David: In the world, there's over 4,000
gigawatts of installed fossil fuel capacity out there. And our goal is to replace it
all. And I don't think one type of fusion probably is enough to do all that. We're
going to try. We're going to move as fast as we can. But I think that you're going to have
different kinds of power in different locations. And you're going to need those, whether
it's remote, whether it's military bases, whether it's giant factories, whether it's
data centers. And they're going to require different kinds of power. And so our plan is,
yes, we demonstrate electrons on the grid in 2028. And then we have to scale manufacturing
as fast as possible and start manufacturing the systems to deploy them. And so we're
going to do that as fast as possible. Our goal is to get to by 2030. We're now making
generators. And we're making it. We're making. generators per day rather than generators every
few years. That's a big scale. That's a big lift. And so as a human, I want other fusion and other
types of advanced carbon-free power out there in the world too, because we just have that big of
a need and we need to move that fast. So that's my view. We're gonna move as fast as we can
though. And we engineer that into the systems, behind me here in Everett, Washington, we engineer
the mass manufacturing into the systems right now. Packy: The person you just heard from is David
Kirtley, the founder and CEO of Helion Energy. The dates David mentioned – 2028 and 2030 –
are five and seven years away. He believes that Helion Energy will deliver fusion-generated
electrons to its first customer in five years, and to the grid in seven. On the last
episode, we talked about the joke that fusion is always thirty years away. But
today, that joke is far too pessimistic. Julia: Helion is one of a batch of roughly eighty
startups working to make fusion happen within the next decade. In the bizarro relay marathon that is
the fusion race, the baton is firmly in the hands of the startups. The outcome, to be sure, is still
uncertain, but the question isn’t whether humanity will achieve commercial fusion, but which
companies will, with which approaches, when? Packy: This is truly an extraordinary time to be
alive. Between solar, fission, and fusion, we’re entering a new era in human history: for the first
time, we won’t primarily produce energy by burning things. We’ll be able to manufacture energy by
capturing the sun’s rays, splitting atoms apart, and fusing them together. Fusion, many believe,
will be one of humanity’s greatest triumphs: we will be able to generate energy in the
same way that stars do, right on earth. And we have one of the coolest jobs in the world, because we get to talk to some of the people
who are most likely to make it happen. Julia: Today, we’ll be talking to
five fusion founders and operators, each taking a different approach
to generating fusion energy: David Kirtley at Helion Energy
JC Btaiche at Fuse Energy Francesco Sciortino (shor-tino) at Proxima Fusion
Ryan Umstattd and Derek Sutherland at Zap Energy We’ll also hear from a few of the
investors we met on the last episode: Clay and Clea at Lowercarbon Capital, who will
tell us about a few of their portfolio companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Avalanche
Energy, and Ian Hogarth at Plural Platforms, who will explain why he’s making a
concentrated bet on stellarators. Packy: I have to say, these interviews were one
of the coolest parts of doing this series for me personally. Last week, I was reading my son
Dev this book on quantum physics for kids and one of the pages was about fission and fusion.
The next night, I had to miss storytime for our conversation with David, and when I got off, it
was kind of surreal getting to tell him “Remember fusion? Smashing two atoms together so they make
energy? I just got to talk to one of the people who’s actually going to make that happen!” This
sounds like a made-up Paul Graham “my 3-year-old said this profound thing” story, and Dev only
kind of cared, but it was one of those moments where it hit me that a lot of the people we’ve
spoken to this season – including you! – have a shot at making the world legitimately better
for a lot of people, including our kids. It’s why we started Age of Miracles with fission and
fusion. We think this stuff really matters. Anyway… we have a lot to cover in this one. Julia: Let’s do it. First, we’ll answer the question of “Why now?”
