Newsletter

General Fusion has successfully achieved several aggressive performance goals of a prototype system for its Fusion Demonstration Plant (FDP). The company’s plasma compression prototype, located at its Vancouver, Canada laboratory, is being used to demonstrate a critical element of its proprietary Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology. This important milestone marks another significant step toward General Fusion’s goal of creating practical and commercially viable fusion power.

Commissioned in early 2021, the prototype machine drives a forceful, but precisely shaped, symmetric collapse of a large liquid vortex cavity in tens of milliseconds. The idea of using a collapsing liquid metal cavity to create fusion has been around for decades, but General Fusion has been able to bring new enabling technologies, such as high-speed digital control systems, additive manufacturing, and advanced composite materials, to make this concept viable and to de-risk its implementation in the FDP. Driving a rapid, smooth, and spherically shaped collapse of a cavity created inside a rotating liquid has been a difficult engineering challenge that General Fusion has now demonstrated in this prototype machine. It is the pathfinder for a larger prototype being built in 2022 to validate further refinements to various engineering aspects of this technology.