General Fusion, a Richmond-based company, has made a breakthrough in fusion energy by achieving a record-breaking neutron yield of over 600 million per second. The company’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology, which uses a proprietary liquid metal liner to compress plasma in a spherical tokamak configuration, demonstrated the viability of a stable fusion process.
The experiment, known as Plasma Compression Science (PCS), used high-powered pistons to compress plasmas and achieved significant increases in neutron yield. The plasma became approximately 190 times denser than it started, consistent with plasma particle confinement time being significantly longer than the compression time.
General Fusion’s MTF approach allows for the creation of fusion conditions in short pulses, rather than sustained reactions, while protecting the machine’s vessel and extracting heat. This technology is designed to scale for cost-efficient power plants and does not require large superconducting magnets or an expensive array of lasers.
The company’s results were published in a peer-reviewed journal and are claimed to be the best-performing compression test outcome. General Fusion is now accelerating its progress towards demonstrating fusion and significant heating at a large scale with its Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), which aims to provide commercial fusion energy to the grid by the early to mid-2030s.
The achievement follows recent milestones in fusion research, including those made by OpenStar Technologies and Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research. General Fusion’s breakthrough demonstrates the potential for practical and clean energy technology from a company that has accumulated expertise over two decades of fusion technology development.
Source: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/spherical-tokamak-plasma-compressed-general-fusion