Co-founder of Zap Energy, advancing sheared‑flow‑stabilized Z‑pinch fusion as a path to compact, magnet‑free reactors
Benj Conway is a co-founder and executive at Zap Energy, a Seattle-area company developing fusion reactors based on the sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch. Alongside co-founders Uri Shumlak and Brian Nelson, both professors at the University of Washington, Conway has helped translate decades of university-based Z-pinch research into a privately funded commercial program aimed at producing compact, low-cost fusion power plants that require no external magnets.
The Z-pinch is one of the oldest ideas in fusion research: passing a large electrical current through a column of plasma generates a magnetic field that compresses, or “pinches,” the plasma radially inward, heating it toward fusion conditions. Classical Z-pinches are notoriously unstable, rapidly developing sausage and kink instabilities that destroy confinement in microseconds. The key innovation underlying Zap Energy’s approach is sheared axial flow—the plasma column is driven to flow along its own axis with a velocity profile that varies radially, and this shear suppresses the magnetohydrodynamic instabilities that plagued earlier Z-pinch experiments.1
The sheared-flow Z-pinch concept was developed and experimentally demonstrated at the University of Washington over more than a decade before Zap Energy was incorporated. Conway played a central role in transitioning the technology from the university’s ZaP and ZaP-HD experimental devices into a commercial development program. The company was founded to accelerate the engineering path from laboratory-scale plasma demonstrations to a device capable of producing net energy and, ultimately, electricity.2
The sheared-flow Z-pinch offers a compelling simplicity: the plasma itself generates the confining magnetic field, so there are no external magnet coils, no toroidal vacuum chamber, and no disruption risk in the tokamak sense. The reactor can in principle be physically small and modular. However, significant challenges remain, including scaling the pinch to fusion-relevant densities and temperatures while maintaining flow stabilization, managing electrode erosion, and achieving the repetition rates needed for steady power output.3
Zap Energy has raised over $200 million in venture funding and federal awards, attracting investors including Chevron, Lowercarbon Capital, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program. The company has built and operated its FuZE (Fusion Z-pinch Experiment) series of devices at its Everett, Washington facility, progressively increasing plasma current, temperature, and pulse duration with each generation.4
Conway’s contribution lies in bridging the gap between academic plasma research and the operational demands of a venture-backed startup. His work at Zap Energy represents one of the most distinctive bets in private fusion: that the oldest and simplest confinement geometry, properly stabilized, can outperform far more complex machines on the path to commercial power.