Hi, everyone. I'm George Giannikas, one of Canaccord Genuity, sustainability analysts. Thank you to everyone for joining our 46th annual growth conference, our CGGC. We're very excited to have with us today Megan Wilson from General Fusion, Chief Strategy Officer. Fusion is incredibly exciting and potentially world-changing. No pressure, Megan. Please tell us all about your company.
Okay. Thank you, George. I don't know if I'm short or sitting or standing, so I'm going to stand so you can see me, and I can move around. Thank you all for joining us. George, thank you to Canaccord for hosting us. Before I jump in I will of course, say this presentation includes forward-looking statements and refer you to our disclosures regarding forward-looking statements and risk factors on file with the SEC. Okay. As George said, my name's Megan Wilson. I'm General Fusion's Chief Strategy Officer, and I want to introduce myself first before introducing General Fusion to actually help you understand the company and what we're about. I am an engineer by training. I've spent my career in nuclear power and commercial power generation.
Started out as a U.S. Navy nuclear officer operating fission reactors at sea, then spent about 15 years in the power industry working on both nuclear and non-nuclear technologies in the public market space. I am basically, fundamentally, a fission geek. For those of you who follow the nuclear space and everything happening in nuclear, I have spent my career supporting and advancing fission. For a very long time, I was a fusion skeptic. I'll talk a little bit about the differences, but I'm sure all of you have some idea as to what fusion is or you have watched "Spider-Man" or "Back to the Future" and have some ideas. A fusion skeptic. It was not until I came to know General Fusion and the company's approach and specific technology that I became convinced that practical fusion power is possible.
That is why I left my prior role and came to General Fusion about four years ago. I'm responsible for our long-term strategy development and all of our external relations, including strategic partnerships. At the most fundamental level, we all understand that there is huge global demand for clean, reliable, affordable power, and that is the market we are focused on. I'll explain this in more detail, but at General Fusion, from the beginning, and we've been around for 24 years, our focus is on taking an engineering approach to fusion. Practical fusion power, not a science experiment. That's what we're about. The last 24 years have resulted in a really extensive patent portfolio and a great competitive moat, as well as real fusion results from building real fusion machines. Today, we are operating a demonstration machine at our headquarters in Vancouver. Come visit.
We love visitors. That is operating at a commercially relevant scale and aiming for some really transformative technical milestones between now and 2028. We are doing it with some really great partners that I will talk about. We have got great backers from both investors and the government, in particular the Canadian government where we are based, and a fantastic team not only of all the geniuses you would expect, like plasma physicists but also a very entrepreneurial management team, including our CEO, Greg Twinney, who has taken multiple technology companies either to the public markets through IPOs or major acquisitions and so on. As I mentioned, we were founded in 2002. We believe we are aiming for a trillion-dollar market in the future, and I will explain that a bit more in a second.
To date, we have raised, including our most recent PIPE as we entered the public market and started listing on the NASDAQ about a month ago, about CAD 543 million. CAD 100 million of that has come from the Canadian government. Fusion is a national asset and is growing to be a strategic priority for governments around the world, and Canada is no exception to that. You can also see, I will not go through all of them, but all of the investors who have helped us along our journey to get where we are today, starting from friends and family and VCs, all the way through institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds and so on. I mentioned this is a trillion-dollar market. Why is this potentially a trillion-dollar market? I like to say that fusion has all the benefits of nuclear fission, but without the downside.
What that means is just like what you think of as nuclear power in terms of clean, reliable, base load power, it has got that going for it. But without the long-lived radioactive waste that needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years, without the safety and security concerns related to chain reaction or terror attack and so on, all means that this is a significant potential for a much larger market because it is technology that can be deployed close to the power demand without huge footprint, in a really flexible way, and also has significant cost competitive advantages as well.
The industry as a whole is at a point today where the science has been progressing for decades at this point, very quietly, while most of the world has not been paying attention, and has now moved past an inflection point where the technology has moved out of national labs, government facilities, and so on, and into a really robust industry. While General Fusion is the first and currently only publicly listed fusion company, there is a very healthy industry of more than 60 private fusion companies out there today. A lot of that work is supported by the growth of enabling technologies that are accelerating the momentum of the industry, as you would expect, supercomputing, AI, 3D printing, digital controls, and so on.
At the same time, the regulatory environment is keeping pace as we see governments, including the U.S., develop regulatory frameworks for fusion that recognize these advantages compared to fission. The regulatory environment is really important because ultimately that affects that addressable market. Including the burden, the cost burden that comes with keeping a fission plant safe. You do not have to worry about those costs with fusion. As we think about that cost competitiveness for fusion in general fusion is much more dense than fission. It has got a smaller footprint. You generate less waste. You have that lower regulatory burden and lower fuel costs, all leads to more competitive costs. In particular, at General Fusion, because of our uniquely practical approach, we believe that we can be cost competitive with, I would say the most competitive end of SMR LCOE on an Nth-of-a-kind basis in the future.
