GenF
🇫🇷 Elancourt, FR · Founded 2024 · Active
Also known as GenF Systems
GenF is a French start-up, founded in 2024 as a spin-off from the defence and electronics group Thales, that aims to build a power plant based on laser-driven inertial confinement fusion. In this approach high-energy lasers compress a small target of deuterium and tritium until it fuses. The company names Thales, the CNRS laser laboratories LULI and CELIA and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) as its technical backers and the engineering group Assystem as a partner. Its site gives an address in Elancourt, France. It is a member of the Fusion Industry Association (listed as GenF Systems).
- Sector
- Fusion
- Technology
- Inertial confinement
- Fuel
- Deuterium–tritium
- Role
- Fusion developer
Terms
- Inertial confinement
- Compressing fuel so fast that its own inertia holds it together long enough to burn: nanoseconds, not seconds. Every ICF approach shares the same open problem beyond ignition itself: repeating a shot several times a second at low enough cost per shot to run a power plant, which no driver has yet demonstrated.
- Deuterium–tritium
- Lowest ignition threshold; 80% of energy in 14.1 MeV neutrons. The reference fuel for every near-term net-gain claim.