Virginia wants to be the home of the world’s first commercial nuclear fusion power plant
New Projects - Nuclear

Virginia wants to be the home of the world’s first commercial nuclear fusion power plant

Private nuclear fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced that it will make a multi-billion dollar investment in an effort to build the “world’s first” grid-scale commercial fusion power plant at the James River Industrial Park in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

“This is an historic moment for Virginia and the world at large,” said Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. 

As part of this effort, the MIT spinout has reached an agreement with Dominion Energy Virginia to provide non-financial collaboration, including development and technical expertise, as well as leasing rights for the proposed site. Dominion currently owns the proposed site.

The proposed plant would generate about 400 MW of electricity. CFS conducted a global search for the site of this first commercial fusion plant, known as ARC, which the company will independently finance, build, own and operate.

“Our customers’ growing needs for reliable, carbon-free power benefits from as diverse a menu of power generation options as possible, and in that spirit, we are delighted to assist CFS in their efforts.” said Dominion Energy Virginia President Edward H. Baine. 

CFS is currently completing development of its fusion demonstration machine, SPARC, at its headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. The company said it expects SPARC to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly afterward. This would be a significant achievement, as it would be the first time a “commercially relevant” design would produce more power than consumed. In CFS’ eyes, SPARC paves the way for ARC, which the company expects to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.

Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms combine to form a single atom. The combined atom has less mass than the original two atoms, with large amounts of energy released in the process. Fusion is considered the holy grail of clean energy because of its potential to produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy. But getting energy from fusion – the process that powers the sun and stars – has been a great challenge on Earth. Scientists have been trying to replicate it as far back as the 1930s.

But there have been recent breakthroughs. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California for the first time produced more energy in a nuclear fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, a long-sought accomplishment known as net energy gain.

The extremely brief fusion reaction, which used 192 lasers and temperatures measured at multiple times hotter than the center of the sun, was achieved December 5, 2022.

In August 2023, the laboratory said it had achieved net energy gain once again.

Achieving net energy gain has been challenging because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

CFS was spun out of MIT in 2018. Since then, it has raised more than $2 billion in capital. In addition to this private capital, CFS has been awarded $16.5 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy. The most recent grant of $15 million was announced in June 2024 as part of the first phase of the DOE’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program.

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