Nicholas F. Benton is owner and Editor-In-Chief of the Falls Church News-Press.
With the key role of Falls Church's own U.S. Rep. Don Beyer in the lead of the overall effort as the founder and co-chair of the Congressional Fusion Caucus in 2021, Dominion Virginia Power has subsequently taken a notable, if carefully scoped, step toward nuclear fusion energy by entering into a collaboration with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), the Massachusetts-based MIT spinout developing fusion reactors, the News-Press has learned.
Announced on December 17, 2024, the agreement is a non-financial partnership in which Dominion provides development and technical expertise and grants CFS leasing rights to a Dominion-owned site in Chesterfield County, Virginia, where CFS plans to build its first commercial fusion power plant, called ARC. CFS, for its part, will independently finance, build, own, and operate the facility.
The Chesterfield project is the centerpiece of CFS's strategy to move fusion from lab breakthrough to grid resource in the early 2030s.
The planned ARC plant is designed for roughly 400 megawatts of carbon-free electricity -- enough to power around 150,000 homes -- using high-temperature superconducting magnets to confine a deuterium-tritium plasma inside a compact tokamak.
If built and operated as envisioned, ARC would be the world's first grid-scale commercial fusion plant, sited at the James River Industrial Center with an existing grid interconnection advantage. For Dominion, hosting and co-developing at a familiar site reduces siting risk and positions the utility to gain hands-on experience with fusion plant development without committing ratepayer dollars to an unproven asset.
CFS's path to ARC runs through SPARC, a smaller Tokamac device under construction at the company's campus in Devens, Massachusetts. SPARC is intended to demonstrate net fusion energy in the next couple of years -- an essential milestone before any utility would contemplate routine grid operations.
Assembly of the SPARC kicked off with the installation of its cryostat base in April 2025. It is expected to yield first plasma, meaning the milestone moment when a new fusion device is turned on for the very first time and successfully creates a plasma -- a superheated, electrically charged gas in which fusion reactions can potentially occur -- next year, with net energy, meaning more fusion output than input, targeted for 2027.
The company and its backers have repeatedly emphasized a target of first electricity from ARC in the "early 2030s," contingent on SPARC's performance and subsequent engineering scale-up.
This sequencing helps explain Dominion's measured, non-financial role: it secures a front-row seat and real-world project learning while leaving the technology and performance risk squarely with CFS and its investors.
A further boost came on June 30, 2025, when Google announced a strategic partnership with CFS that includes a 200-megawatt power purchase agreement from the Chesterfield ARC plant. While not a Dominion contract, the Google deal is significant for the Virginia project's bankability: it signals demand for ARC's output and could accelerate financing and supply-chain mobilization.
Google has signed an offtake agreement to purchase 200 megawatts of carbon-free electricity from CFS's first commercial fusion power plant. Google's agreement amounts to half of the plant's projected output. Google, which has been an investor in CFS since 2021, is increasing its financial stake in the company as part of the new agreement. As part of the strategic partnership, Google also holds the option to purchase power from future ARC plants, indicating a long-term energy procurement vision.
Thus, the agreement reinforces that fusion's earliest commercial buyers may be large, power-hungry data center operators seeking around-the-clock clean electricity. For Dominion's service territory -- which already hosts dense data-center load growth -- the prospect of local, dispatchable, carbon-free generation is strategically aligned with planning needs.
If SPARC proves out and ARC delivers power on the projected timeline, Dominion stands to benefit from early operational knowledge, a strengthened grid resource in a high-growth corridor, and proximity to a pioneering clean-energy asset in its backyard.
For the broader industry, the Dominion-CFS arrangement offers a pragmatic template: utilities de-risk their exposure while enabling innovators to move first-of-a-kind fusion from promise to practice.
The potential of achieving practical nuclear fusion energy is often described as transformative -- on par with the harnessing of electricity itself. Fusion, the process that powers the sun, fuses light atomic nuclei such as deuterium and tritium to release massive amounts of energy.
Unlike current fission reactors, which split heavy nuclei, fusion produces no long-lived radioactive waste, carries no risk of runaway meltdown, and uses abundant fuel sources, including isotopes of hydrogen available from seawater and lithium.
If humanity succeeds in bringing fusion onto the grid at scale, the implications for energy security and climate change are profound.
Fusion could provide a nearly limitless source of carbon-free electricity, operating around the clock without reliance on weather conditions or long-term fuel constraints. In contrast to solar and wind, which are variable and require extensive storage or backup, fusion would offer stable baseload power while complementing renewables. This reliability is particularly attractive as societies electrify transportation, heating, and heavy industry.
The environmental benefits extend beyond carbon reduction. Fusion reactions produce helium as the primary byproduct -- a benign, non-toxic gas. Tritium handling and neutron flux management remain engineering challenges, but the overall safety profile is dramatically better than fission. Large-scale adoption could drastically reduce the ecological footprint of energy production, displacing fossil fuels that pollute air, destabilize climate systems, and drive geopolitical conflicts over scarce resources.
Economically, commercial fusion could reshape global energy markets. Countries without fossil fuel reserves would no longer be dependent on imports, democratizing access to energy and reducing vulnerability to price shocks.
For developing nations, fusion could accelerate growth by providing abundant, clean, and affordable electricity without the trade-offs that have historically accompanied industrialization. On the geopolitical stage, widespread fusion deployment might ease tensions rooted in resource competition, although it could also create new dynamics around intellectual property, technology sharing, and early-market advantages.
That said, fusion is not a guaranteed panacea. The engineering challenges of maintaining a stable plasma, building materials that withstand extreme neutron bombardment, and reducing costs to commercially viable levels are immense. Achieving net-positive energy in experiments is only the first step; scaling to grid-ready plants requires parallel advances in regulation, supply chains, and financing.
Still, the pursuit of fusion represents a unique convergence of science, technology, and human aspiration. Should it succeed, fusion could underpin a sustainable, high-energy civilization for centuries -- an achievement that would mark one of humanity's greatest technological triumphs.
Rep. Beyer is the founder and a co-chair of the Congressional Fusion Energy Caucus, which he established in 2021 to educate lawmakers about fusion science, dispel misconceptions, and advocate for increased funding through public-private partnerships.
Under his leadership, the caucus has grown significantly -- boasting over 100 House members. Beyer has been instrumental in pushing forward key fusion-related legislation, including the Fusion Energy Act, and bringing fusion to the forefront of Congress's clean-energy agenda.
The Fusion Caucus is a bipartisan group of lawmakers dedicated to advancing nuclear fusion research, development, and commercialization as a cornerstone of America's clean energy future. The caucus brings together members of Congress from both parties who recognize the transformative potential of fusion to provide virtually limitless, carbon-free power and to strengthen U.S. leadership in cutting-edge science and technology.
The caucus serves several key roles. It educates members of Congress about progress in fusion research, from federal programs such as the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences to private-sector initiatives backed by venture capital. It advocates for robust and consistent federal funding for fusion projects, including the ITER international collaboration, national laboratory experiments, and new public-private partnerships. It also supports policy frameworks to accelerate the translation of laboratory breakthroughs into commercial demonstration plants by the 2030s.
Importantly, the caucus positions fusion within the broader context of U.S. competitiveness and climate strategy. With rivals such as China and the EU investing heavily in fusion, the caucus argues that maintaining U.S. leadership is both a national security imperative and an economic opportunity. Its work reflects growing consensus that fusion could be a game-changing energy source for future generations.