Commercial Power from Fusion
High Temperature Superconducting Magnets and Compact Tokamak Power Plants
Alex Creely
Director of Tokamak Operations
Chief Engineer for ARC Conceptual Design
Commonwealth Fusion Systems
About the Lecture
Fusion energy has the potential to provide large quantities of firm, clean, carbon-free energy in the near term and to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (“CFS”) is building on decades of fusion research from around the world, focusing on a type of fusion plant called a tokamak. Having demonstrated a new type of high field superconducting magnet in 2021, CFS is now building a high-field tokamak called SPARC, aiming to achieve net fusion energy production in 2027 in a compact, economical facility. In parallel, CFS is also in the early stages of designing a 400 MW electric fusion power plant called ARC, with a site recently announced outside of Richmond, Virginia. This talk will describe the Commonwealth Fusion Systems path to a fusion power plant, where the SPARC and ARC tokamaks sit on this path, and the broader fusion energy ecosystem.
Selected Reading & Media References
https://cfs.energy/technology/publications
About the Speaker
Alex Creely is the Chief Engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (“CFS”) for the ARC conceptual design project, leading technical aspects of the design of the world’s first fusion power plant. He also leads the Tokamak Operations groups within the SPARC project, preparing the tools and team for operation of SPARC, and optimizing the path to net energy production. Alex joined CFS in 2019 with the goal of putting fusion energy on the grid quickly enough to make a difference to climate change. He was the lead author on the physics basis for the SPARC tokamak and has played a key role in building several functions within the company.
Alex’s PhD work at MIT focused on building and operating specialized instrumentation on tokamaks at both MIT and at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany. This instrumentation measured small fluctuations in plasma temperature to determine how turbulence in fusion plasmas transported heat out of the tokamak. These measurements informed large simulation tools that have aided the design of both SPARC and ARC. In addition to his thesis work, Creely also led parts of early ARC design as part of a graduate student class at MIT, and he spent time working on a stellarator at the National Institute for Fusion Science in Japan.
Creely earned a Bachelor of Science and Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at Princeton University and a PhD in Applied Plasma Physics at MIT.
CV: https://alexcreely.com/
Webpage: https://alexcreely.com
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-creely