Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has verified the core plasma physics assumptions for its upcoming ARC fusion power plant following a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Plasma Physics.
The research confirms the ARC reactor design aligns with known physics, allowing the company to shift its focus toward detailed hardware engineering…
According to the validated models, the ARC plant will produce approximately 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of fusion power to generate 400 megawatts (MW) of net electricity for the grid…
CFS engineers are using this simulation framework to optimize upcoming design iterations, adjusting dimensions like tokamak width and divertor length to refine reactor performance before manufacturing begins.
Just watched a really good and incredibly informative video on this, https://youtube.com/watch?v=nt4rZgndOoE. From what is explained in the video is that this is mostly filing paperwork, they haven’t verified their reactor works or that it’s able to output power, let alone output more power than what is required to start and maintain a fusion reaction. So over all, a little exciting, but really nothing to get too excited about yet.
Edit: grammar fixes
Ah I was wondering this and my cursory search result was that :
Basically it’s really promising because on paper it should really work as expected. But at the same time without building it, there will be obstacles along the way. The materials could last too little time for it to be commercially viable.
So they seem to be at the very last theoretical step of fusion energy but there is still a huge challenge in actually building the thing and most importantly, it to be viable commercially.
Fusion power is still basically TRL 3 and every time it looks like they might be going to move up a level everyone loses their damn minds. It’s not really possible to put a timeline on any of this because the technology doesn’t exist yet and we can’t simulate in computers what we’ve never seen before, not with any degree of accuracy.
Meanwhile the Chinese have working thorium reactors, which are incapable of meltdown.
Thorium is cool but so is this. Also ITER is almost finished.
So are Canadian CANDU reactors.
What’s the connection? This is fusion, not fission
i assume the point is we could have been building clean nuclear energy without waiting for fusion.
That’s a crappy point, since it isn’t a choice between the two. Our collective (bad) decision to abandon fission has nothing to do with this.
It does a little. funding isn’t unlimited. If the goal is to get off fossil fuels ASAP, to me it makes more sense to invest in building technologies that we know work.
Once we stop the house from burning down we can look into upgrading the sprinkler system.
R&D and actual practical power plant construction are worlds apart. It’s extremely questionable that cutting off funding to fusion would have changed any opinions on nuclear. Govts didn’t abandon nuclear due to a lack of technology, it was mainly FUD by lobbyists.
Problem is, that was never the goal for the people in power, it could have been accomplished easily.
Nucluler
Yeah this feels more like a long-shot gamble by a hungry start up that the beginning of a new transformative tech.