Chief Science Officer at @CFS_Energy
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Brandon Sorbom retweeted
@BrandonSorbom takes the main stage of the Science: A New Golden Age Summit to present his work at @CFS_energy and the real-world impacts of the Genesis Mission.
Full keynote:
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We’re getting another useful tool in our fusion toolkit with a Genesis Mission award from the U.S. Department of @ENERGY. Through the program, @CFS_energy will lead a group of U.S. labs, universities, and companies to use artificial intelligence and digital twins to help catalyze commercial fusion energy work.
We already have work underway to use AI to improve how our SPARC fusion machine will work, but this Genesis Mission Phase II award will help us expand and deepen that work — for example by tapping into decades of historical fusion data and marshaling the power of DOE supercomputers to improve AI models. Our partners in the effort are five National Laboratories, four businesses, and two universities.
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For more details, check our press release: cfs.energy/news-and-media/co…
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Fun fact: I couldn’t fit inside the @MIT fusion machine that helped chart the @CFS_energy path to commercializing fusion energy. That’s because that machine, a tokamak called Alcator C-Mod, used a compact design that turns out to be really important. Smaller fusion machines cost less to build, and that translates directly into more economical fusion power.
Over two decades of research at PSFC, C-Mod helped blaze the trail that we’re now following to fusion energy at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. It showed that a compact tokamak with high magnetic fields — like our SPARC demonstration machine and ARC power plant — has the superior performance and flexibility we need to bring fusion energy to the grid.
All the way up to C-Mod’s last day of service 10 years ago, the tokamak was advancing the fusion state of the art. Over a series of pulses on Sept. 30, it showed multiple paths to achieving high plasma pressure — a key measurement since raising the plasma pressure increases the fusion power a lot.
Even though I couldn’t fit inside C-Mod, the machine was a big part of my grad school years at PSFC. I and many others are now putting that knowledge to good use bringing fusion to the world’s electrical grids.
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For more on how MIT’s C-Mod paved the way for CFS, check our blog post:
blog.cfs.energy/how-the-alca…
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Since CFS’ earliest days, I worked to ensure a supply of the high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape that’s critical to our fusion machine magnets. We successfully built a supply for our 2021 TFMC prototype magnet test, then for the SPARC fusion demonstration machine that we’re assembling today, and now we’re working to build that for our ARC fusion power plants, too.
That’s why our announcement today that @CFS_energy agreed to purchase more than 10,000 kilometers (3 GA-m) of HTS tape from Fujikura Ltd. — the largest single HTS purchase order — is a big deal. Bringing commercial fusion energy to the world requires not only breakthrough science and engineering, but also a global industrial base that can manufacture critical components at scale.
Fujikura is an important partner in our global supply chain, and this order will support the expansion of its HTS manufacturing capacity. That’s the kind of investment we need as we move from building our SPARC demonstration machine to deploying our ARC power plants.
My thanks to the team at Fujikura for working with us to build this important industrial capability.
Fusion energy is often discussed as a matter of plasma physics, funding, and machine design, but bringing commercial fusion to the grid also requires a global industrial base that can manufacture critical components at scale.
Today CFS took an important step toward meeting that need, announcing an agreement to purchase more than 10,000 km (3 GA-m) of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape from Fujikura Ltd. It’s the largest single purchase order for HTS tape, a critical component of our breakthrough magnets.
This news is important evidence that our fusion industrial supply chain is taking shape. Our order allows Fujikura to invest in new manufacturing capacity for the long term, stepping up in our global network of more than 1,000 suppliers across 30 countries.
We already built a supply chain for our SPARC fusion demonstration machine, but this agreement helps secure HTS tape for our next chapter: building ARC power plants, starting with our first at the Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Virginia. The ARC effort is moving ahead with design, technology development, and commercialization work like applying to connect that first ARC plant to the grid with PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market.
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For more details on our HTS supply chain agreement with Fujikura, check our press release here: cfs.energy/news-and-media/co…
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Everything we do in our magnet factory for SPARC feeds into our work for the magnets we'll build for our ARC fusion power plant.
"We see energy as a fundamental lever for growth...We believe fusion can provide this source of energy."
– That's CFS Chief Science Officer and Co-founder @BrandonSorbom reflecting on the direct relationship between energy and human prosperity — and the fact that the world's demand for energy is growing rapidly. The gap between the energy we all have and the energy we all need is one of the reasons why CFS is on a mission to delivery fusion energy to the world as fast as possible.
