General Fusion Achievements and Future

General Fusion of Canada is developing magnetized target fusion and is one of the top five fusion energy startups in terms of overall funding. They have raised about $322 million from Jeff Bezos, the Canadian and Malaysian governments. I track over 30 nuclear fusion projects and think this one, Helion Energy and HB11 Energy are the most promising. HB11 Energy needs more funding. General Fusion are Helion Energy have no funding issues and are doing variations of pulsed approaches to fusion. I think the Tokomak and other approaches involving holding the plasma for months and years are not good approaches conceptually or practically.

“Commercializing fusion energy is within reach, and General Fusion is ready to deliver it to the grid by the 2030s,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion. “We have the right team, the right technology, and the right strategy to get us there.”

General Fusion’s MTF machine, tritium is produced with a breeding ratio high enough to sustain the operation of the plant over its lifetime. The liquid metal wall that surrounds and compresses our plasma to produce a fusion reaction contains lithium, which is converted into tritium by fusion neutrons. This reduces fuel costs to almost zero.

Neutron Bytes interviewed General Fusion.

They avoid the “first wall” neutron degradation challenge and ensure the durability of the machine with our proprietary liquid metal wall. The collapsing liquid metal wall, used to compress and heat magnetized plasma, uniquely shields the fusion machine from damage caused by high-energy neutrons released by the fusion reaction. With a machine that lasts longer, the economics improve.

The planned commercial plant is reported to be composed of two fusion machines to produce 230 MWe. That’s the approximate electrical generation capacity of a medium size PWR type small modular reactor (SMR). At 4,500/Kw such an SMR would cost $1.035 billion. Can GF produce two machines (in volume) combined to be competitive with that cost figure?

General Fusion’s liquid metal wall which provides a simple way to extract heat from the fusion reaction. In a commercial fusion power plant, the hot (500 degrees Celsius) liquid metal, which has absorbed heat from the fusion reaction, will be circulated from the fusion machine through a heat exchanger to produce steam that will drive a turbine and generate electricity. This is a fully industrialized process used in most modern power plants today that can be readily applied to our MTF approach to fusion.

General Fusion’s primary compression prototype has completed over 1,000 shots, consistently achieving its compression performance targets. In addition, researchers and engineers have used test results across a range of compression parameters to validate and refine their fluid dynamic models to a high degree of fidelity. These models show that the fusion demonstration can achieve a shaped collapse in a liquid metal cavity within approximately five milliseconds. This is sufficient for the thermal confinement times already achieved within General Fusion’s existing plasma prototypes.

2005: Fusion reaction in the company’s first MTF prototype
2010: First at-scale plasma injector with magnetically confined plasma
2011: First demonstration of compressive heating of magnetized plasma
2012: Liquid metal compression tests validate engineering of liquid metal approach and synchronization of at-scale pistons
2013: Plasma achieves performance to enable compression heating
2017: Stable compression of plasma
2018: Heating and increased neutron yield during plasma compression
2019: Plasma lifetime maintained within a liquid metal cavity
2019-2021: Plasma performance sufficient to achieve fusion conditions at scale
2021: Compressed liquid cavity into a controlled, symmetrical shape sufficient to achieve fusion conditions when scaled in the company’s fusion demonstration
2022: Plasma energy confinement time of 10 milliseconds and validated compression time of 5 milliseconds support achieving 10 keV at power plant scale

21 thoughts on “General Fusion Achievements and Future”

  1. Fusion experiments such as Tokamak or inertial fusion have still 30 years to better versions only, because these experiments are not based on knowledge of physics, but only on miracles, known as quant tunneling. Our only 3cm small Fission-fusion nanoreactor generates artificial nanometric sun thanks permanent 1MW gamma laser, based on the same verified principle as thermonuclear weapons.

    Increased pressure (implosion) has a positive effect on spontaneous fission, but for mastering of quant tunneling effect and thus effective fusion is necessary high density of gamma photons.

  2. How so? Sole supplier of a DOD core a year or so indefinitely… Some DOE work that is always there to fuel HFIR, ATR… there’s a chance they might build some TRISO – not holding breath. Of course they’ve got the DOD micro reactor and the rocket engine on paper.

    If you consider a slew of taxpayer funded defense work and a couple pipe dreams “doing well”, then that is certainly one perspective. After the mpower debacle, the company was split into the DOD shop (no debt) and the fossil coal shop (all the debt).

  3. What about LPP fusion, the most underfunded company, achieving world purest plasma purity this year, highest confined ion energy and highest ratio of fusion energy output to device energy input in 2016…

      • Derision aside LPP needs the purest plasma to have a chance at fusion, hence why they are focused on it.

        I still do not understand how GF will compress a plasma that has lead ions at vapor pressure present in the vacuum. Of course this is such an obvious issue that I assume it has been worked out.

        • As each DT fusion reaction generates only one neutron and you need one neutron to convert Lithium to Tritium you will need no leaks and a 100% yield in conversion and extraction to be sustainable over the plant’s lifetime. Tritium is extremely expensive at $30k per gram and there are 25kg commercially available worldwide, lots of competition for it and a 3GWe Fusion plant will eat up 167kg/year. Admittedly most of the supply comes from Canadian nuclear reactors which may help this Canadian start up.

          • Apparently lead acts as a neutron breeder, converting single neutrons into multiple, so maybe this has a chance of working.

    • LPP redesigned their switches and has demonstrated repeatable synchronous firing of the switches within 5 nanoseconds. No more pre-fires, surface flashovers, late and non-synchronous firing, current oscillations and negative voltage pulse.

  4. 1. What causes the plasma to suddenly stop in the middle of the machine?
    2. What causes the Liquid Metal to return to a cylindrical shape after each ignition event? The repetition rate is supposed to be 1 Hz.
    3. The radial forces on the rotating structure holding tons of liquid metal will be huge and cyclic implying fatigue issues as well as issues for the bearings that support the rotating mass.
    4. How can fusion quality conditions (presumably a high quality vacuum) be maintained in an environment where liquid metal is constantly present?
    I wish GF success, but I am skeptical.

    • “What causes the Liquid Metal to return to a cylindrical shape after each ignition event? The repetition rate is supposed to be 1 Hz.”
      I mean, looking at it, the pistons are either actively or passively allowed to expand, so centrifigul force should do it

  5. Awhile back there was some hubub about a company using high power magnetrons originally developed for nuclear fusion, to bore holes. Figured they could make drilling so cheap and easy that geothermal would be practical in nearly any location. Any thoughts on feasibility?

    • Probably Quaise. They managed to generate tons of hoo hat with just a press release that they were planning microwave drilling. All quiet since.

  6. Chris Mowrey says he needs just a little more funding…

    He spent $480M in 4 years at Babcock&Wilcox to draw pictures of a PWR.

      • How so? Sole supplier of a DOD core a year or so indefinitely… Some DOE work that is always there to fuel HFIR, ATR… there’s a chance they might build some TRISO – not holding breath. Of course they’ve got the DOD micro reactor and the rocket engine on paper.

        If you consider a slew of taxpayer funded defense work and a couple pipe dreams “doing well”, then that is certainly one perspective. After the mpower debacle, the company was split into the DOD shop (no debt) and the fossil coal shop (all the debt).

  7. So many claptrap parts besides the plasma donut injector.

    Are eddy currents with or against us here? Are eddy currents supposed to keep the collapsing wall from quenching the hot fart puff?

  8. I can’t wait to see General Fusion’s reactor in action producing electricity, even in a trial stage. This is exciting.

Comments are closed.