Last October, Pacific Fusion emerged from stealth with a splashy $900M Series A and a commitment to build an inertial fusion machine based on the technologies that made the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the Z Machine successful.
Now, the company has come out with a roadmap to build a net gain facility by 2030—and has announced that it’s already completed a technical milestone that unlocks a batch of funding from its original investors.
So things are moving fast.
“We’re really, really fortunate to be able to build on decades and decades of work at the National Labs, both on the pulse power side and also in the science side,” Pacific Fusion cofounder and president Will Regan told Ignition. “We could build on a lot of known pieces and proven science and engineering and integrate them all together. So a lot of that work, we kind of knew where we had to go. We knew roughly what it would cost.”
Laser focused: The company is designing its system using a modular architecture that could achieve 100x the fusion gain of NIF but cost only a tenth as much—effectively a 1,000x performance increase, Regan said.
The company is planning to achieve this performance improvement through increased efficiency in delivering stored energy to the target, as well as through modularity and simpler construction. The machine is built by stacking simple units:
- It starts with a “brick,” which Regan says is essentially two capacitors and a switch
- Ten bricks arranged in a ring make a stage
- Multiple stages stacked together form a module
- 156 modules adding their currents in parallel form the whole system
“What we’ve already shown and proven is that the stage and brick, the fundamental building blocks at the smallest level, meet the performance and reliability requirements that we need,” Regan said. “And that really translates to the whole system. And that sets us up to now do one full scale module, which is the real unit that is going to be used to build our demonstration, and also future commercial power plants.”
The company is currently 81 people strong, with most of that workforce focused in engineering and science roles. The company works out of a space in Fremont, CA, where it’s building its first bricks and doing testing. It also recently signed a lease on a facility in San Leandro, CA, that will serve as the company’s build center for future modules.
Dole it out: Part of the funding was secured at the initial signing-on of investors, Regan said. The balance of the $900M round will be unlocked in phases:
- Phase I: Validating the building blocks of the system work as intended (recently completed)
- Phase II: Building the full module
- Phase III: Integrating several modules together into a demo facility
The company is also working on software development and target design in parallel.
“It was important to us starting this company that first of all, [we were] building on a strong science and engineering foundation, but also we wanted to minimize the financing risk,” Regan said. “So we didn’t want to just raise a little bit and go back out to market in a few years. Who knows what would have been happening.” Regan credits General Catalyst, the lead investor on the Series A, for spearheading this funding structure.
The size of the batch of funding unlocked with each milestone corresponds to the investment needed to complete the next, Regan said, but the company declined to outline the size of each phase.
What now? Now that the company has validated the performance of its smallest building blocks, it will work towards building the first module. The Series A, batched out, is expected to carry the company through the first five years of development—to a fusion machine that achieves net facility gain by 2030.
Pacific Fusion is currently in conversation with potential partners to site its first demo machine. The cities of Alameda and Livermore are on the shortlist.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
