DEVENS, Massachusetts — On a rainy July day at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a former U.S. Army base-turned-research park forty miles northwest of Boston, dozens of material science experts and engineers are intently focused on the task at hand: assembling huge, 10-foot long magnets out of stacks of superconducting copper-colored tape on a massive factory floor.
Specialized welders will soon attach the magnets to a partially-built nuclear reactor, which looks vaguely like something out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Iron Man comes to mind.) To be clear: This isn’t the atom-splitting “fission” reactor most people are familiar with, the likes of which once sparked public fear in the United States and is now experiencing a renaissance. It’s a fusion reactor, nicknamed SPARC, designed to trigger the same atom-fusing reaction that powers the sun.
Creating the pancake-like layers of each magnet “used to take months. Now it takes a shift,” points out Benjamin Byboth, a former Navy nuclear submarine engineer who now runs business development for the company, as he walks me through a tour of the factory.
Commonwealth — an 8-year-old firm that was born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now the most well-funded of a wave of fusion startups, backed by $3 billion from Bill Gates, Google and other investors — aims to switch on the reactor next year and generate more energy than it took to drive the reaction. It would be the first time a company, as opposed to a government-funded laboratory, has done that. What’s more, executives say, it would prove that fusion is capable of fueling actual power plants and homes — and, yes, data centers — with carbon emissions-free energy by the early 2030s.
