A rendering of the Commonwealth Fusion Systems proposal for Chesterfield County. (Courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems)

Virginia could soon make history as the home of the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant, state officials and private sector leaders announced Tuesday.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a fusion power company founded in 2018 in Cambridge, Mass., unveiled plans to build the groundbreaking facility on a 100-acre site at James River Industrial Park in Chesterfield County. The plant, expected to generate 400 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 150,000 homes — could be operational by the early 2030s.

“Commonwealth Fusion Systems plans on building the world’s first grid scale commercial fusion power plant in the world, full stop, and it’s going to be right here in the commonwealth of Virginia,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said at a presentation of the undertaking at Richmond’s Patrick Henry Building.

Unlike traditional nuclear power plants that rely on fission, fusion replicates the energy-producing process of the sun, offering a cleaner and more sustainable power source. The project, which would occupy about 25 acres of the site, signals Virginia’s growing role in shaping future energy solutions. 

The announcement comes as Virginia’s energy needs are surging, driven by the rapid growth of data centers that power big tech operations. These facilities consume enormous amounts of  electricity and water to process and cool computer systems.

A report from the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Audit Review Commission (JLARC) released last week found that energy demand from data centers could triple from about 10,000 megawatts today to about 30,000 megawatts by 2040 if infrastructure, like new transmission lines, were already available.

Virginia’s two largest utilities, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power Company, are already exploring small modular nuclear reactors to meet rising  energy demands, with Dominion also investing in offshore wind, solar and natural gas. 

Fusion power offers another path to clean energy, avoiding emissions that scientists link to  climate change and its increasingly intense and frequent storms. 

Fusion technology works by combining hydrogen isotopes — deuterium extracted from water and tritium from lithium — under extreme heat and pressure, using powerful magnets to fuse the elements. The process generates heat, which boils water to create steam that spins a turbine, producing electricity. The byproduct is helium.

“Our customers’ growing needs for reliable, carbon-free power benefits from as diverse a menu of power generation options as possible, and in that spirit, we are delighted to assist CFS in their efforts,” said Dominion Energy Virginia President Edward H. Baine, in a statement.

CFS selected the Chesterfield site after conducting a global search. The company will lease the land from Dominion Energy. 

To secure the project, Virginia offered $1 million from the Virginia Energy Clean Energy Innovation Bank, $1 million from Chesterfield County, and a sales and use tax exemption for the plant’s equipment. The company has also received U.S. Department of Energy funding. Youngkin said the project would bring “billions” in economic development and create “hundreds” of jobs.

CFS is currently building its SPARC demonstration plant in Massachusetts, a project that will pave the way for the ARC technology planned for Chesterfield. While the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved a major milestone in 2022 by demonstrating fusion using lasers, CFS employs a different approach. Their technology relies on a donut-shaped device called a tokamak to confine and fuse molecules.

“You won’t need a pipeline to bring the fuel in, or a smokestack for the exhaust,” said CFS co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bob Mumgaard.

Unlike fission, which splits heavy atoms like uranium to produce energy — and leaves behind radioactive waste — fusion creates energy by fusing light atoms, explained Alex Creely, CFS director of tokamak operations.

“One of the big advantages of fusion is that it doesn’t produce any long lived waste material, and there’s no risk of some kind of meltdown event,” Creely said. “It’s a very safe energy source — something that you can live right next to and feel very comfortable with.”

Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, said in a statement Tuesday that he will introduce legislation to define fusion energy in state code. The energy source would be allowed as “zero-carbon electricity” under the Virginia Clean Economy Act, a 2020 law aimed at  decarbonizing the state’s electric grid. 

“Since the VCEA’s passage, we have succeeded in driving energy innovation in the commonwealth, and today marks another important step in what has been a remarkably successful effort — a step that would not have been possible had Virginia declined or abandoned the opportunity and responsibility it took to lead in clean energy,” Sullivan said.

Youngkin emphasized that the project will be financed entirely by CFS, with no cost passed on to Dominion Energy ratepayers. The facility will operate as an independent l power producer, selling its electricity to specific customers through power purchase agreements or directly into the regional PJM Interconnection market.

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis that the growth in data centers in Virginia will very happily take the power that is generated at this plant,” Youngkin said.

Preston Bryant, senior vice president at McGuireWoods Consulting, which was involved in the site selection process, said Virginia was chosen in part because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined  months ago that fusion technology does not require a federal license like fission and can instead be approved at the state level.  

