Alex Zylstra (Pacific Fusion) is the experiments lead at Pacific Fusion and was formerly based at LLNL, where he played a significant role in achieving ignition on NIF.
Pacific Fusion’s path to fusion energy
Pacific Fusion is a privately-funded fusion company pursuing pulsed power driven fusion energy. We are building a fusion demonstration system based on impedance-matched Marx generator technology to demonstrate fusion engineering gain. Our pulser-driven fusion approach uniquely leverages physics de-risking from the National Ignition Facility and Z combined with an attractive physics scaling path to high gain. This talk will provide an overview of the physics basis for our fusion approach, the development pathway to engineering gain, our plan to develop the demonstration system into a world-class experimental facility, and our computational capabilities using the FLASH radiation-hydrodynamics code.