General Fusion

“We’re closing the gap to fusion commercialization!” Our Director of Strategic Partnerships, Myles Hildebrand, shared insights on the rapid progress in the fusion industry at a recent webinar hosted by the Fusion Energy Council of Canada. Myles presented our unique MTF technology that is spearheading the growth of Canada’s fusion industry, and how our LM26 fusion machine is on track to achieve breakthrough #fusionenergy milestones. To learn more, visit https://lnkd.in/gQFqy29a.

Next stop—Canada's first Fusion Day! Hosted by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, we’re excited to join industry leaders from across the globe to share what’s required for a Canadian fusion ecosystem to thrive. Our CEO Greg Twinney will provide updates on our trailblazing LM26 program as we advance towards transformative technical milestones, with the help of strong partners in Canada and around the world. Together, we are building Canada’s #fusionenergy future! ⚡

Breaking through barriers! ⚒ We don’t need expensive lasers or superconducting magnets to achieve fusion conditions. A General Fusion power plant will mechanically compress liquid metal around our plasmas. By 2021, our primary liquid compression prototype completed over 1,000 experiments and successfully compressed a liquid cavity with symmetry & controlled shape sufficient to achieve fusion conditions. The peer-reviewed results from these experiments validate our compression technology and are scalable to a commercial machine. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gBCAtjpj #TechTuesday #CanadianInnovation #fusionenergy

Thanks, Simon Marcotte, for sharing your experience at General Fusion! As a leader in Canada’s innovation ecosystem, we’re developing young professionals to build the next generation of #fusionenergy and #STEM leaders. Dedicated students like Simon are what make our co-op program so successful.

At the recent PSI-26 conference in Marseille, our partners at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—renowned for achieving fusion ignition in 2022—presented simulation models with their unique code using data from our operating plasma injector to predict plasma edge behaviour. Through this work, we can better predict how our plasma will behave as it is compressed to fusion conditions in our new demonstration—LM26. ⚡ Access the conference proceeding: https://lnkd.in/g3YPSy2S

Our founder, Dr. Michel Laberge, is back at ITER Organization this week to present at the inaugural private-public fusion workshop, which brings together fusion leaders worldwide to establish meaningful collaboration between ITER and the private fusion industry. We’re at the workshop to share our practical Magnetized Target Fusion approach, which addresses the material degradation, fuel production, energy capture, and cost barriers other fusion technologies still face. Thank you, ITER, for the invitation! Together, we can achieve the collective goal of a clean energy future powered by fusion. 🤝

Smoothing the path to LM26. 🚀 Every week, our team completes compression experiments on our testbed, Prototype 0. Since its launch, 30 compression tests using solid lithium liners have provided the critical data we need to prepare to assemble our large-scale MTF demonstration machine—LM26. Today, we are creating the custom solid liners for P0 in-house, machining them on our lathe under an inert atmosphere. We target smooth, uniform solid liners to achieve symmetry during compression. In LM26, the symmetrical collapse of the solid lithium liner is key to compressing our world-leading plasmas to achieve fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius and scientific breakeven equivalent. #TechTuesday #CanadianInnovation #fusionenergy

“Fusion power is closer than you think!” Next month, our Chief Strategy Officer, Megan Wilson, will be at FUSION24 in London, UK. She will join a panel discussion on the future of fusion power plants, sharing our fast-moving progress in commercial plant design, including the role of our Market Development Advisory Committee (MDAC) in ensuring our solution meets the needs of real-world end users when commercialized.  A single General Fusion power plant will be designed to provide zero-carbon power to approximately 150,000 homes and can be placed close to energy demand at a cost competitive with other energy sources such as coal and natural gas. Through our MDAC, the prospective markets and global utilities we’re collaborating with get a front-row view of our progress as we prepare to deploy practical commercial fusion to the energy grid. Learn more about FUSION24, the world’s greatest fusion energy showcase, at fusioniscoming.com.

In 2019, our SLiC prototype brought together two key components of our technology: plasma and liquid lithium. It demonstrated that our plasma lifetime is maintained within the liquid metal wall cavity. The liquid metal wall is what makes our MTF approach truly game-changing—it protects our machine from damage, breeds fusion fuel, and efficiently transforms the energy captured from the fusion reaction into electricity for the grid. Showing that plasmas can remain stable within a lithium metal liner was an important step to validate our practical approach. #TechTuesday #CanadianInnovation #fusionenergy

At the recent High Temperature Plasma Diagnostics conference, physicists Allison Radich, Simon Coop, and Henry Gould presented posters on the cutting-edge diagnostics in development for LM26. With collaborators from around the world, our team is designing and building first-of-a-kind systems to provide the data we need to verify LM26’s transformative technical milestones: fusion conditions of over 100 million degrees Celsius and scientific breakeven equivalent.