Inside the Race for Net Facility Gain with Pacific Fusion
Carrie von Muench is the COO and Co-Founder of Pacific Fusion, a company building the first pulser-driven inertial fusion system designed for net facility gain. Fusion has long promised limitless, carbon-free, dispatchable power, but only recently have breakthroughs—from ignition at the National Ignition Facility to major advances at Sandia and new high-efficiency pulse-power technology—shifted fusion from scientific aspiration to solvable engineering challenge.
The Pacific Fusion founding team came together after these 2022 milestones revealed a credible, engineering-driven path to fusion energy. Backed by a landmark $900M Series A led by General Catalyst, the company is developing a highly modular system that can be mass-manufactured using accessible materials and domestically sourced supply chains. In this episode, Carrie explains why these breakthroughs matter, how the modular pulser architecture works, why New Mexico became home for the world’s largest pulse-power facility, and how fusion could reshape global energy, industry, and security. MCJ is proud to participate in Pacific Fusion’s Series A through our venture funds.
Episode recorded on Nov 19, 2025 (Published on Dec 9, 2025)
In this episode, we cover:
[13:28] Pacific Fusion’s origins and founding team
[17:54] The company’s unique financing structure
[18:57] Why traditional venture models fail for fusion
[25:42] Pacific Fusion’s progress to date
[27:23] What a pulsed magnetic fusion system looks like
[29:15] The path from modular components to full-scale system
[33:20] Looking ahead at Pacific Fusion’s 2026 milestones
[35:04] Why they’re building in Albuquerque, New Mexico
[41:29] The global race with China to commercialize fusion
[46:24] The fusion supply chain
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Carrie Von Muench, COO and Co-founder of Pacific Fusion. Fusion energy has long represented the ultimate breakthrough, abundant carbon-free dispatchable power with no long lived waste and no dependency on scarce materials. For decades, the challenge wasn't a lack of imagination, it was that the underlying physics and engineering hadn't yet reached the point where building a practical fusion power system looked achievable. That picture began to change in 2022 when ignition at the National Ignition Facility was followed by a major advance at Sandia National Labs and new high efficiency pulse power technology from Lawrence Livermore. Alongside progress across several fusion approaches and companies, these breakthroughs helped shift fusion from a distant scientific aspiration to an enormous but solvable engineering challenge. Pacific Fusion was founded in that window. A company MCJ has backed through our venture capital funds as part of a landmark $900 million Series A led by General Catalyst and whose board includes Hemant Taneja, Eric Schmidt and Patrick Collison. In today's conversation, Carrie and I explore why these breakthroughs mattered how Pacific Fusion is building the first pulsed magnetic system designed for net facility gain and how fusion could reshape the future of energy and the industries that depend on it. From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms and this is Inevitable.
(01:37):
Climate change is inevitable. It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry. Carrie, welcome to the show.
Carrie Von Muench (01:58):
Thanks, Cody. It's good to be here.
Cody Simms (02:00):
As we dive into this, a disclaimer that I want to give is even though I've spent time in this space, it's very complicated and very complex and I think one of the things I'd like to do in this conversation with you is try to help everyone understand how this works. But I know not everyone's going to take away everything we say. I know I still don't have a full grasp of how all this works. For sure. People spend entire PhDs trying to make this work and one of the things that I find impressive about you, Carrie, is you don't have a PhD in this space. Far it, but you have a really good grasp on this problem and my goal here today.
Carrie Von Muench (02:36):
I'm definitely still learning.
Cody Simms (02:37):
My goal here today is to help us try to unpack as much of this as we can and then ultimately to help all of us understand how this might work. And then assuming Pacific Fusion hits its goals, ultimately what does that unlock for the future?
Carrie Von Muench (02:53):
It's a really important question, especially in a field with a lot of hype and broken promises. As know I am not a fusion expert and really was not one when I met this founding team, I had been sitting in the private investment seat, maybe similar to you, had seen a number of fusion companies come across my desk and really had been a skeptic, not in fusion's potential, but in what I would describe as its venture backability in that there were a number of things that were well precedented scientifically, but still seemed like a moonshot to make work techno economically. And then there were some other things out there that you have a clever engineering approach, which is great. You can build something affordable, but from a scientific perspective, you're still factors of a thousand or more from the performance needed to get energy out.
(03:40):
That also introduces a lot of schedule risk. And so I think really the question in fusion when you think about the landscape and look at any given approach is how far from the scientific finish line is the closest experimental result that this company builds on, and what is it going to take to build a power plant? How far down the cost curve do you need to come? What's the cost reduction multiple that you need to believe in, and what are the yet unsolved engineering challenges to build something that's affordable, deployable, maintainable? I think those are really the inherent two questions that you can ask about anything you see out there in the fusion landscape. And the team that I met founding the Pacific Fusion team because of the breakthroughs we talked about, was really the first team I'd ever met that had a path to do both. Building on now both the number one and number two highest performing fusion approaches out there, but also building a machine that is made of, I mean somewhat of an exaggeration, but more or less things you can find at a hardware store has a sort of an affordable, fairly straightforward modular architecture that you can readily mass manufacture with materials that you can source domestically for the most part is really, really important.
(04:44):
To your point on thinking about the fusion field, thinking about communicating fusion, those are two points that we've really tried to help folks understand. I think the other thing that's frankly hard is that big projects, as you know, schedule and budget is always a risk. Finding a way to make promises that are realistic is really important. Finding a way to publish our work is really important to us to have peer review on the things that we claim and finding a way to build trust over time by actually doing those two things both as a company and then also with our collaborators academically in the national labs, really matters to us.
