Commonwealth Fusion Systems — CFS — is pursuing fusion energy, a famously hard science and engineering challenge. But the payoff for this technology will be huge. It’s why so many people have called fusion the holy grail of energy.
Here’s why it’s such a big deal.
Fusion electricity comes with almost none of the ugly side effects of most energy generation today. No emissions, no pipelines, no problems on cloudy or windless days, no long-lived radioactive waste.
Compared to most energy sources, fusion requires almost no fuel. You can drop off all the fuel a fusion power plant needs for its entire life when you build it.
The tremendous amount of power possible from such a small amount of fuel is why the stars — huge fusion furnaces in space — shine for billions of years. Our mission to bring that fusion process to Earth is why we at CFS sometimes call ourselves star builders.
And fusion is safe. There’s no physical way it could melt down or have a runaway chain reaction like in a nuclear power plant. You can shut them off immediately if you need to. That means you can build fusion power plants right where power demand is high, with minimal need for new power lines.
Fusion fuel will be readily available. We’ll need two types of hydrogen: deuterium, which is easily filtered from seawater, and tritium, which we’ll make in our power plants from the fusion process. That fuel availability isn’t just convenient for power plants. It also means nations won’t need to worry so much about losing their access to energy.
What fusion energy enables
Fusion is cool, but what it’ll enable is cooler. With no fundamental barriers to scaling up fusion energy, fusion will ease today’s energy limits.
At home, you’ll be able to crank the air conditioning or the heat to your heart’s content or charge your electric vehicles whenever you want. At work, industries and other businesses will be assured of a steady supply of power.
And for nations, abundant energy enables economic growth, new industries, the latest in AI and other computing advances, and new technology like affordable desalination to ease the world’s water supply constraints.
So yeah, fusion really is a big deal.
For some more background, check our posts on the CFS journey to Q>1 and a fusion power plant and on the new technology that made CFS possible.
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