Last week, in the New Mexico desert just south of Albuquerque, Pacific Fusion put shovels in the ground on the site of a first-of-a-kind fusion facility. Our Demonstration System will prove two firsts: net facility gain, the essential threshold for commercial fusion power, and high-yield fusion, bursts of energy exceeding 100 megajoules that are critical to national security.
"Three years ago, Pacific Fusion was just an idea," said co-founder and CTO Keith LeChien. "Today we're breaking ground, one of the fastest journeys from idea to groundbreaking in fusion history."
The science behind fusion was pioneered in America's national labs – Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine a few miles away from our new campus, ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's NIF, decades of research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But scientific leadership in this moment requires sustained effort and deliberate funding.
"The competition with China is real, and the stakes couldn't be higher," Senator David McCormick told the crowd. "America pioneered the path to fusion, and we cannot afford to lose our lead in this critical technology."
The same technology that will put abundant, on-demand power on the grid can recreate the safe testing conditions the United States needs to maintain its deterrent. "This is for America," said National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Brandon Williams, who signed a memorandum of understanding with Pacific Fusion onstage. "We are the world champions in innovation. That’s what today signifies.”
Thomas Mason, Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, echoed the sentiment: "If there are new experimental capabilities that are important for our core mission, and they are achieved through public-private partnerships, then this kind of partnership will give us access to those experimental regimes."
Running a proven American playbook is how we'll win the global race to commercial fusion. Twenty years ago, as Keith reminded everyone onstage, a public-private partnership between NASA and a nascent private sector gave us SpaceX. That same model – government lays the research foundation while industry brings the speed and the capital, joining forces to accelerate progress – is how fusion will move from the lab to the grid.
And the capital is already moving, because the prize is enormous. Driven by AI and electrification, energy demand continues to rise, and fusion answers it with clean, affordable, base-load power. "Twenty-five years from now, if the majority of electricity is generated from fusion in America, it solves like all the problems," said Pacific Fusion board member Eric Schmidt.
We're building a technology that is manufacturable, affordable, and scalable from the start – on American soil, with American workers.
The ground is broken, and the race is on. Let's build.
