General Fusion announced on Tuesday that Plasma, the overheated fourth-state material state required for the fusion, was successfully created inside a prototype reactor. The Milestone marks the beginning of a 93-week quest, proving that the costume's steampunk approach to fusion power is a viable candidate.
The reactor, called the Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), is the latest iteration of General Fusion in a set of devices that have tested various parts of its unique approach. The company is hoping to collect LM26s in just 16 months and play “Breakeven” in 2026.
General Fusion is one of the oldest fusion companies still operating. It was founded in 2002 and has raised $440 million so far, according to Pitchbook. Meanwhile, competitors have seen their rise and fall. And, as the fusion industry writes on a massive scale, it failed to fulfill its break-even promises, including those created over 20 years ago.
In fusion ability, there are two points in which the reaction is called break-even. What most people think of is called a commercial break-even point. That is when the fusion reaction produces more power than the entire facility consumes, allowing the power plant to place electricity on the grid. No one has reached this milestone yet.
The other is known as the scientific break-even point. In this case, the fusion reaction must produce as much power as it was delivered directly to the fuel. Scientific break-even points are only seen within the boundaries of the experimental system, ignoring the rest of the facility. Still, it is an important milestone in fusion attempts. So far, only the US Department of Energy's National Ignition Facilities have reached it.
General Fusion's approach to Fusion Power is very different from other startups. With regard to inertial confinement, known as magnetized target fusion (MTF), it is a technology used by the National Ignition Facility in late 2022 to prove that the fusion reaction can produce more force than is necessary to initiate them.
However, when the National Ignition Facility uses lasers to compress fuel pellets, General Fusion's MTF reactor design relies on steam-powered pistons. Within the chamber, the deuterium fuel is zapped with a little power to generate a magnetic field, which means that it contains plasma. The piston drives and compresses the liquid lithium walls inwards over the plasma.
When the fuel is compressed, its temperature rises until it triggers a fusion reaction. The reaction then heats up the liquid lithium. It plans to circulate the heat exchanger to create steam and rotate the generator.
MTF appeared from the US Navy Research Institute in the 1970s, and researchers were developing the concept of a compact fusion reactor. Those efforts were not fruitful. The general fusion is said to be because the piston compressing the liquid liner was not well controlled, providing a better opportunity for modern computers to perform complex choreography.
Whatever the LM26 achieves, there is still work to do in general fusion. The device does not have liquid lithium walls and instead relies on solid lithium compressed by electromagnets. This limits the number of tests that can be performed, as it takes time to reset the device. The company is working on prototypes for liquid walls and runs over 1,000 tests to see how it will last over time, but integrating everything remains a monumental engineering challenge.
Nevertheless, turning the switch on the LM26 is an important step for companies currently competing to deliver power plants along with many newcomers with their own deep pocketbooks and aggressive timelines.