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    Developing materials for stellar performance in fusion power plants

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    When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop — “zookeeper” featured prominently for a while — but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist.When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents’ Chicago home recently, it felt serendipitous because, by all measures, she has realized that childhood dream. The second-year doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) is studying materials for fusion power plants at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the advisement of Michael Short, associate professor at NSE. Dennis Whyte, Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at NSE, serves as co-advisor.On track to an MIT educationGrowing up in Chicago, Fisher had heard her parents remarking on her reasoning abilities. When she was barely a preschooler she argued that she couldn’t have been found in a purple speckled egg, as her parents claimed they had done.Fisher didn’t put together just how much she had gravitated toward science until a high school physics teacher encouraged her to apply to MIT. Passionate about both the arts and sciences, she initially worried that pursuing science would be very rigid, without room for creativity. But she knows now that exploring solutions to problems requires plenty of creative thinking.It was a visit to MIT through the Weekend Immersion in Science and Engineering (WISE) that truly opened her eyes to the potential of an MIT education. “It just seemed like the undergraduate experience here is where you can be very unapologetically yourself. There’s no fronting something you don’t want to be like. There’s so much authenticity compared to most other colleges I looked at,” Fisher says. Once admitted, Campus Preview Weekend confirmed that she belonged. “We got to be silly and weird — a version of the Mafia game was a hit — and I was like, ‘These are my people,’” Fisher laughs.Pursuing fusion at NSEBefore she officially started as a first-year in 2018, Fisher enrolled in the Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), which starts a week before orientation starts. Each FPOP zooms into one field. “I’d applied to the nuclear one simply because it sounded cool and I didn’t know anything about it,” Fisher says. She was intrigued right away. “They really got me with that ‘star in a bottle’ line,” she laughs. (The quest for commercial fusion is to create the energy equivalent of a star in a bottle). Excited by a talk by Zachary Hartwig, Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor at NSE, Fisher asked if she could work on fusion as an undergraduate as part of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. She started with modeling solders for power plants and was hooked. When Fisher requested more experimental work, Hartwig put her in touch with Research Scientist David Fischer at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Fisher eventually moved on to explore superconductors, which eventually morphed into research for her master’s thesis.For her doctoral research, Fisher is extending her master’s work to explore defects in ceramics, specifically in alumina (aluminum oxide). Sapphire coatings are the single-crystal equivalent of alumina, an insulator being explored for use in fusion power plants. “I eventually want to figure out what types of charge defects form in ceramics during radiation damage so we can ultimately engineer radiation-resistant sapphire,” Fisher says.When you introduce a material in a fusion power plant, stray high-energy neutrons born from the plasma can collide and fundamentally reorder the lattice, which is likely to change a range of thermal, electrical, and structural properties. “Think of a scaffolding outside a building, with each one of those joints as a different atom that holds your material in place. If you go in and you pull a joint out, there’s a chance that you pulled out a joint that wasn’t structurally sound, in which case everything would be fine. But there’s also a chance that you pull a joint out and everything alters. And [such unpredictability] is a problem,” Fisher says. “We need to be able to account for exactly how these neutrons are going to alter the lattice property,” Fisher says, and it’s one of the topics her research explores.The studies, in turn, can function as a jumping-off point for irradiating superconductors. The goals are two-fold: “I want to figure out how I can make an industry-usable ceramic you can use to insulate the inside of a fusion power plant, and then also figure out if I can take this information that I’m getting with ceramics and make it superconductor-relevant,” Fisher says. “Superconductors are the electromagnets we will use to contain the plasma inside fusion power plants. However, they prove pretty difficult to study. Since they are also ceramic, you can draw a lot of parallels between alumina and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), the specific superconductor we use,” she adds. Fisher is also excited about the many experiments she performs using a particle accelerator, one of which involves measuring exactly how surface thermal properties change during radiation.Sailing new pathsIt’s not just her research that Fisher loves. As an undergrad, and during her master’s, she was on the varsity sailing team. “I worked my way into sailing with literal Olympians, I did not see that coming,” she says. Fisher participates in Chicago’s Race to Mackinac and the Melges 15 Series every chance she gets. Of all the types of boats she has sailed, she prefers dinghy sailing the most. “It’s more physical, you have to throw yourself around a lot and there’s this immediate cause and effect, which I like,” Fisher says. She also teaches sailing lessons in the summer at MIT’s Sailing Pavilion — you can find her on a small motorboat, issuing orders through a speaker.Teaching has figured prominently throughout Fisher’s time at MIT. Through MISTI, Fisher has taught high school classes in Germany and a radiation and materials class in Armenia in her senior year. She was delighted by the food and culture in Armenia and by how excited people were to learn new ideas. Her love of teaching continues, as she has reached out to high schools in the Boston area. “I like talking to groups and getting them excited about fusion, or even maybe just the concept of attending graduate school,” Fisher says, adding that teaching the ropes of an experiment one-on-one is “one of the most rewarding things.”She also learned the value of resilience and quick thinking on various other MISTI trips. Despite her love of travel, Fisher has had a few harrowing experiences with tough situations and plans falling through at the last minute. It’s when she tells herself, “Well, the only thing that you’re gonna do is you’re gonna keep doing what you wanted to do.”That eyes-on-the-prize focus has stood Fisher in good stead, and continues to serve her well in her research today. More

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      Will neutrons compromise the operation of superconducting magnets in a fusion plant?

