Fusion power’s biggest question remains unanswered: how do you ensure the cost to start the fusion reaction isn’t higher than the price at which you can sell the power?
Plenty of people have ideas, but no one has cracked it yet. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, is confident enough that it’s building a massive reactor that costs several hundred million dollars. But the device won’t be turned on until next year, leaving the question unanswered for now.
Other companies that were founded more recently think they have a shot at building a fusion power plant for less, including Pacific Fusion, which today announced the results of a series of experiments it performed at Sandia National Laboratory that it says will eliminate some costly parts of its approach. The company exclusively shared the results with TechCrunch.
Fusion power promises to generate large amounts of electricity 24/7 and deliver it in a way that’s familiar to today’s grid operators. Most fusion startups are targeting the early to mid-2030s to switch on their first commercial fusion power plant.
Pacific Fusion is chasing an approach known as pulser-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF). At its core, it’s similar to the experiments carried out at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The company compresses small fuel pellets in rapid succession, and that compression causes atoms inside the fuel to fuse and release energy.
But where NIF uses lasers to kick off the compression, Pacific Fusion wants to use massive pulses of electricity. Those pulses will create a magnetic field that encircles the fuel pellet — about the size of a pencil eraser — causing it to compress in less than 100 billionths of a second.
“The faster you can implode it, the hotter it’ll get,” Keith LeChien, co-founder and CTO of Pacific Fusion, told TechCrunch.
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One of the challenges with pulser-driven ICF is that the process has typically needed a bit of a kickstart to work properly. To create con …