Even though the machine we're building right now, SPARC, won't put electricity onto the grid, our power generation goal informs everything about SPARC. And what we've learned from building SPARC and its magnets already is informing the design of the machine that will connect to the grid, our ARC power plant. We developed the manufacturing muscle for SPARC, but we're flexing it again for the ARC plant.
#FusionEnergy
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Our cryogenic and operations teams have knocked it out of the park, getting SPARC’s cryo system down to its operating temperature of 8 kelvin, aka -265 celsius! That’s a huge achievement on our way to Q>1.
As we work toward that net fusion energy goal, we try to avoid reinventing the wheel. The cryo system is a great example: We borrowed as much as possible from other industries. But even then, we had to clear engineering hurdles like figuring the best way to handle the surge of heat that our high-field, high-power tokamak will produce during a fusion pulse. That meant developing what we call the blowdown system.
To handle the heat from a fusion pulse, we developed and built this pressurized system. It sends a massive flow of very cold supercritical helium — 25,000 gallons in just a few seconds — during each pulse. It then captures the helium in a closed loop and re-cools it for the next pulse.
This blowdown system is unique to SPARC. In our ARC power plant, most of this heat will be captured using tokamak technology called the blanket that ultimately lets us convert all that heat into electricity. But we’ll still need to keep ARC magnets cold, so that plant will also have a cryo system that’s a close cousin to SPARC’s.
As we continue to test and commission the SPARC cryo system, it retires some big execution risks for us, ultimately clearing the path for SPARC to hit Q > 1 (net fusion energy) as fast as possible. Check the video and blog post for details.
To create a region with the hottest temperature in the solar system, we also have to create another nearby that’s just about its coldest. For our SPARC fusion machine, that cooling job falls to its cryogenic system — a system that recently reached a major achievement of operating at a very cold 8 kelvin (–445°F or –265°C) temperature.
This cryogenics achievement is a big deal. The system applies well understood cooling technology to the cutting-edge new job of fusion energy. SPARC uses superconducting magnets to confine and control a superhot cloud of charged particles called a plasma, enabling those particles to fuse together and release energy. To perform well, our magnets must be cooled as low as 8 K to carry enormous electrical currents with no resistance.
Bringing the full cryogenic system to 8 K is an example of our shift toward operations at SPARC. We’re testing and commissioning the support systems that surround the heart of the facility in anticipation of a major integrated test called dry dress rehearsal (DDR) that will put the SPARC support equipment through its paces. That allows us to exercise the equipment before we’ve completed assembly of the SPARC tokamak itself — the hardware with the magnets and vacuum vessel where the fusion will occur.
SPARC won’t generate electricity, but its successor, the ARC power plant, will. The ARC cryogenics system will be similar to SPARC’s, though it’ll have to handle the power plant’s continuous operations. That means what we learn on SPARC will apply directly to our work on the ARC plant.
For more details, check the link in the comments for our blog post on the SPARC cryogenic system.
#FusionEnergy
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Brandon Sorbom retweeted
At CFS, we’re very confident that our SPARC tokamak will generate net fusion energy, a crucial performance threshold also called Q>1.
Q is the ratio of fusion power coming out of the heart of a fusion machine to the heating power that’s pumped in to make fusion occur. Achieving Q>1 shows a fusion plasma is generating a surplus of power, and that’s the foundation for a power plant — the electricity source CFS expects to bring to the power grid in the early 2030s.
Fusion is hard, but we have the design, the resources, and the team to make fusion power real. Our conviction that Q>1 is comfortably within reach begins with our 1,000+ person team of physicists, engineers, fabricators, and operators who’ve learned from decades of experience building and running tokamaks. Next is SPARC’s cutting-edge design, which is designed to reach performance well over Q>1.
“We have some margin to achieve Q>1. We’re not sitting right at the threshold, hoping the stars align perfectly,” said Phil Snyder, Vice President of Plasma Physics. “SPARC is designed to reach Q>10, so Q>1 is not an extremely difficult milestone.”
Only one machine so far, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has achieved Q>1 so far. To read about why CFS fully expects SPARC will be the next to reach this enormously important milestone, check our blog detailing our fusion approach.
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Congratulations to Dennis Whyte (@MIT_Fusion), the next CEO of @UKAEAofficial.
Dennis was my advisor in graduate school before we co-founded @CFS_energy together, and the biggest thing he taught me wasn't plasma physics (although he taught me a lot of that too) — it was ambition and the importance of having a big vision. That the whole point of the science we do is to put fusion power on the grid, as fast as possible.
That mindset allowed @MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center to thrive even through a turbulent time and helped us launch CFS. Now Dennis is taking it to Culham, where UKAEA's 70-year legacy and world-class team are ready for exactly this kind of leader.