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      High-temperature superconducting magnets made from REBCO, an acronym for rare earth barium copper oxide, make it possible to create an intense magnetic field that can confine the extremely hot plasma needed for fusion reactions, which combine two hydrogen atoms to form an atom of helium, releasing a neutron in the process.But some early tests suggested that neutron irradiation inside a fusion power plant might instantaneously suppress the superconducting magnets’ ability to carry current without resistance (called critical current), potentially causing a reduction in the fusion power output.Now, a series of experiments has clearly demonstrated that this instantaneous effect of neutron bombardment, known as the “beam on effect,” should not be an issue during reactor operation, thus clearing the path for projects such as the ARC fusion system being developed by MIT spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems.The findings were reported in the journal Superconducting Science and Technology, in a paper by MIT graduate student Alexis Devitre and professors Michael Short, Dennis Whyte, and Zachary Hartwig, along with six others.“Nobody really knew if it would be a concern,” Short explains. He recalls looking at these early findings: “Our group thought, man, somebody should really look into this. But now, luckily, the result of the paper is: It’s conclusively not a concern.”The possible issue first arose during some initial tests of the REBCO tapes planned for use in the ARC system. “I can remember the night when we first tried the experiment,” Devitre recalls. “We were all down in the accelerator lab, in the basement. It was a big shocker because suddenly the measurement we were looking at, the critical current, just went down by 30 percent” when it was measured under radiation conditions (approximating those of the fusion system), as opposed to when it was only measured after irradiation.Before that, researchers had irradiated the REBCO tapes and then tested them afterward, Short says. “We had the idea to measure while irradiating, the way it would be when the reactor’s really on,” he says. “And then we observed this giant difference, and we thought, oh, this is a big deal. It’s a margin you’d want to know about if you’re designing a reactor.”After a series of carefully calibrated tests, it turned out the drop in critical current was not caused by the irradiation at all, but was just an effect of temperature changes brought on by the proton beam used for the irradiation experiments. This is something that would not be a factor in an actual fusion plant, Short says.“We repeated experiments ‘oh so many times’ and collected about a thousand data points,” Devitre says. They then went through a detailed statistical analysis to show that the effects were exactly the same, under conditions where the material was just heated as when it was both heated and irradiated.This excluded the possibility that the instantaneous suppression of the critical current had anything to do with the “beam on effect,” at least within the sensitivity of their tests. “Our experiments are quite sensitive,” Short says. “We can never say there’s no effect, but we can say that there’s no important effect.”To carry out these tests required building a special facility for the purpose. Only a few such facilities exist in the world. “They’re all custom builds, and without this, we wouldn’t have been able to find out the answer,” he says.The finding that this specific issue is not a concern for the design of fusion plants “illustrates the power of negative results. If you can conclusively prove that something doesn’t happen, you can stop scientists from wasting their time hunting for something that doesn’t exist.” And in this case, Short says, “You can tell the fusion companies: ‘You might have thought this effect would be real, but we’ve proven that it’s not, and you can ignore it in your designs.’ So that’s one more risk retired.”That could be a relief to not only Commonwealth Fusion Systems but also several other companies that are also pursuing fusion plant designs, Devitre says. “There’s a bunch. And it’s not just fusion companies,” he adds. There remains the important issue of longer-term degradation of the REBCO that would occur over years or decades, which the group is presently investigating. Others are pursuing the use of these magnets for satellite thrusters and particle accelerators to study subatomic physics, where the effect could also have been a concern. For all these uses, “this is now one less thing to be concerned about,” Devitre says.The research team also included David Fischer, Kevin Woller, Maxwell Rae, Lauryn Kortman, and Zoe Fisher at MIT, and N. Riva at Proxima Fusion in Germany. This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      Unlocking the secrets of fusion’s core with AI-enhanced simulations

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      Creating and sustaining fusion reactions — essentially recreating star-like conditions on Earth — is extremely difficult, and Nathan Howard PhD ’12, a principal research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), thinks it’s one of the most fascinating scientific challenges of our time. “Both the science and the overall promise of fusion as a clean energy source are really interesting. That motivated me to come to grad school [at MIT] and work at the PSFC,” he says.Howard is member of the Magnetic Fusion Experiments Integrated Modeling (MFE-IM) group at the PSFC. Along with MFE-IM group leader Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez, Howard and the team use simulations and machine learning to predict how plasma will behave in a fusion device. MFE-IM and Howard’s research aims to forecast a given technology or configuration’s performance before it’s piloted in an actual fusion environment, allowing for smarter design choices. To ensure their accuracy, these models are continuously validated using data from previous experiments, keeping their simulations grounded in reality.In a recent open-access paper titled “Prediction of Performance and Turbulence in ITER Burning Plasmas via Nonlinear Gyrokinetic Profile Prediction,” published in the January issue of Nuclear Fusion, Howard explains how he used high-resolution simulations of the swirling structures present in plasma, called turbulence, to confirm that the world’s largest experimental fusion device, currently under construction in Southern France, will perform as expected when switched on. He also demonstrates how a different operating setup could produce nearly the same amount of energy output but with less energy input, a discovery that could positively affect the efficiency of fusion devices in general.The biggest and best of what’s never been builtForty years ago, the United States and six other member nations came together to build ITER (Latin for “the way”), a fusion device that, once operational, would yield 500 megawatts of fusion power, and a plasma able to generate 10 times more energy than it absorbs from external heating. The plasma setup designed to achieve these goals — the most ambitious of any fusion experiment — is called the ITER baseline scenario, and as fusion science and plasma physics have progressed, ways to achieve this plasma have been refined using increasingly more powerful simulations like the modeling framework Howard used.In his work to verify the baseline scenario, Howard used CGYRO, a computer code developed by Howard’s collaborators at General Atomics. CGYRO applies a complex plasma physics model to a set of defined fusion operating conditions. Although it is time-intensive, CGYRO generates very detailed simulations on how plasma behaves at different locations within a fusion device.The comprehensive CGYRO simulations were then run through the PORTALS framework, a collection of tools originally developed at MIT by Rodriguez-Fernandez. “PORTALS takes the high-fidelity [CGYRO] runs and uses machine learning to build a quick model called a ‘surrogate’ that can mimic the results of the more complex runs, but much faster,” Rodriguez-Fernandez explains. “Only high-fidelity modeling tools like PORTALS give us a glimpse into the plasma core before it even forms. This predict-first approach allows us to create more efficient plasmas in a device like ITER.”After the first pass, the surrogates’ accuracy was checked against the high-fidelity runs, and if a surrogate wasn’t producing results in line with CGYRO’s, PORTALS was run again to refine the surrogate until it better mimicked CGYRO’s results. “The nice thing is, once you have built a well-trained [surrogate] model, you can use it to predict conditions that are different, with a very much reduced need for the full complex runs.” Once they were fully trained, the surrogates were used to explore how different combinations of inputs might affect ITER’s predicted performance and how it achieved the baseline scenario. Notably, the surrogate runs took a fraction of the time, and they could be used in conjunction with CGYRO to give it a boost and produce detailed results more quickly.“Just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in”Howard’s work with CGYRO, PORTALS, and surrogates examined a specific combination of operating conditions that had been predicted to achieve the baseline scenario. Those conditions included the magnetic field used, the methods used to control plasma shape, the external heating applied, and many other variables. Using 14 iterations of CGYRO, Howard was able to confirm that the current baseline scenario configuration could achieve 10 times more power output than input into the plasma. Howard says of the results, “The modeling we performed is maybe the highest fidelity possible at this time, and almost certainly the highest fidelity published.”The 14 iterations of CGYRO used to confirm the plasma performance included running PORTALS to build surrogate models for the input parameters and then tying the surrogates to CGYRO to work more efficiently. It only took three additional iterations of CGYRO to explore an alternate scenario that predicted ITER could produce almost the same amount of energy with about half the input power. The surrogate-enhanced CGYRO model revealed that the temperature of the plasma core — and thus the fusion reactions — wasn’t overly affected by less power input; less power input equals more efficient operation. Howard’s results are also a reminder that there may be other ways to improve ITER’s performance; they just haven’t been discovered yet.Howard reflects, “The fact that we can use the results of this modeling to influence the planning of experiments like ITER is exciting. For years, I’ve been saying that this was the goal of our research, and now that we actually do it — it’s an amazing arc, and really fulfilling.”  More

