trending Market Intelligence /marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/m_2yflosg20p_ccuozvnoq2 content esgSubNav
In This List

MIT launches fusion project with $50M from Eni and 15-year commercial goal

Podcast

Next in Tech | Episode 49: Carbon reduction in cloud

Blog

Using ESG Analysis to Support a Sustainable Future

Research

US utility commissioners: Who they are and how they impact regulation

Blog

Q&A: Datacenters: Energy Hogs or Sustainability Helpers?


MIT launches fusion project with $50M from Eni and 15-year commercial goal

SNL Image

Visualization of the proposed SPARC tokamak experiment.
Source: Ken Filar, MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center research affiliate

Aiming to fulfill the long-held dream of achieving sustainable and inexhaustible power from nuclear fusion, a promising new project has launched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The project, a collaboration between MIT researchers and nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems, has already attracted an initial investment of $50 million from Italian energy company Eni SpA.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, or CFS, and MIT announced the project, called SPARC, on March 9 with an ambitious timeline of 15 years to deploy and commercialize fusion reactors. Developers hope that the project's rapid, staged research, which will build upon decades of federal government-funded advances in high-temperature superconductors, will father a new generation of fusion experiments and power plants.

Nuclear fusion, which powers the Sun and the stars, involves light elements, such as hydrogen, smashing together to form heavier elements, such as helium, releasing prodigious amounts of energy in the process.

"Fusion is the true energy source of the future," said Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi. "It is completely sustainable, does not release emissions or long-term waste, and is potentially inexhaustible."

However, fusion produces net energy only at temperatures of hundreds of millions degrees Celsius — far too hot for any solid material to withstand. As a way around this problem, fusion researchers use magnetic fields to hold in place the superhot plasma in which the reactions occur, keeping the subatomic particles from coming into contact with any part of a donut-shaped chamber.

The joint venture seeks specifically to build the world's most powerful large-bore superconducting electromagnets, in order to construct a compact device called a tokamak that is capable of generating 100 megawatts. MIT President L. Rafael Reif credited advances in superconducting magnets for putting a functioning tokamak, and possibly a safe, carbon-free future, potentially within reach.

"Everyone agrees on the eventual impact and the commercial potential of fusion power, but then the question is: How do you get there?" asked CFS CEO Robert Mumgaard, who received a PhD from MIT in 2015. "We get there by leveraging the science that's already developed, collaborating with the right partners, and tackling the problems step by step."

CFS will support more than $30 million of MIT research over the next three years through investments by Eni and others. The project's announcement comes as Democrats and Republicans in U.S. Congress decry proposed cuts by the Trump administration to America's estimated $213 million annual share of project costs for an international fusion project in France, known as ITER. Launched in 1985 by a consortium of scientists from the U.S., the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea, the experimental fusion reactor has experienced a series of cost overruns and missed deadlines.