Commonwealth Fusion Systems marked an important step on Tuesday morning, announcing the installation of a key element of its Sparc demonstration reactor.
The new part is a 24 55 -toned stainless steel circle that forms the foundation of Tokamak, the heart -shaped heart of a fusion reactor that CFS hopes will be the first of its kind to generate more power than it consumes. Called the Cryostat base, it was made in Italy and shipped halfway around the world on the CFS site in Devens, Massachusetts.
“This is the first piece of the real merger machine,” said Alex Crely, director of tokamak operations CFStold Techcrunch. Work on the site has been underway for more than three years while the company builds buildings and machines that will support the heart of the reactor.
“This is a big problem for us, because it means that we are going to a new stage of the project where we do not build an industrial installation-we always do it a little-but we also build the Tokamak itself,” he said.
CFS is one of the many startups that have emerged in recent years to continue fusion power, which promises to provide gigawatts of electricity without pollution from a hydrogen fuel derived from sea water. Investors have counted on technology to meet future power needs, which skyrocketing while heavy users such as electric vehicles and data centers proliferate.
The company, supported by Bill Gates Breadthrough Energy Ventures, among other investors, is largely considered one of the best prospects to prove whether the merger power is commercially possible. The company announced in December that its first commercial scale reactor will be located outside Richmond, Virginia.
SPARC should be put online in 2027, and if it works as the CFS provides, it could be the first Tokamak to produce more power than it takes to work. Until now, only the national national ignition installation of the Ministry of Energy has been able to strike the so -called scientific rupture even in a series of successful experiences, the first of which occurred in December 2022.
But the NIF reactor differs considerably from CFS, using lasers to compress a fuel pellet with fusion conditions. The CFS Tokamak uses magnets to collect 100 million degrees C plasma in a tight form of donut, confident and compress it until the fusion occurs.
Tokamaks use superconductive magnets to generate the powerful magnetic fields necessary to coralize the plasma. These magnets should be cooled to –253 degrees C using liquid helium. Cryostat helps maintain these freezing conditions, acting as a thermos by insulating it from ambient temperatures. “The Cryostat base is essentially like the bottom of the thermos,” said Crely.
Like someone receiving an Amazon package, CFS had to unpack and inspect the Cryostat base before installing it. But unlike a set of electronic commerce that takes a few seconds to open, it took the CFS team for a few days to withdraw the shipping equipment and another week “just to make sure that nothing was damaged in the expedition,” said Creely.
The CFS team then moved the Cryostat base to the Tokamak Hall, where the bolts placed with precision protruding from the concrete foundation while waiting for the stainless steel disc. “Then you pour it,” he said.
In addition to the Cryostat base, the work continues on the other three main parts of the Tokamak, which will be assembled simultaneously in their final configuration at the end of this year or at the start of next year. After that, CFS will ensure that all the parts work together as expected, a process known as commissioning that will take months.
“This is the first one in a kind,” said Crely. “There is not only like a walking button and it lights up.”