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      in Environment

      Cleaning up critical minerals and materials production, using microwave plasma

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      The push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. is running up against an unfortunate truth: The processes for making many critical materials today create toxic byproducts and other environmental hazards. That’s true for commonly used industrial metals like nickel and titanium, as well as specialty minerals, materials, and coatings that go into batteries, advanced electronics, and defense applications.Now 6K, founded by former MIT research scientist Kamal Hadidi, is using a new production process to bring critical materials production back to America without the toxic byproducts.The company is actively scaling its microwave plasma technology, which it calls UniMelt, to transform the way critical minerals are processed, creating new domestic supply chains in the process. UniMelt uses beams of tightly controlled thermal plasma to melt or vaporize precursor materials into particles with precise sizes and crystalline phases.The technology converts metals, such as titanium, nickel, and refractory alloys, into particles optimized for additive manufacturing for a range of industrial applications. It is also being used to create battery materials for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, and data centers.“The markets and critical materials we are focused on are important for not just economic reasons but also U.S. national security, because the bulk of these materials are manufactured today in nonfriendly countries,” 6K CEO Saurabh Ullal says. “Now, the [U.S. government] and our growing customer base can leverage this technology invented at MIT to make the U.S. less dependent on these nonfriendly countries, ensuring supply chain independence now and in the future.”Named after the 6,000-degree temperature of its plasma, 6K is currently selling its high-performance metal powders to parts manufacturers as well as defense, automotive, medical, and oil and gas companies for use in applications from engine components and medical implants to rockets. To scale its battery materials business, 6K is also building a 100,000-square-foot production facility in Jackson, Tennessee, which will begin construction later this year.A weekend projectBetween 1994 and 2007, Hadidi worked at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC), where he developed plasma technologies for a range of applications, including hydrogen production, fuel reforming, and detecting environmental toxins. His first company was founded in 2000 out of the PFSC to detect mercury in coal-fired power plants’ smokestacks.“I loved working at MIT,” Hadidi says. “It’s an amazing place that really challenges you. Just being there is so stimulating because everyone’s trying to come up with new solutions and connect dots between different fields.”Hadidi also began using high-frequency microwave plasmas to create nanomaterials for use in optical applications. He wasn’t a materials expert, so he collaborated with Professor Eric Jordan, a materials synthesis expert from the University of Connecticut, and the researchers started working on nights and weekends in the PSFC to develop the idea further, eventually patenting the technology.Hadidi officially founded the company as Amastan in 2007, exploring the use of his microwave plasma technology, later named UniMelt for “uniform melt state process,” to make a host of different materials as part of a government grant he and Jordan received.The researchers soon realized the microwave plasma technology had several advantages over traditional production techniques for certain materials. For one, it could eliminate several high-energy steps of conventional processes, reducing production times from days to hours in some cases. For batteries and certain critical minerals, the process also works with recycled feedstocks. Amastan was renamed 6K in 2019.Early on, Hadidi produced metal powders used in additive manufacturing through a process called spheroidization, which results in dense, spherical powders that flow well and make high-performance 3D-printed parts.Following another grant, Hadidi explored methods for producing a type of battery cathode made from lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC). The standard process for making NMCs involved chemical synthesis, precipitation, heat treatment, and a lot of water. 6K is able to reduce many of those steps, speeding up production and lowering costs while also being more sustainable.“Our technology completely eliminates toxic waste and recycles all of the byproducts back through the process to utilize everything, including water,” Ullal says.Scaling domestic productionToday, 6K’s additive manufacturing arm operates out of a factory in Pennsylvania. The company’s critical minerals processing, refining, and recycling systems can produce about 400 tons of material per year and can be used to make more than a dozen types of metal powders. The company also has 33,000-square-foot battery center in North Andover, Massachusetts, where it produces battery cathode materials for its energy storage and mobility customers.The Tennessee facility will be used to produce battery cathode materials and represents a massive step up in throughput. The company says it will be able to produce 13,000 tons of material annually when construction is complete next year.“I’m happy if what I started brings something positive to society, and I’m extremely thankful to all the people that helped me,” says Hadidi, who left the company in 2019. “I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I like to make things. But that doesn’t mean I always succeed. It’s personally very satisfying to see this make an impact.”The 6K team says its technology can also create a variety of specialty ceramics, advanced coatings, and nanoengineered materials. They say it may also be used to eliminate PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” though that work is at an early stage.The company recently received a grant to demonstrate a process for recycling critical materials from military depots to produce aerospace and defense products, creating a new value stream for these materials that would otherwise deteriorate or go to landfill. That work is consistent with the company’s motto, “We take nothing from the ground and put nothing into the ground.”The company’s additive division recently received a $23.4 Defense Production Act grant “that will enable us to double processing capacity in the next three years,” Ullal says. “The next step is to scale battery materials production to the tens of thousands of tons per year. At this point, it’s a scale-up of known processes, and we just need to execute. The idea of creating a circular economy is near and dear to us because that’s how we’ve built this company and that’s how we generate value: addressing our U.S. national security concerns and protecting the planet as well.” More

