Fusion is approaching with a successful test of new types of magnets

It did all this by consuming only about 30 watts of power, orders of magnitude lower than the traditional copper conductive magnet that MIT had previously tested, which used 200 million watts, said Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s PSFC. and co-founder of CFS, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

Nuclear fusion is the reaction that powers the sun and stars. It occurs when two smaller, lighter nuclei fuse to form a single, heavier, energy-releasing nucleus.

If fusion can be achieved on earth and commercialized, it will provide an almost limitless source of clean energy without producing nuclear fission waste, which can remain radioactive for thousands of years.

In a donut-shaped fusion machine, called a tokamak, the magnets hold and isolate the plasma in flames to produce nuclear fusion reactions.

The new CFS and MIT magnet is strong enough that when the team builds a donut-shaped fusion machine, called a tokamak, with these magnets, it will be able to achieve “clean energy,” meaning that the machine fusion makes more energy needed to start and maintain the reaction, MIT’s CFS and PSFC said.

So far, no company has been able to achieve clean energy fusion. So far, all the energy created by the fusion reactions has been usurped to start and maintain the reaction.

“No one (without companies, universities, national labs or governments) has achieved the goal of merging balances so far,” said Andrew Holland, The CEO of the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC.

MIT CFS and PSFC scientists and engineers said the success of their new magnet technology is a key step in their commercialized fusion technology development.

“This magnet will change the trajectory of science and fusion energy, and we believe that ultimately the energy landscape of the world,” Whyte said.

The performance of these magnets is confident in the Netherlands that CFS and MFC’s PSFC will be able to achieve the goal of the commercialized merger. “It’s a big deal,” Holland told CNBC.

“This is not advertising, it is reality. With the advances of the entire fusion industry, we see the birth of a new source of clean, sustainable and always available energy,” Holland said.

To build the magnets capable of reaching 20 tesla in their experiment Sunday, CFS and MIT used high-temperature superconductors.

“The scale and performance of this magnet is similar to a non-superconducting magnet that was used in the MIT experiment that concluded its experiments five years ago,” Whyte said. But “the difference in terms of energy consumption is pretty impressive.”

CSF has previous income and has raised more than $ 250 million from a handful of investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the high-profile sustainability investment fund that features Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Ray Dalio as sponsors.

The high-temperature superconducting magnet demonstrated Sunday will be used in its test fusion device, called SPARC, which is already under construction in Devens, Massachusetts, and is on its way to demonstrating the net fusion energy on 2025, teams said.

Its first fusion power plant, called ARC, is expected to be online in the early 2030s.

SPARC “is not a trading system in the sense that you can rely on it for 30 years to sit there and pump electricity to people who, if it doesn’t work, turn off the lights,” said Bob Mumgaard, CFS CEO. a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

The difference between SPARC and ARC (which are not acronyms so they technically represent nothing) is “reliability and service life,” Mumgaard said. First a test plane is built and then the passenger plane, Mumgaard said.

SPARC “is doing most of the things the passenger plane does, but not all of them,” Mumgaard said. “It’s doing it in a flexible way, that we can test, that we can, that we can break and fix … so that we develop the technologies and supply chains that you need to build the next one.”