Fluor Corporation has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Longview Fusion Energy Systems to be its engineering and construction partner in designing and planning laser fusion energy commercialisation.
The target chamber at the National Ignition Facility (Image: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
The MoU will see Fluor using its experience in developing and constructing large-scale facilities to provide the preliminary design and engineering support for the development of Longview's proposed fusion plant.
Longview's plan is for laser fusion power plants, with capacity of up to 1600 MW to provide electricity or industrial production of hydrogen fuel and other materials that can help to decarbonise heavy industry.
Ed Moses, CEO of Longview Fusion Energy Systems, said its plant design was based on the breakthrough work of USA's National Ignition Facility (NIF) in "showing the world's only experimental demonstration of fusion with energy gain" and "will combine modern, efficient lasers and a patented design to replicate these conditions several hundred times a minute - similar to the repetitive pulses in a car engine but delivering over one million horsepower".
Tom D’Agostino, group president of Fluor’s Mission Solutions business, said: "We look forward to working with Longview on the mission to demonstrate the feasibility of laser fusion technology and deliver it to the commercial market."
Longview's plan is to have a fusion pilot plant up and running in the "early 2030s". Moses, a former National Ignition Facility director, said on the day NIF announced its breakthrough in December that Longview had been "working quietly in anticipation of this day - we knew ... it would too late to begin to plan for full-scale commercialisation" at that stage so it had "been working with a broad partnership of US industry, utilities, academia, national labs, and strategic investors over the past 18 months to design a power plant based on the physics that has now been proven at the NIF".
