American energy company, Pacific Fusion is one step closer to commercialising fusion power after Tuesday groundbreaking on a facility in New Mexico, designed to generate as much energy as it consumes.
Speaking on the project, co-founder and chief operating officer of Pacific Fusion, Carrie von Muench described it as a huge step forward for commercial fusion power.
“To our knowledge, there’s no such facility being constructed in the country,” Muench said.
While fusion power startups have been making rapid progress so far, no experiment or device has been able to generate enough power to offset the energy used by the facility, a milestone the industry calls net facility gain.
One device, at the National Ignition Facility, has shown that controlled fusion reactions can generate more energy than they consume, but it is still far short of what would be needed to power the facility.
Pacific Fusion aims to hit net facility gain by 2030, with an eye toward operating a commercial power plant in the mid-2030s. Its commercial-scale reactor will need to generate about five times more energy than the demonstration system, in part to power the additional equipment a power plant requires.
The new facility in Albuquerque will test Pacific Fusion’s approach to fusion, which uses intense, tightly coordinated pulses of electricity to create a magnetic field around a pencil eraser, squeezing it until the fuel atoms fuse.
The demonstration facility will be able to fire a handful of ‘shots’ per day, said co-founder and chief technical officer at Pacific Fusion, Keith LeChien, adding that full-size power plant would need to complete one shot per second.
The pulses of electricity will be generated by 156 pulser modules, each of which contains 32 circular stages made up of 10 bricks. Each brick consists of two capacitors, which store power, and one switch, which releases it. Earlier this year, Pacific Fusion tested a one-third-scale version of a pulser module, which released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds. The results were good enough to greenlight the demonstration facility.
In addition to demonstrating net facility gain, Pacific Fusion’s new campus will also host national security-related experiments involving high-yield fusion.
The US government has other sites that conduct similar research, like the National Ignition Facility, though that facility is starting to show its age. Each pulse of the new demonstration system will generate on the order of 100 megajoules, about 10 times the output of the National Ignition Facility, LeChien said.
