The Business Development Bank of Canada and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories will contribute $10 million each to a plasma compression machine General Fusion is building at Sea Island in Richmond.
The financing will bring total funding for its Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) project to $71 million to date. In total, since its founding more than two decades ago, General Fusion has raised $442 million, most of it in private venture capital.
As a new lead investor, CNL will be given a seat on General Fusion’s board of directors. BDC, which has previously invested in General Fusion, also has a seat on the company’s board of directors.
“This financing is really important to us because it moves us into the next phase of compressing plasmas," Megan Wilson, General Fusion’s chief strategy officer, told BIV News.
"And it's also significant to us to be bringing in CNL as a new investor. Given their nuclear expertise and science and technology expertise, it's great to have them at the table and on the board."
The $20 million in new investment will be used to “fast-track its progress toward commercialization,” the company said in a press release.
The LM26 is a core component of General Fusion’s approach to producing energy from magnetized target fusion. The basic fuels for fusion energy are deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, which need to be turned into plasma.
General Fusion’s approach is to inject a hot plasma inside a lithium metal blanket and then compress it using pistons all firing at the same time to trigger fusion ignition. Electricity would then be produced from steam turbines using the heat that the fusion generates.
Achieving ignition requires reaching certain temperature benchmarks and energy balances.
General Fusion will be doing a demonstration with the LM26, and aims to achieve two key milestones: achieve temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius (10 keV), and a “breakeven equivalent,” in which the energy produced is equivalent to the energy that goes into the process.
The plasma injection system is now complete, and General Fusion is now working on compression.
"In the last several months, we've been focusing on the compression system, focusing on not just simulation, but actually prototyping and demonstrating the compression of a lithium liner and scaling that up," Wilson explained.
"And this financing, which we're very excited about, is going to enable us to move forward with the next phase, which is integrating the full scale compression system into LM 26 and begin compressing plasmas, which will be a major milestone for the program."
