Fusion startup Pacific Fusion has begun construction on a demonstration facility in New Mexico, with the goal of generating as much energy as it consumes. This milestone, known as net facility gain, has not yet been achieved by any existing experiment or device, according to the company.
Carrie von Muench, co-founder and chief operating officer at Pacific Fusion, stated that to their knowledge, no similar facility is currently under construction in the country. The company aims to reach net facility gain by 2030, with plans to operate a commercial power plant by the mid-2030s.
The Albuquerque facility will test Pacific Fusion's method of creating fusion, which involves using intense, tightly coordinated pulses of electricity to generate a magnetic field around a fuel target. This process squeezes the fuel atoms until they fuse.
The demonstration system will be capable of firing a handful of “shots” daily. Keith LeChien, co-founder and chief technical officer, noted that a full-size power plant would require one shot per second. The system's design includes 156 pulser modules, each containing 32 circular stages with 10 bricks, which house capacitors and switches.
Earlier this year, a one-third-scale pulser module test released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds, providing sufficient results to proceed with the demonstration facility. The new campus will also host national security-related experiments involving high-yield fusion, with each pulse generating approximately 100 megajoules, about 10 times the output of the National Ignition Facility.