Focused Energy buys two of the world’s most powerful lasers for its fusion quest

Fusion power startup Focused Energy has signed a deal to buy two of the world’s most powerful lasers, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The massive lasers will be installed in the startup’s future facility, which it is building in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next two years.

“These are some of the highest-average-power lasers in private company hands,” Focused Energy CEO Scott Mercer told TechCrunch. The lasers, capable of delivering over a kilojoule of energy to a target, cost nearly $40 million.

Focused Energy is pursuing an approach to fusion known as inertial confinement, where several laser beams converge to compress a fuel pellet to the point where its contents fuse and release energy. The technique is the first to have proven that net-positive fusion power is possible, though there are still significant hurdles to overcome. 

The current state-of-the-art inertial confinement system is at the U.S. government’s National Ignition Facility, which announced the net-positive breakthrough just over two years ago. There, physicists can perform about 300 “shots” per year to investigate nuclear fusion. That’s far fewer than a commercial fusion power plant will require. Focused Energy, for example, is targeting 10 shots per second.

Focused Energy’s two new lasers will be capable of firing about once per minute, though that’s in part because the equipment that supports them is also being actively developed.

“All of these sub-systems are technology demonstrators for the ultimate fusion pilot plant that we want to build,” said Doug Hammond, the company’s VP of laser engineering. He added, “We are developing the high-energy main amplifiers in parallel, because those don’t currently exist.”

Because the lasers are technology demonstrators, too, they’re effectively bespoke, manufactured by French laser specialist Amplitude Laser. A single laser system will occupy about 1,600 square feet, the size of a small house. “One of the reasons why we are not making such big lasers in series is because nobody wants them in series,” Amplitude CEO Damien Buet told TechCrunch.

If Focused Energy can hit its milestones, that may change. The company’s current designs for a commercial power plant require thousands of lasers per facility. “The number of diodes needed for one facility would more than max out the current diode capacity worldwide,” Buet said. “We would need to ramp up an entire supply chain.”

The high number is required both to provide enough energy to spark ignition and to give each power plant enough reliability so that, if a laser should need to be repaired or replaced, the facility can continue operating.

Today, Focused Energy’s main challenge is building things quickly enough, Mercer said. “We set our target for 2035. It’s mostly conditioned on, how quickly can we start to move towards laser manufacturing at scale?” he said. “Even putting a traditional power plant on the grid in a ten year time frame is an ambitious process today.”