Cody Simms (05:19):
And I think part of my goal in having this conversation and what I'm going to hope to achieve and we'll see if we achieve it or not as we go, is to help everyone here listening understand that, gosh, I mean I certainly don't understand everything about this space and I know I'm going to fumble some questions here, but what is interesting to me and the reason we got excited at II and why I think this is an incredible story and ultimately company that you're building is a few things. One, what you're building is rooted in some very recent scientific milestones that are new and unique to the field that has been around for 50 plus years but are leapfrog new milestones. And they are the technical basis for what you're building. Two, that you have assembled a team that has a very broad set of experiences from deep technical expertise in the space to large scale scaling to broad horizontal view of the landscape to broad financing structures that can work and that you've brought that team together to do this. And three, that you have actually figured out a way to capitalize this business in a way that for us makes sense relative to a number of the other projects we've seen. So anyway, just for my listeners context and for your benefit, that's what I hope we can have a conversation about today. And please forgive me when I do ask really dumb questions.
Carrie Von Muench (06:41):
No, they're not dumb questions. Often the dumb questions are the most important ones that I think in fusion it's do you build on a scientific foundation that indicates that this will work experimentally? Do you have a economically tractable path? Do you have a team to do it? Because there are not a lot of people in the world that have recently built big fusion machines. And if you want to build one, you should hire those people. And then finally, do you have the capital to do it? Because to your point, Cody, this doesn't work scale down and this financing risk is a real risk for any really capital intensive endeavor and right fusion. So you see the fusion industry reports, we've deployed 7 billion or so private dollars into fusion companies. Really most of those have gone into three big companies that are a resource to build something big. And it was important to us and to our investors at the outset to make sure that if we were doing this, we were doing this seriously. And we had all those sort of main pillars in place to have a real shot at success.
Cody Simms (07:34):
Carrie, you were awesome in that you joined our recent annual meeting for MCJ, we're proud investors in Pacific Fusion. And at that meeting where you presented to our investors, you opened the line with I guess a joke, which is that fusion is the energy of the future and always will be, or at least that's what everyone had said for a very long time. And I think what's really interesting about Pacific Fusion and really the industry at large is it seems like we're at a moment in time where maybe that is actually not a future statement anymore. We're getting closer to where it's not a future statement. If it's been a joke punchline for 50 years, what's different now?
Carrie Von Muench (08:13):
For as long as I can remember, nobody has disagreed that if we can make fusion work, it's game changing. It's the process, the power to sun in our stars. It offers the potential for basically limitless clean on demand firm power with no dependence on intermittent resources, no fossil fuels, no meltdown risk, no carbon emissions. And so it's been the holy grail of energy for a long time. We've never needed it more than we do today where we're seeing low growth like we haven't seen since World War II. But the operative question in the field was, oh, is can you make it work? And work really has two parts. The first is, can you produce more fusion energy than the machine to produce that energy consumes as it actually produce that energy? And the second is, can you do so at a cost structure that makes sense for actual power generation?
(08:59):
Three things happened in 2022 that to our founding team, meant that for the first time, the answer to both of those questions was yes. So on the scientific side, taking a step back, there are two big ways to do fusion. The first is steady state fusion, usually tokamaks, they're kind of like a furnace. They hold fuel at low pressure for really long amounts of time. People have been working on that for many decades. The record result today is from 1995, a factor of a few from the scientific finish line. The second is inertial fusion, which was originally developed for defense purposes, entered the field much more recently just in the last few decades and progressed so rapidly that in 2022 it crossed the scientific finish line. And that was the first of three breakthroughs that made everything we do possible and made it make sense.
Cody Simms (09:43):
What does that mean? It crossed the scientific finish line.
Carrie Von Muench (09:46):
Yeah. It means that researchers at Livermore on their big laser got more energy out of a little target of fusion fuel than they drove into the fuel, which is a really, really big deal. It means if you know that if you drive fusion fuel to a certain pressure, you get more energy out than you put in.
Cody Simms (10:00):
This was the ignition milestone at National Ignition Facility.
Carrie Von Muench (10:03):
Exactly, yeah.
Cody Simms (10:04):
Okay. So you saw that happen and I think there were one or two other milestones that kind of gave you a little bit of, Hey, wow, now may be the time.
Carrie Von Muench (10:12):
So that was the first big breakthrough where the scientific finish line is you know what it takes to get more energy out than you put into a fusion reaction. The second breakthrough is also a scientific breakthrough, and it was on the Z facility at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and they achieved very quietly the second best fusion performance ever using a much more efficient and affordable system than a laser driven system. And the third breakthrough was that our CTO Keith co-invented technology that more than doubles the efficiency and power density of systems like Z at Sandia. When you take all those things together, what it means in practice is that you know the conditions for ignition and hygiene fusion, and you can for the first time build affordable modular mass manufacturable systems that you know will reach those conditions, giving you a pathway for a fusion energy project that is massive industrial and engineering project, but not a scientific moonshot. And that's really the reason we were able to raise certainly the largest Series A in fusion history is because we have a big engineering project with a viable path to fusion energy but not a scientific moonshot.
Cody Simms (11:20):
And so if I understand maybe taking each of these and kind of cracking them open slightly, the ignition milestone that happened at National Ignition Facility basically proved that you could, as you said, get more energy out of a fusion reactor than the energy you put in. It didn't prove that you could then reuse that energy in the reactor and keep going. So that's sort of a thing that still has to get figured out. Does your second milestone that you mentioned help unlock that in any way?
