The commercial availability of high temperature superconductors (HTS) in the 2010s opened a promising pathway to building the higher field magnets required to achieve ITER-like levels of energy gain in a compact device. To leverage this new technology, the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) successfully built and tested the Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) in 2021 to demonstrate the necessary 20 Tesla magnetic field needed to build SPARC, a device designed to achieve a similar fusion gain as ITER but with only ~1/40th ITER's plasma volume.
The commercial availability of high temperature superconductors (HTS) in the 2010s opened a promising pathway to building the higher field magnets required to achieve ITER-like levels of energy gain in a compact device To leverage this new technology, the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) successfully built and tested the Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) in 2021 to demonstrate the necessary 20 Tesla magnetic field needed to build SPARC, a device designed to achieve a similar fusion gain as ITER but with only ~1/40th ITER's plasma volume.