Pacific Fusion breaks ground on a facility aimed at net energy gain

Pacific Fusion started construction Tuesday on a demonstration facility in Albuquerque built to test its approach to fusion power, with the goal of reaching “net facility gain”: producing at least as much energy as the whole facility uses. No experiment or device has hit that mark yet. The National Ignition Facility has shown that a controlled fusion reaction can release more energy than it consumes, but that result falls far short of covering the energy needs of the surrounding facility.

Pacific Fusion aims to hit net facility gain by 2030, with an eye toward running a commercial power plant in the mid-2030s. A commercial-scale reactor will need to generate about five times more energy than the demonstration system, in part to power the extra equipment a power plant requires.

The Albuquerque facility will test a method that uses intense, tightly coordinated pulses of electricity to build a magnetic field around a fuel target roughly the size of a pencil eraser, squeezing it until the fuel atoms fuse. It will be able to fire a handful of “shots” per day; a full-size power plant will need to complete one shot per second, according to co-founder and chief technical officer Keith LeChien.

The pulses come from 156 pulser modules, each built from 32 circular stages of 10 “bricks” — a pair of capacitors that store power plus a switch that releases it. Earlier this year, a one-third-scale pulser module released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds, a result strong enough to greenlight the new facility. Each pulse of the demonstration system will generate on the order of 100 megajoules — about 10 times the output of the National Ignition Facility, LeChien said.

“This exists nowhere in the world,” LeChien said. “China is building these types of facilities, and we intend to be the first to deliver them.”

Beyond net facility gain, the new campus will also host national-security-related experiments involving high-yield fusion, work the government currently conducts at other, aging sites like the National Ignition Facility.

Founded in 2023, Pacific Fusion is one of the younger entrants in the field but also among the best-funded, having raised over $1 billion in a milestone-based Series A round. Co-founder and chief operating officer Carrie von Muench said the large, gated round let the company plan further ahead instead of fundraising every few years — “I don’t think it would have been possible to move at this speed if we hadn’t designed the capital stack the way that we have,” she said.

Why it matters

Pacific Fusion now faces a crowded field of similarly well-capitalized rivals — including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, Proxima Fusion and Inertia Enterprises — all racing to connect a fusion plant to the grid by the mid-2030s, if not earlier.