First Light Fusion
🇬🇧 GB · Founded 2011 · Active
First Light Fusion is a British company founded in 2011 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford and based in Oxfordshire. Its approach to inertial fusion fires a projectile at very high speed at a target, where a patented structure it calls an amplifier focuses the impact onto the fuel; the IAEA's 2022 survey describes a gas gun launching projectiles at more than 6.5 km/s. In April 2022 it announced that it had produced fusion this way in November 2021, a result validated by the UK Atomic Energy Authority. In March 2025 it dropped plans to build its own power plant and turned to selling its amplifier technology and high-pressure testing to fusion and non-fusion customers. In September 2025 it launched FLARE, a design that combines compression with fast ignition.
- Sector
- Fusion
- Technology
- Projectile-driven
- Fuel
- Deuterium–tritium
- Role
- Fusion developer, Supplier
It is the operator of record for FIRST LIGHT (operating).
Terms
- Projectile-driven
- A physical projectile accelerated to extreme velocity compresses the fuel on impact. The main open problem is achieving symmetric compression from one, or a few, points of impact, where laser and heavy-ion approaches can spread the drive over many beams.
- Deuterium–tritium
- Lowest ignition threshold; 80% of energy in 14.1 MeV neutrons. The reference fuel for every near-term net-gain claim.