General Fusion announced a new Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) machine that will fast-track the company’s technical progress. The planned fusion machines is to achieve fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius by 2025, and progress toward scientific breakeven by 2026. They completed the first close of its Series F raise for a combined $25 million USD (approximately $33.5 million CAD) of funding.
The round was anchored by existing investors, BDC Capital and GIC. It also included new grant funding from the Government of British Columbia, which builds upon the Canadian government’s ongoing support through the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF).
This machine represents a significant new pillar to accelerate and de-risk General Fusion’s Demonstration Program, designed to leverage the company’s recent technological advancements and provide electricity to the grid with commercial fusion energy by the early to mid-2030s.
In 2018, Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture, interviewed with Christofer Mowry, CEO of General Fusion at the C2 Conference in Montreal. In 2018, General Fusion was trying to reach the next step is to make a 70% scale pilot plant that will prove out the viability of generating electricity from General Fusion’s magnetized target nuclear fusion. There have been some delays but the demo program is now targeting results in 2025-2026.
General Fusion Demo Program
Called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), the MTF demonstration is designed to be cost-efficient and produce results quickly using General Fusion’s unique approach to fusion. LM26 will validate the company’s ability to symmetrically compress magnetized plasmas in a repeatable manner and achieve fusion conditions at scale. The machine will integrate General Fusion’s existing operational plasma injector (PI3) with a new lithium liner compression system. PI3 is the culmination of 24 predecessor prototypes and over 200,000 plasma experiments. It is one of the world’s largest and most powerful operational plasma injectors, having already demonstrated plasma temperatures of five million degrees Celsius, along with 10 millisecond self-sustaining energy confinement time. Both are critical steppingstones to achieving LM26’s target of fusion conditions in 2025 and equivalent scientific breakeven in 2026.
Over the next two to three years, General Fusion will work closely with the UK Atomic Energy Authority to validate the data gathered from LM26 and incorporate it into the design of the company’s planned commercial scale demonstration in the UK.
General Fusion’s MTF technology is unique in the fusion market. Unlike others, it was designed to scale for cost-efficient power plants from its inception by deliberately avoiding the pitfalls of other approaches that require expensive superconducting magnets or high-powered lasers. As a result, the path to generating zero-carbon electricity for the grid is shorter for General Fusion than other approaches, which still need to address longstanding barriers to the commercialization of fusion, such as machine durability (i.e., the “first wall” issue), fuel production, simple energy conversion, and commercial production economics.
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
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
The whole point of these fusion companies is just to soak up money by the trillions.
Sure, they’ll have fusion in 10 years.
Like every past decade. Same ol’ story – we’ll have break thru in ten years – fund us!
They actually are following a will’o’the-wisp[ and have no hope of obtaining what they lie about achieving.
Because, they think it is so.
I guess they believe if they think it so hard enough – it’ll work.
Sooner or later someone is going to get there. I’m not ready to invest yet, however, as it is too uncertain as to who is going to get there 1) first, and 2) succeed in commercialization. Maye soon. We shall see.
What is possible is investing in industries that will most heavily benefit from cheap sustainable power. That’s not really my advice, that’s derived from Peter Lynch, the patron god of investors. I read it in his book some decades back when I was in college and it has worked very well for me.
But wait. Industries that will most heavily benefit from cheap sustainable power? That’s probably pretty much all of them, at least in some degree.
Depending on cost, however, all kinds of new things become possible. Landfills might become valuable because with cheap enough energy it becomes possible to break down and retrieve all the basic elements embedded therein. Refining sea water for gold and other valuable elements come become profitable. Desalinization, coupled with other break throughs specific to that technology, and possibly advances in automated robotics, could make it affordable to refill the great aquifers we’ve drained, or even create new ones. It could also become profitable to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for use in industry. And, given that one of the other new articles here today talks about powerful laser defenses against missile, yeah, that too becomes more doable.
Of course, all that’s keeping in mind that nothing happens by itself. Scientific and technological progress is holistic.
Which is what makes beloved (and enjoyable) tv shows about a culture that colonizes hundreds of planets with warp drive ships, teleports cargo and personnel into space and back, and restores people to existence, and even to youth, when their scanned image is in “the pattern buffer,” all seem rather silly when they don’t even have super capable autonomous AIs on a mass scale, embedded man-machine interfaces (a kinder gentler version than the Borg’s tech), or a cure for old age, or even for male pattern baldness.