Carrie Von Muench (11:50):
Reusing the system and keeping going is really important, but I would actually take a step back and break it into three steps. The first question is can you get more energy out of the fusion fuel than when into the fuel? So if you draw your box around the fuel, that's question one. That's what Livermore did. The second question is can you get more energy out of the whole machine than was required to run the whole machine. And that has never been done. That's the next big milestone in fusion called net facility gain and an essential step to building fusion power systems. And then the third is, can you do that at a cost structure that makes sense and harness the energy output and use it to power cities, businesses, and homes? That's the third step on the journey. So we are currently on a mission to make number two happen in a way that gives us a clear and rapid path to number three.
Cody Simms (12:37):
And it's some of Keith's research then that you believe unlocks both two and three to some extent.
Carrie Von Muench (12:43):
So Keith, you know him well, he's our CTO and one of our co-founders. He played a number of important roles in making the breakthroughs that we build happen and now is the primary architect of our technical roadmap. So first he oversaw the whole inertial confinement fusion program at NNSA, under which the work at Livermore and Sandia that we discussed sits. So he played a really important role in making those scientific breakthroughs happen. And then second, he invented co-invented technology while he was at Livermore. That allows you to reach those physical conditions with a much, much more efficient and affordable system, which paves the way as discussed to affordable fusion power. So he played a number of important roles in making all of this possible and now is the chief architect of and executor of our technical roadmap.
Cody Simms (13:28):
We could keep going down the deep technical side to help me try to understand it, but I think what would be useful really is to then go into, okay, you saw these milestones happen. How did that turn into, Hey, we're going to start a company around them. What was the founding moment for bringing the team together and saying, there's a thing here and then from there I want to go into, and then how did you decide to capitalize it so aggressively from the start? But let's answer the first question first and then we'll get to the capitalization question.
Carrie Von Muench (13:53):
Like many companies, ours is really a story of having the right people in the right place at the right time. And as discussed, our five co-founders and founding investors came together to build this in 2023 because of the breakthroughs in 2022 that gave us a path to fusion energy that's mostly about engineering and execution. There are five of us co-founders all with really different backgrounds. So Eric Lander, our founding CEO, spent much of his career tackling grand scientific challenges. For example, the Human Genome project. He has always been motivated by the increasingly urgent need for clean firm power and wanted to learn more about fusion. So he was introduced to another of our co-founders, Will Reagan by Eric Schmidt, who's our current board chair. Wwill had spent much of his career in fusion building the ARPA-E's ALPHA, which funded many others in the space in their early days.
(14:47):
So he knew the field incredibly well and he pulled in our CTO, Keith with whom he had previously worked at Google. Keith, as I mentioned, actually ran the whole inertial fusion program at NNSA, which oversaw the campaign towards ignition on the NIF and the breakthroughs at Sandia that I mentioned and personally invented much of our pulse power technology. He immediately recognized that to make this possible in-house simulation capabilities are a critical first step. So he pulled in Leland Ellison, our founding simulation lead, who played a key role in building the codes that make these breakthroughs possible. And so by the time I joined, Keith, Will, and Leland had convinced Eric that for the first time in 50 years, we had a clear path to building affordable fusion systems that actually work and Eric inspired them to start a company, raise a billion dollars and make the whole thing happen.
Cody Simms (15:37):
And Eric maybe worth sharing his background as well because he's obviously been part of something that is an incredible scientific breakthrough.
Carrie Von Muench (15:46):
Oh yeah. I mean Eric is probably best known for making the Human Genome Project happen. He's built a number of other big scientific institutions and honestly, he's the only person I've ever met that has delivered a big first of a kind scientific project ahead of schedule and under budget, and he's just so passionate about finding brilliant technical teams and empowering them to do more than they ever thought they could. And we've been incredibly fortunate to have him as a mentor and a guide on this journey.
Cody Simms (16:14):
This is Eric Lander. And then you mentioned Eric Schmidt's involvement as a board chair, and there's quite a few, Google kind of ties to this. You mentioned Will's role at Google and you were at Google as well, and then you worked at Eric Schmidt's venture firm, I believe too, right? So you've had quite a bit of exposure to this sort of, I guess Google way of thinking about technology innovation.
Carrie Von Muench (16:36):
Yeah, it's funny. Eric Schmidt was actually my introduction to this founding team. So I was working at the time of Pacific Fusion's founding for an investment entity affiliated with Eric Schmidt, and the team had decided to build this fusion project. We knew it would cost on the order of a billion dollars to build a net facility gain capable system. And furthermore that it might be a lot easier to find the first a hundred million than the next nine. So Eric Schmidt pointed the team in my direction because my team had previously done some tranche deals in biotech and come up with creative financial structures to solve for that problem. And so I got involved initially as a friendly advisor to the team to think about how we do the financing and very quickly realized that this was something really special. Eric, Lee, Keith, Will were some of the smartest, kindest, most hardworking people that I had ever met and everybody that I was calling for diligence to prepare for the financing was voting with their feet to come do this, including many of the people who were most responsible for ignition on the National Ignition Facility, which is the last big fusion facility built in this country.
(17:47):
Anyway, fast forward a year, here we are, but Eric Schmidt was certainly an important part of the connective tissue that brought us all together.
