The Innovators: General Fusion is getting ready to demonstrate its limitless power

Credit: General Fusion

The world’s biggest plasma injector at General Fusion’s Burnaby HQ

The alternative energy firm from Burnaby has hired an architect to design its first nuclear fusion plant

Burnaby-headquartered General Fusion has achieved a few firsts in its decades-long quest to harness the as yet untapped power of nuclear fusion, such as building the world’s largest plasma injector. (Plasma is the ionized hydrogen gas that fuels the emission-free reaction, which is roughly the reverse of what happens in a conventional nuclear fission plant.) Already counting Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos among its backers, the company, now with 70-plus employees, accepted a further undisclosed sum from Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC Private, Maryland-based technology fund IBX and an unnamed Asian financial institution last July to help build its planned Fusion Demonstration Plant. The infusion of capital coincided with the elevation of longtime director Klaas de Boer, managing partner of the London-based Entrepreneurs Fund, to chair of the board. And in November the company announced that U.K. architecture firm AL_A would design the plant, to be built by Mississauga, Ont.-based Hatch at a location to be determined.

Credit: General Fusion 

Artist’s rendering of General Fusion’s planned demonstration plant