
with Future Ventures (Saenko), Khosla Ventures (Vinod), Lowercase Capital (Sacca) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Gates, Bezos and Ma).
Here is a little video of my visit with my daughter as we crawled all over their record-setting Alcator-C reactor.
From today’s announcement: “Leveraging decades of MIT-led research, CFS will produce first-of-its-kind high temperature superconductor magnets to build smaller and lower-cost fusion power plants. CFS in collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center will use these magnets to build SPARC by 2025 and demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history. SPARC will pave the way for the first commercially viable fusion power plant called ARC, which will produce fusion power onto the grid.”
“We have been looking for the right clean energy investment opportunity in fusion for the past 20 years,” said Steve Jurvetson, CEO of Future Ventures. “We wanted a company that was ready to make a business of fusion and we have finally found it with Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The hard science from which their approach is based has been proven by this team as well as leaders in the field around the world. With some clever engineering, CFS is ready to harness the power of the solar cycle to change the world and usher in the era of clean baseload energy generation for the betterment of all.”
Maryanna Saenko started a PhD at MIT, birthplace of CFS, and led this investment for Future Ventures. And practical fusion has been a holy grail for me for many years. It just so happens that the very first investment I ever made in a private company was in a novel nuclear fusion company, back in 1995.
More on the CFS approach, and congrats to CFS Chief Scientist Brandon Sorbom for being selected to the MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.
That big boy up there is a copper conduit that carries 2500 Amps! The energy storage for each fusion cycle is an unusual design space in power and energy density. They spin up a huge flywheel for 10 minutes and then dump that potential energy it into an electric generator. It’s like having 2000 Tesla P100 battery packs discharging rapidly, but for only 10% of their charge.
It’s Take Your Daughter to a Nuclear Reactor day
Only fair, as my son and I went to a couple 10 years ago when she was too young to go.
^ more on this big boy.


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