February 10, 2026 Canada is about to make history in the race for clean energy by taking a homegrown fusion start-up public — and with it, a $1-billion bet on an industrial-style reactor powered by pistons and liquid metal. Vancouver-based General Fusion is merging with U.S.-listed SPAC Spring Valley Acquisition Corp., positioning itself as the world’s first “pure play” fusion company on public markets.
The deal marks a strategic pivot for both Canada and the global energy transition. It combines private funding from a heavily subscribed €100 million round with up to €220 million in SPAC-held capital, giving General Fusion the financial firepower to complete its full-scale demonstration reactor, Lawson Machine 26 (LM26).
While most fusion research focuses on massive magnets or high-powered lasers, General Fusion is taking a distinctly mechanical path. Its LM26 machine uses synchronized pistons to compress a molten lithium sphere, forcing plasma to fuse and release energy, an approach known as magnetized target fusion (MTF).
This “steam-engine” approach to fusion makes LM26 feel more like a power plant prototype than a lab experiment. It is designed for repeatable operation and built close to commercial scale, giving the company a real-world platform to trial everything from thermal loads to plasma stability.
LM26’s roadmap focuses on crossing three major thresholds: 1 keV (forming and stabilizing the magnetized plasma core), 10 keV (the ignition temperature for efficient fusion reactions) and the Lawson criterion (a specific set of conditions where fusion output could exceed energy input).
If LM26 proves successful at this scale, it could push General Fusion closer to the elusive goal of net energy gain. Central to General Fusion’s design is a liquid-lithium shell that acts as both neutron shield and heat absorber. This dual-purpose innovation helps the system withstand the harsh fusion environment while also simplifying heat transfer to conventional turbines.
It also avoids a key flaw in magnetic fusion designs: solid components that become radioactive and brittle under repeated neutron bombardment. With no internal structures to degrade, General Fusion believes its reactors could be cheaper to operate and easier to maintain.
Going public via SPAC isn’t just a financial milestone. It is a high-risk, high-reward leap of faith. General Fusion is years from commercialization, and public investors are effectively backing the physics, the engineering and the timing. Still, the company’s industrial design philosophy and modular vision — reactors near data centres, industrial zones or urban grids — could prove attractive in a carbon-constrained future.
General Fusion joins a rising cohort of private fusion players including Helion Energy, backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
With electricity demand set to soar by up to 50 per cent by 2035, according to the IEA, the world needs more than just wind and solar. Fusion promises clean, always-on power in compact footprints, but only if the science can scale.
