Fusion has long been heralded as the “Holy Grail” of clean energy, able to potentially supply boundless electricity without producing climate-warming emissions.
But it’s also proven incredibly difficult to achieve.
Now, a Massachusetts startup hopes Virginia will be the first in the world to overcome the obstacles and send nuclear fusion energy onto the electric grid.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced this week it plans to build the first commercial fusion power plant in Chesterfield County.
The company aims to bring the multi-billion-dollar facility, called ARC, online within a decade.
“In the early 2030s, all eyes will be on the Richmond region and more specifically Chesterfield County, Virginia, as the birthplace of commercial fusion energy,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said in a news release this week.
Dominion Energy owns the proposed site at the James River Industrial Park and agreed to provide “non-financial collaboration” including sharing technical expertise.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in a statement it’s “an historic moment for Virginia and the world at large.”
To secure the project, Virginia offered a $1 million grant, in addition to $1 million in grant funding from Chesterfield County.
Officials say the facility would generate about 400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power up to about 150,000 homes.
Harnessing the power of the sun
Commonwealth Fusion Systems spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 and has since raised more than $2 billion in private funding and more than $16 million from the federal government.
Fusion is a nuclear reaction that powers the sun and other stars.
It’s the opposite of fission, which powers traditional nuclear plants. Those plants split atoms apart in order to create energy, whereas fusion combines atoms.
“It’s a relatively simple difference, but it has enormous ramifications,” said Rick Needham, CFS’ chief commercial officer.
Officials say fusion could offer virtually limitless amounts of energy, using very little fuel on the front end without leaving behind long-term radioactive waste like traditional nuclear facilities.
“If you look in any science fiction book or movie, anywhere in the future, what you'll see with respect to energy is that humans have mastered fusion,” Needham said. “And it's because it's not just the next energy generation source. It's kind of like the final one. Once you've mastered fusion, the only thing that will beat a fusion power plant is a better fusion power plant.”
But for decades, no one’s been able to crack the code.
Fusion is difficult to achieve because it requires extremely high temperatures – over 180 million degrees Fahrenheit — and a magnetic field to contain it all, along with other engineering challenges that make it hard to create the conditions for fusion to happen on Earth.
Needham said CFS’ innovation is not a singular scientific breakthrough. Instead, the company built upon research and methods developed over the past several decades, including using a magnetic device called a tokamak to confine hot plasma during the fusion process.
CFS developed a new, high-temperature superconducting material to use in its tokamak that allows the company to build the device much smaller in order to build an affordable power plant.
The machine creates electricity similarly to existing power plants, by heating up water to turn into steam that powers a turbine.
To fuel the tokamak, CFS would not need expensive substances like plutonium and uranium used for fission reactors. Instead, the fuel comes from isotopes that can be distilled from seawater and produced inside the same facility.
The company is currently completing its demonstration machine at its Massachusetts headquarters and expects to get it running in 2026.
That would pave the way for the Virginia plant to start operating in the early 2030s, though it will need several local and state approvals.
CFS will build and run the Virginia power plant independently. Needham said the goal is to sell power through purchase agreements to customers interested in paying a premium for clean electricity, such as data centers or manufacturing companies trying to meet climate goals.
Another way to power Virginia
This week’s announcement comes as Virginia officials are searching for ways to significantly boost the state’s energy supply.
Energy demand is expected to double in the next 15 years, according to Dominion, largely driven by the rise in power-hungry data centers.
A recent report from the Virginia Legislative Audit and Review Commission said building enough infrastructure to accommodate the surging demand will be incredibly difficult.
Emil Avram, Dominion’s vice president of business development, said they’re “going to need every power generation resource we can deploy,” and that could include fusion.
“It could be a solution for us to consider in the future as we look for clean energy,” Avram said.
He said he’s most excited by fusion’s unique potential to generate more power than the amount that goes into the process.
Most modern power stations never exceed about 60% efficiency, he said, whereas fusion could surpass 100%.
“That to me is the game changer, potentially, in our industry,” Avram said.
He said now Dominion just needs to see whether the technology proves reliable and cost-effective in Virginia.
Meanwhile, the utility’s pursuing more traditional nuclear power, too. With help from Amazon, Dominion is exploring whether it could build a never-been-done small modular reactor at its existing North Anna nuclear plant.