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      MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems unveils plans for the world’s first fusion power plant

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      America is one step closer to tapping into a new and potentially limitless clean energy source today, with the announcement from MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) that it plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.The announcement is the latest milestone for the company, which has made groundbreaking progress toward harnessing fusion — the reaction that powers the sun — since its founders first conceived of their approach in an MIT classroom in 2012. CFS is now commercializing a suite of advanced technologies developed in MIT research labs.“This moment exemplifies the power of MIT’s mission, which is to create knowledge that serves the nation and the world, whether via the classroom, the lab, or out in communities,” MIT Vice President for Research Ian Waitz says. “From student coursework 12 years ago to today’s announcement of the siting in Virginia of the world’s first fusion power plant, progress has been amazingly rapid. At the same time, we owe this progress to over 65 years of sustained investment by the U.S. federal government in basic science and energy research.”The new fusion power plant, named ARC, is expected to come online in the early 2030s and generate about 400 megawatts of clean, carbon-free electricity — enough energy to power large industrial sites or about 150,000 homes.The plant will be built at the James River Industrial Park outside of Richmond through a nonfinancial collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia, which will provide development and technical expertise along with leasing rights for the site. CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the power plant.The plant will support Virginia’s economic and clean energy goals by generating what is expected to be billions of dollars in economic development and hundreds of jobs during its construction and long-term operation.More broadly, ARC will position the U.S. to lead the world in harnessing a new form of safe and reliable energy that could prove critical for economic prosperity and national security, including for meeting increasing electricity demands driven by needs like artificial intelligence.“This will be a watershed moment for fusion,” says CFS co-founder Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT. “It sets the pace in the race toward commercial fusion power plants. The ambition is to build thousands of these power plants and to change the world.”Fusion can generate energy from abundant fuels like hydrogen and lithium isotopes, which can be sourced from seawater, and leave behind no emissions or toxic waste. However, harnessing fusion in a way that produces more power than it takes in has proven difficult because of the high temperatures needed to create and maintain the fusion reaction. Over the course of decades, scientists and engineers have worked to make the dream of fusion power plants a reality.In 2012, teaching the MIT class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering), Whyte challenged a group of graduate students to design a fusion device that would use a new kind of superconducting magnet to confine the plasma used in the reaction. It turned out the magnets enabled a more compact and economic reactor design. When Whyte reviewed his students’ work, he realized that could mean a new development path for fusion.Since then, a huge amount of capital and expertise has rushed into the once fledgling fusion industry. Today there are dozens of private fusion companies around the world racing to develop the first net-energy fusion power plants, many utilizing the new superconducting magnets. CFS, which Whyte founded with several students from his class, has attracted more than $2 billion in funding.“It all started with that class, where our ideas kept evolving as we challenged the standard assumptions that came with fusion,” Whyte says. “We had this new superconducting technology, so much of the common wisdom was no longer valid. It was a perfect forum for students, who can challenge the status quo.”Since the company’s founding in 2017, it has collaborated with researchers in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC) on a range of initiatives, from validating the underlying plasma physics for the first demonstration machine to breaking records with a new kind of magnet to be used in commercial fusion power plants. Each piece of progress moves the U.S. closer to harnessing a revolutionary new energy source.CFS is currently completing development of its fusion demonstration machine, SPARC, at its headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. SPARC is expected to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly after, demonstrating for the first time a commercially relevant design that will produce more power than it consumes. SPARC will pave the way for ARC, which is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.“There’s more challenging engineering and science to be done in this field, and we’re very enthusiastic about the progress that CFS and the researchers on our campus are making on those problems,” Waitz says. “We’re in a ‘hockey stick’ moment in fusion energy, where things are moving incredibly quickly now. On the other hand, we can’t forget about the much longer part of that hockey stick, the sustained support for very complex, fundamental research that underlies great innovations. If we’re going to continue to lead the world in these cutting-edge technologies, continued investment in those areas will be crucial.” More

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      Transforming fusion from a scientific curiosity into a powerful clean energy source

