Inside a concrete-and-steel facility in Devens, Massachusetts, a crane lowered a 20-ton high-temperature superconducting magnet into the steel shell of the SPARC tokamak this spring, marking the first physical installation in what will eventually be a ring of 18 such magnets. For Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), the company building SPARC, the moment converted years of laboratory testing into reactor-scale hardware. The company says it is targeting first plasma by 2027, which would make SPARC the fastest privately funded fusion device to reach that stage and potentially the first magnetic-confinement machine built outside a government lab to produce more fusion power than it consumes. SPARC’s entire design hinges on a single bet: that high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets can generate magnetic fields strong enough to confine a burning plasma in a machine far smaller than conventional tokamaks. In September 2021, CFS and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center proved the concept by demonstrating a large-bore magnet that reached 20 tesla, roughly double the field strength of the niobium-tin magnets used in ITER, the $22-billion-plus international fusion project under construction in southern France. MIT reported the result as a major advance, and the achievement was subsequently described in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Plasma Physics that laid out SPARC’s physics basis and projected performance.

Full report : Commonwealth Fusion Systems looks to start world’s first plasma energy reactor in 2027

For more see the OODA Company Profile on Commonwealth Fusion Systems.