When scientists achieved fusion ignition for the first time in 2022, they did it at a facility built and operated for national security – the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ignition, one of history’s greatest clean energy breakthroughs, came out of a facility designed for stockpile stewardship science.
Pacific Fusion was founded to deliver affordable fusion power as quickly as possible. Our core technology, the pulser, stores electrical energy and releases it in a fast, powerful burst. That same technology can serve other demanding objectives, including critical national-security science. When these missions reinforce one another, both can move faster.
Hard problems create new industries
Many of America’s most transformative technologies were built on top of versatile enabling innovations that were invented to meet hard government missions:
- The internet grew out of ARPANET, a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1960s for secure military communications.
- Lithium-ion batteries emerged out of Department of Energy-funded research at national labs, and now underpin the entire EV and grid storage industry.
- LiDAR, refined through NASA spacecraft navigation programs, now underpins Waymo and other autonomous vehicles.
- The earliest customers of SpaceX were DARPA and the U.S. Air Force – government demand that helped create the market for a company that went on to reshape the entire commercial space industry.
Pacific Fusion is another chapter in that American story. We bring world-class pulser capability to meet a demanding government need, all while accelerating pulser technology that will become the backbone of fusion power.
The internet didn’t stay in the Pentagon, GPS didn’t stay in orbit, and fusion energy won’t stay in the lab.
Dual use gets us to the grid faster
The long-term goal of Pacific Fusion is to build practical, affordable, scalable fusion systems that put abundant clean energy on the grid.
We plan to deliver commercial fusion power by the mid-2030s. Between now and then, the pulser systems we're already building can provide valuable capabilities for other critical missions including stockpile stewardship, satellite component testing, medical isotope production, and more.
These applications use the same pulser technology and help accelerate our path to energy. They give us more operating experience, more experiments and data, and more opportunities to improve reliability and performance against demanding real-world requirements. They also let us build U.S. supply chains, manufacturing capacity, and technical talent earlier than we otherwise could – turning decades of U.S.-led science into American-made technology.
Many of us at Pacific Fusion spent years working at the national laboratories, so we know firsthand that great technology gets stronger when tested against the hardest problems. It makes our pulser technology platform more versatile and our business model more capable, while keeping us on the same accelerated path to scalable, affordable fusion power built on American soil.