Look inside the SPARC fusion facility as CFS powers on its first systems
It’s time for a fresh look inside the facility where we’re building SPARC, a machine called a tokamak we’re building to demonstrate fusion energy’s commercial viability. In this tour, you can see how the first element of the tokamak is installed — and how we’ve begun putting some of the supporting hardware through its paces.
“We’re going from building stuff to commissioning and operating, which is a really exciting phase of the project and a really exciting step on our path to operating SPARC,” said Alex Creely, Director of Tokamak Operations and tour guide for this new look inside the facility.
SPARC is a donut-shaped fusion machine called a tokamak that’ll use powerful electromagnets to confine and control a super-hot cloud of fusion fuel called a plasma. CFS is building it at our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts, to prove out most of the technology that later will be used to build our ARC power plants.
Ultimately, we plan to build not just one ARC in Chesterfield County, Virginia, but thousands around the world. We’re planning for a large-scale business that can help meet fast-rising power demand, improve energy security, and supply people with clean, reliable, zero-carbon energy. To get there, we first have to build and run SPARC.
SPARC’s first main goal is to generate net fusion energy — producing more power from the fusion process than it takes to start and run it. In scientific circles, that milestone is called Q>1, where Q is the ratio of power out to power in.
Creely shows how it’s all put together. In this tour, you can see:
- The cryostat base. This is the bottom of the SPARC, a 75-ton circular steel disc that will help keep the tokamak’s magnets cold enough. We positioned the cryostat base with millimeter accuracy.
- Two hefty orange stands where we’ll stack up our D-shaped toroidal field (TF) magnets. Later, that’s where we’ll add the two vacuum vessel halves that ultimately will house SPARC’s plasma.
- The utility building. This is where we’ve begun test runs of some of SPARC’s cryogenic cooling hardware.
- The radio frequency heating building. This contains electronics similar to microwave ovens, but using a different frequency, that will generate radio waves we’ll pipe into SPARC to help warm the plasma up to 100 million degrees Celsius.
- The power building. This is home to power adapters that’ll be used to charge our superconducting magnets — not unlike laptop power adapters, but a lot beefier.
- The operations building. It’ll house diagnostic equipment that we’ll use both to operate SPARC and to understand what’s happening inside SPARC.
The knowledge from those diagnostic systems will be invaluable when it comes to ARC.
“We want to learn stuff,” Creely said. “We’ll make a bunch of additional measurements on SPARC so we can improve the design of the ARC power plant and improve its operation.”