You aren’t meant to look at space opera and other entertainments quite that hard. On the other hand, if we are speculating about real-life possibilities, we have to.
I fail to see how this would compete economically with Gen 4 fission or even NuScale.
I love fusion but if you want to be a commercial success you have to be economical.
Fusion is the watermelons’ “Best” to be the enemy of the “good”; They use theoretically supporting it as a way of fending off recognition that they’re just opposed to modernity, period.
As soon as it does become practical, they’ll oppose it as fanatically as they do fission. The reason they support solar and windmills is because they DON’T work well enough to power a modern industrial society. Feature, not bug.
Yeah, fission IS more economically viable than fusion, if fission were rationally regulated, rather than being subject to regulations intended to destroy the industry. Fission is just plain easy to pull off. Fusion is barely possible to do. Fission works at a cast iron and rivets level of technology, the Victorians could have built fission reactors if they’d known about radioactivity. Fusion is a real prima donna, it requires ultra high vacuum, high levels of purity, intense magnetic fields, you name it.
I think we’ll eventually crack that problem, and fusion has advantages in space, but it’s never going to be as affordable as fission anywhere you have a supply of fissile or fertile isotopes.
But again, not being affordable is a feature so far as the watermelons are concerned.
And you STILL get neutrons, unless you’re using the much more difficult ‘aneutronic’ reactions, which usually have neutronic side reactions anyway.
Totally agree. Attitudes about fission are changing in Europe.
Excellent points all around.
Very true. Mass production of some form of SMR is an actual solution, that can be done now.
Instead, we saw things like Germany being “green” by replacing fission with coal. Nice logic.
As for fusion, I think it’s great to support research of it in all its forms. It could turn out to be useful in the future. But it shouldn’t cloud our vision: we need fission now.
I am sorry but your comment does not make sense. The advantage with Fusion is that you really have to make an effort to keep it going and if something fails it stops in the order of microseconds with most of the material in the reactor being inert and not radioactive. Obviously during fusion you produce neutrons and stuff gets irradiated, but the levels of radioactive pollutants released in case case of catastrophic reactor failure is negligeable because you do not have a vessel filled with tons of enriched fuel. Not to mention the fact that very few (if any) fission reactor are truly walkway safe, so from a military standpoint the presence of fission reactors on your territory make them a very good tatgets to disrupt: not only disrupting their activity reduces the power in the grid, but even if they are not producing power you will have to allocate resources to cool them down and keep them safe.
i agree that fission reactors on the battlefield are targets, yet the development pork still flows to ‘Project Pele’.
it is remarkable to see the difficulty in maintaining the ‘fields’ that fusion needs described as a ‘fail safe feature’ making fusion reactors ‘walkaway safe’.
Literally 20% of the mass involved in the attainable fusion reactions (DT, DD) is neutrons. You are glossing over the “stuff gets irradiated” part, but that is fine because we are arguing about science fiction.
It isn’t entirely clear for our current European land war if fission reactors are actually targets. If fission reactors are targets then fusion reactors would be also battlefield targets.
If fusion reactors were significantly less radioactive than fission reactors (debatable) then that would make them more likely to be targeted as there would be less fallout.
Either way the original point stands. Fusion reactors as currently envisioned aren’t cost competitive and so won’t be built in quantity.
The battlefield microreactors on FOB, supplying power and syn-fuel to the FOB, would be targets in a war with a real enemy (non-Bedouin).
Russia clearly doesn’t want to level Ukraine, but wants it to realign it to its former status as a fraternal nation/province.
Big power stations like Zaporizhzhia would only be attacked by terrorists or those seeking to lay waste (perceived) to lost territory. Ukraine is worth more with Zaporizhzhia functioning.
I spoke with the Army officer in charge of the microreactor program on LinkedIn back in 2020/21; he was of the opinion that making hydrocarbon fuel using micro reactors would give advantage for eliminating fuel convoys and fuel dumps, which ARE military targets. We disagreed about how realistic it was to make fuel with a little TRISO reactor, but I felt blessed to have had the conversation. I’m sure he’s still there. Had a Hispanic name.