Cody Simms (17:54):
And so let's then move into how you decided to finance the company so aggressively. You indicated just now you've worked on some tiered financing structures in biotech. I've been in venture capital for 12 or 13 years. I've been in technology for way longer than that. Unfortunately at this point I have not seen very many. I would call them traditional tech companies funded in. You typically follow the typical Pre-Seed, Seed Series A, Series B, Series C sort of thing where you have to prove a certain amount of milestones over the course of, call it 18 to 24 months, and you find a new outside investor and they come in and they value the company at a different valuation than the prior investors did. And it requires you to continue to show both technical and commercial progress in order to attract that outside capital. What made you all decide A, that model shouldn't be the one to do for fusion, and then B, how in the world did you create a structure that did ultimately attract large scale capital to come in?
Carrie Von Muench (18:57):
I mean, I think you've hit on a really important point, which is the types of companies and projects for which the traditional venture ecosystem works well and the types for which doesn't. The model that you've described where you go out and raise a Seed from one person, a Series A from the next person, a Series B from the next person and so on and so forth until you go out of business, get acquired or go public basically works really well if you as a company and your early investors know exactly what you need to deliver to have that next tranche of capital, write the next check. And so right, you would know this, well, you could speak to this. My knowledge is now pretty dated. You could speak to this in a much more informed way than I could, but everybody kind of knows if you're building a software company, what the Series A milestones are, there aren't really questions there. Same with Series B, same with Series C because there are so many companies that look the same from a milestone perspective that you are able to build pattern recognition and capital stack. And so you don't have a lot of Series A investors thinking that there's fundamental financing risks to their company so long as the company delivers. If your company fits one of those architects,
Cody Simms (20:00):
You can raise a Seed round on a hope and a dream and a team, and then you go to your Series A and you actually have to have some degree of business milestones typically, and those milestones just increase as you go. I'm guessing a $5 million hope in a dream in a team Seed round wouldn't have done much to help the mission of what you were trying to do.
Carrie Von Muench (20:19):
There are some companies where that doesn't work well. So biotech is a good example for new modalities or new types of drugs that the market doesn't know well, everybody kind of knows what FDA approval is worth or what certain preclinical milestones are worth. There are these milestones close to the end of the road that everybody agrees are massively valuable, but because we haven't seen a ton of companies that look like this come through the capital stack, there aren't known intermediate milestones that the market agrees on. So if you have a founding team going to market and early investors wanting to make their first round happen, you're looking at a bunch of uncertainty about the next tranches of capital. Like if we deliver these things, we think the next investor is going to fund it. They told us they would, but we don't know because we don't have a bunch of comps.
(21:01):
And so my old fund had solved for this with some biotech deals by saying, okay, why don't we think about assembling all the capital we need at the outset to reach this big goal that we all agree is valuable, that's great, but to your point, you still need to ensure accountability. You can't have investors funding a ton of money unless the company is delivering. So then the second point says, okay, why don't we get this capital stack to agree on what those milestones are at the outset and fund so long as the company is delivering against those milestones. And that does a bunch of really great things. First, it radically reduces financing risk for early investors as well as the team. So if you deliver, you have a path to achieving this thing we all agree is valuable. Second, it provides incredible clarity and focus.
(21:43):
The team knows exactly what they're executing against, which really improves the likelihood of success. Third, it gives you a horizon to plan for long-term things. So if you need to place long lead procurements, if you need to get buildings built, if you need to do things that take more than a year and a half of planning, you can actually plan against them and get those balls rolling in a way that pulls in the overall schedule for the project. And finally, and really importantly, investors are only funding if the company delivers and that matters, right? We haven't seen a lot of great outcomes with massive financings at the beginning that aren't milestone gated, and so we thought fusion looks similar. Fusion, everybody kind of knows that net facility gain is a massively valuable milestone. The market is learning but has not yet built pattern recognition for what those intermediate milestones are.
(22:27):
So if what we and our early investors want is to maximize the probability that we demonstrate net facility gain as quickly as possible, we should collect the capital that we need to do that at the outset and call it as milestones are achieved. And that model really appeal. You asked how do we get a bunch of founding investors involved? That model was really appealing to a lot of people we spoke with that lived through Cleantech 1.0. Cody, I know you bring some scars from this era too. Hemat of General Catalyst let our Series A, he'd seen so many hardware companies go through this in Cleantech 1.0 and he actually felt really strongly that to make a project like a fusion company successful, we needed to resource it in a serious way from the outset. And so he was a fantastic partner to our team in structuring that round to set it up for success in making sure that we had the right founding team of investors on board with Eric Schmidt and Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, [inaudible] and a number of others, and then helping us bring in the right syndicate who was aligned with the vision and ambition and wanted to do everything in their power to make the project successful.
Yin Lu (23:30):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin a partner at MCJ here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ Collective membership. Globally startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable and more secure. And at MCJ, we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry MCJ Collective connects members with one another with MCJ's portfolio and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique talent matchmaking system and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJ.vc and click the membership tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (24:31):
So as you move from, I think you have these three stages in the company then just to be super clear about it, then you unlock different pockets of this total $900 million investment that has been essentially pledged but not all wired to the company yet. Is that the way to think about it?
Carrie Von Muench (24:50):
Yeah, that's the way to think about it. You can think about it kind of like a capital call model for a fund. So we have known tranches of capital that have been agreed with our investors. We have known milestones that we've agreed to hit, and then once our investors determined that we've hit those milestones, the next tranche is funded and the milestones relate to demonstrating the modular components of the system. This wouldn't work if this were a binary scientific risk reduction project. It works because it's a very well-defined execution project, and so we can say things like we're going to demonstrate the modular components of our machine. Once we've done that, we all know what the technical performance requirements are, we're going to build the next level of integrated system. We're going to build the next level of integrated system. We're going to demonstrate that our codes work and agree with the world-class codes of the national labs and accurately predict the experiments that we build on. These milestones are very well defined. And so we've been able to lay out a very clear roadmap to execute against.
