General Fusion announced on Tuesday that he had managed to create plasma, a fourth state of overheated material required for merger, inside a reactor prototype. The milestone marks the start of a 93 -week quest to prove that the steampunk approach to fusion power is a viable competitor.
The reactor, called Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), is General mergerThe last iteration in a series of devices that have tested various parts of its unique approach. The company gathered LM26 in just 16 months, and hopes to strike “Breakeven” in 2026.
General Fusion is one of the oldest fusion companies that still work. Founded in 2002, he has collected $ 440 million to date, according to Pitchbook. During this period, he saw competitors increase and descend, and, as the merger industry in large part, he failed to hold the number of promises, including one Over 20 years ago.
In Fusion Power, there are two points in which a reaction is supposed. The one most people think is called the commercial panel. It is at this point that a fusion reaction produces more power than the entire consumption of the installation, allowing the power plant to put electricity on the network. No one has reached this milestone yet.
The other is known as Scientific Breavake. In this case, the fusion reaction must produce at least as much power as that delivered directly to fuel. The threshold of scientific profitability only looks within the limits of the experimental system, ignoring the rest of the installation. However, this is an important step for any attempted merger. So far, only the national ignition installation of the US Energy Ministry has reached it.
General Fusion’s approach to fusion power differs considerably from other startups. Called magnetized target fusion (MTF), it is similar in some respects to inertial containment, the technique that the national ignition installation used at the end of 2022 to prove that fusion reactions could generate more power than what was necessary to start them.
But when the national ignition installation uses lasers to compress a fuel base, the design of the MTF reactor of General Fusion is based on steam pistons. Inside the bedroom, the fuel from the deuterium-Tritium is zapped with a little electricity to generate a magnetic field, which helps maintain the contained plasma. The pistons then lead a liquid lithium wall inwards to the plasma, compressing it.
When the fuel is compressed, its temperature increases until it triggers a fusion reaction. The reaction then heats the liquid lithium, which the company plans to circulate via a heat exchanger to create steam and run a generator.
MTF emerged In the 1970s US Naval Research Laboratory, where researchers developed concepts for compact fusion reactors. These efforts did not bear fruit. General Fusion says that it is because the pistons compressing the liquid lining were not controlled sufficiently precisely, and that modern computers now offer a better chance of executing the complex choreography.
Whatever LM26, the general merger has even more work to do. The apparatus does not have the liquid lithium wall, based rather on solid lithium compressed by electrmpets. This limits the number of tests that the company can take because it takes more time to reset the device. Company has makes progress On a prototype of the liquid wall, perform more than 1,000 tests to see how it holds over time, but integrating everything will be a monumental engineering challenge.
The reversal of LM26 is nevertheless an important step for an company which is now rushing to deliver a central alongside a multitude of newcomers with their own deep keychain and their aggressive deadlines.
