Pacific Fusion’s next fusion machine could clear a key hurdle to commercial power

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Pacific Fusion is one step closer to commercializing fusion power after breaking ground Tuesday on a facility in New Mexico designed to generate as much energy as it consumes.

“It’s a huge step forward for commercial fusion power,” Carrie von Muench, co-founder and chief operating officer at Pacific Fusion, told TechCrunch. “To our knowledge, there’s no such facility being constructed in the country.”

While fusion power startups have been making rapid progress, 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 fuel target about the size of a pencil eraser, squeezing it until the fuel atoms fuse.