The company said the new investment, led by Singapore-based investment company Temasek, significantly expands its portfolio of institutional, sovereign and high net worth investors, providing the prelude to a large financing round being prepared for 2022.
Combined with broad financial support from the Canadian, UK, and US governments, the funding round will support General Fusion’s “aggressive pursuit” of several near-term initiatives and milestones in its programme to commercialise magnetised target fusion (MTF).
In December 2019 General Fusion said it had secured more than USD100m of financing for its fusion programme. This was followed in July 2020 by additional financing led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the deep technology fund IBX.
General Fusion was established in 2002 and is funded by a global syndicate of energy venture capital firms, industry leaders, and technology pioneers.
The company’s MTF reactor system uses a sphere filled with molten lead-lithium that is pumped to form a vortex. A pulse of magnetically-confined plasma fuel is then injected into the vortex.
Around the sphere, pistons drive a pressure wave into the centre of the sphere, compressing the plasma to fusion conditions. This process is then repeated, while the heat from the reaction is captured in the liquid metal and used to generate electricity via a steam turbine.
General Fusion aims to deploy of a power-plant scale fusion demonstration plant at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Oxford, England. It has also accelerated MTF development activities at its new Vancouver headquarters and opened a new facility next to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US.