A Denver company that has developed technology aimed at commercializing fusion energy, seen as a promising source of carbon-free power, is expanding its operations and plans to more than double its workforce.
is adding 16,000 square feet of office space at 4880 Havana St. effective June 1. The company has a 74,000-square-foot headquarters and laser facility at 10325 E. 47th Ave.
The company that started in Silicon Valley in 2022 moved to Colorado in 2024. Plans are to double the current workforce of approximately 150 over the next year.
Xcimer has developed what the company says is the largest privately owned laser system in the world with the goal of building a pilot fusion power plant in 2035.
“Fusion is the last and best energy source that humanity is ever going to develop. There’s nothing on the horizon after fusion,” Alexander Valys, Xcimer co-founder, president and chief technology officer said in an interview with The Denver Post.
Fusion is what powers the stars and produced all the elements around us, Valys said.
Fusion is the opposite of which uses heavy elements such as uranium and plutonium and splits atoms into two or more parts, unleashing energy. Fission is used in nuclear power plants to produce electricity.
uses light elements, such as hydrogen, and extreme heat to make nuclei collide and fuse, producing a single, heavier atom and massive energy.
Fusion generates low-level, short-lived radioactive waste, not the high-level, long-lasting waste that fission does, according to
Scientists around the world have been working for decades on fusion, which requires overcoming particles’ natural repulsion to combining. made history in 2022 when scientists for the first time achieved fusion “ignition” in a lab setting, creating more energy from the reaction than the energy used to start the process.
Different approaches are used to try to achieve fusion, but the only time more energy has been produced than energy used was at Livermore using lasers, Valys said. However, a challenge to using lasers to ignite the reaction is the expense.
“If you tried to take the laser technology (at Livermore) that was used to demonstrate that result,” Valys said, “you would need to spend something like $10 billion to build an equivalent laser that’s capable of running a power plant.”
Xcimer is developing a different laser technology that is an order of magnitude cheaper than the conventional technology, Valys said. If successful, the company would be able to build a commercially viable power plant.
The laser systems Xcimer is developing use a mixture of gases rather than lenses and optics to generate and focus light onto a small fuel capsule that triggers a reaction. Valys said the technology has been used for decades in the semiconductor industry.
“We’re talking about building the laser at a much larger scale than they’re used industrially. You need probably tens, hundreds of thousands of times more energy for fusion than you use for making chips,” he said.
Xcimer has partnered with a number of federal laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The company has received funds from the Department of Energy and investors.
Valys said the company moved to Colorado because of the area’s engineering, aerospace and other industrial talent and proximity to national labs. “That’s not what you find in Silicon Valley. You find great people. There’s a lot of software and other stuff, but not deep tech.”
Colorado is known for its work in lasers because of programs at Colorado State and in the “Denver-Boulder-Fort Collins triangle,” Valys said.
“One reason we’re really excited about Colorado is Colorado has the potential to be the center of commercial laser fusion for the U.S. because of all those advantages, because of the existing programs, the existing workforce, and of course, we hope, companies like us.”
