MIT 22.63, Principles of Fusion Engineering is the graduate nuclear science and engineering course, taught by 📝Dennis Whyte, in which the 📝ARC power plant was designed as a class project.
Whyte replaced conventional lectures with collective design work: student teams take separate subsystems of a single machine and coordinate across groups, on the principle that, as he put it, "there is no lone genius who solves all the problems." The format produces publishable engineering rather than coursework. An earlier iteration designed Vulcan, a 📝tokamak concept that yielded five peer-reviewed articles in Fusion Engineering and Design.
The following design cycle produced ARC — a compact, high-field 📝fusion nuclear science facility and demonstration power plant with demountable magnets. Graduate student 📝Brandon Sorbom was lead author of the 2015 paper that introduced the design to the field, with Whyte as senior author. The course is the common origin of the group that later became 📝Commonwealth Fusion Systems: several of its students, including 📝Bob Mumgaard and 📝Zachary Hartwig, now hold leadership roles at the company or at MIT, and the machine now under construction at Devens carries the name of a class deliverable.
Our first power plant was a homework assignment. ARC began in Dennis Whyte's design class, and the company exists because a room of graduate students was asked to build a real machine instead of answering problem sets.