The UK is gaining a huge asset today. Thrilled for you, Dennis — and excited to continue working with you in this new, global context.
#FusionEnergy
BREAKING NEWS: Professor Dennis Whyte has been appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer of UKAEA Group.
For the Press Release, visit gov.uk/government/news/fusio…
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I recently had some fun playing with this online simulator of what it’s like to crank up a tokamak and run a fusion pulse. Researchers at the Columbia Fusion Research Center put together this cool website that shows a control room view of one of these donut-shaped fusion machines — the same kind we’re building here at @CFS_energy.
One big advantage of tokamaks is that the world has a lot of experience building and operating them. The simulator at @Columbia University offers a choice of two real-world tokamaks, JET and DIII-D, and two other designs that aren’t actually running yet, ITER and a conceptual device from Columbia called CENTAUR.
Our SPARC tokamak (which we’re building right now at our Massachusetts headquarters) will have a lot of similarities. Tokamaks use very powerful magnets that bottle up and help heat up a puff of fusion fuel into a superhot cloud of charged particles called a plasma. Some of the magnets are on continually but others you have to ramp up and down during the plasma pulse.
Even if you don’t know much about fusion, clicking the “start” button gives a look at how a fusion pulse plays out — the rise and fall of the electrical current, magnetic field, and fusion power. Daniel Burgess, who developed the simulation, also has a tutorial so you can dig into what’s going on.
p.s. When will we see SPARC in the simulator? 👀
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Today, @CFS_energy published some major research: five new papers detailing the physics basis for our ARC fusion power plant. Speaking as one of the authors of the first ARC research papers back in 2015 and 2018, I’m stoked by the progress we’ve made refining the physics that will make these machines tick. The depth of thought, the detail of the supercomputer simulations, and the breadth of the 58 co-authors from around the world.
These papers are a sequel to the seven SPARC physics basis papers we published in 2020, cementing our confidence in our approach. All this knowledge, including what we’ve already learned from building SPARC and will learn from running it, builds into the solid foundation we need for tackling all of fusion energy’s challenges.
I also want to call out the value of the peer review process — a core tenet at CFS that brings transparency and independent validation. Fusion is hard, but we’re showing our work so you don’t have to take what we say on faith. We also collaborate to tap into the world’s expertise. In this case two thirds of the papers’ 58 co-authors are from beyond CFS’ walls, working at world-class universities and research institutions around the world.
Their conclusion: When we build ARC, it’ll work. The science behind this plant is solid.
Fusion is super easy to oversell but hard to actually build. Collaborative, peer-reviewed research helps to validate results and builds confidence that it’ll one day become a reality. This is important not only in the science community, but also for investors, governments, customers, and others who want to be well informed when deciding to dedicate valuable resources to the effort. The only way to build and maintain confidence is to put the science up for scrutiny. That’s not giving away trade secrets. Just as every credible deep tech company balances scientific transparency with the protection of intellectual property, every fusion company can and must do the same.
Thank you to all the researchers who produced these papers and to the JPP from @CambridgeUP for publishing them in a special collection. With this publication, and global confidence in our work, CFS is now able to devote more of our attention to the design and engineering steps on the path to commercial fusion energy.
Today, we laid the physics foundation for our ARC fusion power plant. ⚛️
With 5 deeply researched papers — validated by independent peer review and published in the Journal of Plasma Physics — we’ve shown we've nailed the scientific basics of producing copious amounts of fusion power.
The collective assessment from our 58 co-authors? This machine will work.
No scientific breakthroughs are required to bring this clean, secure, abundant source of energy to the grid. Here is how we're handling fusion's biggest challenges:
⚡ Powering the Grid: Using extremely strong magnets, ARC will confine the plasma long enough to generate 1.1 GW of fusion power. We'll convert that into 400 MW of continuous net electricity — enough to power ~280,000 average American homes.
🛡️ Handling Heat Exhaust: To control a superhot, unruly cloud of charged particles, we're utilizing proven methods to safely handle the heat exhaust that acts as a key practical constraint for tokamaks.
✅ Managing Disruptions: We aren't trying to build an operationally perfect machine. We are pragmatically designing ARC to safely handle disruptions and keep the plasma stable for top performance.
🏗️ Proving the Approach: We're building on decades of tokamak research and supercomputer simulations. And we're proving our approach right now with SPARC, the tokamak we are actively building in Massachusetts.
With our transparency, you don’t have to take our assertions on faith. We are really pushing fusion forward.
