News Release
At Pulsed Power Workshop at Â鶹´«Ã½, Momentum for Fusion Engineering Continues to Build
Â鶹´«Ã½ Pulsed Power Workshop Brings Together Industry, Academia, National Labs and Government Research Leaders
March 4, 2025
The University of California San Diego continues to build the collaborations and community connections needed to advance fusion engineering – with the ultimate goal of solving the most challenging engineering challenges holding back practical fusion energy systems. Â鶹´«Ã½’s, sponsored by the US Department of Energy and ARPA-E, is a recent example of these strategic efforts to accelerate advances in fusion engineering and science.
The workshop, which was held in November 2024, brought together leaders from industry, academia, National Laboratories, and U.S. Government agencies with interest and expertise in fusion energy – and the pulsed power systems that are an integral part of fusion systems.
“All fusion systems require pulsed power in one form or another,” said Keith LeChien, a workshop speaker and Co-Founder and CTO of Pacific Fusion, a pulsed magnetic fusion startup that has raised over $900M in investment since 2023.
LeChien’s comment, and his workshop talk overall, reflected the larger theme of the Â鶹´«Ã½ pulsed power workshop: there are significant opportunities for the fusion energy community writ large – which includes the pulsed power community – to work more closely together on shared challenges and goals. In fact, bringing these communities from industry, academia, National Laboratories and government agencies together to build new collaborations was one the primary objectives of the workshop.
“We are here to talk science, to talk challenges, to talk supply chains,” said Â鶹´«Ã½ mechanical engineering faculty member Mike Campbell, a workshop organizer and a co-director of the new .
“The NIF ignition successes would have been impossible without the supply chains we have all built together,” said Campbell in his opening remarks for the workshop, which he organized along with Â鶹´«Ã½ mechanical engineering professor Farhat Beg, also a co-director of Â鶹´«Ã½’s Fusion Engineering Institute.
Now that ignition has been achieved in the US, what are the next big moves that the US needs to take in order to win the global race to roll out cost-effective fusion energy systems?
Given the intense global competition of this race, workshop speakers from all fusion sectors highlighted the need to step back and consider with fresh eyes how private companies, universities, US National Laboratories and US federal government agencies could collaborate in new ways to ensure that the US emerges as the global leader in the rollout of practical fusion energy technologies.
“This workshop provided a platform to establish collaborations between industry, national laboratories and universities to address scientific and engineering challenges for pulsed power driven fusion and also facilitate opportunities to bring young researchers and students into this exciting research area,” said Beg.
The put on the workshop, which was supported by the and the.
, which includes a link to the full agenda.
Technical topics from the workshop included:
* Drivers that use pulsed power technology
* Targets including driver-target coupling
* Chamber concepts, such as Tritium breeding and waste streams
* Diagnostics and simulations of plasmas
“These are exciting and challenging times, and we are confident that this workshop will help propel us on the road to fusion energy,” said Javier Garay, Associate Dean for Research and Mechanical Engineering Professor at the Â鶹´«Ã½ Jacobs School of Engineering. Garay is the founding director of the Fusion Engineering Institute at Â鶹´«Ã½.
When Â鶹´«Ã½ launched its in October of 2024, it signaled its efforts to double down on building and strengthening the cross-sector collaborations needed to solve the toughest engineering challenges that are holding back the rollout of practical fusion energy systems. Realizing the promise of fusion energy requires advances to many areas, including pulsed power systems.
Workshop Organizing Committee
Farhat Beg (Co-Chair), Â鶹´«Ã½
Michael Campbell (Co-Chair), Â鶹´«Ã½
Petros Tzeferacos, University of Rochester
Mike Farrell, General Atomics
Genia Vogman, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Matt Gomez, Sandia National Laboratories
Keith LeChien, Pacific Fusion