But we have some work to get there. Let me talk about the technology. I will give a little fusion lesson just to give you a framework for understanding our differentiation. But let us start actually with fission so everyone is on the same page if you are not familiar with nuclear in general. Fission, if you are not familiar with it is basically you are taking an atom and you are hitting it with a neutron, you split it, and you get another neutron, and you get some really highly radioactive byproducts. That is the nasty stuff that comes out of fission. Fusion is a completely different atomic process. You are taking two atoms and you are making them combine, and you also, just like fission get a neutron, but instead of those highly radioactive byproducts you get helium.
So you end up with the same thing, energy in the form of neutrons, but instead of those highly radioactive byproducts, helium. Party balloons. So fundamentally different at the atomic level. We see this happen every day. You look at the sun, you look at the stars, that is fusion happening. But to make it here on Earth, we have to do a few things. We have to first create a plasma. That is just a special hot cloud of ionized gas. We have to put it in a special environment that forces those atoms to fuse. That is what we need for fusion science. Then to make a power plant, we have to do it in a way that we can capture the energy, put it to work to make electricity. And academia and government facilities have been focused on the first two steps, make the fusion happen for decades.
General Fusion is focused on all four. This is where we come in. Do it in a way where you can capture the energy and put it to work. Okay. Like I said, a lot of companies out there pursuing fusion, a lot of different technologies. I cannot go through all of them. But we are all working with just a few levers. Really, we make that plasma, and then it is what do you do with it? Traditional approaches have either focused on let us use really, really strong magnetic fields and these big superconducting magnets to make that plasma hold its energy a really long time, then the fusion will happen. Or on the other end of the spectrum, let us focus on increasing its density. And to do that, we are going to use these huge football fields' worth of lasers and crush that plasma.
So it is either make it hold its energy a long time or increase its density to extreme levels. Really great for science, not so great for a power plant to have huge fields of superconducting magnets or lasers. General Fusion's approach, magnetized target fusion, is designed to operate in a sweet spot between those two extremes. We take a little bit from the magnet guys and a little bit from the laser guys, but we do it without magnets and without lasers in a completely mechanical way to make the same fusion happen, just in a different way that translates to a power plant. How this works, and I am going to use my hands, so bear with me. This is really what we call the diesel engine of fusion.
If you think about a diesel engine, you are injecting the fuel and compressing it, okay, in a combustion chamber. First we form our compression chamber. We have basically a vat full of liquid metal. We spin that vat, that liquid metal moves outward, and we form a hollow cylinder of liquid metal. That is our compression chamber. At the top of the machine, we form our fuel, our plasma. We form that plasma, we inject it into the compression chamber, then we use an array of pistons, not lasers, pistons, to compress that liquid metal, squeeze the plasma, increase its density, encase it, four pi coverage, completely encase that plasma, make the fusion happen. The neutrons, the energy radiate outward into that liquid metal. And the whole thing resets and repeats once per second 1 Hz . Just like a diesel engine.
Why do we want to do it that way? I said in my intro, fission geek, fusion skeptic, didn't think fusion could ever be a practical power technology. This is what convinced me about General Fusion's approach and the possibility of practical fusion power summed up on one slide. There are really four challenges to commercializing fusion. The neutrons from fusion destroy the machine. It is kind of a problem if you have to rebuild your machine every year or so. The fuel we are using, tritium, doesn't exist on Earth. You have got to breed it. There is no practical way to capture that energy if you are in the middle of 500 lasers and magnets and everything else and put it to work. And all of those not-yet commercial technologies add up to, we think, tremendous cost for fusion power. How do you address that?
That liquid metal wall, I talked about that makes the fusion happen is designed to address all of these challenges. And does so in, I believe, a very elegant way. First, that liquid metal captures all those neutrons, protects the machine. We can build it with existing stainless steel alloys. Very practical. Build a power plant that lasts 40 years plus . It also breeds the fuel. The neutrons interact with lithium in the metal. You make the tritium and become self-sustaining from a fuel perspective on site at the power plant. The liquid metal also, because it captures all those neutrons, captures all the energy. You can run a loop to a heat exchanger, produce steam, turn a turbine, make electricity in a very practical way. And again, no big magnets, no lasers, using existing materials. All adds up, we believe, to a cost-competitive LCOE, as I showed you.
