By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, June 4 (Reuters) - Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the world's top-funded private firm among those seeking to generate power by replicating the nuclear reaction that takes place in stars, said that peer-reviewed papers published on Thursday validate the science behind its efforts.

• CFS hopes to build its first 400-megawatt fusion power plant, called ARC, in Virginia in 2027 and start generating power in the early 2030s.

• Fusion, which is still experimental, generates energy by jamming light atoms together under extremely high temperatures.

• The five peer-reviewed papers, published in the Journal of Plasma Physics, were co-authored by 58 scientists, the majority from universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

• "This means that the science foundation of the plant is solid and there's global agreement about this," Brandon Sorbom, the co-founder and chief science officer of CFS, told reporters about the papers. "The papers provide confidence that ARC will be able to continuously deliver 400 megawatts of clean firm base load net energy electricity to the grid."

• Commonwealth, based in Massachusetts, has raised about $3 billion, more ​than any other firm looking to build fusion plants, with investments from Bill Gates and Nvidia NVDA.O and others.

• Nobody knows if fusion will ultimately succeed and engineering hurdles include building plants that can withstand constant neutron bombardment and learning how to operate a dependable fusion power plant.

• Simulations aided by artificial intelligence help scientists mirror behavior of particles in plasma, the superheated ionized gas that conducts electricity where fusion reactions take place.

• Fusion, if successful, would have benefits over today's fission nuclear reactors as it would not generate long-lived nuclear waste and there's no risk of a reactor meltdown.