Thank you very much. It's an honour to be here today.
I would like to thank the members of the committee for the opportunity to discuss fusion energy.
I've provided a set of slides, which I am going to speak to. I wanted to start by just reminding people what fusion is.
The first slide talks about the fusion technology. Fusion is the energy source that the universe really runs on. It's the energy source of the stars and the sun. It's a process where, at very high temperatures and pressures, atoms are forced together and fused into other atoms. And on earth, what we would be doing to create energy from fusion is to fuse atoms of hydrogen. Now, that takes a temperature of about 150 million degrees. These are extreme conditions, and so this is a very difficult technology. The benefit is that a tremendous amount of energy can be produced. From those atoms of hydrogen, one kilogram of fusion fuel produces the same amount of energy as roughly 10,000 tonnes of coal. You could imagine building a power plant and putting the fuel source in a small room onsite and allowing it to run for 30 years.
Not only that, but it's a zero C02 source of energy. The reactors would run on demand, and the fuel source is abundant. We can extract the fuel source from sea-water, and there's enough on earth to run for hundreds of millions of years. This is an energy source that really will last for all of humanity.
Fusion R and D has been going on around the world for decades now, a lot of that led by national governments. More recently there's been a tremendous amount of progress, and I wanted to highlight some of that on the next slide. Not only is a multinational project called Iter under construction in the south of France, but we've also seen major facilities either under construction or commissioned or hitting important results in Japan; in Germany with the Wendelstein stellarator that was recently commissioned; in the United States at the national labs in Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There are big investments being made around the world in this sector. I haven't even talked about the Chinese, who actually have fusion as a core element of their energy road map.
More importantly, what's new in fusion is the advent of private sector companies like my own, which is General Fusion. Science magazine, a science journal, a couple of years ago called us “Fusion's restless pioneers”, in that this is a group of entrepreneurs that have come together to look for more practical paths to fusion, not only more practical but more economically viable, and most importantly, that will achieve fusion energy commercially sooner.
In the United States, in Europe, and in the U.K., we've seen these companies attract tens of, even hundreds of, millions of dollars in private capital. Here in Canada, General Fusion is actually the second largest of these companies in the world. I'm proud about what we've done.
Here's a little bit about General Fusion. We're 65 people based in Burnaby, British Columbia. We've secured over $100 million in private capital since 2009. Investors in General Fusion include venture capital firms in Canada, in the United States, and in Europe and a sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia. Also highlighted are technology leaders such as Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon and a member of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition; and Cenovus Energy, Canada's oil and gas company, which has invested in General Fusion because of the opportunities that fusion energy could provide not only in terms of an energy source for the world but also as a heat source in the long run in Canada's oil and gas industry.
We're also proud to be supported by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. I would highlight that we are 65 employees, more than 50 of whom are in R and D. General Fusion is one of Canada's largest, if not the largest, R and D investor from the private sector in the nuclear industry in Canada.
Questions have been asked in previous sessions about what we have been doing to build awareness about what this technology is, and I wanted to highlight some of the recognition that General Fusion has received.
In the last few years, General Fusion has been highlighted everywhere from the cover of Time magazine, to this most recent month's Scientific American, to a TED talk that has received over a million views to date, to BBC World Service, to the Vancouver Sun, to The New York Times, and so on. And in the last two years, General Fusion has been named to the Global Cleantech 100. This is the first time that any nuclear company was named to the Global Cleantech 100, and we are one of the few Canadian companies on that list.
I also wanted to talk to you today about a document that we in the fusion research community in Canada have put together. This “Fusion 2030” document has been submitted to the committee. I understand it's being translated. It's a joint initiative of the fusion research community across Canada.
Not only General Fusion but also research groups in Alberta and Saskatchewan have been important leaders, and we've had contributions from people in Ontario and Quebec as well.
It's an initiative that proposes how we can position Canada to support the development and deployment of a demonstration fusion power plant by 2030. It proposes a staged program, the first part of which is an investment in renewing Canada's research capacity.
Unfortunately, Canada is the only industrialized country without a national fusion program, and we haven't had one for about 20 years. In that period of time, what we've seen is a decay of the research infrastructure in fusion R and D in Canada. Programs such as the plasma physics program at the University of British Columbia, from which our founder got his Ph.D., no longer exists. That means we're not training the graduates that a company like General Fusion needs. It means the research partners within Canada that a company like General Fusion needs don't exist, so we turn to recruit internationally and to partner internationally. That's a missed opportunity for Canada. Not only that; when there are successes in this technology around the world, we don't have the domestic researchers who can collaborate with those people externally and bring and take advantage of that technology.
The reason everybody else is investing around the world is not only because this is a game-changing energy source that could make a massive difference when it comes to global climate change and energy poverty, but it's also because fusion R and D impacts many fields. The superconducting technology that was developed for fusion research is what is in your MRI machines. Plasma physics has a tremendous impact on the semiconductor industry. Fusion has been one of the leaders in the development of scientific computing, a field that is touching everything now, from computational biology, to material science, to physics, to chemistry. Advances in fusion are pushing lasers, photonics, nanotechnology sensors, and robotics.
The reason other countries make big investments in fusion is also because it's a cornerstone of their R and D and innovation strategy. Again, this is something that we feel strongly needs to be a part of Canada's strategy.
I'd be happy to answer questions from you about what we've put together as a community, and I look forward to the discussion.
Thank you.