First Light Fusion Ltd

First Light Fusion Ltd is a lean, focused and agile corporation researching energy generation by inertial confinement fusion. The company was spun out from the University of Oxford in June 2011 and is based near Oxford. First Light continues to work closely with the academic community, both in the UK and internationally. The company is well-funded by both institutional investors and private individuals.

Inertial confinement fusion for energy generation is a well-established research field and is being pursued in many laboratories worldwide, perhaps most notably in the US at the National Ignition Facility. First Light is exploring a number of alternative research directions that harness the same fundamental physics, with the prime focus being power generation. First Light’s work to-date has included theoretical analysis, detailed numerical simulation and experimental validation. This has allowed description of the accessible parameter space and has led to a clear vision of the pathway to fusion.

First Light has also considered the costs and engineering practicalities of a reactor implementing its technology and can articulate a number of advantages over other approaches. We are pursuing pulsed power driver technology, which we believe will reduce costs by an order of magnitude.

Additionally, the energy focusing processes being pursued form the foundations of a new technological platform where secondary opportunities exist in a number of alternative applications, for example material processing and chemical manufacture.