Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion (CFS), updated our investors today on the progress being made toward a clean fusion energy future with their SPARC machine under construction, and the larger ARC to come.
From yesterday’s FastCompany article on “the frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power” leading with CFS:
“On a growing campus an hour outside of Boston, the MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025.” CEO Mumgaard: “You’ll push a button, and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That’s about 200 million degrees—you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them—and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go.”
“One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet—a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils—and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC’s tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels. Mumgaard estimates the world will need something to replace the world’s 60,000 carbon-emitting power stations, which account for about half of global energy use. Ten thousand fusion plants would do it.”
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