Google Buys 200 Megawatts of Fusion Energy That Doesn't Even Exist Yet (cnn.com)
- Reference: 0178238364
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/30/2143225/google-buys-200-megawatts-of-fusion-energy-that-doesnt-even-exist-yet
- Source link: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/30/climate/fusion-energy-google-commonwealth-agreement
> Google and Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced a deal Monday in which the tech company bought 200 megawatts of power from Commonwealth's first commercial fusion plant, the same amount of energy that could power roughly 200,000 average American homes. Commonwealth aims to build the plant in Virginia by the early 2030s. When it starts generating usable fusion energy is still TBD, though the company believes they can do it in the same timeframe.
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> Google is also investing a second round of money into Commonwealth to spur development of its demonstration tokamak -- a donut-shaped machine that uses massive magnets and molten plasma to force two atoms to merge, thereby creating the energy of the sun. Google and Commonwealth did not disclose how much money is being invested, but both touted the announcement as a major step toward fusion commercialization. "We're using this purchasing power that we have to send a demand signal to the market for fusion energy and hopefully move (the) technology forward," said Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google.
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> Commonwealth is currently building its demonstration plant in Massachusetts, known as SPARC. It's the tokamak the company says could forever change where the world gets its power from, generating 10 million times more energy than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from a form of hydrogen found in seawater and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no radioactive waste involved. The big challenge is that no one has yet built a machine powerful and precise enough to get more energy out of the reaction than they put into it.
[1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-latest-bet-on-a-fusion-powered-future/
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/30/climate/fusion-energy-google-commonwealth-agreement
The Incredible Google PR Clown Car (Score:2)
I watched the parade of talent leave Netscape and march over to Google back-in-the-day - it included a good majority of pr and marketing staff, I said to myself, "Self, they are going to be some kind of good a PR in the future". And here we are...
Google has been courting nuclear for years. (Score:2)
Robert Bussard must be [1]spinning in his grave. [youtu.be] It's a shame nothing ever really came of the Polywell.
[1] https://youtu.be/FhL5VO2NStU
A Fool & His Money (Score:2)
Whoever at Alphabet signed off on this is a fool. It's an entire culture of spendthrift on longshots caused by the founders of all those companies having hit the jackpot once and them and all their investors blowing their money chasing another one. The whole industry is going to collapse in like 5 years. It's going to make the dot-com bust look like a minor market correction.
no jewel (Score:1)
Power and energy are not the same creature. Watts do not toast bread. The article meant KW-hours ... certainly.
Literal vaporware (Score:2)
ONE day, it will work, and you're going to love it!
I like that we are going to burn our entire world (Score:2)
Down to the last cinder so that we can put a shitload of white collar workers out of work and drive up shareholder value just a little bit more.
I'm kidding I'm kidding. It's a lot more shareholder value.
Remember kids, it's a big club and you ain't in it.
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire wo (Score:2)
Offtopic and incorrect. This is supposed to save us because it *doesn't* burn anything and using future value of energy and assets is used in PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) routinely.
But expecting fusion to be in production in 7 years is still risky.
Are they really confident this is just an engineering problem now?
Re: (Score:3)
Google is an investor in Commonwealth Fusion. I expect this deal isn't about Google actually getting 500 MW in 2032, but a method to a) give CF more money and b) to demonstrate confidence in them. Probably there are some tax advantages over just giving them more money.
Re: I like that we are going to burn our entire w (Score:2)
Well, we've been hearing about it 10 years away forever, but at some point, we probably will get there... it's a holy grail, more or less unlimited energy. Someone is gonna chase it.
Re: (Score:2)
Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere. So even if you have miraculous electricity you're still going to be belching heat into the atmosphere.
But fusion is getting the headlines while these big tech companies are building out nuclear power plants.
The resources that are going to go into building those plants are going to be diverted from other projects. They don't have to be but they will be because there is very very very little money for anything besides corporate profits.
The economy doesn't
Re: (Score:3)
I know this is a joke, but waste heat is not what is causing global warming. We would have to raise the amount of energy we are using by some orders of magnitude for waste heat to make a measurable fraction of global warming.
IMHO I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a interesting and legitimate sci-fi scenario but the real problem isn't going to be waste heat it's going to be diverting huge amounts of limited resources, ie construction and money and time, to building out nuclear power plants for the sole purpose of AI to replace white collar workers.
So instead of machines serving all of us they are going to survey very very very very tiny group of people. Techno feudalism.