5 Questions with... General Fusion
General Fusion featured in our ‘5 Questions With…’ interview in the March 2025 issue of the Fusion Energy Insights Quarterly.
Each issue we ask a founder or CEO of a private fusion company these 5 questions:
- What's your approach and how does it work?
- Why is it unique/what's the USP?
- What are your milestones to commercial fusion—where are you now and what is your timeline?
- How are you backed financially? What have you raised and how much do you estimate you will need to raise to achieve your goals?
- What are the key strategic partnerships that you have in place or in planning that will get you to commercial fusion?
Plus a couple of personal ones.
Here is a sneak-peek of some of the things General Fusion revealed.
1. What is the approach of General Fusion?
Our Magnetised Target Fusion (MTF) is the fusion equivalent of a diesel engine: practical, durable, and cost-effective.
When Dr. Michel Laberge founded General Fusion in 2002, he purposefully sought a practical method that overcame the barriers to commercialising fusion energy that didn’t rely on expensive superconducting magnets or high-powered lasers.
MTF was originally conceived in the 1970s. In many ways, it was an idea before its time. But since then, plasma physics has matured and modern supercomputers and advanced simulation allow us to understand, model and control the fusion plasma process. At the same time, General Fusion has been building testbeds, prototypes and demonstrations that have achieved real results to prove the viability of MTF. As a result – the time for MTF is now!
Here’s how it works: we inject hydrogen plasma (DT) into a liquid metal vessel formed inside our fusion machine. From there, an array of pistons compress and reshape the liquid metal vessel around the plasma, increasing the density and temperature of the plasma to fusion conditions – making fusion happen! It is a pulsed approach that repeats once per second in a commercial plant. The liquid metal wall of our vessel captures the energy of the neutrons, converts it to heat, and then carries it to a heat exchanger to create steam and ultimately produce electricity.
2. Why is General Fusion’s approach to fusion unique?
What sets General Fusion apart is that from the outset, our MTF approach was designed to overcome the known challenges of commercialising fusion, not just demonstrate the science. MTF is elegant and simplistic and uses a liquid lithium liner to perform many of the functions of a fusion machine: first wall, breeding blanket and heat transfer medium. General Fusion’s MTF sidesteps the four major barriers that other approaches will face when moving from demonstration to commercialisation. A General Fusion MTF power plant will produce economical fusion energy with a durable and reliable machine, sustainable fuel production and the means to extract and put that energy to work.
Leader Insight
Greg Twinney, CEO of General Fusion
How long have you been working in fusion?
I joined General Fusion five years ago. Prior to that, I spent about 20 years successfully building companies by taking disruptive technologies from concept to commercialisation. Throughout my career, I’ve worked closely with visionary technical founders, such as Dr. Michel Laberge, General Fusion’s founder and Chief Scientist, to turn transformative ideas into successful businesses. My expertise lies in assembling the right teams and resources to take complex innovations like fusion from concept to the lab and then scaling them for global commercial deployment.
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