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      If you’re looking for hard problems, building a nuclear fusion power plant is a pretty good place to start. Fusion — the process that powers the sun — has proven to be a difficult thing to recreate here on Earth despite decades of research.“There’s something very attractive to me about the magnitude of the fusion challenge,” Hartwig says. “It’s probably true of a lot of people at MIT. I’m driven to work on very hard problems. There’s something intrinsically satisfying about that battle. It’s part of the reason I’ve stayed in this field. We have to cross multiple frontiers of physics and engineering if we’re going to get fusion to work.”The problem got harder when, in Hartwig’s last year in graduate school, the Department of Energy announced plans to terminate funding for the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, a major fusion experiment in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center that Hartwig needed to do to graduate. Hartwig was able to finish his PhD, and the scare didn’t dissuade him from the field. In fact, he took an associate professor position at MIT in 2017 to keep working on fusion.“It was a pretty bleak time to take a faculty position in fusion energy, but I am a person who loves to find a vacuum,” says Hartwig, who is a newly tenured associate professor at MIT. “I adore a vacuum because there’s enormous opportunity in chaos.”Hartwig did have one very good reason for hope. In 2012, he had taken a class taught by Professor Dennis Whyte that challenged students to design and assess the economics of a nuclear fusion power plant that incorporated a new kind of high-temperature superconducting magnet. Hartwig says the magnets enable fusion reactors to be much smaller, cheaper, and faster.Whyte, Hartwig, and a few other members of the class started working nights and weekends to prove the reactors were feasible. In 2017, the group founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to build the world’s first commercial-scale fusion power plants.Over the next four years, Hartwig led a research project at MIT with CFS that further developed the magnet technology and scaled it to create a 20-Tesla superconducting magnet — a suitable size for a nuclear fusion power plant.The magnet and subsequent tests of its performance represented a turning point for the industry. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has since attracted more than $2 billion in investments to build its first reactors, while the fusion industry overall has exceeded $8 billion in private investment.The old joke in fusion is that the technology is always 30 years away. But fewer people are laughing these days.“The perspective in 2024 looks quite a bit different than it did in 2016, and a huge part of that is tied to the institutional capability of a place like MIT and the willingness of people here to accomplish big things,” Hartwig says.A path to the starsAs a child growing up in St. Louis, Hartwig was interested in sports and playing outside with friends but had little interest in physics. When he went to Boston University as an undergraduate, he studied biomedical engineering simply because his older brother had done it, so he thought he could get a job. But as he was introduced to tools for structural experiments and analysis, he found himself more interested in how the tools worked than what they could do.“That led me to physics, and physics ended up leading me to nuclear science, where I’m basically still doing applied physics,” Hartwig explains.Joining the field late in his undergraduate studies, Hartwig worked hard to get his physics degree on time. After graduation, he was burnt out, so he took two years off and raced his bicycle competitively while working in a bike shop.“There’s so much pressure on people in science and engineering to go straight through,” Hartwig says. “People say if you take time off, you won’t be able to get into graduate school, you won’t be able to get recommendation letters. I always tell my students, ‘It depends on the person.’ Everybody’s different, but it was a great period for me, and it really set me up to enter graduate school with a more mature mindset and to be more focused.”Hartwig returned to academia as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in 2007. When his thesis advisor, Dennis Whyte, announced a course focused on designing nuclear fusion power plants, it caught Hartwig’s eye. The final projects showed a surprisingly promising path forward for a fusion field that had been stagnant for decades. The rest was history.“We started CFS with the idea that it would partner deeply with MIT and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center to leverage the infrastructure, expertise, people, and capabilities that we have MIT,” Hartwig says. “We had to start the company with the idea that it would be deeply partnered with MIT in an innovative way that hadn’t really been done before.”Guided by impactHartwig says the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in particular, have seen a huge influx in graduate student applications in recent years.“There’s so much demand, because people are excited again about the possibilities,” Hartwig says. “Instead of having fusion and a machine built in one or two generations, we’ll hopefully be learning how these things work in under a decade.”Hartwig’s research group is still testing CFS’ new magnets, but it is also partnering with other fusion companies in an effort to advance the field more broadly.Overall, when Hartwig looks back at his career, the thing he is most proud of is switching specialties every six years or so, from building equipment for his PhD to conducting fundamental experiments to designing reactors to building magnets.“It’s not that traditional in academia,” Hartwig says. “Where I’ve found success is coming into something new, bringing a naivety but also realism to a new field, and offering a different toolkit, a different approach, or a different idea about what can be done.”Now Hartwig is onto his next act, developing new ways to study materials for use in fusion and fission reactors.“I’m already interested in moving on to the next thing; the next field where I’m not a trained expert,” Hartwig says. “It’s about identifying where there’s stagnation in fusion and in technology, where innovation is not happening where we desperately need it, and bringing new ideas to that.” More

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      Turning automotive engines into modular chemical plants to make green fuels

