Meet the newly public, Bezos-backed company that’s recreating the sun and stars

Smashing nuclei together to generate energy has proved a lot more difficult than splitting the atom.

The first pure-play publicly traded company in pursuit of that goal, General Fusion, debuted on the Nasdaq on Monday as part of a SPAC merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp III.

The firm uses a hybrid approach called Magnetized Target Fusion (or more colorfully, steampunk) in which magnetism and shockwaves combine to generate intense heat and compress what are among the tiniest things in the universe.

CEO Greg Twinney spoke with Sherwood News from the Nasdaq during the stock’s first day of trading, calling fusion a “trillion dollar opportunity” with the potential to deliver “on-demand, clean, incredibly abundant energy.”

It’s something to dream on — and something that’s been dreamt on for a long time.

With $150 million in the bank, Twinney says that General Fusion has “the capital we need to hit those really important science milestones” with the goal of having a fusion power plant running by 2035.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Sherwood News: Off the top for those who might not be too familiar, uh, can you just describe where you think you are in terms of General Fusion generating commercially viable nuclear fusion energy? What have you achieved, and what’s your roadmap for progressing?

Greg Twinney: I think it all starts with the demand case, right? The world's entering an era of unprecedented energy demand. That's driven by AI, data centers, advanced manufacturing, electrification, industrial growth, all those things driving massive demand. And so the world needs more energy, and ideally that's clean, reliable, base load power. And that is what we are out to do is provide that clean, reliable, base load power with fusion. At General Fusion,  we've been at this for over two decades now and are a world leader on the path to commercialize fusion, put fusion power plants on the grid. And that's exciting. It's exciting for us, but it's also exciting to think about how the decades past with fusion have set us up now to move into ultimately a first of a kind as the major milestone in 2035. 

SN: One thing I noticed in some of your filing materials you put forward was the disclaimer that some of your growth depends on technology that has not yet been demonstrated or developed. Can you speak to what you need to get done? What are the incremental milestones that investors should be looking for?

GT: To create a fusion power plant, you need to almost recreate conditions similar to the sun and the stars. The sun and stars…that's fusion happening in front of our eyes. And so recreating those conditions inside a machine allows us at General Fusion to unlock all the potential of fusion. And the first major milestones for us based on, you know, the last 20 years of foundation are to achieve these fusion conditions using our unique approach to fusion.

And really, it's climbing a temperature curve up from industry accepted milestones of ours for 10 million degree temperatures inside the machine, the fuel, and then 100 million degrees, and then, the third major industry milestone, which we're aiming to achieve by 2028, is something called the Lawson Criterion, and that's this combination of temperature, fuel density, and time long enough to get enough fusion reactions that, the energy that could come out of that reaction would be equal to what went in to create it in the first place.

And so that's the first major set of science milestones. On the other side of that, building out repeatability, and some of the engineering components of, of our approach, we take a very engineering-centric approach to creating these fusion conditions. So we'll need to build out those pieces and then, finalize the design and, and have our first of a kind stood up in 2035.

SN: You’re probably tired of hearing this, but there’s the old joke that nuclear fusion is the energy of the future, and it always will be. What's changed about either the technology or the funding environment that’s bringing us closer to retiring that phrase, in your mind?

GT: I think that phrase comes from an era of national labs and academia working on fusion for many decades. And now what I can say is that the acceleration of the development and the advancement of the plasma physics of the demonstrations has accelerated an extraordinary amount, and that's because you've got private companies working on fusion now, and we're one of the world leaders in that regard.

And so the pace of development has increased significantly, and what's been achieved has been a demonstration of some of these really important fusion conditions in different science demonstrations, and it's now up to us — a company like us, General Fusion, that have a commercial design for creating those conditions — to recreate those conditions and then move this from a science project into commercialization.

SN: General Fusion is — as every headline will have it — Bezos-backed. What's his level of involvement, interest in the company, and the nature of that relationship?

GT: So I can't speak to all, all the details, but can say, he has been an investor in the company, and one of many of our investors. We've had sovereign wealth funds, other ultra high net worth individuals, VCs, et cetera, all part of the mix of the $400 million or so that we raised in the private markets to set ourselves up for where we are now, which is stepping into the public markets and now having a much broader set of investors, and deeper capital pool to be able to fund the go forward milestones.

SN: I believe you have about $150 million today, and one of the things I’ve seen you say about developing your technology is “We Build It to Prove It.” That sounds to me like a capex intensive exercise. So is $150 million enough to get where you want to go, or do you foresee that you'll be needing to take advantage of some of this deeper pool that public markets offer in order to continue to meet the roadmap you laid out?

GT: It's a good question. The $150 million of capital we're entering into the public markets with is the capital we need to hit those really important science milestones, the 10 million degrees, 100 million degrees, and those breakeven fusion conditions inside the machine. So that's the capital that will fully fund it. And why we have confidence, is that we've already built the machine. The machine's fully licensed. It's operating. It's compressing plasmas in the way that it needs to, and we're already progressing towards those milestones. And so a lot of the uncertainty around the costs is behind us now. And, and now it's all about using this $150 million to advance through those next set of milestones. 

SN: Let's fast-forward to a world in which you've hit these milestones and beyond, and you’ve successfully commercialized nuclear fusion energy.

What does this disrupt? What changes about the world? One thing that jumps to mind for me is, there’s been a lot of talk recently about data centers in space. If we have this energy source to tap into on Earth, are we really going to be needing to look to do that?

GT: Just imagine a world where we have on-demand, clean, incredibly abundant energy, in a way that nothing else provides at this point. That's why for decades, scientists have been pursuing fusion, and now we pick it up because the market opportunity for fusion is a trillion-dollar market opportunity, and being one of the first companies to get there, capture that market, and deliver is our goal.

SN: One thing you can offer some good insight into is the funding environment right now. Is AI sucking all of the oxygen out of the room? 

GT: If you think about the tailwinds for fusion, and they're threefold, right? You got this huge demand for energy, a desire to do that in a clean way, and this AI power crunch that's exasperating all of that. And those are the long-term tailwinds.

And the investors that have been a part of our journey recognize that those are long-term tailwinds. And the goal is to not just demonstrate fusion, but to capture those tailwinds by commercializing fusion. And that's been our goal from day one. And so even though there's a lot of capital flowing into these other areas, underneath all of that, we're still gonna need energy.

And that's the long game that creates this trillion-dollar market opportunity, starting with our first of a kind in 2035.

SN: So when's the last generation that didn't fight a war over access to energy? There’s a clear national security interest in terms of developing energy. In the US, there’s been a lot more of a muscular industrial policy — we’ve even seen Canadian-based critical minerals producers receive equity financing from the US government. And I know you have, you know, support from the Canadian government in terms of R&D funding from crown corps, federal and provincial governments, and partnership in the UK and with the US DOE. But would you like some more support form the US government, is that something you’d be advocating for?

GT: We work with governments all around the world actually, and we've had good support from the Canadian federal government on the financial side, but we have worked with the US DOE, won several awards there. We work with the UK, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, for example, on the science side. So we are a Canadian company, but operating globally because the market ultimately is global, and fusion energy will reorder how energy is produced globally. Some of the things that you just talked about, those challenges can be overcome with clean, safe, on-demand energy, and fusion can provide that in a way that fission and traditional nuclear can't.