[If all goes to plan, Virginia will be the site of the world’s first grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant, able to harness this futuristic clean power and generate electricity from it by the early 2030s, according to an announcement Tuesday by the startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
CFS, one of the largest and most-hyped nuclear fusion companies, will make a multibillion-dollar investment into building the facility near Richmond. When operational, the plant will be able to plug into the grid and produce 400 megawatts, enough to power around 150,000 homes, said its CEO Bob Mumgaard.
“This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale,” Mumgaard said. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin welcomed the announcement, calling it “an historic moment for Virginia and the world at large.”
The plant would represent a new stage in the quest to commercialize nuclear fusion, the process which powers the stars. But the path toward it is unlikely to be smooth, not least because the technology has not yet been proved viable.
The world is desperate for a clean, abundant source of energy that can replace fossil fuels as an always-available baseload power: nuclear fusion promises to be just that. It involves fusing atoms together to create a powerful burst of energy, achieved using the most abundant element in the universe: hydrogen.
Fusion is near limitless, produces no planet-heating pollution and unlike fission, the nuclear technology the world currently uses, it leaves no legacy of long-term nuclear waste. But taking it from research projects in labs around the world to commercial use has proved fiendishly difficult.
The startup is “deep into” building a tokamak able to demonstrate net fusion energy: meaning a reaction that produces more energy than it consumes. It hopes to produce its first plasma – the superheated cloud of charged gas in which fusion reactions happen – in 2026 and achieve net fusion energy shortly afterward.
Building, owning and operating a power plant to plug fusion power into the grid is its “next act,” Mumgaard said. The startup looked at more than 100 locations around the world for the power plant before choosing the James River Industrial Center in Virginia.
The location was chosen for its growing economy, skilled workforce, clean energy focus and the ability it offered to connect into the grid after the retirement of a coal plant, CFS said. The construction process is set to be long and CFS says it is still seeking permits.
The location was chosen for its growing economy, skilled workforce, clean energy focus and the ability it offered to connect into the grid after the retirement of a coal plant, CFS said. The construction process is set to be long and CFS says it is still seeking permits.
The startup is far from the only private company trying to accelerate the timeline toward achieving and commercializing nuclear fusion, with others also promising to do so by early next decade. But CFS says the Virginia plant is intended to be the first of thousands they plan to put onto the grid in the future.
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