Canada’s General Fusion has begun trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol GFUZ, following completion of business combination with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III announced in January, to become the first publicly listed fusion company.
General Fusion secured a committed private investment in public equity (PIPE) in the range of $105-108m, which was oversubscribed. In addition, the company had access to some $230m in Spring Valley’s trust capital. As a result, General Fusion entered public markets with approximately $150m in cash to advance its technology.
This capital is expected to fund General Fusion’s Lawson programme through several key technical milestones, which the Company aims to complete in 2028, with the goal of demonstrating and de-risking its Magnetised Target Fusion (MTF) technology in a commercially relevant way. Proceeds from the transaction will fully fund its Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) MTF demonstration facility, which is operating at the company’s headquarters near Vancouver.
MTF technology is based on the concept of an enclosed, liquid-metal vortex. Plasma is injected into the centre of the vortex before numerous pistons hammer on the outside of the enclosure, compressing the plasma and sparking a fusion reaction, with the resulting heat being absorbed by the liquid metal. MTF aims to achieve fusion in a practical and economical way, avoiding superconducting magnets and high-powered lasers while enabling the use of existing materials for durable machines.
“At General Fusion, we are dedicated to our vision of bringing practical, clean, and abundant fusion energy to the world,” said Greg Twinney, Chief Executive Officer of General Fusion. “We bring more than 20 years of real-world testing, demonstration, and results to the development of commercial fusion energy. We are excited about this next chapter and grateful to Spring Valley and our shareholders for joining us in our commitment to this mission.”
Over the past two decades, General Fusion has built and operated dozens of testbeds, prototypes, and demonstrations, completing more than 200,000 plasma experiments and culminating in LM26. General Fusion recently announced significant progress toward its next major technical milestone with LM26 – 1 keV electron temperature.
General Fusion has achieved a critical temperature milestone by heating its plasma to an electron temperature of 0.72 keV (approximately 8.4m degrees Celsius) via mechanical compression alone. This represents a more than threefold increase in plasma temperature and brings the company within striking distance of its target.
Following the 1 keV baseline, the LM26 programme is sequentially engineered to reach a 10 keV (100m degrees Celsius) threshold, eventually aiming for full Lawson criterion conditions to prove net fusion energy output at a commercial scale.
The Lawson criterion, first formulated by British engineer and physicist JD Lawson in 1955, is the fundamental mathematical rule in physics used to determine when a nuclear fusion reactor will reach ignition – the point where the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining because the heating generated by the fusion process exceeds all energy losses. It dictates that a fusion plasma must simultaneously maintain a specific minimum density, temperature, and confinement duration to achieve net energy output.