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      Reducing methane emissions is a top priority in the fight against climate change because of its propensity to trap heat in the atmosphere: Methane’s warming effects are 84 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year timescale.And yet, as the main component of natural gas, methane is also a valuable fuel and a precursor to several important chemicals. The main barrier to using methane emissions to create carbon-negative materials is that human sources of methane gas — landfills, farms, and oil and gas wells — are relatively small and spread out across large areas, while traditional chemical processing facilities are huge and centralized. That makes it prohibitively expensive to capture, transport, and convert methane gas into anything useful. As a result, most companies burn or “flare” their methane at the site where it’s emitted, seeing it as a sunk cost and an environmental liability.The MIT spinout Emvolon is taking a new approach to processing methane by repurposing automotive engines to serve as modular, cost-effective chemical plants. The company’s systems can take methane gas and produce liquid fuels like methanol and ammonia on-site; these fuels can then be used or transported in standard truck containers.”We see this as a new way of chemical manufacturing,” Emvolon co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Kasseris SM ’07, PhD ’11 says. “We’re starting with methane because methane is an abundant emission that we can use as a resource. With methane, we can solve two problems at the same time: About 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from hard-to-abate sectors that need green fuel, like shipping, aviation, heavy heavy-duty trucks, and rail. Then another 15 percent of emissions come from distributed methane emissions like landfills and oil wells.”By using mass-produced engines and eliminating the need to invest in infrastructure like pipelines, the company says it’s making methane conversion economically attractive enough to be adopted at scale. The system can also take green hydrogen produced by intermittent renewables and turn it into ammonia, another fuel that can also be used to decarbonize fertilizers.“In the future, we’re going to need green fuels because you can’t electrify a large ship or plane — you have to use a high-energy-density, low-carbon-footprint, low-cost liquid fuel,” Kasseris says. “The energy resources to produce those green fuels are either distributed, as is the case with methane, or variable, like wind. So, you cannot have a massive plant [producing green fuels] that has its own zip code. You either have to be distributed or variable, and both of those approaches lend themselves to this modular design.”From a “crazy idea” to a companyKasseris first came to MIT to study mechanical engineering as a graduate student in 2004, when he worked in the Sloan Automotive Lab on a report on the future of transportation. For his PhD, he developed a novel technology for improving internal combustion engine fuel efficiency for a consortium of automotive and energy companies, which he then went to work for after graduation.Around 2014, he was approached by Leslie Bromberg ’73, PhD ’77, a serial inventor with more than 100 patents, who has been a principal research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center for nearly 50 years.“Leslie had this crazy idea of repurposing an internal combustion engine as a reactor,” Kasseris recalls. “I had looked at that while working in industry, and I liked it, but my company at the time thought the work needed more validation.”Bromberg had done that validation through a U.S. Department of Energy-funded project in which he used a diesel engine to “reform” methane — a high-pressure chemical reaction in which methane is combined with steam and oxygen to produce hydrogen. The work impressed Kasseris enough to bring him back to MIT as a research scientist in 2016.“We worked on that idea in addition to some other projects, and eventually it had reached the point where we decided to license the work from MIT and go full throttle,” Kasseris recalls. “It’s very easy to work with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office when you are an MIT inventor. You can get a low-cost licensing option, and you can do a lot with that, which is important for a new company. Then, once you are ready, you can finalize the license, so MIT was instrumental.”Emvolon continued working with MIT’s research community, sponsoring projects with Professor Emeritus John Heywood and participating in the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and the MIT Industrial Liaison Program.An engine-powered chemical plantAt the core of Emvolon’s system is an off-the-shelf automotive engine that runs “fuel rich” — with a higher ratio of fuel to air than what is needed for complete combustion.“That’s easy to say, but it takes a lot of [intellectual property], and that’s what was developed at MIT,” Kasseris says. “Instead of burning the methane in the gas to carbon dioxide and water, you partially burn it, or partially oxidize it, to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which are the building blocks to synthesize a variety of chemicals.”The hydrogen and carbon monoxide are intermediate products used to synthesize different chemicals through further reactions. Those processing steps take place right next to the engine, which makes its own power. Each of Emvolon’s standalone systems fits within a 40-foot shipping container and can produce about 8 tons of methanol per day from 300,000 standard cubic feet of methane gas.The company is starting with green methanol because it’s an ideal fuel for hard-to-abate sectors such as shipping and heavy-duty transport, as well as an excellent feedstock for other high-value chemicals, such as sustainable aviation fuel. Many shipping vessels have already converted to run on green methanol in an effort to meet decarbonization goals.This summer, the company also received a grant from the Department of Energy to adapt its process to produce clean liquid fuels from power sources like solar and wind.“We’d like to expand to other chemicals like ammonia, but also other feedstocks, such as biomass and hydrogen from renewable electricity, and we already have promising results in that direction” Kasseris says. “We think we have a good solution for the energy transition and, in the later stages of the transition, for e-manufacturing.”A scalable approachEmvolon has already built a system capable of producing up to six barrels of green methanol a day in its 5,000 square-foot headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.“For chemical technologies, people talk about scale up risk, but with an engine, if it works in a single cylinder, we know it will work in a multicylinder engine,” Kasseris says. “It’s just engineering.”Last month, Emvolon announced an agreement with Montauk Renewables to build a commercial-scale demonstration unit next to a Texas landfill that will initially produce up to 15,000 gallons of green methanol a year and later scale up to 2.5 million gallons. That project could be expanded tenfold by scaling across Montauk’s other sites.“Our whole process was designed to be a very realistic approach to the energy transition,” Kasseris says. “Our solution is designed to produce green fuels and chemicals at prices that the markets are willing to pay today, without the need for subsidies. Using the engines as chemical plants, we can get the capital expenditure per unit output close to that of a large plant, but at a modular scale that enables us to be next to low-cost feedstock. Furthermore, our modular systems require small investments — of $1 to 10 million — that are quickly deployed, one at a time, within weeks, as opposed to massive chemical plants that require multiyear capital construction projects and cost hundreds of millions.” More

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      Smart handling of neutrons is crucial to fusion power success

