Will Regan, Ph.D, Co-Founder & President, Pacific Fusion
Listen on your favorite podcast platform:
A Novel Approach to Fusion with Pacific Fusion's Will Regan
Will Regan, President and Co-founder of Pacific Fusion, is our tour guide for pulser-driven inertial fusion, which involves compressing hydrogen isotopes with powerful electrical pulses. The isotopes are in a small canister, and an analogy of what happens to the canister is in the image, albeit at about 1/600 of the electrical current. This approach differs from magnetic confinement fusion, which relies on sustaining a plasma with magnetic fields. The “impedance-matched Marx generator” and other existing technologies and pathfinding, when refined and adapted for PF’s objectives, help smooth the way to the cost-efficient fusion energy the company aspires to deliver.
Will shares his journey from studying applied physics at Cornell and UC Berkeley to his roles in the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program and eight years at Google X, the “Moonshot Factory.” He saw fusion as ready for major breakthroughs in efficacy, and he joined other pioneers in the field to co-found Pacific Fusion in 2023.
With a mid-2030’s target for putting electricity on the grid at commercial scale and rates, Will explains how tried-and-true foundational technologies such as capacitors, advanced Marx generators, and fuel pellets that use widely-available materials enable a formula for clean, relatively inexpensive, and abundant energy.
