Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Power

Fusion Power Company CFS Raises $863M More From Google, Nvidia, and Many Others (techcrunch.com) 64

Posted by EditorDavid from the power-plays dept.
When it comes to nuclear fusion energy, "How do we advance fusion as fast as possible?" asks the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They've just raised $863 million from Nvidia, Google, the BIll Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures and nearly two dozen more investors, which "may prove helpful as the company develops its supply chain and searches for partners to build its power plants and buy electricity," reports TechCrunch.

Commonwealth's CEO/co-founder Bob Mumgaard says "This round of capital isn't just about fusion just generally as a concept... It's about how do we go to make fusion into a commercial industrial endeavor." The Massachusetts-based company has raised nearly $3 billion to date, the most of any fusion startup. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) previously raised a $1.8 billion round in 2021...

CFS is currently building a prototype reactor called Sparc in a Boston suburb. The company expects to turn that device on later next year and achieve scientific breakeven in 2027, a milestone in which the fusion reaction produces more energy than was required to ignite it. Though Sparc isn't designed to sell power to the grid, it's still vital to CFS's success. "There are parts of the modeling and the physics that we don't yet understand," Saskia Mordijck, an associate professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, told TechCrunch. "It's always an open question when you turn on a completely new device that it might go into plasma regimes we've never been into, that maybe we uncover things that we just did not expect." Assuming Sparc doesn't reveal any major problems, CFS expects to begin construction on Arc, its commercial-scale power plant, in Virginia starting in 2027 or 2028...

"We know that this kind of idea should work," Mordijck said. "The question is naturally, how will it perform?" Investors appear to like what they've seen so far. The list of participants in the Series B2 round is lengthy. No single investor led the round, and a number of existing investors increased their stakes, said Ally Yost, CFS's senior vice president of corporate development... The new round will help CFS make progress on Sparc, but it will not be enough to build Arc, which will likely cost several billion dollars, Mumgaard said.
"As advances in computing and AI have quickened the pace of research and development, the sector has become a hotbed of startup and investor activity," the article points out.

And CEO Mumgaard told TechCrunch that their Sparc prototype will prove the soundness of the science — but it's also important to learn "the capabilities that you need to be able to deliver it. It's also to have the receipts, know what these things cost!"

Fusion Power Company CFS Raises $863M More From Google, Nvidia, and Many Others More | Reply

Fusion Power Company CFS Raises $863M More From Google, Nvidia, and Many Others

Comments Filter:

  • It's a Tokamak (Score:3)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday August 30, 2025 @02:54PM (#65626750)

    If I understand correctly... their innovation is using stronger magnets than anyone has before.

    To me that doesn't imply any better control over plasma, just that the current level of control will be confined in a tighter space. IANA fusion researcher, though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      This is basically correct. They're using "high temperature" superconducting "tape" to build toroidal magnets. It's a big deal for tokamak design because they can get extremely powerful magnetic fields in a "small" toroid: SPARC is physically tiny when compared to ITER, but expected to produce to higher field strength. This lowers costs, risks, etc.

      • That sounds great in theory, just like all the other advances over the past 70 years that supposedly brought us closer to practical fusion. The road from theory to commercial product is a very long one. There will undoubtedly be setbacks along the way. If they were honest, they would freely admit that.

        They haven't even finished building a prototype to test the theory yet. They hope to prove the theory by sometime in 2027 and then start building a commercial power plant... in 2027??? Everything about th

        • "There will undoubtedly be setbacks along the way. If they were honest, they would freely admit that."

          Yes, an honest company would have stated that it's always an open question when you turn on a completely new device that it might go into plasma regimes we've never been into, that maybe we uncover things that we just did not expect.

          It's just utterly dishonest that they didn... oh wait...

          • Read the story again. The part you're quoting is from a professor at College of William and Mary, not from the company. What the company says is that they "expect" to achieve breakeven in 2027 and start building their commercial scale plant in 2027 or 2028.

    • Yes, they have developed / are developing stronger magnets and that should result in a much smaller machine than ITER to reach breakeven. The hope is that reduces the capital costs of a fusion reactor to where its economically viable. It seems like a reasonable approach.

