Vancouver, BC: General Fusion, a Canadian company developing its own technology to produce power from nuclear fusion, announced March 6 that one of the most critical and complex areas of its research and development, plasma injector technology, had reached the minimum performance levels required for a larger scale, integrated prototype.
"If you compare our approach to fusion to how a diesel engine works, we inject the fuel into a compression chamber and compress it until it gets hot enough to ignite. In our case the fuel is plasma, and the ignition is fusion," said Chief Financial Officer and Interim CEO Bruce Colwill. "The investment we have made in our plasma injection program over the last few years has paid off."
"The dramatic improvement in plasma performance has brought us to the point where we can now increase our focus on the compression stage," said Mr. Colwill. "While there is still a lot of work to be done, this is a very large step forward for our research and development program."
General Fusion's proprietary fusion system is designed to use compression to heat a magnetized plasma of superheated hydrogen gas to temperatures above 150 million degrees Celsius. The company's program is now advancing to the next stage -- developing and integrating plasma injector, compression chamber and pistons in the design of a larger scale prototype.
The Vancouver-based private company anticipates that its approach to creating fusion energy, referred to as Magnetized Target Fusion, will be a practical path to making fusion a commercially available form of power.
"General Fusion's system is unique in that it combines cutting-edge plasma physics with established technologies," said the company's Chief Technology Officer, Michael Delage. "This gives us a range of practical advantages when it comes to designing an eventual power plant that will produce electricity for the grid."