Routine radioactive emissions from a fusion plant will be high. Tritium is very leaky stuff. Medium-lived (very active, but not so active it disappears in 2 seconds) and a piss-weak beta emitter (which won’t make difference to the people opposed to fusion).
Nuclear plants have been temporarily shut down for tritium leaks less than a broken radiolumiscent key chain fob and much less than a radioluminescent exit sign.
They will also notice that neutrons in excess of that required for tritium production (which increase greatly if you run even a little bit tritium-lean and get some of the tritum from D-D) can be used to irradiate U-238 to Pu-239.
More people have been hit by lightning 3 times than have died from commercial nuclear waste. Like Brett says; the fact that concerns the deep green hair shirt types is that nuclear energy is safe, efficient and clean. This is what they oppose; they agree with Amory Lovins that giving humans clean, cheap energy is like giving an “idiot child” a machine gun. They are not against the problem, they are against the solution.
Where is the typical observation that lead and lithium obviously have vapor pressure?
If compression in such a manner is plausible, they could use smokeless powder and precise electronic detonation to achieve the mechanical part of the shot a couple times a day without all the steam junk – but Chris Mowry thinks big. Maybe he has pictures of Trudope with oompaloompas.
Obviously they have vapor pressure, but since the magnetized plasma is injected, compressed once, and then leaves, the vapor has no time to contaminate the plasma. The magnetic field is containing it to the outside of the plasmoid, long enough to get things done.
Sure, they’re going to have to keep that vapor from propagating back into the area where they’re generating the plasmoids. That doesn’t strike me as terribly difficult.
Well heck. Things don’t have to make sense anymore – it’s 2023. We can claim superconductivity in poprocks. It was destiny for Chris Mowry to drive BWXT mPower into the ground so that he could arrive at the helm of the company* that captured the holy grail of Kardashev type 2 civilization…
*”company” in modern parlance does not imply successful business trading goods or services for money. A “company” in this sense may take payroll from other sources such as tax money (DOD, DOE, canadian equavalents) or the stock market (Tesla has 14x the market cap of Honda), IPO, angels (Bezos).
aspirations for commercialization prior to demonstration or proof of concept is a red flag for fraud. If the physics had promise, the way to proceed would be to strip away as much complexity as possible and demonstrate a single shot with neutrons observed. A single shot. No steam hammer ballet required to prove the fundamental physics IF the physics is valid. Lots of interest would bring the machine over the finishing if their shot gave neutrons.
I well remember ZETA (Zero Energy Thermal Apparatus) which – it was said – would be developed to produce fusion energy in ten years’ time.
It was on display at the Festival of Britain in London in 1951.
I was as schoolboy, 13 years old.
Still waiting at 85.
Lawrence Livermore achieved net positive energy twice already. If you must bet on a horse you probably want to bet on the horse that has a twenty year head start and government funding.
Now we have a three consecutive year forecast timeline for commercial efforts at break even. Zap Energy this year (I still hold out hope), Helion next year and now general fusion the following year. I give them all a good chance at succeeding. Crossing fingers.
Yes, though it’s different kinds of breakeven. GF is talking about a scientific breakeven, where more heat is produced by fusion than the input energy that reaches the atoms. But that ignores the fact that only a small fraction of the wall-plug energy input will actually reach the atoms, and it ignores the fact that only a fraction of the heat output will end up as output electricity.
But Helion is hoping next year to actually have more electricity output than wall-plug electricity input. If that happens, it will be a big deal.
Yup. Just like betting on the space shuttle with a twenty year head start and government funding was the right horse to be on for cheaper access to orbit. Wait a minute…
Look Mr. KGB is just talking about how he sees life from the perspective of a command economy geared towards maximizing bribery and graft. He doesn’t understand that when people spend their own money that they are far more likely to spend it efficiently but when people spend Government billions they are far more likely to waste.
Lawrence Livermore is a dead end. They had net gain in terms of the laser energy hitting the target, vs energy from the target.
But they need to improve the energy output in over 100 TIMES (not 100%) to get more energy out of the target than what the lasers consume.
But that’s far from being their main problem. They would need to implode like 100 of those targets per minute… right now… they can implode one per week.
And it’s a PRECISION MACHINERY made target of gold. Which is carefuly positioned at the correct place.
