Pacific Fusion has commenced construction of a facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, designed to achieve net facility gain—generating as much energy as it consumes—by 2030, according to co-founder and COO Carrie von Muench. The company asserts that no comparable facility is currently under construction in the United States. The new demonstration facility will test Pacific Fusion’s fusion approach, which employs intense, coordinated electrical pulses to create a magnetic field around a small fuel target, initiating fusion reactions.

The demonstration system will be capable of firing a limited number of “shots” daily, while a full-scale power plant would need to achieve one shot per second. Pacific Fusion’s pulser modules, each containing 32 stages composed of capacitors and switches, have demonstrated the ability to release 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds in a one-third-scale test. In addition to pursuing net facility gain, the new campus will host national security-related high-yield fusion experiments, with each pulse generating approximately 100 megajoules—about ten times the output of the National Ignition Facility, as stated by co-founder and CTO Keith LeChien. Source

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