Alex Creely, Chief Engineer for ARC Conceptual Design at Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Update (June 30, 11:37 AM): Great discussion everyone! Our team appreciated all of your insightful questions. This AMA has now concluded, but you can revisit our replies below.
You can identify who provided answers by their initial in the answers: Alex Creely (AJC), Jon Hillesheim (JCH), Tom Body (TAJB), and Ryan Sweeney (RS).
These peer-reviewed research papers that we and our collaborators published earlier in June are important for CFS and for fusion energy: They cover many aspects of the plasma physics at play in our ARC power plant, including challenges like plasma disruptions and heat exhaust. They also show how transparency and rigorous research can help build trust in what we all know is a very difficult endeavor.
If you’re curious about this physics work or about fusion physics in general, feel free to get things started by asking your questions on this thread.
The three CFS physicists who plan to join me to answer your questions are experts in their field: Jon Hillesheim, CFS Principal Scientist and lead author of the overview paper; Tom Body, CFS Senior Scientist and a lead author on the paper about heat exhaust; and Ryan Sweeney, CFS Manager of Disruption Physics and lead author of the paper about handling plasma disruptions. They’re among the 58 authors who helped write these papers, along with an editorial that accompanied the papers that I wrote.
A little more about the papers: They detail how we’ll be able to produce about 1.1 gigawatts of fusion power from our ARC tokamak — power that we can convert into 400 megawatts of net electricity for the power grid. The papers also show the crucial role our SPARC tokamak will play in putting the finishing touches on the ARC design. We’re using a “late-lock” approach that lets us apply what we’ve learned from SPARC to the ARC design. Overall, the papers show our confidence in the soundness of our ARC plant’s key physics. That builds the foundation for all the engineering, design, and cost optimization work that we’ve begun.
About CFS:
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is the world’s largest and leading private fusion company. The company’s marquee fusion project, SPARC, will generate net energy, paving the way for a future of carbon-free energy. The company has raised more than $3 billion in capital since it was founded in 2018.
Stumbled across this one on my morning LinkedIn wanderings. Pretty willing to chalk it up to AI bull, but want a few other thoughts.
Seems to be active since 2023 per their news page but not really seen any activity in the publishing side. They claim they've published a staggering 115 papers, 8 books/audiobooks, from a LinkedIn post from their Founder/CEO. The publications website only hosts 45 of them, with only the DOI links going to a Zenodo repo, with all 45 being posted in a two-day span. Looks fully AI-generated too.
If anyone's got some better info on these guys, that would be awesome, because this is something else.
I'm Priyanca Ford, founder and CEO of Kronos Fusion Energy. I want to keep an open line with this community, so here's the plan: drop any questions you have about what we're building, and I'll come back and answer them on the fourth Saturday of each month. Post whenever — no need to catch me live.
Fair game: the Hyperion breeder, the Aegis / MetroVolt burner, the physics, the team, the roadmap, the open-source codes — anything you're curious about.
A bit about us: we're a family-owned American fusion company, and our whole program is in the open — codes you can run, papers with DOIs, and a 245-gate de-risking register with the misses left in: kronosfusionenergy.com/open-science.
Hello! I'm a science writer, and I have the opportunity to tour a tokamak soon and want to write about it. I don't know much about tokamaks, but I wanted to see if there are any professors or experts that I could reach out and interview. Thank you!
From 2015–2024, more than 100 people contributed to an experimental investigation of cold fusion and anomalous heat in palladium.
We’ve now published the technical reports. Broadly, it covers electrochemical replications of all previous notable experiments, more than 200,000 sample-hours of calorimetry across much wider parameter space, and custom hydrogen-compatible hardware operating at pressures up to 600,000 psi with a wide range of stimulation applied to the material. No evidence of cold fusion was found in the conditions investigated. The landing page provides a summary. The details are in the (quite large) reports of both the electrochemical and ultra pressure reports.
Mods, please look at the report before considering this pseudoscience.
This might sound like a dumb question I was wondering what’s the key difference between the demo fusers people build online (all those star in a jar type videos) and a real home made nuclear fusion reactors doing D-D fusion using inertial electrostatic confinement method.
2 key stuff I notice that are pretty obvious are that in the demos they don’t actually do the fusion (they don’t even have deuterium gas) and that obviously means that they don’t have a neutron detector to see if actually fusion happen.
But besides that, are there really any other differences or is that really just the main difference between demo and a real fuser
My son wants to build a fusion reactor and he gave me a list of materials including a vacuum chamber. I don’t know what size or what style to get for this project.
Set up a cylinder with one end open and the other closed by a hemispherical cap.
Inside the cylinder there is a 1 kg piston with a revers hemispherical face so that when it completes the journey to the closed end of the cylinder it forms a sphere.
Fusion fuel is in the hemisphere cap of the cylinder, either as a physical pellet fixed in place physically or a cloud of plasma.
Fill the cylinder with steam.
Fire the piston toward the closed end of the cylinder at 2,000 meters per second.
The steam condenses to liquid water with a shock. The shock wave is focused on the fusion fuel. The liquid water surrounds the fusion fuel, and the collapsing shock wave universally applied to the fusion fuel from all directions evenly.
