Liberty Ships

In 1787, three men began publishing essays in New York newspapers under the shared pen name Publius. They tried to convince New York, a state that mostly didn’t want the new constitution, to ratify it anyway. They kept writing for months and ended up producing 85 essays. We call these the Federalist Papers now, which make them sound like relics, but back then they were op-eds.

The founders treated independence as something you engineer and keep on engineering, because the conditions that threaten it never stop changing. The declaration itself might have taken an afternoon, but the upkeep is at 250 years now and counting.

America turns 250 today and it is the right day to state what Liberty Fusion believes in, as plainly as I can manage: the next test of American independence is energy and the technology that decides it is fusion.

The fact that commercial fusion will anchor the world’s energy supply eventually is not controversial anymore. The question is when. The country that gets there first will set prices and write standards for everyone else coming after, similarly to how a few Texas regulators quietly set the world price of oil for decades of the last century. If that first country turns out to be an authoritarian state, the free world may end up spending the next hundred years buying its most important commodity from a rival. I’d rather not find out what that looks like.

Liberty Fusion works out of New Mexico, a short drive from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the location is everything. Our approach to fusion came out of research there, and the lab’s Plasma Liner Experiment will always be the scientific foundation under everything we do. People know Los Alamos for one thing: handed an impossible deadline, American physics met it. We want the peaceful half of the legacy: energy on the grid, sold by the kilowatt-hour.

Now, the Liberty ships, an exemplary case where the name accurately describes the substance. In 1941, German submarines were sinking Atlantic cargo ships faster than anyone could replace them, and the American answer to this was not elegant. The Liberty ship was a slow, plain freighter adapted from a British design. Roosevelt looked at the plans and called it “a dreadful looking object.” Time magazine went with “Ugly Duckling.” And then 18 shipyards built 2,710 of them. Average build time fell from about 230 days per ship to 42. One yard in Richmond, California assembled a complete ship, the Robert E. Peary, in 4 days and 15 hours, mostly as a stunt. Those ugly ships carried the cargo that kept the free world in the fight.

Our plasma guns are the Liberty ships of the fusion era.

That sentence carries most of what I believe about this industry, so let me unpack it. The machine that wins the fusion race will probably not be the most refined one on anyone’s drawing board. It’ll be the one you can build in numbers, at a cost the mission can bear. We designed for that from the start.

The machine itself is a sphere roughly 8 meters across, studded with several hundred plasma guns. The approach goes by Plasma-Jet-Driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion (PJMIF). The name is a mouthful, but it’s at least honest about the idea: use an inertial implosion to compress the fuel, and use a magnetic field to make the implosion easier.

A shot works like this:

1. We inject a small charge of deuterium and tritium fuel into the center of the chamber.
2. The guns fire in a precisely timed sequence and launch jets of heavier argon plasma inward at around 60 miles per second, close to 300 times the speed of sound.
3. The jets merge in flight into a closed spherical shell, and the shell becomes a piston.
4. It compresses the fuel until the fuel reaches fusion conditions and burns.
5. A magnetic field inside the fuel slows heat loss during its compression letting a piston made of plasma do work that other designs assign to giant laser arrays or building-sized superconducting magnets.

What matters most for commercialization are the plasma guns mounted outside the chamber, at a standoff distance from the burn, so a shot destroys nothing expensive. Some inertial fusion designs sacrifice precision components every time they fire. Ours fires, then fires again, up to once per second, with no damage. Repetition is the difference between a physics milestone and a power plant.

There is a longer argument behind every claim in this essay, and the coming papers will make it clear. We will get into the machine itself, and into the economics we believe favor it. For today, the point is that 250 years in, independence still has to be engineered. Our plan is to take fusion from science to the grid, and to get there first.

Happy 250th.