Canadian Start-up’s Pathway To a Zero Emission Grid

Recognition highlights the company's progress toward commercial fusion energy as it advances plans to become a public company

“Being named TIME’s top GreenTech company of 2026 is a testament to the incredible work of our team and a recognition of our innovative approach to transforming the world’s energy supply through fusion energy. For more than 20 years, we have been building and proving our technology. That experience has led to LM26, our world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration machine, now in operation. We’re on the path to industry-defining technical milestones to deliver practical fusion power in the next decade.”

– Greg Twinney, CEO General Fusion

 As energy demand rises around the world, in part due to new data centers and widespread use of AI, greentech and climatetech are gaining investment, according to analysts at JP Morgan.

“Renewable energy has been increasing in capacity and decreasing in cost, helping meet the modern era’s energy new energy needs, and investors continue to seek solutions for stabilizing the grid and transforming outdated energy infrastructure. To highlight the companies driving the transition to a greener world, TIME partnered with data firm Statista on the second annual ranking of the World's Top GreenTech Companies, naming the 250 top performing companies that either develop or provide green technologies, products, or services that help mitigate or reverse the environmental impacts of human activity.” –TIME

Renewable energy companies—including companies using solar, wind, geothermal, fusion, or biomass to generate power; or creating infrastructure for clean energy production—make up 34% of the list. The top two companies, Canada-based General Fusion (no. 1) and Eavor (no. 2), both fall under this category.General Fusion is a nuclear energy startup specializing in a technique called magnetized target fusion that plans to go public on the U.S. stock exchange through a $1 billion SPAC deal in mid-2026.

What Does The TIME Award Mean?

 Selected from more than 8300 applicants worldwide, General Fusion was recognized by TIME and Statista Inc for the transformative potential of its technology which uniquely addresses critical barriers to practical fusion energy. Once commercialized fusion has the potential to be a long-term solution to rising electricity demand, energy security concerns and decarbonization goals.

What is Magnetized Target Fusion?

General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) is designed to solve significant barriers to commercializing fusion energy at a time when electricity demand is surging and nations around the world are racing to commercialize fusion power.

As a technology, MTF aims to achieve fusion in a practical way, avoiding superconducting magnets and high-powered lasers, while enabling the use of existing materials for durable machines that would produce cost effective energy.

In early 2025 General Fusion announced that it had designed, built and begun operating its world's first Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) fusion demonstration machine in under 2 years. LM26 is the first MTF demonstration machine to be built at a commercially relevant scale. It mechanically compresses plasma with a lithium liner at 50% commercial scale diameter.

The Next Milestone

The next major technical milestone is the innovative large-scale Magnetized Target Fusion ("MTF") machine, Lawson Machine 26 ("LM26"). The results show meaningful plasma heating to electron temperatures of approximately 8.4 million degrees Celsius or 0.72 keV, driven by the compression of a plasma with a lithium liner. This is a key indicator of success for the Company's uniquely practical approach to fusion energy.

These results are detailed in a technical paper being concurrently posted on General Fusion’s website and submitted for peer review. LM26 is the first MTF demonstration machine to be built at a commercially relevant scale, and it mechanically compresses plasma with a lithium liner. The Company’s next major targeted milestone with LM26 is 1 keV electron temperature.

Since it started operating in 2025, LM26 has completed a series of plasma compressions with results that advance the Company's groundbreaking technology. These results, detailed in the technical paper, include:

• Electron temperature of approximately 8.4 million degrees Celsius (0.72 keV +/- 0.08), which represents a more than 3 times increase in electron temperature during mechanical compression, largely due to plasma compressional heating. This is believed to be a unique result for General Fusion’s practical MTF approach, which uses a plasma solely heated by mechanical compression after it is formed. These results are supported by multiple diagnostics, including Thomson scattering and Absolute Extreme Ultraviolet (AXUV) systems.
• Significant plasma density and poloidal magnetic field increases during compression, both to 10 times starting values; these increases are similar to or better than results achieved in prior General Fusion test beds and at significantly larger scale.
• Plasma stability until deep into compression.
• No significant plasma contamination by the lithium liner during the stable compression phase.
• Observed increase in neutron yield during compression.

The Company believes these results validate the operating principles of the LM26 machine and lay the foundation for planned increases in starting plasma parameters that are expected to enable the mechanical compression of plasma to increasingly higher densities and temperatures. While these preliminary results undergo peer review for potential scientific journal publication, the Company intends to continue optimizing LM26 performance toward achieving 1 keV electron temperature, its first major targeted milestone.

“We are forging a new path in fusion with our uniquely practical MTF approach. The results announced today are all key indicators of real-world progress toward our targeted technical milestones with LM26,” said Greg Twinney, Chief Executive Officer at General Fusion. “I am grateful to our team for their unwavering dedication and expertise, as well as our collaborators at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, General Atomics, and others who have supported our diagnostic efforts with LM26.”

“The LM26 experiments have delivered an important validation of General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion approach," said Tony Donné, Chair of General Fusion’s Science and Technology Advisory Committee and former Chief Executive Officer of EUROfusion. “The observed increases in magnetic field, plasma density, and electron temperature during compression demonstrate substantial technical progress and are consistent with the expected behavior from modelling and simulations. The agreement between experiment and theory is particularly encouraging, as it provides confidence that the planned machine upgrades will enable access to even more demanding plasma conditions and bring the technology closer to its next major milestones.”

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