for fusion, and for startups in particular, by talking to the companies
taking advantage of the moment. Next, we’ll dive into their business
models and the economics of a fusion plant. And finally, we’ll discuss what a rollout of
fusion across the globe might look like. That feels crazy to say – it makes fusion
seem almost mundane, like an ordinary business – but it’s something these operators
are already thinking about and planning for. If commercial fusion is going to change the
world, it needs to be commercially viable. Let’s start with one of a venture
capitalist’s favorite questions: why now? Why, after 80 years in government and
academic labs has fusion finally broken into the commercial sector, and why might
these companies, which have much smaller teams and smaller budgets than international
governments actually make fusion happen first? Packy: Why now is maybe the most
important question in fusion, and there are four main categories of answers: Government-funded breakthroughs. These startups
stand on the shoulders of giant research programs. The funding landscape. With
climate change a looming threat, both governments and venture capitalists
Technological Advances. Better materials, better software, and better components have
been game-changers for the startups we spoke to. Startup Building Speed and Iteration.
Inspired by companies like SpaceX, startups are taking approaches that governments
can’t or won’t to get to market more quickly. Clean Air Task Force’s Sehila Gonzalez
has been in fusion for two decades, and she told us she’s never seen
a time as promising as right now: Sehila: Well, I have been in
Fusion already almost 20 years, and I had never seen the excitement and the... the hope for the future that I have seen in
the last two, three, five years, okay, for now. Before, fusion was something done in the academia
and in some national labs. Now it's something that is on the financial times, the economist, and
even people on the street can know something about that because it's becoming more popular and more
popular because you have more interest on that. So I think we are really in a good moment. We have
the private capital and the private sector, which is providing flexibility and a more agile approach
to fusion, which is really convenient. We have a lot of knowledge generated in the public sector,
in the traditional sector, which is very important because without knowledge, you cannot progress,
okay? On top of that, we have now a situation. which is common to all technologies, new
technologies that we have tools that we didn't have before. So all the artificial
intelligence, all the new software tools, all the, for example, in terms of
superconductors, all the developments, all these new elements that maybe
has been created out of Fusion. But help Fusion to progress. 3D printing, not now,
not immediately now, but will help Fusion a lot because components of our Fusion machines
are extremely complicated. If you are able to 3D print that component, you will make it
cheaper, easier, faster. We are in a time where tools that were not existing
10 years ago are available now. Sehila Gonzalez (27:55.075)
and more that will come in the next year. So this is, and together
with the need of new source of energy, which has to be clean. So it's a really good
combination of having new tools and having the need to have these new sources of energies, which
are making fusion to go faster than ever now. Packy: Clay Dumas at Lowercarbon Capital
said that he came into his first fusion pitch skeptical and came out sold,
because of these very same trends: Clay: very early on, we were offered an
introduction to Bob Mumgard, who's the CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which
to many people was kind of the introduction to private fusion companies. And to be totally candid
with you guys, the first conversation we went into thinking, like so many other people, that
fusion is 30 years away and it always will be, but we got this introduction from someone we
really like and respect, and this could be in mind. And we came out of a one hour
conversation with Bob, completely sold, committed to invest in CFS's, was their series A, but it was
their first round of outside capital because they raised a hundred million dollars all at once. But
also really curious about different paths towards commercializing fusion technology. One of the big
takeaways from the conversation with Bob was that the same trends that were benefiting CFS
were not exclusive to CFS. And in fact, they would give rise to other
pathways to commercializing Fusion, some of which could be competitive,
but not all of which would be going after the same end markets and customers. Some of those
trends, just to call them out, because I think they're really relevant, and they resonated with
what we were seeing happening across the rest of. or, you know, what, then we were still kind of
struggling to figure out the name, but what we now think of as climate tech. First, you were
having, you were benefiting from major advances in material science, which had big implications
for the kinds of magnets and superconductors that CFS was looking to develop, but which has broad
implications, not just with infusion, but with, you know, everything from transmission to
cancer research. You were also seeing the impact of really cheap compute and a generation
of engineers that were steeped in machine learning and advancing towards something that I think
with a straight face we can all look at each other and say is really AI today. And that
had big implications for how we simulate what happens to these super weird plasma
conditions when you reach 150 million degrees Celsius and you're trying to figure out how these
tiny little particles interact with one another. and having greater fidelity of what
was happening in those conditions from running models on computers really
was speeding up the rate of learning and physical world testing that companies like
CFS were really on the cutting edge of. Julia: Each of the startups we spoke with
takes advantage of all four in some way, so we wanted to flag them upfront so you
know what to look for throughout the episode. Like Clay, we hope that by hearing from the
founders directly, you’ll come away with a greater appreciation for how close we might actually be,
and why. You might even leave this episode with thoughts on which company will get their first.
