Fusion Plant Catalog¶
Nine plant geometries that humans are using to bring the energy of stars to Earth. Each plant has its own physics, its own engineering bet, and its own path to commercial deployment. The Fusion room of Franklin walks the operator through all nine with the same Plain / CALORIE / CURE depth that the Quantum Algorithm Catalog uses for the 19 quantum algorithms.
Every claim on this page is warranted by a substrate row. Atom IDs are listed alongside each entry; the same content renders into the chat narration in the operator's locale via FranklinMeaningRenderer. The same content is the body of the corresponding franklin_ontology_facts row that the chat oracle reads when the operator asks "what is ITER" or "what is NIF".
The 9 plant geometries in plain terms¶
Tokamak — ITER, Cadarache, France¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_tokamak_teaching · FOF-130
What it does: Confines plasma in a torus (donut) using massive magnetic fields. ITER is 35 nations, 30 years, 8 Tesla, 15 megaamperes — the world's largest fusion experiment, expected first plasma 2025.
CALORIE: Demonstrates Q>10 (fusion produces 10x the energy injected). The reference design every commercial fusion plant inherits from.
CURE: Heals the energy-source deficit. If ITER proves the physics, the 30 fusion startups that copy its approach scale to commercial power by mid-2030s instead of mid-2050s. Fossil-fuel dependence for electricity ends in one generation instead of three.
Stellarator — Wendelstein 7-X, Greifswald, Germany¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_stellarator_teaching · FOF-131
What it does: Twisted helical superconducting coils confine the plasma without driving a current through it. Steady-state by geometry rather than by current — no disruption events.
CALORIE: Continuous burn over hours and days instead of seconds, which a current-driven tokamak cannot match. The opposite-engineering-bet to ITER and just as important to prove.
CURE: Heals the disruption-instability deficit. Tokamaks halt when plasma current collapses; stellarators keep running. Steady-state fusion changes the grid-integration math from "fusion as peaker" to "fusion as baseload."
Spherical Tokamak — SPARC (Commonwealth Fusion), MAST-U (Culham), NSTX-U (Princeton)¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_spherical_teaching · FOF-132
What it does: Compact aspect ratio — the plasma is almost a sphere, not a donut. Lower magnetic field at the plasma core, but the geometry stays hot longer.
CALORIE: SPARC uses high-temperature superconductor magnets that didn't exist when ITER was designed. Burning plasma in a machine the size of a tennis court instead of a soccer stadium.
CURE: Heals the cost-and-time deficit. Compact aspect-ratio + HTS magnets means smaller, cheaper fusion plants on a faster build schedule. The path Commonwealth Fusion bets ARC commercial plants on by 2035.
FRC — Field-Reversed Configuration · Helion Energy, TAE Technologies¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_frc_teaching · FOF-133
What it does: The plasmoid generates its own confining magnetic field. Simpler geometry than tokamak — closer to a smoke ring than a donut.
CALORIE: Compact, modular, potentially mass-producible. Helion's bet: build 100 small fusion plants in the time it takes one ITER to be built.
CURE: Heals the gigaproject deficit. If FRC works at scale, fusion deploys like wind turbines instead of like aircraft carriers. Distributed clean baseload power.
RFP — Reversed Field Pinch · RFX-Mod (Padua), Madison Symmetric Torus¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_rfp_teaching · FOF-134
What it does: Toroidal field reverses sign at the plasma edge. Self-organized confinement at lower magnetic field cost than tokamak.
CALORIE: Lower magnet costs at comparable confinement. A different point in the design-space humanity is exploring.
CURE: Heals the magnet-cost deficit. If RFP physics scales, fusion plants need less superconductor, which means less rare materials and lower capital cost per plant.
Magnetic Mirror — GDT (Budker Institute), SPHEX, modern Realta Fusion¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_mirror_teaching · FOF-135
What it does: Open geometry — charged particles bounce between two field maxima at each end. Simple to build, hard to confine — the "loss cone" is the persistent challenge.
CALORIE: Simpler than torus designs. New high-field HTS magnets are reviving mirror configurations after 30 years of dormancy.
CURE: Heals the design-monoculture deficit. Mirrors prove fusion isn't restricted to tokamaks. Different physics, different failure modes, different paths if the dominant approach falters.
MTF — Magnetized Target Fusion · General Fusion, Vancouver¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_mtf_teaching · FOF-136
What it does: Pre-magnetized plasma compressed by an imploding liner of liquid metal (typically liquid lead-lithium). Hybrid between magnetic and inertial confinement.
CALORIE: The liquid metal blanket doubles as a tritium-breeder and heat-transfer medium. Solves three engineering problems at once that tokamaks solve separately.
CURE: Heals the materials-survival deficit. Solid first-walls erode under neutron flux; liquid metal walls regenerate themselves. A fusion plant that can run for decades instead of years before requiring rebuild.
Z-Pinch — Zap Energy, Sandia's Z Machine¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_zpinch_teaching · FOF-137
What it does: Axial current compresses the plasma column via its own magnetic field. Microsecond-scale events; pinch sustained by sheared-flow stabilization.
CALORIE: The simplest fusion geometry. No external magnets at all — the plasma current does all the work.
CURE: Heals the capital-intensity deficit. If sheared-flow Z-pinch holds, fusion plants without superconducting magnets become possible. Manufacturing economics change completely.
ICF — Inertial Confinement Fusion · NIF, Livermore¶
Substrate atom: narration_fusion_icf_teaching · FOF-138
Ignition reached December 5, 2022.
What it does: 192 laser beams converge on a 2-millimeter deuterium-tritium fuel pellet. Implosion is faster than the plasma can escape — fusion happens in nanoseconds.
CALORIE: First controlled fusion event in human history with net energy gain from the fuel (3.15 MJ out, 2.05 MJ delivered to target). Proof that fusion ignition is real.
CURE: Heals the "fusion is always 30 years away" narrative. ICF physics is now settled science. The remaining work is engineering the laser drivers and target factory to run at 10 Hz instead of once a day. Commercial ICF (Focused Energy, Xcimer) builds on this foundation.
Substrate references¶
| Layer | Where the truth lives |
|---|---|
| Per-plant semantic predicate | meaning_atoms.atom_id for each narration_fusion_*_teaching |
| Per-plant en-US rendering | meaning_renderings.rendered_text keyed by (atom_id, locale='en-US') |
| Per-plant operator-facing ontology fact | franklin_ontology_facts.body for FOF-130..138 |
| Render audit (every speak event) | meaning_render_audit |
| Migration that seeded the teaching enrichment | cells/xcode/Sources/GaiaFTCLCore/NarratorSchemaV37.swift |
When the chat oracle answers "what is ITER", it reads FOF-130. When the Fusion room narration cycle reaches the Tokamak beat, FranklinMeaningRenderer resolves narration_fusion_tokamak_teaching to the operator's locale via meaning_renderings. The same content; one substrate truth; multiple operator-facing projections.
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