Pacific Fusion just figured out how to save over $100 million on its fusion reactor design. The startup exclusively shared results with TechCrunch from recent experiments at Sandia National Laboratory's Z Machine, where it eliminated the need for expensive preheating lasers by tweaking a fuel pellet's aluminum casing. It's the kind of cost engineering breakthrough the fusion industry desperately needs if commercial power plants are going to hit competitive electricity prices by the early 2030s.
Pacific Fusion just cracked one of fusion power's most expensive problems. The startup ran experiments at Sandia National Laboratory's Z Machine and discovered they can ditch over $100 million worth of preheating lasers by making a simple tweak to their fuel pellet casings. They shared the results exclusively with TechCrunch.
Fusion power's fundamental economics question remains wide open: how do you keep the cost of starting fusion reactions below the price you can sell the electricity for? Commonwealth Fusion Systems is betting hundreds of millions on their approach, but their massive reactor won't fire up until next year. Pacific Fusion thinks they've found a cheaper path forward.
The company is chasing what's called pulser-driven inertial confinement fusion, similar to experiments at the National Ignition Facility that made headlines. Instead of NIF's lasers, Pacific Fusion uses massive electrical pulses to create magnetic fields that crush pencil-eraser-sized fuel pellets in under 100 billionths of a second. "The faster you can implode it, the hotter it'll get," Keith LeChien, Pacific Fusion's co-founder and CTO, told TechCrunch.
But here's where it gets interesting. Pulser-driven inertial confinement fusion has always needed a kickstart - researchers typically use both lasers and magnets to preheat the fuel pellet before the big compression hits. "It's just a little bit of energy just to give it a little bit of a boost before you compress it," LeChien explained, roughly 5% to 10% of total energy. Those extra lasers and magnets add complexity, cost, and maintenance headaches that make competitive electricity pricing nearly impossible.