That’s one of the fun parts about watching a race! So let’s meet the fusion startups and hear why
they think now is the right time to build fusion in the way they’re building it. While fusion
seems like a sci-fi technology, these are real, serious people with real, practical plans to bring
it online. Their backgrounds and experiences range from years in some of the world’s top
fusion labs all the way to high school. Packy: Let’s start with the 800-lb gorilla
in fusion: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, or CFS. While we didn’t get a chance to speak
with CEO Bob Mumgard or Chairman Dennis Whyte, we highly recommend that you listen to Dennis’
conversation with Lex Fridman. We’ll link to it in the notes and the resources guide. For
now, here’s Clay to explain what CFS does: Clay: Well, the first and probably best understood
fusion reactor design is a Tokamak. This is a reactor that's being commercialized now by
Commonwealth Fusion Systems outside of Boston. And it's the one that has received the most attention
and dollars from researchers over the past four to five decades. So the consequence is the one
where the physics are the most derisked. And it's part of the reason why CFS has been able to
raise as much capital as they have in pursuit of of a tokamak. One of the downsides for
tokamaks historically has been that they have to get really, really big because you need
extremely powerful magnets to confine plasma at these outrageous conditions of more than 150
million degrees Celsius, which just for a frame of context is like hotter than the center of the
sun. And so for a long time, the kind of leading Concept in people's minds who study this. So
what it took Mac was is either which is this multinational effort to develop a Q greater
than 10 reactor in the south of France. That's billions of dollars over budget and at this
point decades behind schedule CFS has turned the concert of tokamak on its head and taking
a really large reactor and making it small by shrinking the size of the
magnets, but making them much, much more powerful using superconductors.
So that isn't to say that tokamaks are fully understood. There's still a lot of work
that has to be done to keep those reactors. operating under safe conditions and keep
the reactions on themselves continuous and contain the plasma. But there's a reason why
CFS is often referred to not just by itself, but by people in the know as the safest and
in some ways surest way to commercial fusion. Julia: CFS is a giant in the space. Spun out of
Whyte’s lab at MIT, where Mumgard was a student, the company has raised $2 billion from investors
including Lowercarbon, Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy, Alphabet, and Khosla Ventures. Like
Clay said, it’s the safest bet. Tokamaks are well-understood, and thanks to advances in
magnets, CFS can scale down its reactor, speed up development, and make fusion commercially
viable. Whyte is a legend in the field, having worked on ITER before heading to
MIT, as you heard on the last episode. CFS expects to bring its first 200
MWe plant online in the early 2030s, and the smart money is betting that they’ll do it. But CFS certainly isn’t the
only startup in the fusion race, and ITER to MIT to startup isn’t the only
route. JC Btaiche took the most direct and least conventional route into fusion:
he skipped college and started building. JC: Yes, so growing up, my father was actually a
nuclear physicist. So, you know, I was fascinated about, you know, the universe and how things
work. And I really wanted to go see it. And I was very disappointed when my father told me
that, you know, we've never had a human go and actually physically see the universe and it's
not quite possible. And so I started Googling, how can we go to space and how can a human
go to space and come back and tell the world about what they've seen? And so as part
of my Googling, I found that the only... like reasonable possible way to do that is if
you build like fusion drives like fusion powered rockets. And so I started like aggressively
reading about, you know, fusion drives, fusion powered rockets and really wanted to build one.
