B.C.-based General Fusion is one of more than thirty players in a global race to make nuclear fusion an economically viable source of carbon-free electricity.KRISTOPHER GRUNERT/General Fusion
General Fusion, the B.C.-based firm that aims to advance fusion energy at commercial scale, is delaying plans to build a demonstration plant in Britain in order to focus on a smaller machine at its home base in Canada, the company said Wednesday.
The point of the device will not be to harness fusion for energy production, but to boost investor interest by showing, in a more streamlined way, that the company’s approach can achieve the extreme temperatures required for fusion reactions to occur.
“We are a building a new machine in Vancouver that reflects current market conditions and also where we’re at as a company from a technology development perspective,” General Fusion’s chief executive, Greg Twinney, told The Globe and Mail.
The scaled-down machine, he said, “will allow us to demonstrate technical results in a shorter time frame at a fraction of the cost of what we previously planned.”
On Wednesday the company also announced it has secured $33.5-million to finance the effort, including a $5-million grant from the B.C. government and support from private investors.
Unlike many technology companies – particularly those in early stages of proving they can work scientifically – the financing valued the company at more than its previous, US$130-million funding in November, 2021, Mr. Twinney said in an interview.
He declined to comment further on the company’s valuation or the amount he expects the company will need to spend to get its new project up and running.
But a source familiar with the matter said the new preferred share financing values General Fusion at upward of US$500-million not including the funds received, up from the previous investment round, which valued the company at just over US$400-million, including the funds raised. The source also said the project is expected to cost less than C$250-million to get up and running, far less than the British project would have cost. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source as they are not authorized to discuss the matter.
The machine in Vancouver will be built at 50 per cent of commercial scale, the company said, with the goal of rapidly compressing and heating gaseous plasma to a temperature of about 100 million degrees by 2025. Its further objective would then be to achieve “scientific breakeven” conditions – the point at which an appropriate fuel would produce as much energy through fusion reactions as it receives – a year later, in 2026.
But the new machine will not contain that fuel – a mixture of tritium and deuterium. Rather, it will be used with deuterium only to show that the hardware can reliably create the necessary conditions for fusion to take place.
In the meantime, Mr. Twinney said, the company has paused development of a demonstration plant at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority’s fusion centre in Culham, west of London.
In 2021, General Fusion unveiled its plans for a demonstration plant at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority’s fusion centre. Construction on the project has not yet begun.
The company said the UKAEA would play a role in validating the performance of its new machine to be built in Canada as a prelude to the larger device.
Tim Bestwick, chief technology officer for the UKAEA, said in a statement that the authority “is pleased to continue to work with General Fusion on their technical programme, leading to the company’s planned commercial scale demonstration in the U.K.”
General Fusion's planned demonstration plant at UKAEA’s Culham Campus in the U.K. has been delayed in an effort to focus on the company's Canadian project.handout
The shift in strategy comes at a time of increasing activity in the commercial fusion sector, once a niche area where General Fusion was an early entrant.
The Canadian company is currently one of more than 30 players in a global race to make nuclear fusion an economically viable source of carbon-free electricity.
“It’s a good thing to see more people leaning in but it’s also important that the capital and the resources get funnelled into companies that have a real shot at making this happen on a time scale that is going to be relevant,” said Mr. Twinney, who stepped into the CEO role last year.“We see ourselves, obviously, as one of those players.”
General Fusion ranks fourth in terms of investment raised in the sector, according to the latest survey by the U.S.-based Fusion Industry Association. But the window for demonstrating that it has a workable approach to commercial fusion is narrowing.
“It’s important for firms to prove out their ‘proof of concept devices,’ which are the machines that will inform their electricity-generating power plants,” said Caroline Anderson, the association’s manager for outreach.
At stake is a big prize: If fusion can be practically harnessed, it offers significant advantages over uranium fission, the process used in conventional nuclear plants. Advocates for fusion also point out that it would offer continuous power with a far smaller footprint per kilowatt than wind or solar energy.
Enthusiasm for the technology has grown steeply since last December when the National Ignition Facility, a laser-powered experiment developed by the U.S. government near Livermore, Calif., triggered a fusion reaction in a small target pellet that exceeded the breakeven threshold for the first time.
But the crucial milestone was only reached for an instant and does not offer a direct path to commercial power. A separate international project, known as ITER, could set the stage for a future fusion plant but it remains years from completion.
Nevertheless, the achievement has put a spotlight on private companies that are pursuing pathways to fusion energy. The sector has now attracted more than US$6.2-billion in funding, approximately one-quarter of which has been committed in the past year alone.
Mr. Twinney said General Fusion’s investors have signalled that fast-tracking a machine that can demonstrate that the company can achieve breakeven conditions “would be massively valuable to us.”
The planned device, dubbed Lawson Machine 26, or LM26, after a key criterion in fusion physics, will lack many of the features that distinguish the reactor design that General Fusion has pursued until now.
Rather than compressing plasma with mechanical pistons around a liquid metal envelope, it will be an electromagnetic device with a solid metal liner. The cylindrical liner, made of lithium, will be triggered to implode in a fraction of a second around the plasma inside. The company has previously developed an injector that will be used to send plasma into the device.
Physicist Michel Laberge, who founded General Fusion in 2002 and leads the company’s technical development, said the machine will be used to determine if the plasma inside can be heated fast enough without energy loss to reach the threshold for fusion. He added that this detail represents the largest source of risk in the company’s overall approach to fusion.
“We’re in a realm of plasma physics that has not been tested before,” he said. “What we will learn is the energy confinement time at very high energy density. That’s what the experiment will give us.”