Magnetized target fusion technology is seen in this undated handout photo.
(Source: General Fusion)
Scott Miller
CTV News London Videographer
Published Feb. 3, 2022
The joke in the scientific world is that fusion energy is 20 years away, and always will be. Well, Jay Brister from General Fusion says otherwise.
“I like to tell people fusion is getting much more tangible than it ever has,” says Brister, the chief business development officer with the B.C.-based fusion development company.
General Fusion has joined forces with the Port Elgin, Ont.-based Nuclear Innovation Institute and Ontario’s largest nuclear plant, Bruce Power, to work towards advancing fusion-based electricity and possibly building a fusion power plant in Ontario.
“If there was an area in Ontario that would be a potential candidate for it, the Bruce Power site would be at the top of that list,” says Bruce Power’s Chief Development Officer James Scongack.
Bruce Power’s CANDU reactors harness the powers of 'fission,' splitting one atom into two, to power their nuclear fleet.
'Fusion,' which unleashes the power of combining two atoms into one, has not yet been harnessed commercially to produce electricity, -- until now, says General Fusion.
The company is about to build a fusion demonstration plant in the United Kingdom, with operations to begin in three years' time.
“That will bring us to the point that we’re ready to put a shovel in the ground by the end of this decade on the first fusion power plant, with operations anticipated in the early 2030s,” says Brister.
And if all goes according to plan, that first fusion plant could be built at or near the Bruce Power site.
“A lot of the attributes that we have for a nuclear site would make sense for a fusion site. It’s a secure site, there are utilities, support services, technical staff, not to mention the 60+ clean energy companies that are in the tri-county (Bruce, Grey, Huron) region,” says Scongack.
Hold your horses, says University of British Columbia professor and nuclear power researcher, Dr. M.V. Ramana.
He doesn’t believe fusion energy will be commercially feasible for many, many decades, if ever.
“As of today, no experiment in the the world has actually produced more energy than has been put in, so we are far from even the point where we can contemplate fusion being a source of energy,” he says.
That isn’t dulling the excitement at General Fusion or Bruce Power, who believe fusion energy could be part of the answer to our future carbon-free energy needs.
“To tackle net zero we need massive volumes of clean power, so that allows us to say, 'Let’s put every tool in the tool box on the table to tackle this problem,'” says Scongack.
Scott Miller
CTV News London Videographer
Published Feb. 3, 2022
The joke in the scientific world is that fusion energy is 20 years away, and always will be. Well, Jay Brister from General Fusion says otherwise.
“I like to tell people fusion is getting much more tangible than it ever has,” says Brister, the chief business development officer with the B.C.-based fusion development company.
General Fusion has joined forces with the Port Elgin, Ont.-based Nuclear Innovation Institute and Ontario’s largest nuclear plant, Bruce Power, to work towards advancing fusion-based electricity and possibly building a fusion power plant in Ontario.
“If there was an area in Ontario that would be a potential candidate for it, the Bruce Power site would be at the top of that list,” says Bruce Power’s Chief Development Officer James Scongack.
Bruce Power’s CANDU reactors harness the powers of 'fission,' splitting one atom into two, to power their nuclear fleet.
'Fusion,' which unleashes the power of combining two atoms into one, has not yet been harnessed commercially to produce electricity, -- until now, says General Fusion.
The company is about to build a fusion demonstration plant in the United Kingdom, with operations to begin in three years' time.
“That will bring us to the point that we’re ready to put a shovel in the ground by the end of this decade on the first fusion power plant, with operations anticipated in the early 2030s,” says Brister.
And if all goes according to plan, that first fusion plant could be built at or near the Bruce Power site.
“A lot of the attributes that we have for a nuclear site would make sense for a fusion site. It’s a secure site, there are utilities, support services, technical staff, not to mention the 60+ clean energy companies that are in the tri-county (Bruce, Grey, Huron) region,” says Scongack.
Hold your horses, says University of British Columbia professor and nuclear power researcher, Dr. M.V. Ramana.
He doesn’t believe fusion energy will be commercially feasible for many, many decades, if ever.
“As of today, no experiment in the the world has actually produced more energy than has been put in, so we are far from even the point where we can contemplate fusion being a source of energy,” he says.
That isn’t dulling the excitement at General Fusion or Bruce Power, who believe fusion energy could be part of the answer to our future carbon-free energy needs.
“To tackle net zero we need massive volumes of clean power, so that allows us to say, 'Let’s put every tool in the tool box on the table to tackle this problem,'” says Scongack.
