Here’s how Pacific Fusion plans to build a fusion power plant

Summary

Pacific Fusion made a splash in October when it emerged from stealth with a $900 million Series A and a founding team led by a scientist who is most widely known for his work on the Human Genome Project. Now, the startup is revealing the physics that underpin its plans to build a fusion reactor. “We’re publishing our detailed technical roadmap,” Will Regan, co-founder and president of Pacific Fusion, told TechCrunch. “We lay out the details of the system that’s going to let us get 100x the gain of what the [National Ignition Facility] can do at about one-tenth the cost.” The bet is a long term one: the company said that the first commercial reactor is about a decade away. Pacific Fusion follows a similar path to fusion power as the National Ignition Facility, the Department of Energy research program that was the first to demonstrate that a controlled fusion reaction could generate more power than was required to ignite it. The approach is called inertial confinement, which means the fuel is squeezed to the point where atoms start fusing with one another, releasing tremendous amounts of power in the process. But where the NIF uses lasers to compress the fuel pellet, Pacific Fusion plans to send a massive pulse of electricity into a target, generating a magnetic field that’ll cause it a shell encasing the fuel to compress in about 100 nanoseconds. Generating the electricity will be 156 impedance-matched Marx generators (IMG), or pulser modules, a power source invented by co-founder Keith LeChien and others. Together, the pulser modules produce 2 terawatts for 100 nanoseconds. “That’s about 4x the average power of the U.S. grid,” Regan said. Banks of pulser modules will send coordinated bursts of electricity to the reaction chamber in the center.Image Credits:Pacific Fusion Each pulser module contains repeating elements. There are 32 “stages,” which are essentially rings of metal surrounded by ten “bricks.” Each brick consists of a switch and a capacitor, or a short-t...