This is why General Fusion, to me. This is General Fusion's value proposition. Practical fusion power in a way that translates to a power plant. What have we done? All sounds great, but what have we actually demonstrated? General Fusion has been at this for 24 years. We have built, over the years, a number of fusion machines, prototypes, testbeds, demonstrations. When you boil it all together, we have checked three really big boxes. We have demonstrated that we can achieve a stable fusion process with magnetized target fusion. We can compress a plasma with a metal wall and see the fusion yield as you would expect. See the neutrons go up and to the right as you're aiming for at small scale. Then we scaled up at the system level, right? Two key systems.
Make the fuel and inject it, make that liquid wall and compress it. We've demonstrated both of those technologies and shown that we can achieve the performance of those systems that we need at commercially relevant scale. Now we have taken everything we've learned, and I should say, in the fusion industry, publishing results and putting them through the scrutiny of peer review is very important. All of these results have been published and peer-reviewed. It makes us one of only four fusion companies in the world to have published peer-reviewed meaningful fusion results. We put it all together into a machine we call LM26. This machine's operating today. As I said, please come see it. We are compressing plasmas at about 50% commercial scale, and we recently put out some early results from that program.
Well on our way to our first meaningful technical milestone that we're aiming for, which is achieving heating of a plasma through mechanical compression to 10 million degrees Celsius. After that, we'll be aiming for 100 million degrees, and then ultimately, we aim to be the first company not government entity, company to have achieved what we call the Lawson Criterion. Which is the conditions in a plasma where you can get more energy out of the plasma than put into it. That machine is up and operating and working through this demonstration program. If we put it all together. Okay, that sounds great. How do we get from there to a power plant? We have what we call a three-pronged approach to commercialization. The LM26 program is well underway.
We entered the public markets with about CAD 150 million in cash, and that fully funds the LM26 program, we believe, through its completion and those really meaningful milestones. The next step in the program is to what we call our commercial systems demonstration program. The engineering around the systems that wrap around the fusion. These are seals and valves and heat exchange systems, pulse power and so on, which we can then integrate into the final design for our first-of-a-kind plant, which we aim to have operating in the 2035 timeframe. I will wrap up by saying that we are not doing this alone. We work with a number of partners, both on the technology development side as well as on the commercial side. We also have what we call a market development advisory committee.
This is a group of potential early adopters who have signed agreements with General Fusion to work with us on our technology development roadmap and our commercialization efforts. From my perspective, they're very important to keep us within the guardrails of what does a customer need in terms of a practical solution. What can they permit, finance, own, operate, maintain? It's a very important group to us. We are working with a subset of this group now on potential siting for that first-of-a-kind plant. We separately have an MOU with Bruce Power in Canada to evaluate a potential power plant in Ontario, and most recently announced a framework agreement with Renexia, an energy developer to advance and develop potential magnetized target fusion power plants in Italy. I will, looking at the clock go to our roundup slide and say, happy to answer any questions.
Ask a lot of questions so he doesn't ask me a riddle.
Well, I'm going to sit here and ask you a few. The riddle will come at the end.
Oh, they don't get to ask questions?
Well, they do. Well, you know what? Let's open up to the audience. Any questions from the audience before I start?
Do you have any plan to monetize or commercialize any of the neutron breeding aspects of the fusion generator?
Was that any of the neutron breeding or the-
Correct.
Tritium breeding? There are a number of companies in the industry who are looking at secondary markets for earlier revenue, which is interesting, in the medical isotope arena and so on. That's not currently our plan. I skipped right over it. We have a really healthy patent portfolio, more than 210 patents and patents pending. With, I would say wide applications across not only fusion, but acoustics, compression, diagnostics. There's a lot there. Right now, we are very focused on pursuing and developing our power plant technology, and we'll see as opportunities present themselves whether there are other opportunities.
I will say that in terms of fuel breeding for fusion, tritium breeding, we have analysis from third parties, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, a great partner of ours, that supports our conclusion that we can produce 50% more fuel than we consume on an ongoing basis with our technology, which we believe is significant. Our LCOE calculations don't incorporate anything like tritium sales or any other sort of secondary revenue from the technology. But, we'll keep our ears open for opportunities.
Actually, I want to ask a question on that. But the neutrons you're generating in this scenario that you've laid out are actually being used to breed fuel, right? So are there spare neutrons, so to speak, through which you could generate revenue outside of that?
Within the power plant technology, no. The neutrons represent the energy from the fusion process. And you're right, because we've built in the lithium wall, the neutron hits the lithium, breeds the tritium.
Exactly.
The whole goal of that system is to not have any neutrons-
Exactly
Going past that liquid wall to attenuate them and therefore have the plant avoid any neutron damage. So applications that are generating neutrons for other purposes take a slightly different approach. But I will say we have a significant body of knowledge and knowhow in terms of producing neutrons through fusion.