Bruce Power is looking for its next act — and thinks fusion power might be it
ANALYSIS: The company that operates the world’s largest nuclear plant apparently won’t have enough on its plate in the 2030s, so it’s signed a deal with a Canadian fusion-power startup
By John Michael McGrath - Published on Feb 04, 2022
Bruce Power has signed an agreement with General Fusion to explore a possible commercial fusion power plant in Ontario. (Chuck Szmurlo/Wikimedia/CC BY 2.5)
Jay Brister has heard the joke before a million times: fusion power is 20 years away and has been for the last 50 years. It’s an occupational hazard for him, as the chief business development officer for General Fusion, a Burnaby, British Columbia-based company that’s been developing a novel approach to fusion power for 20 years. He’s able to laugh about it, although, these days, he’s trying to convince people that fusion isn’t some far-off prospect for the future — it’s now.
“We’ve been doing fusion research for over 70 years. And, from a science perspective, we know more today than we’ve ever known about plasma physics,” he says. “Add to that advanced manufacturing technologies that we didn’t have even a few years ago … we’re at a point now where it’s about to become a lot more tangible.”
Earlier this week, General Fusion signed an agreement with Bruce Power — the operators of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station on the shores of Lake Huron — to explore a possible commercial fusion power plant in Ontario. In this context, “now” doesn’t mean soon: if everything pans out, General Fusion and Bruce Power are eyeing a possible fusion plant sometime in the 2030s.
Bruce Power’s chief development officer, James Scongack, says the company will have its hands full with the ongoing work to refurbish the existing Bruce nuclear plant and extend its operating lifespan into the 2060s. But the refurb work will be done after this decade, and then Bruce will be looking to build on its current assets — the power plant itself, but also the network of suppliers and personnel that have been established in the region — to explore new opportunities.
Some of that work has already started: the Bruce’s reactors are now producing medically important radioactive isotopes, for example, and the company is looking at new technologies to help Ontario get to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Fusion is part of the long-term plan, too.
“The commonality with all of those things is that they are all highly technical fields — they require significant expertise — and that’s something we have here for 50 or 60 years,” says Scongack. “We’ve been working with General Fusion for some time; they’re doing great work, and they’re a great Canadian success story.”
It’s not just Bruce Power that’s betting on the potential for fusion power in the near future: a number of companies have landed huge investments from private capital on the promise of finally cracking a problem that scientists have been working on for over half a century.
Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $1.8 billion from investors like Bill Gates late last year;Helion Energy has announced up to $2.2 billion in investments (dependent on achieving certain milestones). For its part, General Fusion announced a successful $130 million funding round in November 2021.
Fusion’s proponents use superlatives like “unlimited clean energy” to describe its potential, and the scientific basis is clear enough: we know that nuclear fusion — combining light elements such as hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, instead of splitting heavy elements in conventional nuclear reactors — powers everything from the sun (benignly) to nuclear weapons (less so). Researchers have spent decades trying to generate a fusion reaction that is controlled, can be maintained, and generates more power than it takes to do both. So far, nobody has demonstrated that can be done on a commercial scale.
Critics have also argued that, even if fusion does turn out to be technically possible — which is still a big “if” — it may end up being so difficult and expensive that it will never produce power more cheaply than more conventional methods. Daniel Jassby, a former plasma physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, wrote in 2017 that, in his retirement, he’d come to take a more jaundiced view of the potential for fusion power. In particular, while fusion proponents say their reactors don’t produce nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods (as conventional nuclear reactors do), the power plants themselves will be subjected to intense radiation for their operating lives and could effectively be radioactive waste that would need to be decommissioned carefully and expensively at the end of their lives.
Those might be difficult or even impossible problems to solve. (Brister says that General Fusion’s design for a reactor will minimize the creation of radioactive-waste problems.) Alternatively, it’s possible that one of the competing designs for a fusion power plant could succeed but that General Fusion’s might not. General Fusion is confident enough in its approach that it’s leased space at the Vancouver International Airport to build a 70 per cent-scale version of what it believes will be a commercial-size plant. That should begin construction later this year and be in operation by 2025.
But then there are the problems technology can’t answer, which come from Ontario’s murky politics around electricity planning. Both the current government and its predecessor have, for example, ended up being rebuked by courts or tribunals for cancelling wind-power projects that have happened to conflict with political imperatives of the government of the day. So is General Fusion worried about spending time, energy, and money working in a province where energy planning can be so unpredictable?
“That landscape is a variable, I would say, that’s not unique to Ontario,” says Brister, charitably. He describes navigating political waters as just as much a part of getting a new project built as securing financing or proving the science and engineering.
Bruce County has hosted the current generating station for half a century, first as an Ontario Hydro station and since 2001 as Bruce Power — and, Brister says, with more than 20 years of experience navigating the political and regulatory space, the company can help General Fusion navigate the sometimes treacherous political and regulatory shoals here.
Scongack sees that as just another one of the assets that Bruce Power can bring to the table. “We’ve got the supply chain, we’ve got the workforce, and we’ve got the site. We believe if we’re going to tackle net-zero, we need to be open to all technologies.”
