The time has finally come: Commonwealth Fusion Systems is assembling SPARC.
The megafunded fusion company has been working on the components of its flagship tokamak for the last several years, and now it’s putting the pieces together. This week, the company announced the installation of the cryostat base in the SPARC facility—the first piece of the fusion machine to be bolted into its final destination.
“That’s a really cool moment, where we’ve moved from building this facility to now building the actual fusion machine,” Alex Creely, director of tokamak operations at CFS, told Ignition.
So, what’s a cryostat? The first installed piece of the fusion machine in Devens, MA, is, essentially, a heavy steel plate. It has specially designed holes to allow the wires and systems for cryogenic cooling, power, and instrumentation to pass through while maintaining a vacuum seal.
- CFS designed the cryostat base for SPARC and outsourced manufacturing to a supplier.
- The rest of the cryostat will surround the tokamak and create a vacuum-sealed environment.
The next step: Now that the heavy bottom piece of the tokamak is in place, CFS can start layering on other components it’s already built and tested. On top of the base, the company can now start installing layers of thermal shields. Cryogenic systems can also start to be fed through the cryostat base, and the two halves of the tokamak can be stood up.
There’s still a bit of work to be done on the facility around the fusion machine, Creely said. CFS expects the facility to be largely finished this year.
“When you’re commissioning a new thing for the first time, you want to have worked out all the challenges on the more standard systems, so that you aren’t waiting on an air compressor somewhere to run the tokamak,” Creely said. “By the time we get to the tokamak, the hard part is the area we can focus on.”
Lead Reporter of Ignition
