The news: General Fusion today announced $25 million in new funding and plans to build a demonstration machine in its home province of British Columbia.
Fusion energy companies are attempting to replicate the power of the sun and stars, smashing together atoms and capturing the energy that the reactions produce.
The 21-year-old company has raised a total of roughly $330 million in its quest for clean power’s holy grail. This latest round was anchored by existing investors BDC Capital and GIC. It included a $3.7 million grant from the Government of British Columbia. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos is a past investor.
New reactor: General Fusion’s new magnetized target fusion machine, dubbed the Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), will be about half the size of its planned commercial fusion device. The reactor should be able to reach more than 100 million degrees Celsius — more than six-times hotter than the center of the sun.
The company aims for the LM26 to reach fusion conditions by 2025, and ultimately achieve scientific breakeven equivalent — which means the machine can produce as much power as it takes for it to create fusion.
“Over 20 years, General Fusion has achieved significant technical milestones, and validated all key elements of the magnetized target fusion approach including plasma stability, temperature and compression,” said Zoltan Tompa, senior partner with BDC Capital. “The new LM26 machine represents a capital efficient steppingstone to de-risk their Fusion Demonstration Program.”
Other initiatives: General Fusion is pausing the start of construction of a larger demonstration machine in the United Kingdom. The new plans to build the LM26 will delay by a couple of years the start of the U.K. reactor, which was to begin operating in 2025.
Insights provided by the LM26 will be incorporated into plans for the U.K. device, with the intention of making the latter’s design closer to the commercial product than was previously planned.
General Fusion aims to commercialize its technology by the early 2030s, and it has partnerships with two U.S. national labs to advance that goal.
Big picture: The Pacific Northwest is a fusion energy hub, home to three additional fusion companies in Washington state — Helion Energy, Zap Energy and Avalanche Energy — as well as ExoFusion and Kyoto Fusioneering, which are focused on commercializing fusion technology.
There are demonstration fusion reactors running or under construction around the world. But none of the commercial devices have been able to produce more electricity than they require to operate, let alone generate enough power to send to the grid. Some in the clean energy industry are skeptical it will ever work.
Last year, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved a key milestone in fusion, creating more energy than went into generating the reaction, which is also known as ignition. On July 30th, that team hit ignition once again.
Helion aims to get a commercial plant operating by 2028, while Zap set a 2030 target for getting fusion energy on to the grid.
Fusion is different from fission — which is the splitting of atoms and the reaction that powers existing nuclear power plants. Fusion doesn’t create the same sort of radioactive waste as fission or pose similar meltdown risks.
Editor’s note: Story updated to correct that General Fusion has not started construction of their machine in the U.K. and to provide additional context regarding the state of the fusion sector.