ANALYSIS: The company that operates the world’s largest nuclear plant apparently won’t have enough on its plate in the 2030s, so it’s signed a deal with a Canadian fusion-power startup
By John Michael McGrath - Published on Feb 04, 2022
Bruce Power has signed an agreement with General Fusion to explore a possible commercial fusion power plant in Ontario. (Chuck Szmurlo/Wikimedia/CC BY 2.5)
Jay Brister has heard the joke before a million times: fusion power is 20 years away and has been for the last 50 years. It’s an occupational hazard for him, as the chief business development officer for General Fusion, a Burnaby, British Columbia-based company that’s been developing a novel approach to fusion power for 20 years. He’s able to laugh about it, although, these days, he’s trying to convince people that fusion isn’t some far-off prospect for the future — it’s now.
“We’ve been doing fusion research for over 70 years. And, from a science perspective, we know more today than we’ve ever known about plasma physics,” he says. “Add to that advanced manufacturing technologies that we didn’t have even a few years ago … we’re at a point now where it’s about to become a lot more tangible.”
Earlier this week, General Fusion signed an agreement with Bruce Power — the operators of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station on the shores of Lake Huron — to explore a possible commercial fusion power plant in Ontario. In this context, “now” doesn’t mean soon: if everything pans out, General Fusion and Bruce Power are eyeing a possible fusion plant sometime in the 2030s.
Bruce Power’s chief development officer, James Scongack, says the company will have its hands full with the ongoing work to refurbish the existing Bruce nuclear plant and extend its operating lifespan into the 2060s. But the refurb work will be done after this decade, and then Bruce will be looking to build on its current assets — the power plant itself, but also the network of suppliers and personnel that have been established in the region — to explore new opportunities.
Some of that work has already started: the Bruce’s reactors are now producing medically important radioactive isotopes, for example, and the company is looking at new technologies to help Ontario get to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Fusion is part of the long-term plan, too.
“The commonality with all of those things is that they are all highly technical fields — they require significant expertise — and that’s something we have here for 50 or 60 years,” says Scongack. “We’ve been working with General Fusion for some time; they’re doing great work, and they’re a great Canadian success story.”
It’s not just Bruce Power that’s betting on the potential for fusion power in the near future: a number of companies have landed huge investments from private capital on the promise of finally cracking a problem that scientists have been working on for over half a century.
Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $1.8 billion from investors like Bill Gates late last year;Helion Energy has announced up to $2.2 billion in investments (dependent on achieving certain milestones). For its part, General Fusion announced a successful $130 million funding round in November 2021.
Fusion’s proponents use superlatives like “unlimited clean energy” to describe its potential, and the scientific basis is clear enough: we know that nuclear fusion — combining light elements such as hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, instead of splitting heavy elements in conventional nuclear reactors — powers everything from the sun (benignly) to nuclear weapons (less so). Researchers have spent decades trying to generate a fusion reaction that is controlled, can be maintained, and generates more power than it takes to do both. So far, nobody has demonstrated that can be done on a commercial scale.
Critics have also argued that, even if fusion does turn out to be technically possible — which is still a big “if” — it may end up being so difficult and expensive that it will never produce power more cheaply than more conventional methods. Daniel Jassby, a former plasma physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, wrote in 2017 that, in his retirement, he’d come to take a more jaundiced view of the potential for fusion power. In particular, while fusion proponents say their reactors don’t produce nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods (as conventional nuclear reactors do), the power plants themselves will be subjected to intense radiation for their operating lives and could effectively be radioactive waste that would need to be decommissioned carefully and expensively at the end of their lives.
Those might be difficult or even impossible problems to solve. (Brister says that General Fusion’s design for a reactor will minimize the creation of radioactive-waste problems.) Alternatively, it’s possible that one of the competing designs for a fusion power plant could succeed but that General Fusion’s might not. General Fusion is confident enough in its approach that it’s leased space at the Vancouver International Airport to build a 70 per cent-scale version of what it believes will be a commercial-size plant. That should begin construction later this year and be in operation by 2025.
But then there are the problems technology can’t answer, which come from Ontario’s murky politics around electricity planning. Both the current government and its predecessor have, for example, ended up being rebuked by courts or tribunals for cancelling wind-power projects that have happened to conflict with political imperatives of the government of the day. So is General Fusion worried about spending time, energy, and money working in a province where energy planning can be so unpredictable?
“That landscape is a variable, I would say, that’s not unique to Ontario,” says Brister, charitably. He describes navigating political waters as just as much a part of getting a new project built as securing financing or proving the science and engineering.
Bruce County has hosted the current generating station for half a century, first as an Ontario Hydro station and since 2001 as Bruce Power — and, Brister says, with more than 20 years of experience navigating the political and regulatory space, the company can help General Fusion navigate the sometimes treacherous political and regulatory shoals here.
Scongack sees that as just another one of the assets that Bruce Power can bring to the table. “We’ve got the supply chain, we’ve got the workforce, and we’ve got the site. We believe if we’re going to tackle net-zero, we need to be open to all technologies.”
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