Here’s how Pacific Fusion plans to build a fusion power plant

Pacific Fusion made a splash in October when it emerged from stealth with a $900 million Series A and a founding team led by a scientist who is most widely known for his work on the Human Genome Project. Now, the startup is revealing the physics that underpin its plans to build a fusion reactor. “We’re publishing our detailed technical roadmap,” Will Regan, co-founder and president of Pacific Fusion, told TechCrunch. “We lay out the details of the system that’s going to let us get 100x the gain of what the [National Ignition Facility] can do at about one-tenth the cost.” The bet is a long term one: the company said that the first commercial reactor is about a decade away. Pacific Fusion follows a similar path to fusion power as the National Ignition Facility, the Department of Energy research program that was the first to demonstrate that a controlled fusion reaction could generate more power than was required to ignite it. The approach is called inertial confinement, which means t ... Read full article.