Commonwealth Fusion expects to start commercialization in 2025. They say it will put power onto the grid.
But this does not say that they are going to put power on the grid in 2025. They say net energy from fusion by 2025 which may just mean Q-plasma > 1, it does not say (which kind of proves the point of the article). They don't have any estimates of an on the grid fusion plant.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/cfs-commercial-fusion-powe...
[0]https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc/faq [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf
And so far, the company, CFS, has been achieving their milestones for the performance of their magnets. The HTS magnets and coils is the main ingredient that the startup is optimizing for. Sometime in the last year, they implied that their Qplasma was much better than they minimally hoped for. I think they achieved Qplasma > 10, but Dennis was keeping the details proprietary.
From all the talks I remember, they are targeting power on the grid with the ARC reactor by 2035.
Edit:
This is the best recent video I've seen, about SPARC and ARC. Jumped to 2:25 for Dennis Whyte.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw
It's targeted to MechE students and gives a lot of details about other aspects of a potential ARC reactor design, e.g. how to get the heat out.
In short, from my basic understanding, there are quite a few additional major challenges involved with fusion power generation. e.g. After creating net-positive fusion, the heat must be efficiently extracted without stopping the reaction. Also tritium must be continually extracted from the FLiBe (fluorine-lithium-beryllium) bath that stops and collects neutrons and extracts the heat.
Since I'm a total novice in all this, I don't know if these require incremental innovations or major advances. But from the video, the problems mentioned seem to be more tractable than achieving fusion ignition or Q>10.
Abdou's team (the fusion engineering guy at UCLA) rejected molten salt blankets for this reason, among others, after trying really hard to get them to work in studies.
One big problem with fusion is the low power density. I harp on that a lot, but it's been known to be a very serious problem for decades. ARC's power density is 40x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel. It's difficult to see how fusion can beat fission given this. I suspect the optimistic numbers for fusion come from using a way too cheery cost estimation methodology, something that would predict fission is far cheaper than it actually turned out to be.
I was always somewhat concerned about the abundance of critical raw materials for ARC or other fusion projects. I had assumed that the rare-earth elements in the REBCO tape, e.g. yttrium, would be constrained. I didn't suspect that beryllium could be a limiting resource. But I wonder if the lack of supply is related to true scarcity or just to a lack of a profitable market currently.
These are all questions I'd want to ask domain experts in mining and fusion.
But I agree that fission would be a better solution for baseload, at least for the next 10-20 years. If only newer modular designs were actually approved...
I have a suspicion that this is being funded at all because the magnet technology would be useful in non-fusion contexts (hybrid electric aircraft, superconducting generators in wind turbines.)
In contrast, IIRC a single ARC reactor of that design would have 90 tonnes of beryllium (although that could be reduced by half if the secondary loop used a different molten salt.)
ITER is (among other things) supposed to be a physics test, but won't come until 2035. So SPARC's goal is to 'leapfrog' that by 10 years.
You're right that there's a lot of work to be done between Q_plasma = 10 and generating energy. A lot of this work on the materials side, to engineer materials that can last for years in a fusion reactor environment.
Edit: There has been Edison, and there has been Musk. If you're not either of them, and you claim other people are doing their engineering wrong ... consider that you might be mistaken.
Make a big song and dance about it, you look like a charlatan.
The game changer here is not very new reactor designs, but cheap high performance high-temperature superconductors that enable very high field and therefore much smaller size.
Other fusion work, like ICF or the LLNL laser fusion or Lockheed or General Fusion all seem to be built on designs that are far less understood and less Q performance so far.