Pacific Fusion broke ground on a $1 billion Research and Manufacturing Campus in Albuquerque on August 24, building what's designed to be the first U.S. fusion facility to hit two milestones at once: net facility gain and high yield output.
The site at Mesa del Sol will house Pacific Fusion's Demonstration System. The target is net facility gain by 2030, meaning the machine produces more energy than the total energy initially stored in it. No one has demonstrated that yet, at any facility, anywhere.
The Yield Factor:
The same machine is designed to produce fusion bursts exceeding 100 megajoules, which would make it the only high yield fusion facility currently under construction in the U.S. That capability reaches past the power grid. It's tied to maintaining the nuclear stockpile without explosive testing, a need the U.S. first identified more than 30 years ago and is only now building hardware to address.
That gap is the backdrop for a new MOU between Pacific Fusion and the National Nuclear Security Administration, covering collaboration on high yield fusion, pulsed power technology, and related research.
What the Build Brings:
Roughly 200 permanent jobs, plus hundreds of construction and regional jobs
A separate manufacturing expansion in Los Lunas building pulsed power components
Backing from New Mexico's State Investment Council
Founded in 2023, Pacific Fusion is developing a pulser driven inertial fusion system built from mass manufacturable parts, leaning on decades of national lab research from Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos.
The company's next milestone is a full scale pulser module, the core building block of the whole system. Three decades after the government flagged the need, the shovels are finally the easy part.
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