Cody Simms (25:42):
And you all recently achieved phase one of your milestones ahead of schedule?
Carrie Von Muench (25:47):
Yeah, we did. We said it would take 12 to 18 months after our first close to achieve those milestones. We ended up able to do it about nine months after first close. And it's funny, right? You don't know how long a lot of things are going to take you. We didn't know how long it was going to take us to raise almost a billion dollars. We didn't know how long it was going to take us to hire 30 people of whom there are five in the world that can do each of what that person does. We weren't sure exactly how many hardware iterations we need on the components and this virtuous cycle where just incredibly accomplished people voted with their feet to come be part of this. That helped us close the rest of the Series A. They hired the best people they'd ever worked with and vice versa and early collaborations with partners at the national laboratories who have been instrumental in making all that we do possible. All those things came together to ensure we could deliver ahead of schedule.
Cody Simms (26:49):
Congrats on that. Let's actually move into describing the actual Pacific Fusion technology stack to some extent because I think that will then help us come back to what we just talked about and describe what it meant to have completed Phase one. I think we probably need a picture of what the thing looks like before we can understand what that milestone meant. Maybe jump at it from a 10,000 foot view of what is the Pacific fusion system and then we can get down into the actual architecture to some extent to help us understand how the system actually operates or will operate.
Carrie Von Muench (27:23):
We do what is called pulser driven inertial fusion, and it's distinct from the other big form of inertial fusion, laser driven inertial fusion in an important way. In laser fusion like what they do over at Livermore, you use a big capacitor bank to charge a laser and then you use a laser to drive a target. In pulse driven inertial fusion, there is no laser. You have a big capacitor bank that stores energy. It's used to make a big electric current. That electric current is run across a little can of fusion fuel, about a centimeter tall and kind of like a lightning bolt. It creates a magnetic field that squishes that target really hard, and so it's a lot more efficient than a laser driven system because there's not a laser in between your energy storage system and your actual fusion event.
Cody Simms (28:05):
What powers that pulse action to begin with if you inject outside power into it and then the theory is the system then reuses the power across to continue to drive those pulses? Yes.
Carrie Von Muench (28:16):
Yeah, so you can think of the system in three big subsystems. The first are a bunch of capacitor banks that store energy. That energy is then carried into a fusion chamber. That's the second big subsystem. So that's the area that surrounds the target across these tiny little cans of fusion fuel called targets. There's a picture of this on our website, anybody's welcome to go take a look. But the way it works in practice is that that first part, the pulsar, which is the majority of the capital cost and footprint acts like a big battery. It stores electrical energy. It discharges that energy in the form of an electric current that's carried into the fusion chamber is run across this tiny target. It implodes the target, squishes the target hard enough to cause fusion and then that process is repeated over and over again. And in a fusion power system, the energy from the fusion reaction is captured by blankets. Heat exchange with heat exchange fluid ultimately used to drive a turbine, put power on the grid.
Cody Simms (29:08):
And so then ultimately the first phase milestone that you recently accomplished was what part of that component system?
Carrie Von Muench (29:15):
So the important thing to understand about the overall fusion machine that we're building is that it's highly modular and mass manufacturable, so the majority of the capital costs and the footprint of the machine sits in this thing we've been calling the pulsar, which is like a big battery pack that stores electrical energy. That Puler consists of 156 identical modules. Each of those modules sits in about the footprint of a shipping container to put this in perspective and produces about two terawatts of peak power over a hundred nanoseconds. So for those a hundred nanoseconds, about four times more power than the average power provided by the entire United States electrical grid. And each of those modules in turn consists of 32 identical units. Each of those 32 identical units consists of 10 identical units. Each of those 10 identical units consists of three identical units. So we built and demonstrated the foundational building blocks of those modules in our first phase of work and show that they met the performance requirements. We're now working on demonstrating that a full module meets the requirements and once we've done that, we'll be able to build another 155 carbon copies and commission the entire integrated system.
Cody Simms (30:24):
At what point do you need to redemonstrate the 2022 NIF milestone in your system using this pulse magnetic field system as opposed to the laser-based system that Lawrence Livermore was using?
Carrie Von Muench (30:38):
We are working to demonstrate net facility gain by 2030, and once the system is fully commissioned ahead of that demonstration, we'll of course demonstrate ignition on the same machine. Does that make sense?
Cody Simms (30:51):
So ignition is not an early stage milestone for you necessarily. It's one of the last things you'll turn on in the system.
Carrie Von Muench (30:57):
Yeah, I mean the thing you have to understand about fusion is that it does not work scale down full stop end. You have to drive fusion to get fusion fuel to fuse, you have to squish it really, really hard and for long enough to cause fusion and that means creating physical conditions that look a lot like the inside of stars and that you can't do on a tabletop. What you can do is prove one that if you drive fuel to a certain pressure, you'll get ignition and two show that you can build a machine that we know physically will drive fuel to that pressure, which is what we've done. Then most of the risk is in showing that you can execute on the build of that machine. And I don't know if you've ever read How Big Things Get Done, it's one of my favorite books on the topic, but if you look at the database of industrial projects in the world, those very rarely deliver on schedule and on budget. And so a lot of our focus is a business is on de-risking the execution of the build to actually deliver the system that we know once functional will create the physical conditions needed for fusion.
Cody Simms (31:59):
And so if I understand then going back to Lawrence Livermore in 2022, they have these lasers which are very expensive. What they also have not built or did not build in that architectural system was basically the energy storage banks that are the pulsers that you're building, which act as the large batteries that part of the system didn't exist there, which is you're starting essentially with that part of the system.
