The company demonstrated they can achieve 440 gigawatts of peak output power from a scaled prototype of its IMG solution
At The Fusion Report, some weeks are slow, which means that we run the stories that we’ve previously written as educational pieces, in-depth explorations, or simply “how-to” or “fun” articles. At other times, there’s more news than we have slots for articles; this week appears like it is going to be the second of those two 😊.
Our first piece of this week is about Pacific Fusion’s completion of their second set of technical milestones leading towards the company’s vision of inertial fusion power. For those of you who are unfamiliar with what Pacific Fusion is doing, they utilize Impedance-matched Marx Generators (IMGs) to generate 156 huge simultaneous current pulses to set off a fusion target. The concept is an outgrowth of the Sandia Lab Z-Machine, but scaled both “up” (significantly more pulse generators) and “down” (using smaller, off-the-shelf capacitors) to make it both more producible and more powerful. But rather than copying word-for-word what is in their release, we will jump right into its contents, which are fairly explanatory.
Keith LeChien’s (Co-Founder and CTO) Blog “Validating the Next Building Block Toward Affordable Fusion Power”
For the past three years, Pacific Fusion has been on a mission to deploy the most practical path to scalable and affordable fusion energy. Over that time we’ve moved quickly. We completed our first set of technical milestones ahead of schedule, expanded operations to New Mexico, and grew a team of more than 200 scientists, engineers, and builders.
Today, we’re excited to announce the completion of our second set of technical milestones, keeping us on track to achieve net facility gain, the point at which a fusion machine produces more energy output than is initially stored in the machine, by 2030. Our most critical hardware milestones center on the module, which is the energy driver of our fusion system.
Each module is a compact, shipping-container-sized pulser module capable of delivering more than a terawatt of peak power in a pulse lasting about 100 nanoseconds, or about a million times faster than a blink of an eye. The module is charged from the wall plug using roughly twice the amount of electricity needed to charge a laptop. It is then discharged in tightly synchronized pulses, without any additional stages of pulse compression or intermediate energy storage.
That same pulser capability underpins a broader technology platform that supports national security missions as we scale toward fusion power. The full system of 156 modules will fire in tightly synchronized pulses to compress a small fuel target and release fusion energy. But before we can build 156 modules, we need to prove that one module meets performance requirements.
We’ve now built and validated a scaled prototype, which is roughly one-third of a full module, and demonstrated that it delivers the performance and reliability required for our fusion system. This is a critical step to show that the major risks in building a system that delivers precise, high-power pulses reliably and repeatedly, have been retired.
With this milestone, we have now demonstrated:
- Architecture: The module is the highest peak power impedance matched Marx generator ever developed with 90-bricks in 9-stages and ~2-nanosecond timing jitter, tested into a variety of loads.
- Power: ~440 GW of peak output power and ~1.1 MV peak voltage in 80 nanoseconds. This is the highest power, single-step pulsed-power driver ever demonstrated.
- Critical components: We’ve validated a low-cost trigger system capable of synchronizing all stages into a single, coherent pulse – a key requirement for scaling to full system performance. And we’ve established the platform as a testbed for critical components like vacuum insulators, helping reduce supply chain risk.
These results are grounded in extensive validation, including more than 1,000 qualification shots, iterative refinement, and continuous comparison between experimental data and simulation models.
Built for scale
Fusion will only matter if systems can be built, operated repeatedly, and deployed at scale. Our system is designed with that constraint from the start.
- We’re building the first fusion system intended for mass manufacturing. Our modules can be factory-built and replicated like industrial equipment, rather than custom-built like research machines. That matters because a commercially viable system has to be affordable, deployable, and maintainable.
- Our modular approach, built from common materials like steel, aluminum, plastic, oil, and water, allows us to scale supply chains, streamline manufacturing, and design systems that can be serviced and maintained over time.
- Our modules are highly configurable for multiple applications. We can arrange them in parallel to build a fusion power system, or adapt them individually to create x-ray, neutron, combined environment, microwave and electromagnetic pulses for a variety of testing applications.
Planning for a full module
Our next milestone is the completion and validation of a production-scale module, which we’re on track to deliver later this year. In parallel, we are scaling up manufacturing operations of the remaining 155 modules.
We’re already preparing for that step by laying the groundwork for the world’s first fusion assembly lines, starting at our San Leandro Build Center (California) and expanding to our Los Lunas Build Center (New Mexico) later this year.
This progress represents a year of focused iteration and thousands of test shots to refine pulse timing, optimize performance, and stress-test components. It’s the result of coordinated work across our teams in Fremont and San Leandro, national laboratory and academic partners and investors who have supported us from the beginning.
And it’s just the beginning, the next in a series of many milestones as we continue to reduce risk, create pathways to near-term revenue, and move toward deploying affordable fusion power at scale.
Watch the video below to learn more about our growing team and see the scaled prototype in action.
Conclusion: A Great First Step!
At $900 million, Pacific Fusion is the best-funded of the inertial fusion energy (IFE) companies. Building on the success Sandia Laboratory Z-Machine, the Pacific Fusion IMG-based machine has demonstrated the ability to put a significant amount of power in a very focused blast, similar to laser but at much higher efficiency. The next step would seem to be building a full-scale prototype of a single pulser; the current one is 1/3 the length of the final pulser, of which 156 will have to be built. Assuming the full-scale prototype of a single pulser puts out the energy expected and can meet the time requirements, then it becomes a matter of synchronizing the blast of the 156 pulsers so that their pulses all arrive at the target at the same time against a real fusion target.
The last question is money: 1/3 of a pulser is much less expensive than 156 of them, It is not clear that even the $900 million that Pacific Fusion has now is enough to build a complete fusion machine. Assuming that is the case, this provides another challenge to Pacific Fusion: raising an up-market B-Round that follows their $900M A-Round. Given the rest of their challenge prior to their first actual fusion shot is engineering execution, this should be doable. We at The Fusion Report are keeping our fingers crossed for the Pacific Fusion Team!