And so this led me to like actually be motivated to sit in a classroom for a little longer in high
school and I'm doing like some research in plasma physics when I was still in high school and this
was my first more formal exposure to like fusion. But then from there, I realized that for me
to have the most, to learn the fastest, the fastest to make the most amount of
progress and to have the biggest impact on the field is much better to
build a company rather than, you know, sit in a classroom. So, so decided to build a
company essentially in the of going to college. Julia: Perhaps because he hadn’t been colored
by years of research or experience in a lab, JC approached the fusion space with
a fresh sheet of paper when starting Fuse Energy out of Canada, and asked the
fundamental questions: starting today, what is the best approach to fusion, and
one that customers would be willing to buy? JC: So what we've noticed is the fundamental
question that I was asking initially was like, who cares the most about like fusion energy and like
how that's going to happen. And there were a lot of academics at the time that were very convinced
that their research, they've done like very impressive research. It was great. It was time
to spin it out. But I started looking at like... where are the government spending like the
billions of dollars because you know the government are like most incentivized to
make this work and this led me to find out about the z machine which is one of the most
successful nuclear experiments in the United States and in the world. It's the highest source
of x-ray, has the Guinness world record of the highest temperature achieved on earth and I was
like okay why is no one building it? This was refurbished in 2007, it was pretty old technology,
and it had reached very impressive results, and it's 10 times more efficient than lasers,
and it's 10% the cost and the size of NIF, which is like the experiment that achieved
ignition for the first time in history. But no one's paying attention to it,
and there's a very clear roadmap that people within the field have laid out
for the next generation of the Z machine. but no one was building. And every time he
asked, like, oh, we know we need to do this, but it's taking time. We're trying to get the
approval. So we just went and built it. And today, I think we've built the world's first and
highest energy post-power driver ever built. And so we're working to essentially build the
next generation of the Z machine or of Maglev. Packy: I’m going to break in here to
explain. On the last episode, Andrew Cote talked about the Z pinch generator design.
The Z Machine is related, but slightly different. The Z machine is a specific facility,
located at Sandia National Labs, that uses the principle of Z pinch as
part of its operation to achieve high energy density conditions for research and
potential fusion energy production. It’s the world's most powerful and efficient laboratory
radiation source, using high magnetic fields associated with high electrical currents to
produce high temperatures, high pressures, and powerful X-rays for research in high energy
density physics. While Sandia uses the Z Machine for things like research on nuclear weapons
and validating physics models in simulations, it can also be used to incinerate things,
and to generate fusion energy. Back to JC: JC: And the reason we chose it is there
are just three main reasons. So first, objectively, controlled implosion methods lead the race for fusion, like neph
is the highest result, z is right after, and there's the tokamaks. So it was a very
practical path. There's billions already in decades behind this research. Granted, it's more
behind closed doors, but it was very mature. And our value prop was very clear to go to the
next generation. The second reason is this is a technology that's very critical. And I
think it's very important when you look at building and fusion or any hard tech, truly
long-term mission company was a vision that may take decades to materialize, to pick a technology
that actually could be commercializable and step function. Building capabilities or the technology
that would enable us to build the next generation of Z is immediately useful today to ensure, to
respond to multiple national security needs. And so this was a very important factor. And
then the third point is, and I'm sure we'll touch on this more at some point, but I'll
briefly brush on the fact that this approach is the only one that actually has an
intermediate step towards providing power, which is essentially using the fusion
neutrons to bombard radioactive waste and used a hybrid fusion fission
concept to produce power along the way. So it's still, you know, it's an idea that
is very polarized opinions, but it's just an option. So these were the three main reasons
why we chose to work on what we're working on. Packy: Already in JC’s answer, you hear
a couple of the “Why now?” themes. One, Fuse is building the next generation of
a technology – Z Machines – initially developed by the government. And two, it’s
building something that might make sense for government funding – and something that customers
might be able to buy sooner rather than later. Julia: His idea about the intermediate
step is really smart. It’s a bit of a fission / fusion hybrid, and a perfect bridge
between the first half of the season and this one. Before Fuse gets to fusion power, it
can use neutrons from a fusion reaction to create a fission reaction from nuclear
waste, kind of like a fast breeder reactor. JC: Yeah, so traditionally there's a bunch
of radioactive waste that's usually stored after the traditional reactors actually work.
