Related same-day story in Wired. You only get this kind of coverage if you have a solid PR/marketing team. The kind of team that $900 million can buy you.
It's definitely a breathtaking announcement for those of us old enough to remember when we were promised living in a fusion-powered future since the 1960s.
“For these next years, leading up to the early 2030s, the goal is to get, for the first time, a single pulse where you get more energy out than you put in,” says Will Regan, Pacific Fusion’s president and an ARPA-E veteran. “As we're doing that, we're looking at a lot of the commercial issues, like getting costs down.”
— imagine having $900 million and you don't need to show any positive results for nearly a decade.
> Taneja proposed that investors commit a sum to be paid over time, with tranches released only if Pacific Fusion reaches certain milestones. “The team was a little skeptical at first,” he says of the Pacific Fusion people. “But it became clear that that structure resonated, because everybody takes early-stage risk in these really capital-intense, long-duration moonshots.”
Mind you, I understand the challenges such an incredible scientific breakthrough as fusion requires. Which is why traditionally such work was funded by national governments. It just goes to show how unique this is for any sort of scientific research or venture capital models.
> "The problems faced by MCF systems involving reactor structures made radioactive and physically weakened by neutron bombardment can be almost eliminated in ICF systems where the fusion fuel capsule must be enclosed in a one-meter-thick flowing liquid metal sphere or cylinder to accommodate the gigajoule-level impulse loading.34 This containment approach can take the form of liquid falls comprising jets of molten metal.35 The incoming fusion neutrons sustain the temperature of the circulating liquid metal, whose heat would be extracted to drive a turbine. Relatively few neutrons would strike the solid outer chamber."
