Commonwealth fusion systems marked a great milestone on Tuesday morning, announcing the installation of a major component of its demonstration Sparc.
The new part is a circle of 24 -foot stainless steel, 75 tonnes, which forms the foundation of the Tokamac, the dual heart of a union reactor that CFS hopes to be the first of its kind that will generate more power than consumes. Called the base of Christostat, it was made in Italy and was sent halfway around the world on the CFS site on Devens, Massachusetts.
“Is the first part of the current melting machine,” Alex Creely, director of Tokamak operations on CFS, told Techcrunch. Work on this site has now begun for more than three years after the company builds buildings and machinery that will support the essence of the reactor.
“It’s a big job for us because it means we are going through a new phase of the project where we are not building an industrial structure – we are still doing it a little – but we are also building the current tokamak,” he said.
CFS is one of the many beginnings that have emerged in recent years to follow the melting power, which promises to give gigavas of electricity without pollution from a hydrogen fuel derived from seawater. Investors have calculated in technology to meet future energy needs, which are increasing as heavy users such as electric vehicles and data centers multiply.
The company, which is supported by Bill Gates Ventures Energy among other investors, is widely regarded as one of the best prospects to prove whether the fusion power is commercial. The company announced in December that its first reactor on the trade scale will be located outside Richmond, Virginia.
Sparc is expected to come online in 2027, and if it works as CFS predicts, it can be the first tokamac to produce more power than it should run. So far, only the national ignition facility of the Energy Department has been able to hit the so -called scientific leave even in a series of successful experiments, the first of which occurred in December 2022.
But the NIF reactor differs significantly from CFS, using laser to compress a fuel pellet into melting conditions. The CFS tokamac uses magnets in the plasma of 100 million C flocks in a narrow donut form, limiting it and compressing it until fusion occurs.
Toksamaks use super -transitor magnets to generate powerful magnetic fields required to coord the plasma. These magnets should be cooled to -253 degrees C using liquid helium. Cryostat helps maintain those solid conditions, acting as a thermos by isolates it from ambient temperatures. “The base of the cryostat is essentially like the bottom of the Thermo,” Creely said.
Like someone receiving an Amazon package, CFS had to unlock and inspect the Cryostat base before installing it. But unlike a package of e -commerce that requires a few seconds to open, it took CFS team a few days to remove the shipping material and another week “just to make sure nothing was damaged in transportation,” Creely said.
The CFS team then moved the base of the Christostat to the Tokamak Hall, where exactly located the bolts elongated from the concrete foundation waiting for the unlikely steel disc. “Then you keep it,” he said.
In addition to the basis of the cryostat, the work continues in the other three main parts of the Tokamak, which will be collected simultaneously in their final configuration either at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year. After that, CFS will ensure that all parts are working together as planned, a process recognized as a commission that will last month.
“This is the first of a kind,” Creely said. “There is not just like an On button and it is lit.”