Carrie Von Muench (32:21):
What they did at Livermore, they have an energy storage system at Livermore, were building a more efficient energy storage system. What they did at Livermore and their ignition campaign is stored a little bit more than 300 megajoules of energy in a capacitor bank to drive two megajoules into a target to get five out. Now they've gotten more like eight out, so that's really exciting. The two to five, two to eight is a really big deal. The 300 to eight is not a practical basis for a power plant. And so we're building a system that stores about 80 megajoules and gets about a hundred megajoules out without demonstrating any new physics. So think of it like a machine that just creates the same physical conditions for the fuel, but much, much more cost effectively and efficiently so that you actually get more energy out at the system level.
Cody Simms (33:05):
Makes sense and thank you. And capacitor bank was the word I was looking for. So maybe describe then where you are in terms of trying to hit the next milestone now that you've built The initial pulsar module I think is what you said for milestone 1.
Carrie Von Muench (33:20):
2026 will be a big year for us as you know as one of our investors. It's in many ways the year in which we transition from foundational R&D to production in support of the demonstration system build and the big milestone that unlocks that is demonstrating that a full module works to spec because then the work of delivering the system is in reproducing that same thing 155 identical times. We are now building the infrastructure to support that build. So for example, we announced that we'll be building our big research manufacturing campus that's the billion dollar fusion machine in Albuquerque, New Mexico in September. We're going to break ground on that facility next year or to get it built by the following year. We're commissioning a manufacturing facility in New Mexico where we'll be building a few of these a month by the end of next year so that we can build the whole integrated system in time. And it's important to invest in that infrastructure early because you need all of that ready to go when you flip the switch on production.
Cody Simms (34:17):
And so having that sort of manufacturing capability is the key milestone that you'll need to hit in order to unlock this sort of second tranche of your Series A.
Carrie Von Muench (34:26):
The big upcoming milestone from a technical perspective to demonstrate that a full module works is expected after that delivering the system is really a matter of scaled production of execution and the modular nature of the system as far as I'm aware, is unique in the field, right? We know when we look at the database of industrial projects that modular projects really outperform non modular projects on schedule and budget because you can learn so much more quickly, you can iterate at a much smaller scale and in a much less expensive way. Optimizing those modular components is really important for us to show that we can deliver the full system on schedule and on budget.
Cody Simms (35:04):
So you mentioned Albuquerque, that's been a huge initiative for you all recently. I know you looked far and wide for where does the company want to set up shop? Essentially a company born I think in California, but ultimately landed on what I think many people in the tech world would say, wow, I didn't know there was a vibrant technology community going on in New Mexico. Maybe walk us through a little bit about that process and what ultimately led you to Albuquerque and the resources around New Mexico to build Pacific Fusion.
Carrie Von Muench (35:38):
I mean it's a really good question in many ways was the single biggest operational decision we made this year, which is where are you citing the big project? For us, there were only two natural places to seriously consider for a fusion project of this scale. The first was here in the Bay area where our corporate headquarters and research campuses are and where our collaborators Livermore National Lab are and the second was in Albuquerque near our collaborators at Sandia and Los Alamos. We feel very strongly that public-private partnership is the way to success in fusion, both for Pacific Fusion and for the country. If we look at what China is doing, which we can come back to more later, but regardless, being close to those collaborators was very, very important to us. And so Albuquerque has been, it's been an interesting journey getting to know the Albuquerque and Los Lunas and New Mexico community. I personally had never spent much time there until we started spending a lot of time there this year.
Cody Simms (36:27):
I hope you're eating breakfast at Frontier regularly because that is the spot
Carrie Von Muench (36:33):
I have been there once. We are working toward regularly.
Cody Simms (36:36):
My dad's whole family is from Albuquerque and it is a near and dear to my heart place, so we don't need to take everyone on the tour of New Mexico cuisine, but it's a special place. I was personally thrilled when I heard that the company was going to be building there because it meant I get a chance to go visit more often. Hopefully.
Carrie Von Muench (36:54):
I mean, I think the thing to understand about New Mexico is that state leadership at all levels from Governor Lujan Grisham and her team to key state legislators to local officials, mayors, city council leaders are all really excited to build next generation hardware companies and what that means put together is that you have a team state, local all levels rowing very hard in the same direction to get a project in our case entitled and ready to build very fast. So we were able to substantially complete entitlements really between June and November of this year, which is very fast. We were able to have final action on all of our incentives on a similar timeframe and it builds a foundation for a relationship with a state in which you can actually make big projects successful and that was really important to us. We have at the end of the day a fiduciary duty to our investors and team to do this as capital efficiently as we can.
(37:49):
It is essential that we build in a place where we have the applied physics and manufacturing talent base to make this successful. And it was really important to us to build in a place where we have leadership at all levels committed to making this a success and right, there was one state official who mentioned to me that if we make this work, this is the largest commercialization possibly of New Mexico technology in history and we want to go make that vision real. The last thing I'll mention about New Mexico is that there's a $65 billion sovereign wealth fund in the state, second largest in the country run by an incredible team, and they are committed to backing best in class venture investors, many of which we work with, and that capital stack and infrastructure, those people also can play a really big role in making it possible for rapidly growing hardware companies be successful. Cody, if there are folks in your portfolio that are considering New Mexico, I think it's a really competitive state at the moment where companies are thinking about big capital investments and certainly we'd be happy to speak with them. I think it's a really exciting opportunity certainly for us and hopefully also for others.
