Pacific Fusion Says Pulsed-Power Prototype Hits Milestone at National Lab

Pacific Fusion said Wednesday that a pulsed-power prototype designed and built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has surpassed 3,000 shots under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the company. The company announced the milestone on July 16, saying it marks a key step in the development of high-gain fusion and provides a practical example of government-industry partnership. The prototype, called Sirius, is an impedance-matched Marx generator, a new pulsed-power architecture designed to deliver short, powerful electrical pulses efficiently and repeatedly. It is the same core technology Pacific Fusion is scaling for its own fusion system. In the Sirius campaign, each pulse of the four-stage prototype delivered 60 gigawatts to a resistive load in a 100-nanosecond pulse with 95% energy efficiency. The campaign focused on component lifetime and reliability, providing experimental data the company has used to design and scale its own technology. In June, Pacific Fusion announced completion of a prototype that expanded the Sirius platform by roughly 11 times, delivering about 440 gigawatts of peak output power. The company, founded in 2023, has raised more than $1 billion in private capital and aims to achieve net facility gain by 2030. Later this summer, Pacific Fusion plans to break ground on a Demonstration System in Albuquerque, New Mexico, designed to produce fusion bursts exceeding 100 megajoules.