They have no plans on how to create millions of those, to implode 100 per minute
Perhaps, but they are not primary fusion research facility. More for n. stockpiles. And their facility is old, designs from the 90s. Some lasers probably 20-30 years old designed a long time ago, that is why they are inefficient.
Modern lasers would give them way, way better efficiency, not 100%, 40x improvement!!! I think their lasers are 0.5 % efficient and modern lasers are 20%.
40x improvement and we get closer, since laser tech is improving very fast.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/Online/31501/The-commercial-drive-for-laser-fusion-power
They proved, that fusion net gain is possible. Now how to get to more efficient lasers and design, engineer new fusion devices is another thing. But it is proven, it can be done.
I never got the point of that facility either, except for now I know military is involved and off course lasers are interesting for them. I believe more in private companies like general fusion or helion energie, all have their problems and solutions, I feel more than one will win the race. Iter will be big as well, for now its the only machine being construted in its size (500megawatts) that will bring fusion for sure. I think Helion and iter can help eachother out on some fronts if they succeed!
NIF was never meant to be a reactor. It was meant to test software that models nuclear warhead explosions. It makes it possible for the USA to design nuclear weapons without violating test ban treaties.
Oh and the gold will obviously vaporize and leave a gold film on the “reactor” which diffuses the laser light and renders the entire “reactor” unusable.
Which is fine if your goal is to test software.
Not sure why NIF gets all this mild hate, other than the typical media ‘pile on’ where armchair experts say exactly the same thing with minor variation: “1) NIF is nowhere near break-even and 2) isn’t scaleable for baseload, 3) and the fuel is delicate and priceless (way more expensive than Lennox china or TRISO pebbles).
Who cares? The point is Teller-Ulam superbomb physics on the milligram scale. The point is giant freaking laser. The point is instrumentation and control and pushing the boundaries of electrical engineering while blowing stuff up. If you don’t see the value in that I cannot help you. Go give crazy scientist Eric Learner more money if you want.
I don’t hate NIF. I hate anybody who proposes NIF as a powerplant and I hate clueless media coverage of NIF. Technically NIF is amazing.
They’re using a laser that dates back to the 1990s, which is less than 1% efficient. Equivalent modern lasers are over 20% efficient. That would put them within a factor of five.
That’s not so far off since the output appears nonlinear. To get the first Q>1 shot, they increased the laser power just 8%, and got 230% more output. They expect that sort of scaling to continue for a while.
Modern lasers can also fire much more frequently, and they’re much more compact.
Right. The NIF was built to allow testing of weapons physics without having to detonate actual nukes. That’s a worthy goal. And they’ve done a good job of that.
It was never really their goal to take steps toward a practical energy source. And they haven’t. That’s not a failure. Because that wasn’t the goal.
But it was a failure of many media sources that covered ignition as if it was progress toward a practical energy source.
The also do basic physics, like producing the ice, deep in Jupiter.Getting to breakeven ,has given commercial fusion a great hope and push.
NIF does all kings of interesting work, they building the petawatt laser for Europe that costs a fraction, and is fitted in Czechia.
LL’s “net” energy is more fusion energy out compared to laser energy in to the gold hohlraum. They skip over laser energy delivered being 1/100th of the energy pulled from the grid and DT fusion needing 10x more energy than net to be viable.
So they are missing real net energy by 1000x.
A multi-million-dollar Snicker’s bar worth of energy is not, in my mind, much of an achievement. More energy could have been produced by burning the banknotes.
No, not even close. LLNL has successfully demonstrated fusion burn with net gain from laser energy to fusion and nowhere near plug power to fusion gain. The main value of this is to develop and refine existing nuclear weapons without nuclear testing, which is their main, overriding goal.
A commercial plant needs to shoot bare, naked fuel pellets ~10 times per second. Those pellets must cost on the order of cents to make.
What LLNL does is make a gold hohlraum (!) with a hollow diamond (!) fuel pellet with an extremely perfect finish and symmetry. They get ~1 shot per day. Nothing like it will ever be commercially viable.
Yes kind of reminds me of all the people who were betting on the SLS horse instead of the SpaceX horse. I mean SLS has a head start and billions in funding per year. Surely it will be the winner!
Being charitable NIF is only 2% of the way to commercial net electricity.