Cody Simms (38:52):
And just to be clear, so what you're actually building there is you talk about net facility gain by 2030, that is the fusion reactor, you are building that in New Mexico? Yes.
Carrie Von Muench (39:02):
Yeah. We're building the world's biggest pulse power facility in New Mexico and all of the manufacturing infrastructure to support the build of that facility.
Cody Simms (39:09):
And a big part of it, it sounds like you believe there's both the manufacturing resources locally as well as the talent I assume coming out of the national labs largely, that have this expertise to both collaborate with you and potentially even become employees or part of the Pacific Fusion team
Carrie Von Muench (39:24):
As you know well, there is nothing more important than who you hire. The whole name of the game in building a company doing something hard is hire people who are way smarter than you and give them clear guidelines for success and then give them what they need to be successful. In New Mexico, we have so far been able to hire very well and we're excited to keep building the team, right? Nothing matters in the first five or 10 or 20 hires at a new site and so far again, we've been able to find really fantastic talent ready to roll up their sleeves and make this successful.
Cody Simms (39:56):
A fun family story on my end, which was my uncle who ultimately ended up actually becoming the governor of New Mexico eventually, but he started his family business in the 1980s, right as Intel was starting to build their first big campus outside Albuquerque. He was basically the construction company that helped do a lot of the build out of that facility and it transformed the local economy. And so I can see why the local government is interested in a project that may seem small today, but could be this world changing energy company.
Carrie Von Muench (40:28):
It's not that small in the context of the environment in which it's being built. We're creating hundreds of jobs just with this first project, more than 200 permanent jobs. We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on components that represent many more hundreds of jobs across the country now. And the state sees, I think, and rightfully so, the opportunity to make that thousands of jobs if we both bring more of that supply chain to the state, bring more production in house, but also start manufacturing fusion energy systems for the country and the world. I think there's a clear path to be a top 10 employer in the state within 10 years, and that's something that looks different in New Mexico than it does in some other bigger states in the country. We are so grateful to have our headquarters in California. We couldn't have built the company's foundation in any other place but Silicon Valley to have brought that talent together the way we did. And I think now with campuses in both New Mexico and California, we can hopefully bring the best of what both states have to offer to bear to actually drive transformative fusion energy outcomes for the country
Cody Simms (41:29):
In AI right now there is very clearly an arms race between multiple AI companies, some of which are, you can't call them startups anymore, but are new companies to the space and some of which are large existing technology companies, but they are racing against one another. There's some collaboration, but it's, they are definitely trying to win AI. Does diffusion fusion feel similar? There are two or three other big fusion projects that are out there. There's maybe a dozen or so funded fusion companies that are out there. Do you feel competitive with these other fusion initiatives or is there a collaborative environment in some way, shape or form in this space?
Carrie Von Muench (42:08):
I think the big picture competition is a competition with China. To put this in context, I think we all now agree for the most part that it's no longer a question of if fusion will work, but when it will work and who will build the future fusion when it works, promises secure, scalable, clean, domestically manufactured power and all of the strategic economic and military advantages that come with controlling the world's most advanced energy technology. To your point, especially in the age of AI, the race for AI is at the end of the day a race for power. And I think most people in the field recognize that. And interestingly, since controlled ignition was demonstrated at Livermore three years ago, China has deployed between six and 10 billion to commercialization relevant fusion energy projects. In contrast, there are no significant public fusion energy infrastructure projects underway in the US to convert what was an American scientific accomplishment into actual industrial leadership. So while the United States pioneered the fusion science, China is moving dollars and concrete and steel and outpacing us in transitioning the science into serious large scale facilities.
Cody Simms (43:21):
And we already saw that happen in solar panels, right?
Carrie Von Muench (43:22):
Exactly. And so when you talk about the fusion industry in the US, we are all rowing very hard in the same direction to maximize the probability that we win this race as a country. We're rowing in the same direction on the policy front and on many others, and I'm so glad there are multiple private fusion companies there building big things because we need big things to be built in order to win this race.
Cody Simms (43:45):
Do you see a world where there's a fusion power plant sitting outside every city? What does it look like at scale to you?
Carrie Von Muench (43:53):
Oh gosh. I mean, Ray, there are various different pictures of the future that you can paint. Maybe I'll try painting three pictures of that future and you can know what you think. Really. The first is what I would call baseline scenario. A fusion power is available but expensive and at this stage, fusion's really about security, secure clean baseload power for critical infrastructure and fusion for critical defense purposes. If you move on to a bigger pie where fusion power is widely available and most importantly affordable enough to power everything you need, suddenly most poverty is energy poverty. Eric Toon put it well when he said "energy is prosperity," suddenly energy is no longer a bottleneck for economic growth across the world and that future looks really different. And then if we want to go crazy, we can talk about future pies in the sky that could exist many decades from now.
(44:47):
People have talked about fusion, chemical fuel production on the moon, fusion powered space, travel, all kinds of crazy things. We're really focused right now on making those first two realities happen in order, but really the first were the path to the second. In terms of infrastructure rollout, the great thing about fusion power plants is you can put them anywhere. You can build them next to existing transmission infrastructure. And so you have a path to roll out power systems that can be cited in your load, which is a really big deal given all the new large loads that are coming online over the next decade or two.
