Our SPARC fusion machine is beginning to take shape — literally.
In our newest six-month video check-in video with Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Bob Mumgaard, you can see how we’ve installed SPARC’s cryostat base. This 75-ton, 24-foot-wide silvery steel disc is the foundation for our SPARC tokamak, the machine we’ve designed to demonstrate net fusion energy.
“We literally build the machine on top of it,” Mumgaard says.
SPARC is the centerpiece of the Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) effort to bring fusion energy online as soon as possible. Fusion, the power source of the stars, is difficult to bring to Earth. But doing so will mean a safe, secure new source of energy with essentially unlimited fuel can help tackle challenges like the world’s growing power demand, AI computing capacity, and climate change.
SPARC is a tokamak, a donut-shaped machine that’ll use powerful magnets to enable fusion. We’ll heat SPARC’s fuel — two forms of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium — into a highly energetic cloud of charged particles called a plasma, and the magnets will confine them as they fuse into helium and release tremendous amounts of power in the process.
SPARC is designed to demonstrate that we can produce more power than it takes to sustain the process, a key threshold called Q>1. And it’ll pave the way for our power plant, ARC, which is set to generate electrical power for the grid in Virginia starting in the early 2030s.
The tokamak is at the center of the SPARC facility. Surrounding it is machinery for powering, cooling, monitoring, and controlling the tokamak. Mumgaard offers a look at several of these systems, including the refrigeration system that’ll keep SPARC’s high-temperature superconducting magnets cold enough to carry huge electrical currents.
We’ve now installed much of that equipment and are beginning to test it in a process called commissioning that ensures it works as required before operations begin.
“Over the last six months, in addition to assembling it, we’re starting to actually commission those subsystems,” Mumgaard says. That commissioning work is leading toward our “dry dress rehearsal,” when we test all the SPARC-supporting equipment at once but not yet with SPARC itself running.
Check the video for more details about:
- Our partnership with Google to purchase 200 megawatts of power, half the output of the first ARC
- How we’re building a supply chain that can produce tokamak parts like the vacuum vessel where fusion will occur
- The arrival soon of new parts like that vacuum vessel and the tokamak’s first magnets
- A look at the site in Chesterfield County, Virginia, where we plan to build ARC
CFS has plotted all this progress out as steps on our multiyear plan.
“When we founded the company, we had a roadmap: Start with magnets, then build a factory to make more magnets for SPARC, build and operate SPARC, go build ARC, build more ARCs,” Mumgaard said. “We’re still on that same roadmap, and it’s all coming together.”
