21 July 2022: The U.S. Department of Energy has selected General Fusion for two new funding awards through the Office of Fusion Energy Science’s Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program. The awards will advance Magnetized Target Fusion technology for use in commercial fusion power plants through collaboration with the Savannah River National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“General Fusion is pleased to continue its collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy to accelerate our technology development with the complementary advanced capabilities of the U.S. national labs,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion. “Through programs such as INFUSE, we are deepening our ties with the Department of Energy to support the goals set out in the White House’s decadal vision for commercial fusion energy and our goal to commercialize our practical approach to fusion energy by the early 2030s.”
Modelling tritium
General Fusion and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), a leading laboratory for tritium process research, will collaborate to advance tritium production within the company’s fusion machine. General Fusion’s fusion technology uses a proprietary lead-lithium liquid metal wall. The liquid metal wall surrounds the fusion plasma and is designed with a low start-up tritium fuel requirement and an advantageous breeding ratio to produce sufficient quantities of tritium fuel to sustain the fusion process. Through this partnership with SRNL, General Fusion will model its tritium fuel cycle and the total inventory of tritium required for its future commercial power plant.
“Savannah River National Laboratory has a unique opportunity to help General Fusion develop and optimize a fuel cycle for their Magnetized Target Fusion approach, and we look forward to engaging with them on this,” said George Larsen, Principal Investigator, Savannah River National Laboratory. “We will have the opportunity to leverage our team’s knowledge to help companies achieve challenging goals like increasing fuel processing rates while reducing tritium inventory.”
Advancing plasma diagnostics
General Fusion and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will expand their existing research partnership to enhance open plasma modelling tools and enable a powerful approach to efficient modelling of General Fusion’s fusion machine. Tapping into the laboratory’s supercomputing capabilities, this work will enable high-fidelity study of General Fusion’s planned Fusion Demonstration Plant, the world’s first power-plant-relevant, large-scale Magnetized Target Fusion prototype.
“With this project, we are enabling the direct calculation of kinetic orbits of particles using the world’s fastest supercomputers, Summit and Frontier, here at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF),” said Mark Berrill, Principal Investigator, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’re working with General Fusion to provide expertise on GPU porting and performance on the OLCF systems. Development work will further benefit the larger fusion community by enabling new capabilities in the open-source code.”
Under previous INFUSE funding partnerships, General Fusion developed computer models and performed physical tests in collaboration with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which provided important insights into the development of the company’s Fusion Demonstration Plant.
About General Fusion
General Fusion pursues a fast, efficient, and collaborative path to practical fusion power. We are completing an aggressive development plan to deliver economical carbon-free fusion energy with our proprietary Magnetized Target Fusion technology by the 2030s. Our mission is supported by a global syndicate of leading institutional investors, venture capital firms, and technology pioneers, together with governments across North America and Europe. General Fusion collaborates with a global network of partners to create a sustainable future built on cleaner energy, better materials, and a comprehensive life cycle approach to the world’s infrastructure. Founded in 2002, we are headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with additional centers co-located with internationally recognized fusion research laboratories near London, U.K., and in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. Learn more at www.generalfusion.com.
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