Bill Gates' Energy Group, Former Google CEO Investing in Pacific Fusion Startup
A fusion energy company that counts executives such as Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates among its backers has emerged from stealth, announcing $900 million in pledged funding. Pacific Fusion, whose technology builds on recent fusion advances at two U.S. national labs, is the latest U.S.-based group to join a growing list of companies working on fusion technology.
The company, headquartered in Fremont, California, in an introduction letter published Oct. 25 wrote “Fusion has enormous potential,” and said that as “Global energy demand continues to soar … the world must also shift to cleaner energy, decoupling economic progress from the consequences of climate change.”
Pacific Fusion said it is “pursuing a pulsed magnetic path to inertial fusion—that is, using fast-rising, high-current pulses to magnetically squeeze and heat small containers of deuterium-tritium fuel, driving the fuel to fusion conditions.”
Eric Lander, known for his work on the Human Genome Project, and who also served as science adviser in the Biden administration, leads Pacific Fusion, which was organized last year. General Catalyst, a Massachusetts-based venture capital firm, led Pacific Fusion’s Series A funding round. Other investors include Schmidt, the former Google CEO; Microsoft founder Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures; Lowercarbon Capital, a Jackson, Wyoming-based group that invests in companies working on decarbonization; and John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former Monsanto engineer who founded Silicon Compilers and sits on the board of Google and Amazon.
General Catalyst on its website said its investment stems from Pacific Fusion’s “exceptional team,” and its “highly pragmatic pulsed magnetic approach” to fusion.
Pacific Fusion in the letter announcing the funding said, “We started Pacific Fusion in the summer of 2023 with a clear mission: to power the world with abundant, affordable, clean energy.” The company said its technology builds on recent advances at the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national labs. “In 2022, breakthroughs in inertial fusion definitively showed the conditions required for ignition and high gain. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) used lasers to achieve ignition and the highest laboratory fusion performance (Pτ) ever, and the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories used fast-rising current pulses to drive the MagLIF concept to achieve the highest pulsed magnetic fusion Pτ ever, second only to laser-driven concepts. This was the culmination of over a half century of US government support and hard-fought progress by fusion researchers.”
The company said, “We are building a fast pulser, similar to Sandia’s well-proven Z Machine. Our pulser is made efficient and compact thanks to decades of advances in pulsed power engineering—especially the recently-demonstrated impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG). In 2022, LLNL first demonstrated this advanced IMG technology, opening an efficient and affordable way to reliably achieve inertial fusion conditions.
“We have a clear path to low cost and global scale. Our system is built of small mass-manufacturable units called bricks [two capacitors and a switch], which are assembled into modules that fit into shipping containers. Our fusion chamber is compact and cylindrical, facilitating low-cost maintenance. Our system is built from widely available materials. And, our fuel is vastly cheaper than fossil fuels, even accounting for consumables such as fuel containers.”
The Series A funding is a phased approach. The entire $900 million is committed, but “only unlocked as the company achieves pre-defined milestones,” General Catalyst said.
Pacific Fusion wrote that the company’s immediate foal is “Net facility gain. We are using these resources to build a high-gain pulsed magnetic fusion driver to achieve ‘net facility gain’ [more fusion energy output than all stored energy input]. In parallel, we have started engineering the components and systems needed for affordable commercial fusion systems. We have a clear path toward achieving these goals, and we’re well on our way to completing our first major milestones.”
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).