A British Columbia-based company has announced a major breakthrough that it believes could lead to the world’s first commercial fusion energy plant.
General Fusion in Burnaby says it has achieved milestone targets for the prototype of its fusion demonstration plant, which can accommodate the extreme conditions of fusion, such as temperatures up to 150 million C.
“When you’re trying to contain a plasma, which is a super-heated form of hydrogen, at conditions and temperatures at the centre of the sun … it’s very hard to think of putting it inside a machine and that machine lasting the lifetime of a power plant,” explained CEO Chris Mowry.
“General Fusion is driving on a path where we could be putting a shovel in the ground on the first commercial plant before the end of the decade.”
Fusion power is a proposed form of clean energy generation that involves heating up two substances — deuterium and tritium — until their atoms collide and fuse into helium and a neutron, which contain a substantial amount of energy.
That energy can be harnessed and used to create electricity.
General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology uses a swirling cylinder of liquid metal to safely compress and heat the required plasma to the right conditions. The concept itself isn’t new, but the company believes it has matured the technology. READ MORE...
