The latest Pacific Fusion prototype packs 440 gigawatts in an 80-nanosecond burst

Pacific Fusion took the wraps off its latest model pulser module on Tuesday, a piece of equipment that allows the company to move forward with its power fusion plant. Construction of the combined cycle power plant is expected to begin this summer.

Results from the shipping-container-sized prototype were good enough to open the rest of Pacific Fusion’s Series A round, which topped $1 billion, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The company did not disclose the size of the division. Pacific Fusion is among the most funded fusion startups.

The tranche-based model is widely used in biotech, where it saves startups time in fundraising, allowing them to stay focused on hitting technology milestones.

The financial arrangement allowed the company to “keep our heads down,” Pacific Fusion CTO Keith LeChien told TechCrunch. “It means we can rely on the future without spending 20% ​​to 50% of our time always looking for the next money.”

Pacific Fusion pursues a form of fusion power known as inertial confinement. Its reactor will use 156 pulser modules to deliver a large jolt of electricity to a small target area of ​​fuel in the fusion chamber. That electric shock will create a magnetic field around the eraser-sized pellet of fuel, squeezing it until the atoms inside the fuse release large amounts of energy.

The next implementation challenge will be scaling up from the subprototype to the full-size pulser module, the main component of the display’s powerhouse. The company hopes that the power plant will be able to produce more electricity than the plant needs to operate, which no one has done yet.

But because the race for fusion power is hot, the company is not waiting for results from a full-scale pulser module before starting work on a power demonstration site. “Shovels went into the ground at that facility this summer,” LeChien said.

So far, inertial confinement is the only way humans have been able to produce a controlled fusion reaction that releases more energy than was needed to start it, a milestone known as scientific breakeven. And so far, only one experiment, at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been able to reproduce and replicate those results.

But where NIF relies on large, expensive lasers, Pacific Fusion hopes it only needs thousands of switches and inexpensive electrical capacitors. Those capacitors and switches will be coordinated to produce large, precisely timed electrical pulses — each about 100 nanoseconds long.

The challenge of Pacific Fusion is ensuring that the capacitors can release their energy at the right time. If they don’t, the fuel pellet won’t be hit with enough force to compress it fast enough to cause a fusion reaction.

The company’s demonstration device will have 156 full-size pulser modules. Each module will contain 32 circular sections, and each section will contain 10 bricks. One brick contains two capacitors to store energy and one switch to discharge them.

The prototype pulser module recently tested by the company is about a third the size of a full module. It consists of nine stages and 90 bricks, and releases 440 gigawatts of peak power in just 80 nanoseconds.

“It meets all of our needs to scale up to build our big show program,” LeChien said.

Once Pacific Fusion has its power plant ready, it intends to skip past the science breach and head straight for the facility’s breach, where its demonstration device will generate enough energy to power the entire facility.

“Any method of integration, regardless of your specific expertise, should go through that,” LeChien said. “It’s the next tectonic milestone in convergence.”