US fusion start-up Pacific Fusion has selected Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the site for its first Research and Manufacturing Campus while its headquarters, including three R&D campuses, will remain in California.
Pacific Fusion, established in 2023, says it is developing high-gain pulsed magnetic fusion. Company’s President & Co-Founder Will Regan was formerly at Alphabet’s X “moonshot factory” where he worked on projects such as Mineral, an agriculture-technology business. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Keith LeChien previously worked at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The company website says it builds on established science. “In 2022, breakthroughs in inertial fusion definitively showed the conditions required for ignition and high gain.” The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL used lasers to achieve ignition and the highest laboratory fusion performance ever. The Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) used fast-rising current pulses to drive the MagLIF concept to achieve the highest pulsed magnetic fusion ever.
“We use proven engineering. We are building a fast pulser, similar to Sandia’s well-proven Z Machine. Our pulser is made efficient and compact thanks to decades of advances in pulsed power engineering – especially the recently-demonstrated impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG). In 2022, LLNL first demonstrated this advanced IMG technology, opening an efficient and affordable way to reliably achieve inertial fusion conditions.”
Pacific Fusion says its system is built of small mass-manufacturable units called bricks (two capacitors and a switch), which are assembled into modules that fit into shipping containers. Our fusion chamber is compact and cylindrical, facilitating low-cost maintenance. The system is built from widely available materials.
In December 2024 the company established a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with SNL followed the next month by a CRADA with LLNL.
The $1bn New Mexico Research and Manufacturing Campus at Mesa del Sol will house the company’s Demonstration System, designed to achieve net facility gain – more fusion energy out than all the energy stored in the system – by 2030. Pacific Fusion will launch its manufacturing operations in New Mexico before the end of the year, with facility construction set to begin in 2026.
Pacific Fusion said the Demonstration System is designed to deliver 100-fold higher facility gain at 10-fold lower cost than NIF and LLNL, a 1,000-fold leap in practical fusion performance. It also builds on decades of scientific and engineering advances at the Z Facility at SNL. The company noted that it continues to expand its headquarters, including its three Research and Development Campuses, in California. These include:
- Fremont Headquarters and Test Centre, where the company builds, tests, and optimises first-of-a-kind fusion system components;
- San Leandro Build Centre, a 135,000 square-foot facility for Manufacturing R&D, where the company will ramp up production of pulser modules, the key building block of its system; and
- Livermore Collaboratory, where the researchers push the frontiers of plasma simulation and fusion target design, working closely with LLNL.
“These developments keep us on track to deliver the first commercial fusion system in the United States by the mid-2030s and then move quickly to scaled deployment of affordable fusion energy,” the company said.
