Bob Mumgaard

CFS is a commercial company, but as a spinoff of MIT our roots are in academia, and we maintain close ties with the university and lab experts whose decades of research made our company possible. This week @CFS_energy physicists will be meeting with many of the top experts in our field at an annual conference called APS-DPP to share our latest work on turning that research into a practical fusion power plant.

It’s important to keep these connections. Outside experts, whether just chatting at our booth or formally collaborating with us, are the first people who are going to spot problems with our approach or validate when we’re on the right track. It takes a lot to make a fusion demonstration machine like our SPARC tokamak and its successor, the ARC power plant, but the first challenge is getting the plasma physics right, and the openness of talking, collaborating, and publishing research helps tackle that challenge.

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The semiconductor industry that’s putting chips in every phone, car, and microwave oven is also important to fusion energy. But there’s more work to be done. That’s why today, @CFS_energy announced a letter of intent with the U.S. @CommerceGov for an $85 million award to advance semiconductor industry work for commercial fusion.

The proposed award, through the CHIPS and Science Act, will allow CFS to improve technologies like power electronics, radio frequency power generators, controller chips, robotic maintenance equipment, and artificial intelligence for fusion.

That innovation effort with the CHIPS Research & Development Office (CRDO) stands to help both fusion energy and the semiconductor industry, advancing two foundational technologies in the United States. These innovations will be a vital part of our global effort to deploy commercial fusion.

#FusionEnergy

This is what good looks like: Significant milestone + credible measurement + peer reviewed result = true fusion advancement.

Congratulations are in order as @GeneralFusion has now advanced the magnetized target fusion concept to Milestone 2 — heating the plasma — and shared the news in a constructive, credible way. 1/4

AI can improve fusion energy, and the U.S. Department of @ENERGY (DOE) can improve AI. CFS announced today we’re leading an effort that’s part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission that we expect will do both.

Through this Genesis Mission Phase II award, @CFS_energy is leading a group of U.S. companies, universities, and labs to use artificial intelligence to help catalyze commercial fusion energy work. By expanding on our earlier work here, we’ll be able to deliver fusion energy’s benefits sooner: clean, safe, baseload energy that can help answer the country’s growing electricity needs.

The program will incorporate decades of past learning on tokamaks, the type of fusion machine we’re building now. Scientific teams will use DOE computing horsepower to turn that knowledge and data into AI “surrogate” models that should help us run our tokamaks better, starting with our SPARC machine in Massachusetts. That’ll speed up learning we’ll apply to our ARC power plants.

It’s a strong group and we look forward to digging into the work together.

We’ve long known that fusion machines perform better when you make them bigger, but 10 years ago, an @MIT tokamak called Alcator C-Mod showed that bigger isn’t always better. Those results helped chart our course at CFS to bring fusion energy to the electricity grid.

Over more than two decades of research, culminating in a final sprint on its final day in service on Sept. 30, 2016, C-Mod showed that compact tokamaks with high magnetic fields deliver the performance we need for economical fusion power. I was there on that last day at the Plasma Science & Fusion Center as we tried three ways to reach a new performance record — basically, three recipes that combined ingredients like magnetic field, plasma current, and plasma density in different ways.

Each recipe provided a good way to crank up performance, and the winning approach set a record for plasma pressure that stands to this day.

C-Mod is the progenitor of our own compact, high-field tokamaks, the SPARC demonstration machine and ARC power plant. We’ve drawn many of the best C-Mod attributes, giving us confidence that our machines will behave similarly.

That’s how innovation and progress occurs. Stay tuned as we put the C-Mod lessons to use pushing #SPARC to Q>1 — net fusion energy — and beyond.