Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs
General Fusion employees prepare for a weekly run of the Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) compression test bed, a device that uses a magnetic force to compress a solid lithium liner, which is one of the components of the company’s planned fusion reactor. (General Fusion Photo)
General Fusion, a fusion energy company based in British Columbia, announced nearly $15 million in new funding on Thursday. The investment will be used for the development of its demonstration device, called the Lawson Machine 26 (LM26).
The Canadian company launched 22 years ago and is one of the oldest commercial ventures in the quest to generate clean energy by smashing together light atoms — replicating the reactions that power the sun and stars.
General Fusion has raised approximately $340 million since 2002, including government grants and investments.
“We’re really excited about this financing,” said Chief Strategy Officer Megan Wilson in an interview. “From our perspective, it’s really a major, major vote of confidence in General Fusion.”
Over time, the company has changed technologies for its fusion device, and last year it put on hold the groundbreaking of a large demonstration project in the United Kingdom. It pivoted to the LM26, which will be half the size of the company’s planned commercial device and is being built in Richmond, B.C.
“This pivot created an opportunity for us to to build stuff faster at General Fusion,” Wilson said. “This program was designed to get to technical results at low cost in a meaningful way.”
General Fusion has 140 employees, and laid off an undisclosed number of workers after pausing the UK effort, Wilson said. With the new funding, the budget so far for LM26 comes to more than $50 million.
To produce power through fusion, physicists need to confine atoms in a space with temperatures exceeding the heat at the center of the sun. That allows the formation of plasma in which atoms can be smashed together and fuse, releasing energy that is converted into electricity.
General Fusion employees use a custom centrifugal spin casting apparatus to create a solid lithium liner for running experiments with LM26 components. (General Fusion Photo)
While physicists have made advances in the pursuit of fusion power, no one has been able to generate more energy from the reactions than they take to produce.
With its LM26 project, General Fusion has created a device called a plasma injector, and is now working to integrate that with a system to compress plasmas at a large scale. The company’s overall technology is called magnetized target fusion.
General Fusion has set a goal of reaching 100 million degrees Celsius with LM26 by next year, and aims by 2026 to hit an energy producing target of “scientific breakeven equivalent” — an intermediate benchmark first reached by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022.
None of the commercial efforts have accomplished this goal, though many have set and missed the milestone. General Fusion originally aimed to hit scientific breakeven in 2006.
LM26 should resolve many technical challenges and questions, said Wilson, adding that the project “is really designed to retire the things that keep our physicists up at night from a risk perspective.” It should also help answer the question of how big the device will ultimately need to be to generate the desired amount of power.
The new funding comes from Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which is a commercial venture that operates and manages nuclear facilities in Canada and is a first-time investor in General Fusion. Also participating in the Series F round is BDC Capital, the investment arm of the Business Development Bank of Canada. The two investors are each contributing nearly $7.3 million.
Doug McIntyre, vice president of legal and insurance for Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, is joining General Fusion’s board of directors as part of the deal.