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Brandon Sorbom retweeted
AI data centers could double power demand by 2030. So where does the energy come from? 🤔⚡
@BrandonSorbom, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of @CFS_energy, explains how his team is racing to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant.
📺 YouTube: link.theneurondaily.com/r/Bu…
🎧 Spotify: link.theneurondaily.com/r/v9…
🎙️ Apple Podcast: link.theneurondaily.com/r/v9…
#AINews #FusionEnergy #AIInfrastructure #TheNeuron #TechPodcast
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Last week I had the opportunity to jump into Reddit’s r/fusion community for @CFS_energy’s first AMA to talk about all things fusion, our progress on SPARC, and the road to commercializing our ARC power plants.
It was a lot of fun being able to engage directly with the community, and the questions were fantastic! We dove deep into everything — including how we collaborate with our partners, how we're tackling hard fusion problems, and how we expect to use AI for fusion energy.
Check out the full AMA thread! Here’s the link:
teddit.net/r/fusion/comments…
What does the path to commercial fusion energy actually look like? ⚡️
CFS Chief Science Officer and Co-founder, @BrandonSorbom, recently spent time with the r/fusion community as part of an AMA to answer exactly that.
Here we've rounded up some of our favorite insights on ARC, AI, and more below👇. 1/7
#FutureOfEnergy #Energy
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Thanks to everyone who tuned in for my AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit! There were so many great questions and I had a great time. I wish I could have spent all day, and sorry for any questions I missed, but I feel like we got through a lot of good material — people were curious about tritium, magnets, our supply chain, how AI could fit into what we are doing, and a lot more.
A couple things I'd like to flag — you'll see in the answers that I dropped in a lot of references to peer-reviewed research that we/our partners have published. That's no accident. It's the gold standard for sharing validated, trustworthy information, and it can help people understand our science, our technology, and our approach. Fusion is such a complex, nuanced topic that it’s important to distill things to a high level, but it’s equally important to provide the foundations for those distillations. Finally, I'd like to give a shout-out to the team of subject matter experts here who volunteered to sit shotgun with me and help pull up the most relevant facts and references when people asked deep questions, so that we could get through as much material as possible.
This was a lot of fun and I hope we get the chance to do something like this again in the future!
teddit.net/r/fusion/comments…
#FusionEnergy #Energy
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If you’re curious about fusion or CFS, I’ll be fielding questions during an AMA — ask me anything — at Reddit’s r/fusion forum. It’ll happen on Thursday, Feb. 26, from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET.
This is a first for CFS, but not for CFS founders: Before we launched the company, we held a couple AMAs about the fate of Alcator C-Mod, the MIT fusion machine that’s the predecessor of the SPARC tokamak we’re building now in Massachusetts.
A little about me: I believe that commercial fusion power can be critical to addressing climate change and has massive potential to become an ideal power source to keep up with rising energy demand. I first fell in love with fusion as a college student, building a Farnsworth fusor. Then, while working on my PhD at @MIT, I was the lead author of the paper that proposed the original design for the ARC power plant that inspired the founding of CFS in 2018. Now I lead the R&D teams at CFS.
I’m always excited to talk about fusion and discuss what we’re up to at CFS. So make sure to join me on Feb. 26 to get your CFS and fusion energy questions answered!
You can submit your questions in advance, comment, and vote on questions others have asked. Check the thread out here: teddit.net/r/fusion/comments…
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Brandon Sorbom retweeted
Big update: Half of our vacuum vessel, the very heart of our SPARC fusion machine, has landed in Devens, Massachusetts.
The vacuum vessel is the donut-shaped chamber inside SPARC that'll house our fusion fuel — a superhot cloud of charged particles called a plasma. The delivery of this key component means that our energy plans are literally starting to take shape. And it shows a big change inside tokamak hall as the once-quiet room begins to bustle with activity.
#PowerMoves #FusionEnergy
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Brandon Sorbom retweeted
Why work on our ARC fusion power plant when we haven't yet switched on our SPARC demonstration machine? It's a fair question. And here's our answer: at CFS, we've deliberately charted a path to fusion energy that lets us work in parallel on multiple projects.
Our new $863 million in Series B2 funding enables us not just to finish SPARC but also to concentrate more attention on ARC. The point of the exercise: spread fusion energy as widely as possible as fast as possible, because we believe humanity will benefit.
Now we're laying out a lot of the detail behind this approach. 🧵1/2
#FusionEnergy #PowerMoves
ALT A large industrial room packed with high-tech cooling equipment, green valves, silver tanks, with an orange crane overhead.
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