Commonwealth Fusion Systems just picked its first commercial site partly because of its proximity to Washington, DC

Commonwealth Fusion Systems will build its first commercial-scale power plant just outside of Richmond, Virginia, the company announced Tuesday, with a goal of hooking it up to the grid in the early 2030s.

Fusion power has long been derided as being decades away, but the new milestone assumes the possibility of commercial operations within the next decade. That confidence is echoed by many in the field after the National Ignition Facility demonstrated two years ago that controlled fusion reactions could generate more power than they take to ignite. 

“For our first power plant, it was important for us to put power onto the grid,” Kristen Cullen, CFS’s vice president of global policy and public affairs, told TechCrunch. 

The company settled on the Virginia site after considering many other possibilities. “Lots of sites would have worked for this,” Cullen said. “We looked at sites at the global level, really focusing in on the U.S. following a unanimous decision by the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] to regulate fusion in a way that we felt was appropriate for the industry.”

Once the field had narrowed, Cullen said the team looked for sites with strong transportation networks to support the construction project. They also wanted to be near an existing power plant, both to facilitate the grid connection and to access a labor pool that’s familiar with industry.

But part of what helped nudge Virginia ahead of the rest was its proximity to Washington, D.C. “It’s not just a power plant, right? It’s the world’s first fusion power plant,” Cullen said. “We’re going to want to take a lot of people here. We’re going to want to take tours through. We’re going to want to show different energy ministers and heads of state what fusion’s all about.”

CFS is leasing the land for Arc from Dominion, though apart from that, no money is changing hands between the two partners. CFS anticipates that Dominion will be able to help the startup secure permits and hook the power plant up to the grid, and in exchange, the utility will be one of the first, if not the first, to gain experience working with a fusion power plant. 

“They’re quite interested in dipping their toe in the water here and understanding what it means to bring fusion power to the grid,” Rick Needham, CFS’s chief commercial officer, told TechCrunch.

CFS is pursuing a type of fusion known as “magnetic confinement,” in which powerful magnets compress and confine superheated plasma. There are many shapes that plasma can take, but CFS is corralling it in what’s known as a tokamak, a sort of doughnut shape that’s one of the best studied approaches to magnetic confinement. Inside the tokamak, as the plasma gets squeezed, the supercharged particles are more likely to bump into one another with such force that atomic nuclei fuse, unleashing tremendous amounts of energy.

The wall of the tokamak will be made of a molten salt that will capture heat and transfer it to a steam turbine used to generate electricity. The molten salt blanket will also absorb harmful neutrons and use them to generate tritium, one of the two hydrogen isotopes the reactor will run on. The other, deuterium, can be harvested from seawater.

Arc won’t be CFS’s first facility. The company is currently building Sparc, a demonstration plant, in Devens, Massachusetts. It plans to start commissioning Sparc later in 2025 and, in 2026, achieving “first plasma” — an industry term for when a fusion reactor fires up for the first time. 

“We’ll hit net energy gain soon thereafter,” Needham said. If the company succeeds, it will mark the first time a tokamak has reached that milestone. To date, only the National Ignition Facility has been able to produce a net-positive, controlled nuclear fusion reaction.

To build Arc, the company will need to raise new funds. Raising a new equity round is a likely path, though Needham said that the company is also exploring “other sources of capital,” including debt and government grants. In June, CFS received $15 million from the Department of Energy through its Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program.

While CFS has its eyes on Sparc and Arc today, Needham said the company is already beginning to think about what comes after those. “Because of all the work we’ve done, we found a lot of great sites,” Needham said. “Our objective as a company is not to build a fusion power plant. It’s to build thousands.”