Slashing CO2Supercharged pulse fusion.
Big Picture
There’s no one-size-fits-all fusion reactor. Different fusion power plants will have different needs and constraints, depending on their objectives, environments, supply chains, and other factors. To make the promise of limitless clean energy a power-plant level reality – in a variety of commercial power plant configurations – we’re going to need a variety of reactor designs. While the fusion race has been on for years, there are still gaps that novel approaches can fill.
How it Works
Pacific Fusion is building a magnetized liner inertial fusion device. MagLIF for short. Their reactor uses massive battery-like capacitors that dump huge amounts of electric current in 100-nanosecond bursts, creating rapid-fire high energy pulses that compress the plasma to generate the fusion reaction. The design combines and supercharges the demonstrated, de-risked fusion approaches of Sandia National Lab and the National Ignition Facility.
Unfair Advantage
Pacific Fusion is the first private company to leverage breakthroughs of both Sandia and the National Ignition Facility, the first lab to prove that net energy gain (Q>1) is possible. The founding team comes from lead roles at those facilities. With stars in plasma containment and cutting edge capacitor tech – CTO Dr. Keith LeChien, for example, invented the capacitors that make this reactor possible – Pacific Fusion is well positioned in the race to grid-level fusion.
02
Cents per kWh
electricity by 2040
WILL REGAN FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
Will led ARPA-E’s ALPHA program for high-reward fusion R&D and founded a successful spinout from Google’s moonshot group, X. He has a Physics PhD from Berkeley.
KEITH LECHIEN FOUNDER & CTO
Keith was Director of the US Int’l Confinement Fusion Program at the DOE and successfully developed new capacitor technology at Sandia National Laboratories.
From NIF to Z: LLNL continues to collaborate with Sandia on technology transfer projects
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Opportunities in Pulsed Magnetic Fusion Energy
Arxiv