Cody Simms (45:22):
And from a security perspective, one of the things we see with energy in general is what kind of energy gets built in what country often has to do with where they have access to the supply chains that are a priority for them in that country to secure and to have economical ongoing access to. You've seen the US has lots of oil and gas and oil and gases continue to be a thing the US does. China does not have a lot of oil and gas, they have a lot of coal and so they've done a lot of coal, but they've also innovated on a lot of these clean energy technologies like solar and batteries and EVs. You end up with these battles of energy systems that rely around what are the endemic resources you have access to. Vision is clearly the one that gets the most attention in this regard because do you have access to nuclear fuel to refining it or not? From a fusion perspective, what does that supply chain look like? Is there going to be a critical materials race around fusion supply chains or are they much more accessible generally?
Carrie Von Muench (46:24):
So that is a really important question and is very much a function of the type of fusion machine you are building. One of the reasons why I was so excited to join the Pacific Fusion team is because our system is basically made of oil, plastic, metal, and water does not depend on any rare earth minerals or critical materials that you have to source from abroad. And so has a straightforward path to being manufactured domestically with resources that we have here and being manufactured in many countries across the world
Cody Simms (46:51):
It sounds like, and exported without a lot of risk that you're giving away materials to a foreign country.
Carrie Von Muench (46:58):
I mean, there's no fizzle material in fusion systems of any kind, which make a big difference for exportability.
Cody Simms (47:05):
Then the idea is you all can ultimately mass manufacture these plants and you could have locations all around the world that could be manufacturing hubs for Pacific Fusion plants.
Carrie Von Muench (47:17):
Exactly. That's the goal.
Cody Simms (47:18):
Alright, getting to our last couple of questions for you. Running this company with a audacious goal, a strong scientific backing and substantial, I would call it probably financial pressure in a different way than running a Seed stage startup feels financial pressure, but a lot of expectation I would say that comes with what you have accomplished from a financing perspective. What is your day-to-day like? How do you orchestrate this?
Carrie Von Muench (47:48):
We need to build a machine that works and do so safely and on time and on budget, and that is what matters. That is what everything we do every day is organized around everything else is in the noise. I think to your point on what the actual operational reality looks like of building a big project like this many days, it's just a mountain of minutia. There are so many little things that have to go right in tandem to make a big project successful, and a lot of our focus has been on building the team that can do that and setting them up for success in doing that. And we are adding to that team. So MCJ, shameless plug for folks who know MCJ has been one of our most helpful investors from a talent perspective. They've put us in touch with a number of wonderful folks who are now part of the team.
Cody Simms (48:30):
Oh, thanks.
Carrie Von Muench (48:30):
And I know have a lot of folks listening who are thinking about moving into climate. And so if there are folks listening who are excited about a career in fusion about building the holy grail of energy now, please reach out. We have lots of jobs open on our website and at the end of the day, Cody, to your point, your day-to-day is determined by the people you work with and the extent to which you can set them up to succeed. And that's what we're all about here.
Cody Simms (48:54):
And I assume you're not just looking for fusion PhDs, you need people who are good at project planning, people who are good at manufacturing, people who are good at HR and finance and all of the above, right?
Carrie Von Muench (49:05):
Yep, a hundred percent. All of the above. Definitely not only PhDs, really wide range of backgrounds and expertise and education levels required for all the different functions that have to come together to make this project successful. So definitely check out those open roles on our website rows adding to them, and there are lots of different ways to contribute no matter where you come from.
Cody Simms (49:24):
We were talking a little bit about fission and when I think through the history of fission, there was obviously an enormous push during World War ii, mostly from a defense and weapons perspective to understand that technology and then that grew into a domestic energy agenda really in the fifties and sixties through the seventies until it started to kind of wane, at least in the US with fusion, do you expect a similar boom in that we've had this, call it early twenties, sort of large scale technical milestones. There is a path to commercialization and really it should be within the next decade plus, and then hopefully a multi-decade sort of expansion from there where we start to see this become something that all of us experience in our lives. Is that a realistic, similar model to rolling out across the country?
Carrie Von Muench (50:21):
Oh yeah. The achievement of ignition was a massive value inflection point for the field because the scientific foundation for every big fusion feet to follow the next big milestone for the field that a lot of different people are working toward is the achievement of net facility gain. We'll see that by 2030 or by the early 2030s. And then the big milestone that follows is the construction operation of the first fusion power plant or power plants. Different approaches have different advantages at different scales and those kinds of things. And from there we'll see rollout as scale. And so I think we're definitely talking about a massive push over the next five to 10 years that will certainly reshape the energy landscape for the many decades that follow.
Cody Simms (51:05):
Carrie, what have we not covered?
Carrie Von Muench (51:06):
Cody, I think you covered a lot of important things. We are so grateful to be building. We are so grateful for the investors we've been able to work with. We're grateful for the state leadership that we get to work with in New Mexico and in California. We are grateful for 50 years of research at the national laboratories that makes everything that we do possible. And I thing I would maybe end with is that to make fusion successful or to make any large transformative technology successful, whether it's AI or fusion or space flight or all these kinds of other things, requires a massively orchestrated level of public private collaboration across so many different corners of government and the private sector. And we're just getting started. So if there are folks listening that feel like they have a way to contribute to helping us win the fusion race with China and make limitless clean firm power available to the world, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you. We will need a lot of different folks and a lot of different minds and a lot of different skill sets around the table to make this happen.
Cody Simms (52:10):
Carrie, this has been wonderful. Thanks for making the time. Thanks for including MCJ in your journey. We are big fans of what you're building and excited for the world you envision.
Carrie Von Muench (52:19):
Well, Cody, thank you so much. It's been wonderful talking to you, and we're so grateful to have you along for the ride.
Cody Simms (52:24):
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us MCJ.vc and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks and see you next episode.
