Fusion Startup Focused Energy to Build Facility in San Francisco

Laser fusion company Focused Energy plans to establish a $65 million laser development facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. The facility, which will serve as the company’s U.S. headquarters, will house advanced high-energy prototype inertial fusion lasers critical to the development of commercially viable fusion.

The location grants the company access to the regional talent pool, said Focused Energy CEO Scott Mercer. The San Francisco Bay Area is host to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which houses the National Ignition Facility, with which the company signed a strategic partnership last November.

Focused Energy is pursuing direct drive laser fusion, building upon work conducted at LLNL that achieved net energy gain in December 2022. The company is developing low-cost, millimeter-scale deuterium/tritium fuel targets (pearls) and modular laser arrays optimized for high repetition rate and efficiency. Focused Energy has already established a fuel targetry lab in Darmstadt, Germany. The Bay Area facility will help optimize the efficiency of the lasers and establish the global supply chain needed to support commercial fusion at scale, according to the company.

Once in production, three soda cans worth of deuterium/tritium fusion fuel will be able to power a city the size of San Francisco for a day, the company said. Ultimately, Focused Energy aims to bring the fuels and lasers together, first in an integrated engineering facility to test and optimize target design and laser and target technology, and later in a pilot plant that will produce fusion power at commercial scale.

Focused Energy has raised more than $175 million in private capital and public grant funding. It is one of eight fusion companies selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for funding under the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. The company was announced in September as the leader of a project funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research to develop a laser-driven neutron source from individual components developed by the project partners and demonstrate how it can be used for the nondestructive examination of nuclear waste containers.