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Jeff Bezos and Cenovus Energy-backed General Fusion aims to create a star on earth with its nuclear fusion technology — straight out of a sci-fi novel

PHOTO BY GENERAL FUSION

Burnaby-based General Fusion, a company backed by Jeff Bezos and Cenovus Energy Inc., harbours ambitions as big as they come: it wants to master nuclear fusion, essentially the same process that generates heat in the sun.

But nuclear fusion is still an emerging technology that has yet to be commercialized. As the name suggests, it involves the fusion of two hydrogen atoms, which produces massive energy: one pound of fusion fuel is said to be equivalent 10 million pounds of coal.

Unlike conventional nuclear power, which involves fission or splitting atoms, the emerging fusion technology promises clean energy where the only emission would be helium, and importantly, no radioactive waste.

Now, after decades of largely government funded research, the industry is in the midst of a transition to the private realm with a couple dozen companies sprouting up around the world Investors say nuclear fusion would provide a baseload source of clean energy, that could be switched on or off, to complement renewable power, such as wind and solar.

Last week, Chris Mowry, chief executive of the Burnaby-based company signed paperwork with the United Kingdom government to build a US$400 million nuclear fusion test plant at Culham in Oxfordshire. If construction on the proposed plant, announced on June 16, begins as expected next summer, it may be the first public-private nuclear fusion demonstration plant in the world.

“This is the commercialization of fusion,” Chris Mowry, chief executive of Burnaby-based General Fusion told the Financial Post as his triumphant week came to a close. “A great analogy is the commercialization of space over the past decade or two, which was historically just the focus of governments.”

While the company remains private, Mowry acknowledged the company has ample funding needs and would likely access public markets as it seeks to commercialize its technology by 2030.

Other investors include Cenovus Energy Inc., The Business Development Bank of Canada and Sustainable Development Technology Canada, while collaborators include Microsoft Corp.

But Mowry also added that government grants account for roughly a third of the estimated US$300 million that his company has raised since being founded in 2020, with the Canadian government leading the way, followed by the U.S., U.K. and other countries.

By far, the largest nuclear fusion project is taking shape in southern France. Known as ITER, it is a product of the combined research and funds from 35 countries with the European Union leading the way and India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the US also contributing to a US$23.5 billion effort to build a nuclear fusion reactor.

Canada has contributed to the project and has a memorandum of understanding to explore future co-operation.

But the project is still in assembly phase, and not expected to begin producing energy until 2025. Meanwhile, the challenges to nuclear fusion remain formidable.

In February, the U.S.-based National Academy of the Sciences issued a report on nuclear fusion that concluded “successful operation of a pilot plant in the 2035-2040 timeframe requires urgent investments by (the U.S. Department of Energy) and private industry — both to resolve the remaining technical and scientific issues and to design, construct, and commission a pilot plant.”

Dennis Whyte, a Canadian scientist who is director of plasma science fusion center at MIT, said the U.S.-based Fusion Industry Association has grown from just a few companies two decades ago to more than 20, amid a proliferation of investor interest.

He said General Fusion had come up with some interesting ways to make fusion more cost-effective.

“The overarching consideration here is, although there’s still science and innovation to come, it’s not whether it’s possible anymore,” he said, “it’s a pivot towards, ‘can we make it economically viable?’”

Scientifically, Whyte said fusion is more difficult to achieve than nuclear fission. Fusion mimics the process that takes place inside stars and the sun and generates heat.

“It sounds like a sci-fi novel,” he said. “We create a star on earth, it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Indeed, the technology being developed by General Fusion sounds like it could have been pulled from the pages of a fantasy or science fiction novel.

The General Fusion website explains that pneumatic pistons surround a cylindrical wall of liquefied lithium metal and hammer away until it changes shape from a cylinder to a sphere. Next, hydrogen plasma is injected into the sphere, compressed and heated to above 100 million degrees Celsius.

All that effort creates steam, which powers a turbine and produces energy.

“The way to think about this is a fusion version of a diesel engine,” Mowry said. “Obviously it’s a bit more complicated, but (that’s) the basic concept.”

Of course, there is a nuclear reaction at the heart of fusion, in which two hydrogen atoms are fused.

Unlike conventional nuclear power, which needs uranium as a fuel, nuclear fusion uses isotopes of hydrogen called “deuterium” and “tritium,” which can be extracted from water. Helium is the only emission from fusion, making it attractive as a means to decarbonize energy.

“The beauty of fusion is there’s no radioactive waste,” Mowry said.

The company’s proposed Fusion Demonstration Plant in the U.K., near that country’s national fusion research centre, would be about 70 per cent of the size of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor. It won’t produce power, but would instead serve to demonstrate the viability of its technology and could come online by 2025.

Mowry said that while the science around hydrogen plasma has advanced in the last two decades, a suite of other technology is also enabling fusion, citing things like 3-D printing and digital control systems.

Currently based in Burnaby, General Fusion is looking for a new headquarters in the Vancouver metropolitan area to house its 140 or so workers.

It continues to raise funds as well, Mowry said, who predicted the market would grow to US$1 trillion by 2030.

In Canada, nuclear power supplies about 15 per cent of the total electricity with 19 reactors, all but one of which are based in Ontario, according to the World Nuclear Association.

But ten of those reactors are coming offline in Ontario, so the plants can be refurbished in order to function for another 30 years. Nuclear power has been growing in recent years even as some countries such as Germany and Japan move away from the technology because of the dangers associated with using radioactive materials at extremely high temperatures.

Whyte, the MIT scientist who works on fusion, said it uses very little fuel — about 70 grams per day would be required for a plant for a small city. As a result, he argued it’s “inherently safe.”

Artist’s rendition of Burnaby, B.C.-based General Fusion’s demonstration plant in the U.K. PHOTO BY HANDOUT/GENERAL FUSION