And so what we can do is this is essentially decaying for hundreds of thousands of years.
So what we can do is if we take a fast neutron, which is like the fusion neutron
that comes from a fusion reaction, so from like a deuterium deuterium,
a normal fusion reaction. and we can surround the fusion chamber
with actinides, so the radioactive waste, the neutron will actually accelerate the
rate of decay of the radioactive waste. So it will make it just, it will excite it in
some way, and that will lead it to decay at a much faster rate, which will reduce the
half-life from 100,000s of years to like 10s of years. And because the radioactive case
happening faster, it will release more energy. So there's one point which is just, you know,
the waste recycling or treating the waste which today I think it's a 40 billion a year, but
just in the United States, but also if the Original concept was called the incinerator
because it's the Z machine So they called the incinerator but also if we end up doing
it efficiently we can be producing power so we can actually that could be a synergistic step
where we actually can start producing power and be a power generating company. That's separate
from just a waste recycling. Now, I think that will take more engineering, but that's a dual
use, like essentially like revenue or customers. Julia: Fuse’s path to market involves generating
revenue from things that are near-term feasible, like disposing of nuclear waste and
producing power from nuclear waste, on the path to generating pure fusion
energy. Most fusion companies need to build multiple generations of generators
on their way to commercial fusion, and JC is betting that he can start
generating revenue earlier in that journey. Others are taking different approaches,
like Germany’s Proxima Fusion, which is taking advantage of another big “why
now” – better simulation software – to run as much of its design process in silico
as possible before ever touching metal. You heard the phrase “in silico” on the
last episode, when we told you about the world’s largest stellarator, and the first
to be tested in silico before construction, the Wendelstein 7X at the Max Planck Institute
in Munich. It’s no coincidence you’re hearing it again here. Proxima founder and
CEO Francesco Sciortino worked on W7X before launching Proxima, and set
up the company’s operations nearby. Francesco: We are a company based in Munich.
We created the company in January, 2023, got a team together from three fourths of
the original team is from the Max Planck. And then one of my co-founders is also from
MIT. I myself was at MIT with him during my PhD. And then Martin joined us, another one of the
co-founders from Google, Google X from California. The company really aims at taking this visionary
project that Wenderstein-Sieben-X is, so this stellarator in northern Germany, and going the
next step, using this simulation-enabled concept, leveraging the high-field superconducting
magnets that we can make today, and that not so many years ago were just a dream. We
can design now solutions to problems that historically in magnetic confinement fusion have
been complicated to deal with in experiments. Now we can design the solution from early on,
let's say. This idea of translating some of the complexity of Tokamaks into a more predictable
kind of device, a device that really works like a microwave oven. The idea is you want to
turn it on, it should just run steady state, continuous operation with no surprises, no
behavior that you cannot really expect. And then you turn it on off when you choose to do.