  • I expect that the same opposition to nuclear fission power will be applied to nuclear fusion power once the people that oppose fission figure out that fusion is also a process that involves radiation, neutrons flying around at near the speed of light, and all the other scary things that make them fear anything that has the word "nukular" associated with it. After that happens then they are back at trying to educate people about what protective measures are in place to keep the radiation contained, and that

    • Worst case, you have neutrotic fusion that means you get a few kg of irradiated reactor cladding every 5-10 years or however long is the useful lifrspan. Or they push through to hydrogen-boron fusion which is aneutrotic. In either case, you aren't getting loads of waste that needs to be stored in a cooling pond for decades while people struggle to find places to store it while NIMBYs prevent safe transfer of waste.

    • Putting those opposed to uranium/plutonium fission reactors in the same basket as those who opposed nuclear energy in all its forms is a sign of simple-mindedness. There are numerous ways of using nuclear energy for energy production, and numerous kinds of people opposed to some or all of these ways for various reasons, some very good.

      Nuclear fusion reactors don't have the potential to render thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable for centuries, even if it fails catastrophically.

      Uranium/plutonium f

      • Putting those opposed to uranium/plutonium fission reactors in the same basket as those who opposed nuclear energy in all its forms is a sign of simple-mindedness.

        Then why the need to remove the word "nuclear" from MRI? I understand the simple minded logic here, and I'm trying to point it out to the Slashdot audience.

        There are numerous ways of using nuclear energy for energy production, and numerous kinds of people opposed to some or all of these ways for various reasons, some very good.

        You mean like how it is simple minded to put all uranium reactors in the same basket?

        Nuclear fusion reactors don't have the potential to render thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable for centuries, even if it fails catastrophically.

        Uranium/plutonium fission reactors do.

        I agree, just like a fission reactor not built by Soviets can't render blah blah blah. Using your logic we should not only ground all Boeing aircraft because of 737 MAX issues but also all aircraft from Airbus and whomever else makes jetliners. It was a Soviet RBMK th

    • Look up how people died from getting metal too close to an MRI machine if you dare.

      Four? A six-year-old in 2001; some guy in India in 2018; and this guy [wusf.org], who was wearing a 20-pound metal necklace "for weight training". Couple of obvious mistakes there. Should have worn gold chains, like Mr T.

      And the Brazilian who brought a loaded gun [scientificamerican.com] into the MRI room, where the MRI machine grabbed the gun and fatally shot him. An all-plastic gun would have been helpful.

      Oh, one last thing. I should mention people have proposed means of using fusion for energy production before but it involved detonating fusion bombs to do so. Look it up. There's been varied names for these ideas. Atoms for Peace. Project Plowshare. More than one project having "Orion" in the name.

      Pretty sure that never happened (unless by "energy production", you mean big-ass explosions). Atoms for Peace was a speech by Presiden

      • Four?

        The issue wasn't "how many" died, but is is related, but "how" they died. They died from ignorance, on top of poor management by the operators.

        I've had an MRI before, and the metal detector at the door was cranked up to such sensitivity that the staff there ignored it. I learned from my first visit from having to wear the hospital supplied disposable shorts that the next time I brought my own more comfortable pajamas to wear, they were understanding enough to allow it. If other places operate similarly,

        • Look up how people died from getting metal too close to an MRI machine if you dare.

          Four?

          The issue wasn't "how many" died, but is is related, but "how" they died.

          Wow! Interesting! It says "how", but I somehow read it as "how many". Brains are weird, and there is definitely a part of mine that's a practical joker. The rest of your contribution was both interesting and informative.

          Also some types of tattoo ink can be heated to painful temperatures by the MRI.

          And an MRI machine snatched a gun in the movie The One (with Jet Li).

  • There should be a tax imposed on these data centers and ML centers that are strangling our power grid. If they are going to create a major problem like this, then it should incumbent on them to fund research into a solution.

    • There should be a tax imposed on these data centers and ML centers that are strangling our power grid. If they are going to create a major problem like this, then it should incumbent on them to fund research into a solution.

      Research? That takes me back to 2008 when Obama and McCain had a debate.

      When asked about energy, maybe it was a question specifically on nuclear energy, I saw two very different responses from the two. Perhaps I recall incorrectly, but I'll give what I recall. McCain answered first with something to the effect of an "all the above" energy policy which would include building nuclear power plants by the dozens. Again, I'm going by memory but that's the gist I picked up so maybe it wasn't dozens, maybe it

    • That's probably the worst way to go about it. AI/ML investors are pushing fusion hard with their own money. Getting the government involved won't improve anything.

      • That's probably the worst way to go about it. AI/ML investors are pushing fusion hard with their own money. Getting the government involved won't improve anything.

        Hard? They are contributing a pittance at this point, and they won't change that until they are forced to. The only way to move the needle on fusion is with a large project, preferably funded by those who have created this problem. It's not going to be solved by two guys working in their garage.

        • Lol wut

          They're spending billions combined on various fusion startups, not counting the private/public funds being spent on Lockheed Martin's fusion reactor that mysteriously vanished after making a lot of news ten years ago.

          "A large project" would be something like ITER that is horrendously behind schedule or China's "let's build shitloads of tokamaks and hope something good comes from it" approach that has borne no fruit.

          Meanwhile, there's a very real race in the private sector to be first to market with a

    • Or maybe we don't need LLMs for everybody and the lazy fucks who are using AI rather than doing normal work for substantially less energy per unit of useful work should just not have AI

  • We have gone from perpetually 20 years away to perpetually 2 years away.

  • Yeah, sure. They'll need all sorts of infrastructure and capital investments once they can F*CKING GENERATE ELECTRICITY.

  • Here's the question. We are having a difficult time trying to get plasma to do what we want to create fusion. We're using all kinds of magnets and electrical fields and can only sustain fusion for a few minutes.

    Someone needs to explain how, in space, with no confinement of any kind, individual atoms can collect in enough mass to produce a self-sustaining fusin reaction.

    • Someone needs to explain how, in space, with no confinement of any kind, individual atoms can collect in enough mass to produce a self-sustaining fusin reaction.

      Gravity. All you need is enough hydrogen to make a star, which is about equivalent to the mass of 300,000 Earths. Simple.

    • Re:How did it work in space? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tschaine ( 10502969 ) on Saturday August 30, 2025 @05:57PM (#65626996)

      "Someone needs to explain how, in space, with no confinement of any kind, individual atoms can collect in enough mass to produce a self-sustaining fusion reaction."

      You were SO CLOSE to writing the explanation that you're asking for. It's all about "enough mass."

      Mass gives you gravity, and with enough gravity you get enough confinement, and that's your explanation.

      • Yes, I understand that part, but we're talking enough atoms of hydrogen finding themselves in the vastness of space to coalesce into a mass dense enough to start fusing. If we're having these many problems trying to force the issue, how was enough gathered, on its own without being pressed together, to form enough?

        I'm not trying to start an argument. I'm simply asking if we're having these problems, how did nature do it? And yes, star formation takes millions of years compared to the decade or so we've b

        • star formation takes millions of years compared to the decade or so we've been trying to create fusion.

          So then you know the answer. Nature did it with gravity and time. Since your comment contained the answer, why/what are you asking?

          It's also not hard for us to create fusion, by modern standards. It's hard for us to create enough fusion to be useful, and also contain it.

          And we still have to not only solve that, but also the process of actually generating useful amounts of power from it.

        • 13.8 billion years is a long time. Enough time for those hydrogen clouds to condense and grow, until they aggregate enough mass for the attraction of gravity to overcome the repulsion between the atoms. When that happens, fusion happens. It takes a huge amount of time and a huge amount of mass, but it's pretty straightforward.

          Doing it on short notice with human-scale amounts of mass is harder, but we figured out how to reliably create fusion decades ago: thermonuclear bombs. The hard part is creating fusio

  • The other story just posted [slashdot.org] about wave energy makes a good counterpoint to this one. Wave energy and fusion energy both promise huge amounts of inexpensive, non-polluting, non-intermittent energy. They also have both been in development for many years. The road to commercialization has been far slower than anyone expected for both of them.

    But the differences are striking. The first working wave energy system was built in 1910. The challenges have never been with fundamental physics, just how to make it

    • Fusion is polluting. The reactor walls break down. They're generally made of beryllium, which is horrible on its own, but quadruply bad when it's a spicy isotope. Anybody who says otherwise is lying or is a fuckwit.

      • Waste is different from pollution. It only turns into pollution if it gets released into the environment.

        Fusion produces lots of radioactive waste, but it mostly has a fairly short lifetime. It's at least plausible to think we could safely store it until it's no longer dangerous. That's unlike the waste from fission, which remains deadly for thousands of years. Believing it will be safely stored all that time and never released is an unjustified act of faith.

        But yes, this is an advantage of wave energy.

  • Raising $3-billion on the basis of ... a yet un-built demonstration model ? Tell me I didn't hear that ! I  get a PERS retirement check and those California cuties might get frisky hearing all the VCs brag about their new ....... wowser ...
  • "How do we advance fusion as fast as possible?" What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

  • >>> enough to power approximately 130 million homes.

    or 4 AI data centers...

Slashdot Top Deals

Felson's Law: To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

Close