Firm one step closer to fusion power
New leadership at Burnaby company
Christofer Mowry is taking the reins at Burnaby’s General Fusion and the company could be poised for a great leap forward.
The Burnaby-based alternative energy firm claims to have succeeded in sustaining plasma fuel with a small, prototype injector just 40 centimetres long, clearing a significant technical hurdle.
GF plans to proceed with building a larger plasma injector and a working prototype of its unique, compression-based reactor under the leadership of Mowry, who has worked with GE Energy and was a founder and CEO of Generation mPower, a firm specializing in small, modular fission reactors. Fred Buckman, formerly of Consumers Power, PacifiCorp and Shaw Group, will replace Rick Wills as chairman of the board.
A handful of teams around the world are pursuing fusion technology as a way to provide carbon-free power that produces little waste and has minuscule fuel requirements by recreating here on Earth the fusion reaction that fuels the sun.
The task is anything but easy. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project in France has already cost $14 billion and will not produce a full-blown fusion reaction until 2027. The project is run by a seven-nation consortium.
“When it comes to innovation, bigger is not always better,” said Mowry, the newly appointed CEO.
“You only need to look at the aerospace industry and the success that Elon Musk and his SpaceX startup have had in creating reusable rockets. NASA was unable to achieve that in half a century with tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.”
General Fusion’s reactor works by containing hydrogen plasma fuel in magnetic suspension, then compressing it with an array of massive pistons, which pushes the temperature of the fuel to 150 million degrees Celsius. The trick is to create a fusion reaction — merging the nuclei of hydrogen atoms — that releases more energy than it takes to create.
The piston-based reactor is designed to create bursts of energy lasting thousandths of a second, rather than maintaining a continuous plasma reaction with enormous energy requirements like some larger projects.
Heat recovered from the bursts in the GF reactor is used to generate electricity in the same way as conventional nuclear power plants, but without the long-lasting radioactive waste.
General Fusion and its partners — including Chrysalix Energy, GrowthWorks Capital, Cenovus Energy, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia — have already sunk about $100 million into the project.
“We are about to transition from a lab-scale type of development to an integrated prototype, a demonstration machine, so the company will step up to the next level and the financing we require will increase commensurately,” Mowry said.