Canada-headquartered fusion energy company General Fusion recently demonstrated the first-ever plasma in a reactor driven by steam. This feat was achieved in the latest iteration of its prototype nuclear reactor which they call the Lawson Machine 26 (LM26), a press release said.

If you believe that nuclear fusion is the buzzword of the day, then the story of General Fusion is sure to come as a surprise. General Fusion was founded in 2002 and has been working towards developing commercial nuclear fusion, even as other fusion research companies went bust.

While tokamaks and stellarators are technologies on which most hopes of fusion energy currently rest, General Fusion has been working on magnetized target fusion (MTF). This technology emerged in the 1970s at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, aimed at developing compact fusion reactors.

In 2022, the U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) made global headlines after successfully achieving the first energy gain from a nuclear fusion reaction. The key to this achievement was the use of lasers to compress fusion fuel, deuterium, and tritium inside the plasma to replicate reaction conditions similar to those in the center of the Sun.

MTF’s approach is similar, however, instead of lasers, it utilizes steam-driven pistons. The fuel is first magnetized using a small amount of electricity, and then the pistons push a liquid lithium wall against the plasma to compress it, further increasing its temperature. At a particular temperature, a fusion reaction can occur, and then the energy released will heat the liquid lithium.

General Fusion plans to send the hot liquid lithium through a heat exchanger and generate steam to spin a generator. However, before it does that, the plasma must first be compressed. Previous attempts to do so have failed since the pistons could not be controlled precisely enough. Modern computers now allow this precise control, leading to its achievement.

General Fusion’s belief in MTF is based on the fact that the technology is designed to be practical and produce power while not requiring expensive components like superconducting magnets or high-end lasers.

A single MTF power plant could supply power to one hundred and fifty thousand homes while being close to energy demand and minimizing transmission losses. The company mentioned in a press release that the technology could help repurpose industrial steam heat and current power generation sites.

However, the journey to reach first plasma has been a difficult one. Dr. Michel Laberge is the Founder and Chief Science Officer of General Fusion. He said in a press release, “We’ve built twenty-four plasma injectors, created over two hundred thousand plasmas, and generated fusion neutrons from plasma compressions.”

With expertise gained from these experiments, the company designed, assembled, and operated the LM26 in a record time of sixteen months. While this is a significant achievement, the company has a long way to go before it will be able to deliver commercial fusion power.

While aiming for grid power by the next decade, the company must still perfect its liquid lithium wall, which is critical to its operations. Integrating the components to work in sync and produce net energy gain from the setup is an engineering challenge the company is working to solve.

If General Fusion experiments with the LM26 are successful, it is poised to rapidly scale the technology.