That's what we are chasing as a as a company. Packy: Francesco listed a
few big why nows for Proxima: Building off the work of Wendelstein
7X, and partnering with Max Planck. New materials, specifically high-field
superconducting magnets – stellarators are a form of magnetic confinement fusion,
like tokamaks, so good magnets are key Software simulations - the company plans
to design and simulate the reactor, making trade-offs between physics
and engineering, in software. Recall that on the last episode, Ian Hogarth,
whose Plural Platforms led Proxima’s seed round, told us that stellarators were the
platonic ideal of fusion generators, but before those advancements,
they were just too hard to build. When we asked her to explain stellarators,
Lowercarbon’s Dr. Clea Kolster made a similar point: she said that stellarators have gone from
impossible to imagine building, to possible: Clea: so then stellarators is like the, I don't
know, maybe you call it like the ugly duckling of the Tokamak. Basically, similar concept. It's
magnetic fusion energy where you're confining plasma using a very strong magnetic field. But in
a Tokamak, you have the a paroidal magnetic field, and then you have a poloidal magnetic
field in the middle, and then a current running through the plasma. Then the other
name of the game with Fusion is how do you minimize instabilities in your plasma, and so the
optimization between all those different magnetic fields and moving pieces is what either drives
the instabilities or keeps the instabilities down. what you want. What's interesting with
Stellarators, what Clay described, look it up, this very twisty, crazy
configuration that historically was just impossible to imagine ever being able to build
or being able to actually simulate because of how complex it would need to be to know how
the plasma would work. Now, today we both. have much better computing, so you
can actually understand what that very complicated twisting magnetic field
looks like and operates like. That's what happened at the German Max Planck Institute
where they have a reactor called W7X. And the stellarator there was the first to show
plasma stability within a stellarator. What we've found really exciting in the,
actually two companies that are working on accelerators that we've invested in is in their
theory of change around making those more simple to build and easier to maintain. On the one hand,
potentially through controls or through being able to laser pattern that magnetic field directly onto
the material instead of basically having to... configure it and make it all at once, which as you
can imagine is like a manufacturing nightmare. The other, the benefit of, the perceived benefit of
this reactor configuration is that because you don't need that additional magnetic field in
the middle, the poloidal magnetic field, you could make stellarators way smaller, which also
in theory would drive down the cost significantly and would mean that you like altogether
would need much less materials to make them. Packy: With better software, Francesco agrees
that building stellarators becomes more feasible, and that when you do, you have yourself a power source as predictable and easy
to operate as a microwave oven. Not being a plasma physicist
or fusion engineer myself, I asked him to explain a little more
about what makes stellarators ideal. Francesco: So just by the concept itself,
you don't have pulsed behavior. So every single fusion concept, as far as I am aware,
involves some sort of up and down behavior, some form of either implosion or
a sudden large amount of energy, or it can be pulses that go over hours. But all
fusion concepts involve some sort of great energy. input and some great energy output. Stellarators
are the only concept that is truly steady state. You can build a stellarator that just runs,
as I said, like a microwave oven. This had to be demonstrated. W7X has demonstrated
that this is now just done. W7X has been run last year for minutes and there is
nothing happening after 20 seconds or so. So that's one key advantage. The other one is that
you are fully controlling your hot ionized matter, this plasma that we have to confine at
150 million degrees. You can confine it completely externally with some big coils.
And so the challenge in Estelerator is, can you design these coils? Can you design
coils that can go to high enough magnetic fields because the fusion power scales with
the magnetic field intensity very strongly. So if you can get this cage,
this magnetic cage done well, then you start addressing other aspects of
the design. You have to support the huge forces. You have to deal with humongous
heat fluxes, lots of things. So you need to have a capability in designing and
assessing the trade-offs. And that's what is the nature of Proxima Fusion, a group
that has these tools and understanding of how Where do you go and put your effort on
the physics questions, on the engineering questions? We are founded on the belief that we
are in the transition from a physics focus to an engineering focus with a mindset on commercial
viability. And Stellarators, in our opinion, have just a much better market fit. If you are
able to deliver continuous base load, much more simple to use kind of device, then you have a much
better future. The question is, can you design it? And then can you manufacture it? And if
we hadn't seen that W7X was manufactured with incredible achievements on the
technical manufacturing tolerances, if we didn't have it, I think it would be a
bad idea to go into this because it would be sort of improbable. But we've done it. The key
to one thing that Ian mentioned is that this has been done in Germany and nowhere else.