So there could be like a hybrid machine or something like that that isn't necessarily geared for them. Okay, I understand. Yep. Okay, I'll stop. So maybe one question that we get asked often is about fusion broadly, that people have been working on this problem for a very long time. Just recently read a book that talks about that. Why now? The company has been at it for 20 years. Why is now the inflection point that we should start to see accelerating progress and bringing fusion power to life?
Yeah, it's a great question, and I do get that question a lot. You're right. The industry and academia and government have been working to develop fusion pretty much as long as fission. After World War II, fission moved into commercial development. Almost immediately, the industry was working on fusion and didn't gain as much traction. But at the same time in the background, there has been steady progress, particularly in the understanding of plasma physics and the behavior of plasma under different environments. The approach we're taking, magnetized target fusion, I can't recall if I mentioned it, but was developed by the U.S.
Naval Research Laboratory in the 1970s under a program called the LINUS Program, to essentially take a more practical approach to fusion after 20 + years of those other approaches, and showed early promise, but they did not have, we did not have the enabling technologies that we have today. I think I mentioned before, the supercomputing, digital controls, AI, 3D printing, all of that, I think has really come together to accelerate the learning process for fusion technology development and really change what we can do in terms of increasing the pace. At the same time, in any industry, any technology development, you can see it can be slow and then start taking off. I think the capital that has been raised in the industry is an indicator of where the technology is today.
But as you saw, we still have a fair amount of work to do. But at General Fusion, that has really been backed by actual results with physical machines, which we believe is important for anyone in the industry to demonstrate beyond modeling and AI, but actually in the physical world that you can achieve fusion results.
So one thing that you addressed in the presentation as well is reaching 100% Lawson, which basically means generating more energy than you put into solving the problem of fusion. But there is actually another level, which means engineering breakeven. Which is the whole point, I think.
Yes.
Why is General Fusion uniquely geared to solve the engineering breakeven problem as opposed to just the Lawson problem?
Yeah, maybe a little vocabulary lesson if we've got a minute left. You hear a lot in the industry about scientific breakeven or Q or Q greater than one. The National Ignition Facility in California achieved the Lawson Criterion scientific breakeven back in 2022. That's the conditions where you can get more energy out of the plasma than you put into the plasma. It's measuring net energy at the boundary of the plasma. But to your point, George, it's not counting all the power across the whole plant. We're aiming for the Lawson Criterion with our current demonstration machine, but absolutely a power plant requires that you achieve what we call engineering breakeven, net energy across the power plant. One of our machines is intended to be 150 MW.
Because our approach is so practical, because we are using a very traditional steam-driven power plant. Because we're not using superconducting magnets or those high-powered lasers, we believe we have an efficiency advantage as compared to other more traditional types of fusion technology to get from the Lawson Criterion to engineering breakeven. Meaning, the number of multiples above Lawson that you need to achieve, we believe will be lower than for some of those others. But there's still as I said, work to do to get there.
Right. Some of the others talk about getting to, I think, 15 - 20 Lawson. Is yours significantly below that?
I would say it's materially less than that.
Materially less than that. Okay. I think we're up. One more question. I think we have one left.
What's the difference between your technology and pulsed fusion, like something by Helion, which is supposed to have electrons out in a couple of years?
I think if everyone couldn't hear that, the question is difference with our technology and pulsed fusion like Helion. Okay. I talked about there are two bookends. There's the magnet guys and the laser guys. We are a pulsed approach, Helion also a pulsed approach. I won't get into their technology. There are a number of companies who are pursuing more innovative novel approaches, many of which are pulsed. The difference between, say, their technology or other technologies also pursuing pulsed approaches is really the mechanism I talked about before in terms of avoiding the neutron damage, inherently breeding the fuel, having an efficient way to capture the energy, and doing it at low cost. Helion, as an example is planning to use a more novel fuel, helium-3, which does not naturally exist on Earth, but can be found on the Moon.
That is targeting, like us addressing the neutron damage, which our liquid metal addresses, but it has some trade-offs, right? It fuses at much higher temperatures, so they've got to achieve higher temperatures and so on. I think the industry broadly has recognized that those four challenges need to be addressed, neutron damage, fuel production, energy extraction, cost. There are others pursuing other ways to do it. We believe we are addressing them the most comprehensively and in the most practical way.
I was doing riddles this weekend with my daughters, and as an addition to our conference firesides, I've decided to ask riddles of the audience and Megan, you're welcome to participate, and whoever gets the riddle right first gets a CG Hydro Flask a very beautiful water-carrying device. Here's the riddle. Where does today come before yesterday? Where does today come before yesterday? Correct. Nice job.
Perfect. All right. Thank you so much. That was.