipping material, while another week was “just to make sure there was no damage in the shipping.”
The CFS team then moved the cryostat base to Tokamak Hall, where bolts extending from the concrete foundation were placed accurately, waiting for the stainless steel disk. “And you fill it up,” he said.
In addition to the cryostat base, three other major works by Tokamak continue, which will be assembled into final configurations at the end of this year or early next year. After that, CFS will ensure that all parts work together as planned, a process called commissioning that takes several months.
“This is the first one,” Criley said. “Not only is there a button, it opens.”