So the advantage of doing this in Germany is nothing short of huge. The industry behind
W7X is one really why we can do this now. Julia: This physics and engineering trade-off
is one that we’ve heard come up a few times, not just with Stellarators. It’s the core
of the approach that Zap Energy is taking. Zap is making a different bet than
many of the fusion companies out there. Instead of pushing to the outer limits
of what’s possible with magnets or lasers, it’s focused on an approach called a sheared
flow Z-Pinch and betting that by building something less capital intensive and easier
to engineer, it can iterate faster and get to market sooner. Ryan Umstattd, Zap’s VP
of Product and Partnerships, explains: Ryan: So Zap energy, no magnets required. So the
idea here is that the traditional approaches to fusion either require really big magnets or
really big lasers. And Zap needs neither of those. I won't jump into the technical physics
aspects of it just yet. But the idea that you could build something that actually has less
capital cost upfront is important to what we're doing at Zap. But equally important,
if not more so, is the iteration speed. Time is money, right? They're oftentimes
interchangeable. And so if you can build something that's cheaper, you can also build
it faster. And fusion is hard, right? Decades and decades of research has shown that fusion is
hard, which means we're going to have to learn a lot. And we want to learn it as fast as possible.
And so if we have an approach that we can design, build, commission a device within a year,
we have an opportunity to make very rapid progress. And I think that's what we're going
to need to see to commercialize fusion energy. Julia: Time is money. Zap is leaning into the
fourth why now – startup speed and iteration. And the company thinks that the fast lane is
right down the middle of the other approaches. Remember in the last episode when we
talked about the triple-product: density, temperature, and confinement time? Roughly,
inertial confinement optimizes for density at the expense of time, and magnetic
confinement optimizes for time at the expense of density. Derek Sutherland, a
plasma physicist and “fusioneer” at Zap, explains how Zap plans to increase its
triple product by splitting the difference. Derek: So where ZAP sets is kind of
in between those extremes. We're kind of in between, we are a pulsed approach to fusion, but we're not getting to quite as high
densities as inertial confinement. but we're also not getting to as long confinement
times as magnetic confinement. We're splitting the difference on the triple product, so we sit
right between those two. And the benefit of that is that you don't really have to go extreme in
any technology direction. You don't need super intense high-tech repco magnets. You don't
need these really awesome lasers that tend to be expensive and you keep having to make
them better and better. We kind of have a very simple approach that's between those two and
we can use largely off-the-shelf technology and a very specific application that gives rise to a
really commercially attractive approach to fusion. Packy: That doesn’t mean that what Zap is doing is easy. They’re bringing a fresh approach
to one of the oldest ideas in fusion, the z-pinch that generated false
positives in the UK way back in 1952. Derek: So the Z-pinch, I kind of consider it as
the like OG fusion concept. The principle is very simple. I mean, you're mainly flowing a current.