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      In fall 2009, when Ethan Peterson ’13 arrived at MIT as an undergraduate, he already had some ideas about possible career options. He’d always liked building things, even as a child, so he imagined his future work would involve engineering of some sort. He also liked physics. And he’d recently become intent on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and simultaneously curbing greenhouse gas emissions, which made him consider studying solar and wind energy, among other renewable sources.Things crystallized for him in the spring semester of 2010, when he took an introductory course on nuclear fusion, taught by Anne White, during which he discovered that when a deuterium nucleus and a tritium nucleus combine to produce a helium nucleus, an energetic (14 mega electron volt) neutron — traveling at one-sixth the speed of light — is released. Moreover, 1020 (100 billion billion) of these neutrons would be produced every second that a 500-megawatt fusion power plant operates. “It was eye-opening for me to learn just how energy-dense the fusion process is,” says Peterson, who became the Class of 1956 Career Development Professor of nuclear science and engineering in July 2024. “I was struck by the richness and interdisciplinary nature of the fusion field. This was an engineering discipline where I could apply physics to solve a real-world problem in a way that was both interesting and beautiful.”He soon became a physics and nuclear engineering double major, and by the time he graduated from MIT in 2013, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) had already decided to cut funding for MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion project. In view of that facility’s impending closure, Peterson opted to pursue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. There, he acquired a basic science background in plasma physics, which is central not only to nuclear fusion but also to astrophysical phenomena such as the solar wind.When Peterson received his PhD from Wisconsin in 2019, nuclear fusion had rebounded at MIT with the launch, a year earlier, of the SPARC project — a collaborative effort being carried out with the newly founded MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He returned to his alma mater as a postdoc and then a research scientist in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, taking his time, at first, to figure out how to best make his mark in the field.Minding your neutronsAround that time, Peterson was participating in a community planning process, sponsored by the DoE, that focused on critical gaps that needed to be closed for a successful fusion program. In the course of these discussions, he came to realize that inadequate attention had been paid to the handling of neutrons, which carry 80 percent of the energy coming out of a fusion reaction — energy that needs to be harnessed for electrical generation. However, these neutrons are so energetic that they can penetrate through many tens of centimeters of material, potentially undermining the structural integrity of components and damaging vital equipment such as superconducting magnets. Shielding is also essential for protecting humans from harmful radiation.One goal, Peterson says, is to minimize the number of neutrons that escape and, in so doing, to reduce the amount of lost energy. A complementary objective, he adds, “is to get neutrons to deposit heat where you want them to and to stop them from depositing heat where you don’t want them to.” These considerations, in turn, can have a profound influence on fusion reactor design. This branch of nuclear engineering, called neutronics — which analyzes where neutrons are created and where they end up going — has become Peterson’s specialty.It was never a high-profile area of research in the fusion community — as plasma physics, for example, has always garnered more of the spotlight and more of the funding. That’s exactly why Peterson has stepped up. “The impacts of neutrons on fusion reactor design haven’t been a high priority for a long time,” he says. “I felt that some initiative needed to be taken,” and that prompted him to make the switch from plasma physics to neutronics. It has been his principal focus ever since — as a postdoc, a research scientist, and now as a faculty member.A code to design byThe best way to get a neutron to transfer its energy is to make it collide with a light atom. Lithium, with an atomic number of three, or lithium-containing materials are normally good choices — and necessary for producing tritium fuel. The placement of lithium “blankets,” which are intended to absorb energy from neutrons and produce tritium, “is a critical part of the design of fusion reactors,” Peterson says. High-density materials, such as lead and tungsten, can be used, conversely, to block the passage of neutrons and other types of radiation. “You might want to layer these high- and low-density materials in a complicated way that isn’t immediately intuitive” he adds. Determining which materials to put where — and of what thickness and mass — amounts to a tricky optimization problem, which will affect the size, cost, and efficiency of a fusion power plant.To that end, Peterson has developed modelling tools that can make analyses of these sorts easier and faster, thereby facilitating the design process. “This has traditionally been the step that takes the longest time and causes the biggest holdups,” he says. The models and algorithms that he and his colleagues are devising are general enough, moreover, to be compatible with a diverse range of fusion power plant concepts, including those that use magnets or lasers to confine the plasma.Now that he’s become a professor, Peterson is in a position to introduce more people to nuclear engineering, and to neutronics in particular. “I love teaching and mentoring students, sharing the things I’m excited about,” he says. “I was inspired by all the professors I had in physics and nuclear engineering at MIT, and I hope to give back to the community in the same way.”He also believes that if you are going to work on fusion, there is no better place to be than MIT, “where the facilities are second-to-none. People here are extremely innovative and passionate. And the sheer number of people who excel in their fields is staggering.” Great ideas can sometimes be sparked by off-the-cuff conversations in the hallway — something that happens more frequently than you expect, Peterson remarks. “All of these things taken together makes MIT a very special place.” More

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      Study: Fusion energy could play a major role in the global response to climate change

