Eric Lander is a big science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist and mathematician, he directed the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless honors include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be his science advisor and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander lost his job due to accusations that intimidated subordinatesbut went on to run a nonprofit called Science for America.
So what is he doing running a Silicon Valley startup that aims to solve the climate crisis by making the long-held dream of clean fusion energy a reality? Lander is the founding CEO of the newly announced Pacific Fusionleading a team that includes top scientists from the national nuclear laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Sandia), as well as simulation and operations experts. He joins several dozen companies pursuing a merger dream that always seems to take 10 to 20 years. And it still is: Pacific Fusion says it won’t deliver an operational commercial fusion plant until well into the 2030s. But this time there’s a clear path to success. Or so says its famous CEO.
In May 2023, Science for America issued a report which noted progress on the merger, citing recent developments. The previous year, a The Livermore group managed what is known as “target gain”, which produces significantly more energy than the amount needed to perform the experiment. Shortly after publishing the paper, Lander quietly formed a company with a few scientists in the field, including some who worked in the labs and others from places like Alphabet’s X division and Tesla.
Sitting in a conference room at Pacific Fusion’s headquarters in Fremont, California, Lander explains to me why a business merger is finally within our reach and why Pacific Fusion may have the best chance of making it a reality. He begins by giving me an introduction to fusion, which occurs when hydrogen is, in his words, “smashed” into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy. It occurs naturally in the sun and other stars, but humans have yet to figure out how to do it efficiently here on Earth. But the potential reward – unlimited clean energy – has led around 50 startups to chase this dragon. Billionaires like Sam Altman and Bill Gates have backed one or another of these startups. It seems like every few months one of those contenders announces some discovery.
Why does Pacific Fusion say it’s different? The method he is pursuing is called pulsed magnetic fusion, which involves inserting small containers of deuterium-tritium fuel into a chamber and firing large electrical pulses through them to magnetically compress the fuel containers and achieve fusion. (It’s all explained here in a paper.) “It’s a very attractive approach that has been known as an idea for decades, but has only become feasible in the last two years thanks to this work at the national laboratories,” Lander says. Their argument, which I will hear repeatedly when I meet with their team, is that we have now made all the scientific advances we need to understand how to use this technique to generate much more energy than is needed to build and run this system. The remaining challenges (difficult, no doubt) lie in engineering.
Another challenge is finding the money to build the prototypes of the hundreds of commercial plants that will theoretically solve the world’s energy problems. (And maybe it will cause global disruption when current suppliers change, but that’s another story.) How is a lunar project financed? Even when an investor accepts the risk, the prospect of profitability is distant: Pacific Fusion’s timeline is to have a full-scale demonstration system sometime in the early 2030s, and commercial systems later in the decade.