The project will still need several state permits, including a radioactive materials license from the Virginia Department of Health, and a certificate of convenience and public necessity from the State Corporation Commission. 

Kristen Cullen, vice president of global policy and public affairs at CFS, said additional approvals may include an air permit from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality for backup generators during emergencies and potentially a storm water discharge permit, depending on the site-design.

Bryant noted that it was “a coincidence” that the selected site was initially chosen by Dominion for a proposed natural gas plant before the utility relocated that project to the nearby, former coal-fired Chesterfield Power Station. 

The announcement followed discussions with  local environmental groups, which expressed some support for the project, but also raised questions about its impact.

“Considering rising energy demand in Virginia driven by data centers and that most folks in the environmental world are not in support of more gas infrastructure, SMRs or hydrogen energy, this seems like a promising solution, if and when it actually comes online,” said Melissa Thomas, senior organizer with Mothers out Front, a climate advocacy group. 

Thomas also raised questions about whether the plant’s backup power would rely on gas-powered systems or electric alternatives.

Editor’s note: This story was corrected to explain the upcoming legislation from Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, and how fusion is allowed under the Virginia Clean Economy Act.

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Once upon a time, the Republican Party was tearing itself apart. It was 1976, and Ronald Reagan was mounting a conservative challenge to the “accidental president,” Gerald Ford, for the GOP nomination. After a hard-fought primary and a convention fight, Reagan lost the nomination. But he won the Republican Party. And it was all sorted out at that year’s Republican National Convention.

In “The Contested Convention,” a short documentary directed by Stephanie Wang-Breal for FiveThirtyEight, we revisit the 1976 Republican primary, which set the GOP on a more conservative course for the next several decades.

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The mockery can be unrelenting.

It frightens Andre Watkins so badly that he asked to be moved from a general population pod to an isolation cell at Hampton Roads Regional Jail.

Some, he admits, comes from voices that only he hears. In the past, those voices led the homeless 34-year-old to hospital...

[Image: Screen-grab from what3words].

Using the bizarre three-word addressing system known as what3words, the now-destroyed curb in Hayward, CA, mentioned in the previous post, is located at a site called “chill.once.waddle.”

As you can tell, of course, what3words is not a descriptive language, and these phrases are not intended to mean anything: they are simply randomly-generated sets of words used to give any location on earth a physical address.

As Quartz explained the system back in 2015, it is, at heart, “a simple idea”:

…a combination of three words, in any language, could specify any three meter by three meter square in the world—more than enough to designate a hut in Siberia or a building doorway in Tokyo. Altogether, 40,000 words combined in triplets label 57 trillion squares. Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and, starting next month, Arabic… All together, this lingua franca requires only five megabytes of data, small enough to reside in any smartphone and work offline. Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another. The dictionaries have been refined to avoid homophones or offensive terms, with short terms being reserved for the most populated areas

The addresses are poetically absurd—shaky.audit.detail, salsa.gangs.square, dozed.lamps.wing.

I mention this, however, because I meant to post last month that “Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases.” Again, from Quartz:

Mongol Post is switching to the What3Words system because there are too few named streets in its territory. The mail network provides service over 1.5 million square km (580,000 square miles), an area that’s three times the size of Spain, though much of that area is uninhabited. Mongolia is among the world’s most sparsely populated countries, and about a quarter of its population is nomadic, according to the World Bank.

While, on one level, in an age of stacks and infinite addressability, this seems like a thrilling, almost science-fictional step forward for locating and mapping physical spaces, it also seems like an alarming example of national over-reliance on a proprietary address system, one that the state itself ultimately cannot control.

Imagine a nation-state losing influence over the physical coordinates of its own territory, or a population stuck living inside an outdated, even discontinued address network, and needing to start again, from scratch, renaming all its streets and buildings—not to mention all the lost local histories and significance of certain place names, from avenues to intersections, that need to be reclaimed.

Granted, in this particular case, the system is being adopted precisely because “there are too few named streets” in Mongolia, that does not change the fact that the country will soon be dependent upon the continued existence of what3words for its packages to be delivered, its services to run, and its spatial infrastructures to function. It will be interesting to see how the transition to the use of these peculiar place tags goes—but, even more so, how this decision looks in five or ten years’ time.

The shift from paper will make government more efficient and environmentally friendly, Democratic governor says.