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      For many decades, fusion has been touted as the ultimate source of abundant, clean electricity. Now, as the world faces the need to reduce carbon emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change, making commercial fusion power a reality takes on new importance. In a power system dominated by low-carbon variable renewable energy sources (VREs) such as solar and wind, “firm” electricity sources are needed to kick in whenever demand exceeds supply — for example, when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing and energy storage systems aren’t up to the task. What is the potential role and value of fusion power plants (FPPs) in such a future electric power system — a system that is not only free of carbon emissions but also capable of meeting the dramatically increased global electricity demand expected in the coming decades?Working together for a year-and-a-half, investigators in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) have been collaborating to answer that question. They found that — depending on its future cost and performance — fusion has the potential to be critically important to decarbonization. Under some conditions, the availability of FPPs could reduce the global cost of decarbonizing by trillions of dollars. More than 25 experts together examined the factors that will impact the deployment of FPPs, including costs, climate policy, operating characteristics, and other factors. They present their findings in a new report funded through MITEI and entitled “The Role of Fusion Energy in a Decarbonized Electricity System.”“Right now, there is great interest in fusion energy in many quarters — from the private sector to government to the general public,” says the study’s principal investigator (PI) Robert C. Armstrong, MITEI’s former director and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering, Emeritus. “In undertaking this study, our goal was to provide a balanced, fact-based, analysis-driven guide to help us all understand the prospects for fusion going forward.” Accordingly, the study takes a multidisciplinary approach that combines economic modeling, electric grid modeling, techno-economic analysis, and more to examine important factors that are likely to shape the future deployment and utilization of fusion energy. The investigators from MITEI provided the energy systems modeling capability, while the PSFC participants provided the fusion expertise.Fusion technologies may be a decade away from commercial deployment, so the detailed technology and costs of future commercial FPPs are not known at this point. As a result, the MIT research team focused on determining what cost levels fusion plants must reach by 2050 to achieve strong market penetration and make a significant contribution to the decarbonization of global electricity supply in the latter half of the century.The value of having FPPs available on an electric grid will depend on what other options are available, so to perform their analyses, the researchers needed estimates of the future cost and performance of those options, including conventional fossil fuel generators, nuclear fission power plants, VRE generators, and energy storage technologies, as well as electricity demand for specific regions of the world. To find the most reliable data, they searched the published literature as well as results of previous MITEI and PSFC analyses.Overall, the analyses showed that — while the technology demands of harnessing fusion energy are formidable — so are the potential economic and environmental payoffs of adding this firm, low-carbon technology to the world’s portfolio of energy options.Perhaps the most remarkable finding is the “societal value” of having commercial FPPs available. “Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C requires that the world invest in wind, solar, storage, grid infrastructure, and everything else needed to decarbonize the electric power system,” explains Randall Field, executive director of the fusion study and MITEI’s director of research. “The cost of that task can be far lower when FPPs are available as a source of clean, firm electricity.” And the benefit varies depending on the cost of the FPPs. For example, assuming that the cost of building a FPP is $8,000 per kilowatt (kW) in 2050 and falls to $4,300/kW in 2100, the global cost of decarbonizing electric power drops by $3.6 trillion. If the cost of a FPP is $5,600/kW in 2050 and falls to $3,000/kW in 2100, the savings from having the fusion plants available would be $8.7 trillion. (Those calculations are based on differences in global gross domestic product and assume a discount rate of 6 percent. The undiscounted value is about 20 times larger.)The goal of other analyses was to determine the scale of deployment worldwide at selected FPP costs. Again, the results are striking. For a deep decarbonization scenario, the total global share of electricity generation from fusion in 2100 ranges from less than 10 percent if the cost of fusion is high to more than 50 percent if the cost of fusion is low.Other analyses showed that the scale and timing of fusion deployment vary in different parts of the world. Early deployment of fusion can be expected in wealthy nations such as European countries and the United States that have the most aggressive decarbonization policies. But certain other locations — for example, India and the continent of Africa — will have great growth in fusion deployment in the second half of the century due to a large increase in demand for electricity during that time. “In the U.S. and Europe, the amount of demand growth will be low, so it’ll be a matter of switching away from dirty fuels to fusion,” explains Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a senior research scientist at MITEI. “But in India and Africa, for example, the tremendous growth in overall electricity demand will be met with significant amounts of fusion along with other low-carbon generation resources in the later part of the century.”A set of analyses focusing on nine subregions of the United States showed that the availability and cost of other low-carbon technologies, as well as how tightly carbon emissions are constrained, have a major impact on how FPPs would be deployed and used. In a decarbonized world, FPPs will have the highest penetration in locations with poor diversity, capacity, and quality of renewable resources, and limits on carbon emissions will have a big impact. For example, the Atlantic and Southeast subregions have low renewable resources. In those subregions, wind can produce only a small fraction of the electricity needed, even with maximum onshore wind buildout. Thus, fusion is needed in those subregions, even when carbon constraints are relatively lenient, and any available FPPs would be running much of the time. In contrast, the Central subregion of the United States has excellent renewable resources, especially wind. Thus, fusion competes in the Central subregion only when limits on carbon emissions are very strict, and FPPs will typically be operated only when the renewables can’t meet demand.An analysis of the power system that serves the New England states provided remarkably detailed results. Using a modeling tool developed at MITEI, the fusion team explored the impact of using different assumptions about not just cost and emissions limits but even such details as potential land-use constraints affecting the use of specific VREs. This approach enabled them to calculate the FPP cost at which fusion units begin to be installed. They were also able to investigate how that “threshold” cost changed with changes in the cap on carbon emissions. The method can even show at what price FPPs begin to replace other specific generating sources. In one set of runs, they determined the cost at which FPPs would begin to displace floating platform offshore wind and rooftop solar.“This study is an important contribution to fusion commercialization because it provides economic targets for the use of fusion in the electricity markets,” notes Dennis G. Whyte, co-PI of the fusion study, former director of the PSFC, and the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “It better quantifies the technical design challenges for fusion developers with respect to pricing, availability, and flexibility to meet changing demand in the future.”The researchers stress that while fission power plants are included in the analyses, they did not perform a “head-to-head” comparison between fission and fusion, because there are too many unknowns. Fusion and nuclear fission are both firm, low-carbon electricity-generating technologies; but unlike fission, fusion doesn’t use fissile materials as fuels, and it doesn’t generate long-lived nuclear fuel waste that must be managed. As a result, the regulatory requirements for FPPs will be very different from the regulations for today’s fission power plants — but precisely how they will differ is unclear. Likewise, the future public perception and social acceptance of each of these technologies cannot be projected, but could have a major influence on what generation technologies are used to meet future demand.The results of the study convey several messages about the future of fusion. For example, it’s clear that regulation can be a potentially large cost driver. This should motivate fusion companies to minimize their regulatory and environmental footprint with respect to fuels and activated materials. It should also encourage governments to adopt appropriate and effective regulatory policies to maximize their ability to use fusion energy in achieving their decarbonization goals. And for companies developing fusion technologies, the study’s message is clearly stated in the report: “If the cost and performance targets identified in this report can be achieved, our analysis shows that fusion energy can play a major role in meeting future electricity needs and achieving global net-zero carbon goals.” More