OpenSesame Licensing Accelerates Fusion Development, New Mexico Expansion

Pacific Fusion has licensed OpenSesame, a software tool developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to support the company’s development of a pulser-driven inertial confinement fusion system aimed at producing low-cost commercial fusion energy.

The technology transfer earned the partnership a 2025 Technology Transfer Excellence honor and gives Pacific Fusion a faster way to model how materials behave under the extreme pressures and temperatures found in fusion systems.

Developed by Los Alamos researchers J. Tinka Gammel and Carl Greeff in the Laboratory’s Theoretical Division, OpenSesame enables rapid development and refinement of high-fidelity material property tables using data from the SESAME database. The software supports simulations of equation-of-state, opacity, and transport properties — in plain terms, how materials respond to extreme heat, pressure, and radiation — across a broad range of conditions, providing information needed to design and evaluate advanced fusion systems.

Pacific Fusion has raised more than $900 million and plans to achieve net facility gain by 2030 at a planned facility in Albuquerque. The company’s approximately $1 billion research and manufacturing campus at Mesa del Sol is expected to create more than 200 long-term, high-wage jobs in scientific research and advanced component manufacturing, in addition to hundreds of construction jobs. The project also includes a dedicated Build Center in Los Lunas focused on component manufacturing.

The project’s taxpayer-backed incentives include hiring milestones, beginning with a requirement to create at least 80 jobs by December 2027, according to local economic development officials.

For Pacific Fusion, licensing OpenSesame provides a competitive advantage by enabling faster, more accurate simulation-driven design. For Los Alamos, the partnership applies the Laboratory’s expertise in materials science and high-energy-density physics to a commercial fusion effort with potential implications for U.S. energy leadership and national security.

The transfer also demonstrates how national laboratory technologies can move from research into commercial applications. Pacific Fusion reported that deploying OpenSesame within weeks was critical to its development timeline, allowing the company to incorporate the technology directly into its fusion development efforts.

Originally published in the 2025 Annual Report for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation.