Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be his science adviser and the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander lost the job because of charges that he bullied subordinates, but he went on to head a nonprofit organization called Science for America.
So what is he doing running a Silicon Valley startup that aims to solve the climate crisis by realizing the long-held dream of clean fusion energy? Lander is the founding CEO of newly announced Pacific Fusion, heading a team that includes top scientists from the national nuclear labs—Lawrence Livermore and Sandia—as well as experts in simulation and operations. It joins several dozen companies chasing a fusion dream that always seems to be 10 or 20 years out. And it still is—Pacific Fusion says it won’t deliver a working 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 that flagged progress in fusion, citing recent breakthroughs. The year before, a Livermore group achieved what is known as “target gain,” producing significantly more energy than the amount required to perform the experiment. Soon after publishing the paper, Lander quietly formed a company with some scientists in the field, including some who worked at 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 commercial fusion is finally within reach—and why Pacific Fusion may have the best chance to make it happen. He starts by giving me a primer on fusion, which happens when hydrogen is, in his word, “squished” into helium, releasing massive amounts of energy. It occurs naturally on the sun and other stars, but humans have yet to figure out how to do it efficiently here on Earth. But the potential payoff—unlimited clean power—has prompted around 50 startups to chase this dragon. Billionaires including Sam Altman and Bill Gates have backed one or another of these startups. Every few months, it seems, one of those contenders announces some breakthrough.
Why does Pacific Fusion say it’s different? The method it’s pursuing is called pulsed magnetic fusion, which involves inserting tiny containers of deuterium-tritium fuel into a chamber and blasting large electrical pulses through them to magnetically squeeze the fuel containers and achieve fusion. (It’s all explained here in a paper.) “It’s a very attractive approach that’s sort of been known for decades as an idea but has only just become feasible in the last two years because of this work in the national labs,” says Lander. His contention, which I will hear repeatedly as I meet with his team, is that we’ve now made all the scientific breakthroughs we need to understand how to use this technique to generate way more energy that it takes to build and run this system. The remaining challenges—hard ones to be sure— lie in engineering.
Another challenge is getting the money to build the prototypes for the hundreds of commercial plants that will theoretically solve the world’s energy woes. (And maybe cause global disruption when the current suppliers are upended, but that’s another story.) How do you fund a moonshot? Even when an investor accepts the risk, the prospect for payoff is distant: The Pacific Fusion timeline is to have a full-scale demonstration system sometime in the early 2030s, and commercial systems later in the decade.