In an industrial park just outside Boston, a team of scientists is racing to crack one of the most elusive scientific goals in history: creating clean, limitless energy.
At the heart of this effort is SPARC, a fusion reactor being built by Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Unlike traditional nuclear power, which splits atoms, SPARC uses nuclear fusion, which is the process of fusing two atoms together like the sun does.
Ideally, this would result in a virtually unlimited energy source without radioactive waste, air pollution, or planet-warming pollution.
"There's a race to lead the world in power generation," Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said at a recent energy conference. And the Commonwealth is trying to redefine the future of energy entirely.
If successful, SPARC will be able to generate more energy than it uses, a breakthrough known as "net energy" that fusion researchers have been chasing for decades.
With over $2 billion in private capital raised and a first-of-its-kind magnet technology, the team is aiming to have a working fusion power plant in Virginia by the early 2030s.
The goal is to provide a steady, safe alternative to energy sources that rely on digging or drilling. Fusion energy doesn't require dirty fuels and instead uses deuterium (found in seawater) and tritium (sourced from lithium) to generate plasma.
A donut-shaped chamber called a tokamak contains that reaction with magnets hundreds of thousands of times stronger than Earth's magnetic field.
Despite the extreme heat, fusion energy is surprisingly safe. If anything goes wrong, the reaction fizzles out any chain reaction or meltdown. As Commonwealth's chief science officer Brandon Sorbom explained, "If you were to blow a breath of air onto the plasma, you would kill it."
Fusion could mean lower power bills, fewer outages, and cleaner air, especially as cities and companies struggle to meet the growing energy demands of things like artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
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Should we be digging miles beneath Earth's surface? Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. |
No way 👎 Unlike wind and solar, fusion doesn't depend on weather conditions. And unlike coal and methane gas, it doesn't contribute to the pollution that causes respiratory illnesses and global overheating.
While the technology is still being refined, progress is accelerating. China is racing to build its own fusion plants, and U.S. scientists are pushing to secure domestic supply chains for critical materials like lithium.
Still, experts say if SPARC's magnet technology performs as expected, it could dramatically speed up the development of fusion worldwide.
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