Albuquerque Journal: Fuse to open Albuquerque facility, adding to state’s nuclear fusion push

At age 19, JC Btaiche, the son of a nuclear physicist, decided not to pursue a college degree. Since he was a young boy, he was fascinated by the physics of the cosmos and, eventually, nuclear fusion, which powers the sun and stars - and could promise to bring humanity limitless energy.

Now 26, Btaiche is the CEO of a company that has broken half a dozen records in fusion science. That company, Fuse, is expanding with a facility in Albuquerque.

Since the nuclear era, scientists have dreamed of creating fusion power generators. The science is there, but building a scalable and economic fusion power plant has proven to be one of science's biggest challenges, and not for a lack of effort.

During fusion, the "nuclei of light atoms overcome the electric resistance that keeps them apart and get close enough to activate the strong nuclear force that holds them together," or fuse, notes the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility and Photon Science.

"Making elements fuse requires an enormous amount of heat and pressure, like that found in the cores of the sun and stars," the lab notes.

To solve this challenge, Btaiche said he faced three options: Get a Ph.D. under the tutelage of a professor, work at the national labs or start his own company.

"Every professor has their own belief of, 'This is the fusion that's going to work,'" he said. "It's like asking a rabbi, priest and sheikh, 'Who is God?' They all have very compelling answers." The national labs struggled with funding and worked slowly, he added.

"So I thought the only option is to build a company in order to make the progress at a pace that we need," he said.

Knowing that, like Rome, fusion power cannot be built in a day, Fuse is building a commercial facility of nearly 30,000 square feet in the 2600 block of Baylor SE, near the Sunport, where it will conduct radiation testing services for national defense, space and electronic components.

Inside the facility, Fuse will have machines, such as a flash X-ray generator and a pulse neutron generator, to test if devices can survive high-radiation environments. (He said the testing process does not produce radiation waste).

New Mexico has made a bet on fusion power, which other states have been unwilling to make, according to Btaiche. Last year, Pacific Fusion, another California company, announced it selected Mesa del Sol for its $1 billion research and manufacturing campus. Hiring is already underway for that expansion, with some 200 long-term jobs expected at Pacific Fusion's facility.

"It's quite safe - there's no radioactive waste or anything like that," he said. "But some states are more comfortable with these technologies than others."

And why would anyone need to test whether a device can withstand high levels of radiation?

"There's different levels of like why do people care," he said. "First, natural space. Once you exit the Earth's atmosphere, you are susceptible to natural radiation just from solar flares or other naturally produced radiation, which is why pretty much all space components generally need to be tested against some radiation threshold."

The other reason is more ominous, something Btaiche calls "human-generated radiation," say, from a nuclear weapon or accident.

"We (need to) make sure that our critical infrastructure will still hold in a bad scenario happening from like a human-made radiation event," he said.

The company, which has in recent years signed cooperative research and development agreements with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, said it has "acquired several acres of land and will invest tens of millions of dollars to build next-generation radiation testing infrastructure." The facility is expected to create dozens of high-skilled engineering and technical jobs over several years and is scheduled to begin serving customers this summer.

New Mexico's two U.S. senators, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, as well as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, were all quoted praising Fuse in its announcement.

"Fuse's investment in Albuquerque is yet another indication that our state is at the forefront of cutting-edge technology while creating high-quality jobs and expanding opportunities for collaboration with our national laboratories and research institutions," Lujan Grisham said in a statement.

Asked what kind of degree it would take to work with Fuse, Btaiche, the wonderkid who opted out of college, said, "I care about being really democratic." If you have the drive and willingness to be a part of the "fusion dream," there are skills that can be built, he added.

"But, at the same time, we have hired already and expect to continue hiring some highly skilled jobs as well as to bring to the state from our other facilities another pool of talent … as well as hire locally," he said.

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