Commercial Fusion in Virginia

how the commercial fusion plant could appear, from the outside
Source: Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), Commonwealth Fusion Systems to Build World's First Commercial Fusion Power Plant in Virginia

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced plans to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant to generate electricity on December 17, 2024. The company chose to locate the ARC fusion power plant at the James River Industrial Center in Chesterfield County, on 25 acres of a 100-acre site leased from Dominion Energy.

The facility was planned to generate 400 megawatts (MW) of electricity by combining hydrogen atoms into helium in a machine called a tokamak. The General Assembly was expected to update the Code of Virginia in 2025 to designate the output from a fusion plant as "zero-carbon electricity."

Commonwealth Fusion Systems was a private corporation that spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018. It expected to scale up and commercialize its fusion demonstration machine, which was called SPARC. The company's news release included:¹

CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia...

SPARC is expected to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly after, demonstrating for the first time a commercially relevant design that will produce more power than consumed. SPARC paves the way for ARC, which is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.

the fusion power plant would be constructed on 94 acres leased from Dominion Energy
Source: ESRI, ArcGIS Online

If electricity is generated by 2027, Commonwealth Fusion Systems will beat Helion. That company, based in Seattle, negotiated a power purchase agreement with Microsoft in 2023 to start selling 50MW of fusion-generated electricity in 2028. Helion had completed six working prototypes, but in 2024 had not yet scaled up to a commercial facility.²

Helion expected to be the first company to build a fusion plant that generated electricity for sale
Source: Helion

Doinion Energy also planned to construct four new 250 MW, gas-fired power plants at the James River Industrial Center. The utility planned to repurpose the site of its Chesterfield Power Station, where coal-fired boilers #3 and #4 were shut down in 2019 and coal boilers #5 and #6 were shut down in 2023, into the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center.³

the commercial fusion plant was proposed to be located where Dominion Energy already planned to build four new natural gas power plants
Source: Dominion Energy, Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center (CERC)

The fusion process was dramatically different from burning coal or natural gas. As described by Commonwealth Fusion Systems:⁴

We use powerful electromagnets to confine and control our fusion fuel, turning the hydrogen into a highly energetic cloud of particles called a plasma housed in a donut-shaped machine called a tokamak. We'll heat the plasma to about 100 million degrees Celsius so it becomes energetic enough for fusion to occur. For fuel, we'll combine two forms of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, to form helium and energetic neutrons...

It'll feature a "blanket" of molten salt that captures the neutrons' energy. The resulting heat is transferred to water that drives a conventional steam turbine to generate power. The neutrons also create tritium in the blanket that supplies the power plant’s fuel needs in a closed cycle...

With fusion energy, there's no possibility of runaway chain reactions or meltdowns, and there's no long-lived, highly radioactive waste like that from nuclear fission.

The fusion process produces tritium (H₃), a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years, so waste from the tokamak will no longer be an environmental threat after 50-100 years of storage.⁵

Links

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems
• Dominion Energy
• Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center
• Helion
• International Atomic Energy Agency
• Moonshots and sure shots
• What is Nuclear Fusion?
• US Department of Energy
• DOE Explains... Fusion Energy Science
• Fusion Energy

References