Fusion

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinout, has announced plans to “build its first fusion power plant in Virginia, with the aim of generating zero-emissions electricity there in the early 2030s,” reports Raymond Zhong for The New York Times. “The proposed facility is among the first to be announced that would harness nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, to produce power commercially, a long-elusive goal that scientists have pursued for the better part of a century,” explains Zhong. 

MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced plans to build the “world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virginia, to generate power by the early 2030s,” reports Timothy Gardner for Reuters. The project, “could revolutionize the global energy industry by tapping into a virtually limitless power source, similar to that which fuels the stars,” writes Gardner. 

Graduate student Zoe Fisher speaks with Yusuf Khan of The Wall Street Journal’s  about what inspired her to pursue a career in nuclear engineering, noting that being able to fight climate change firsthand is one of the key reasons she wanted to make a career in nuclear.. “It’s a cool thing to study that is going to have a lot of broader impacts,” Fisher says.

Explaining China’s increasing advantage over the U.S. in fusion technology, Prof. Dennis Whyte is interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article by Jennifer Hiller and Sha Hua. Noting China took just 10 years to build world-class fusion research facilities, Whyte says “it was almost like a flash that they were able to get there. Don’t underestimate their capabilities about coming up to speed.”

In this video for Wired, Prof. Anne White explains the nature of nuclear fusion in five levels of increasing difficulty to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. “Fusion is so exciting because it is extraordinarily beautiful physics, which underpins some of the most basic processes in our universe," says White. “Nuclear processes have a tremendously valuable application for humankind, a virtually limitless, clean, safe, carbon-free form of energy.”

Researchers from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are using high-temperature superconducting tape as a key part of the design for their tokamak reactor, reports Tom Clynes for IEEE Spectrum. The researchers believe that “this novel approach will allow it to build a high-performance tokamak that is much smaller and less expensive than would be possible with previous approaches,” Clynes notes.

MIT researchers are hoping to use Dyson maps “to translate the language of classical physics into terms that a quantum computer—a machine designed to solve complex quandaries by leveraging the unique properties of quantum particles—can understand,” reports Darren Orf for Popular Mechanics. 

Darby Dunn ’08 speaks with CNBC reporter Catherine Clifford about her journey from building rockets for SpaceX to working on making fusion energy a reality at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). “For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it,” says Dunn. “So that was the huge shift for me to come to CFS.” 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and others are working to build SPARC, a prototype device that aims to extract net energy from plasma and generate fusion power, reports Philip Ball for Scientific American. “SPARC will be a midsize tokamak in which the plasma is tightly confined by very intense magnetic fields produced by new high-temperature superconducting magnets developed at MIT and unveiled in 2021.”  

Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Emeritus Ernest Moniz writes that the National Ignition Facility’s fusion energy advancement “is exciting because when the journey from science demonstration to a commercially viable power plant is completed, the electricity grid will be revolutionized.” Moniz continues, “To meet widely accepted climate objectives, we must double the clock speed of the clean energy innovation process.”

Forbes has named Commonwealth Fusion Systems one of the biggest tech innovations and breakthroughs of 2022, reports Bernard Marr. “Commonwealth Fusion Systems is now working with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center on plans to build a factory that can mass-produce components for the first commercial fusion reactors,” writes Marr.

Prof. Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, speaks with NPR host Rob Schmitz about fusion energy and its impact on climate and energy sustainability. “So in fusion, what you're doing is literally fusing or pushing together these hydrogen atoms,” explains Whyte. “They turn into helium. This is what happens in our sun as well, too. And when that happens, that can release large amounts of net energy.”

Prof. Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, discusses the significance of nuclear fusion energy with Boston Globe reporter David Abel following news that an advance had been made in the development of nuclear fusion. “It’s very exciting, but we’re not all the way there,” Whyte said. “I will be really excited when we put the first watts on the grid.”

Prof. Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, speaks with USA Today about the promise and challenges posed by nuclear fusion energy, in light of an announcement that scientists have crossed a milestone in their efforts to develop fusion energy. Whyte explains that, in theory, fusion could "replace all carbon-based energy sources, because it's scalable in a way that means it can actually power civilization.”

MIT researchers have developed a new machine learning model that can identify and track blobs of plasma created in controlled nuclear-fusion research, reports Ed Browne for Newsweek. “Fusion research is a complex, multidisciplinary project that requires technologies from many fields,” explains graduate student Woonghee “Harry” Han.