Pacific Fusion says it has finally found a way to make its ambitious fusion reactor design affordable enough to build at scale, cutting a major cost barrier that has dogged the field for decades. Instead of a flashy new machine, the breakthrough hinges on a deceptively simple change to how the company prepares and fires its fuel, a tweak that executives argue can shave more than $100 million from each full-scale system. If the approach holds up outside the lab, it could move fusion power from a moonshot to a bankable infrastructure project.
The company’s new method is not just about saving money, it is about proving that a pulsed fusion system can be engineered, manufactured, and replicated like any other energy technology. By stripping out one of the most complex steps in its process, Pacific Fusion is betting it can move faster toward a commercial plant while keeping investors, regulators, and local communities on board.
How a small tweak unlocked a big cost drop
Pacific Fusion’s core claim is stark: by rethinking how it prepares its fuel, the startup believes it can cut more than $100 million from the capital cost of each reactor-scale machine. The company had been relying on an elaborate preheating stage to bring tiny fuel pellets up to the right conditions before compressing them, a step that required intricate hardware and tight timing. Engineers realized they could instead adjust the way a fuel pellet’s aluminum casing behaves during the pulse, allowing the same machine to reach fusion conditions without that extra preheating layer, which is how they arrived at the reported $100M+ savings figure that includes the verbatim metric $100.
The key insight came from experiments at Sandia National Laboratories, where Pacific Fusion has been testing its approach on facilities modeled on the famous Z Machine. By carefully studying how the aluminum shell around each fuel pellet responded to the intense electromagnetic pulse, researchers found they could tune that casing to do more of the work that preheating used to handle. That shift let them eliminate the dedicated preheating hardware entirely and instead rely on a refined version of a fuel pellet’s aluminum casing, a change that the company describes as a simple tweak to fuel pellet’s aluminum.
The cheaper reactor method, explained
Under the hood, Pacific Fusion’s system is built around pulse magnetic inertial fusion, a hybrid approach that tries to combine the precision of laser-driven inertial confinement with the relative simplicity of pulsed power machines. Instead of a continuous plasma like a tokamak, the company fires rapid bursts of electricity into compact targets, each one a shot at net energy gain. The new cost-cutting method simplifies that sequence by reducing the number of components that have to survive each pulse, which is why Pacific Fusion says it has found a way to simplify and cut the cost of its fusion reactor method as it scales up, a claim it has described as a cheaper reactor method in Pacific Fusion Unveils.
The company’s leadership argues that this is not just a lab curiosity but a manufacturing story. By stripping out preheating, they can standardize more of the reactor around identical modules, each one designed to be mass produced and swapped in and out like parts in a data center. That philosophy aligns with their broader pitch that fusion should be built from small, repeatable units instead of bespoke mega-projects, a view that has resonated with investors and policymakers who are wary of cost overruns in large nuclear builds.
From Sandia shots to a Demonstration System
Pacific Fusion’s confidence rests heavily on its experimental campaign at Sandia National Laboratories, where it has been running a series of shots to validate its physics and engineering assumptions. The company reports that results from experiments conducted at Sandia’s Z pulsed power facility have strengthened the scientific foundation behind its approach and directly informed the design of its commercial system, with those results framed as helping to reinforce the national security mission that Sandia supports and described as key Results.
The next step is to translate those experiments into a full Demonstration System that can operate outside a national lab. In New Mexico, state officials have backed a $1 billion fusion research and manufacturing campus that will host Pacific Fusion’s flagship facility, a project the Governor has framed as a way to create hundreds of jobs and position New Mexico at the center of a new energy industry, with the announcement explicitly describing how the Governor in New Mexico highlighted the potential for limitless on demand power.
A billion-dollar campus and a modular vision
At the heart of that New Mexico campus will be Pacific Fusion’s Demonstration System, a state of the art research and manufacturing facility designed to prove that its pulsed fusion bricks can operate reliably and be produced at scale. State documents describe how Pacific Fusion will build this facility to house its Demonstration System, which is intended to be a critical breakthrough toward commercial fusion power and a cornerstone of the broader campus strategy, with the project framed as a way to move from experimental shots to a repeatable product in the description that Pacific Fusion will the Demonstration System.
Pacific Fusion’s hardware is organized into small mass manufacturable units that the company calls bricks, each one containing two capacitors and associated switching gear. In earlier investor materials, executives described how these bricks can be produced on assembly lines and then stacked to build larger systems, a strategy summed up in the statement that “Our system is built of small mass-manufacturable units called bricks [two capacitors per brick],” a phrase that appears in a discussion of how Our system can scale globally.
Big money, big names, and the race to first power plant
That modular vision has attracted an unusually large pool of capital for a fusion startup. Pacific Fusion has raised a $900 m Series A round, with the total $900 million investment structured to be released in stages as the company hits specific milestones, a setup that observers note is unusual in venture capital but more common in large infrastructure projects, a detail spelled out in coverage that highlights the $900 m and $900 million structure.
Investors backing Pacific Fusion include energy focused funds associated with Bill Gates and a group linked to a former Google chief executive, who were drawn to the company’s claim that it has a clear path to low cost and global scale. Those investors have emphasized the importance of building a fast pulser similar to Sandia National Laboratories’ Z Machine and leveraging external partnerships to accelerate development, a strategy described in detail in reports that note how the startup is building a fast pulser akin to the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories.
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