Cautious optimism surrounds plans for the world's first nuclear fusion power plant

While nuclear power plants have become ubiquitous, they all operate using nuclear fission — but one energy startup has plans to change this. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a spinoff branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has announced plans to build the world's first nuclear fusion power plant. If successful, this would mark the completion of a longstanding goal in the scientific community.

The plant is set to be located in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and will infuse "400 megawatts of steady fusion power into the state's electrical grid starting in the early 2030s," CFS said in a press release. Unlike nuclear fission, which splits atoms to create energy, nuclear fusion generates power by combining atoms. It is best known as the process that powers the sun. CFS' reactor would generate this fusion reaction using a donut-shaped device called a tokamak.

Power plants have never used this process because it is extremely difficult, requiring temperatures over 180 million degrees Fahrenheit and immense amounts of pressure and energy, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, there are mixed feelings on whether CFS' plan will be sustainable in the long run, especially with green technology on a constant trajectory of change.

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'A long-elusive goal'

Creating a fusion-based power plant is a "long-elusive goal that scientists have pursued for the better part of a century," said Raymond Zhong at The New York Times. If successful, CFS' plant could "generate abundant electricity without releasing planet-warming carbon dioxide, and with no risk of large-scale nuclear accidents," providing a much sought-after alternative to the current nuclear power plants.

Despite the aforementioned challenges of generating enough energy, many "recent advances, though, have held out hope that the technology could be achievable in the next few years," said Laura Vozzella and Gregory S. Schneider at The Washington Post. If the plant becomes operational, CFS estimates it could power about 150,000 homes. Scientists "need to start fitting fusion energy into our code where necessary because fusion energy for years has been theoretical,” Richard C. Sullivan Jr., a Democrat in the Virginia House of Delegates, said to the Post. With the CFS plant, it is "starting to look real and we need our code to recognize that."

And there is also heavy support on the business side of things for the plant. The "fact that there's a broad investor syndicate, that's a good thing," Bob Mumgaard, the CEO of CFS, said to Reuters, noting that the brand has raised $2 billion since 2018 and is the largest fusion company in the private sector.

'Failed promises litter the path to workable fusion'

Despite the optimism from CFS, many "failed promises litter the path to workable fusion," said Ben Guarino at Scientific American. So we should "hold our nuclear horses for just a moment." Given its difficulties, fusion is the "kind of technology that always seems to be just 15 years away." If CFS is able to provide a working reactor, it "will have done so where previous attempts by well-financed tech companies have failed."

The project has "two major hurdles: maintaining the stability of the fusion process and converting the resulting energy into practical use," Brian Appelbe, a research fellow at the Center for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said to Newsweek. Fusion fuel itself is plasma, charged particles that are "just a ball of isotopes of hydrogen that's at temperatures hotter than the center of the sun." And "when you make something that hot, it just wants to fly apart."

While the ultimate goal of the project is to prove that fusion reactors can be commercialized, the "path toward it is unlikely to be smooth, not least because the technology has not yet been proved viable," Laura Paddison said at CNN. Fusion startups like CFS also "tend to be a little aggressive in what they're promising," Jerry Navratil, a professor of fusion energy and plasma physics at Columbia University, said to CNN. There is a "big difference between producing energy from fusion and having a practical system that puts power on the grid and is safe, licensed and operating."