If you think of a cylindrical coordinate system, if you flow a electric current
in the plasma in the Z direction, it produces an azimuthal or a poloidal
or circular magnetic field around that cylinder that compresses it to
very high densities and temp. That's where the Z-pinch gets its name. It depends
on the direction of the current. But the problem with that is that without any other intervention,
the Z-pinch plasma is unstable. And what that means is that there's be these instabilities
that would crop up that would basically make the plasma terminate before you make enough energy
to pay for everything you put in to make it in the first place. So in other words, it's hard
to hit in that game without any intervention. So where ZEPPS value add here is using a new way
of stabilizing the Z-bench called Shear Flowed Stabilization. And so a good analogy of this is
basically having a cylindrical plasma, but you're flowing the plasma at different velocities as
a function of radius. So you kind of think of this like a busy highway. You get stuck in the
exit lane, you actually wanted to go through, and there's all these fast cars going past you
and you can't get into the next lane because you can't merge because of the shear flow between
your exit lane and the highway. So similarly, we see experimentally and from theory
that when we have enough of that shear, it stabilizes the Z-pinch for very, very long
durations compared to what it should be. And what that means is that you can hold that
plasma ground for long enough time to make enough energy out so you can pay for the energy
that went into it. So it reopens the Z-pinch as a path to net gain, and that's what makes
Zap unique is this your flood stabilization? Packy: And how does Zap measure
progress on the path to net gain? Derek: So technically, the main thing that
you're changing in the Z-Pinch as you scale up performance is the amount of current, the
electric current flowing in the plasma and how hard you're pinching the plasma with that
current. Simply, if you raise the current up, you produce a larger magnetic field and
then you're compressing it to a higher and higher density. It's like a piston
being compressed harder and harder. And so then we can basically see the
temperatures, measure the temperatures, measure the densities, and measure the
confinement times. And that tells you what the triple product is. And out of that, you
can derive like, what's the Q? And so the Q, the scientific gain, power out versus power in,
is how internally we're measuring our progress. Packy: My role on this show
is a role I was born to play: asking the dumb questions. When Derek told
us that progress was a function of current, I asked him why they couldn’t just turn the
current all the way up and achieve Q>1 today. Derek: Yeah, so it's a physics application and
an engineering application thing. So it's very clear to do our scaling laws and we predict this
much courage required to hit scientific breakeven, and indeed that's our guiding light to get
there. But actually realizing that in practice, of course, is a little bit more
involved. And so the main thing that we're working on now is to raise
the current in our pench. And the... How we do that is we need the correct
pulse power system to do that. And so what we, uh, without giving too many details,
what we're learning is how to do that in the most efficient manner as possible is you can
think you take this energy from a, you know, a big capacitor bank, I think you need to couple
that efficiently, as efficiently as you can to the plasma to do the thing that you want to
make fusion. And so learning how to optimize that efficiency and actually realize the
current that you need where you want it to flow. That's not as trivial as just saying,
we need this much current and boom, it's done. But we're definitely making a lot of progress and
we see a path and we're continuing to go down it. Julia: Coming into these conversations, I
didn’t realize that fusion was far enough along that many companies now view it as more
of an engineering challenge than a physics challenge. Engineering is hard, obviously. Going
from models and simulations to a working generator that produces more energy than it consumes is
hard. But talking to Ryan and Derek at Zap, you really feel that they’re on a
path to pulling this off. Iteration speed builds momentum, and it’s cool
to see companies optimizing for speed. Packy: We have to point out here that
one of the big reasons these companies are able to iterate so quickly and so
often is that they’re not burdened by the same regulatory regime that
fission is, as Derek explained. Derek: from a regulatory standpoint,
it's much faster to iterate with fusion, primarily because you don't have all of
the main concerns that comes with fission. So we're not using any special nuclear
materials. There's no heavy, no uranium, no thorium, no plutonium. There's also like
criticality doesn't apply to fusion. It's not a nuclear chain reaction. And so you just, you
don't have as much of that issue of concern. when trying to do experiments and
prototypes and things like that, because it's just very, very safe. Julia: Must be nice! David Kirtley at Helion,
which also prioritizes fast iteration speeds, explained that regulation was the biggest
risk to the business a few years ago, especially since the model is predicated on speed, but that the regulatory situation for
fusion has landed in a good place: David: Yeah, I would say regulation around
fusion three or four years ago I would say was the biggest risk for this technology that we
could because Regulation at that time it wasn't clear if fusion even who would regulate it or how
or there was no default answer So it was possible we build working fusion generators and then can't
deploy them because there isn't regulation And not to say that the regulation too hard or too
easy. It just didn't exist and so that was a big risk for the company, for all the companies,
but also to the technology in general. This year, so we started, and so we started working with
the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a number of years ago. I've given a number of talks
at the public meetings. We've been working with the technical staff and the commissioners over the
last three even more years to try to figure out where does fusion fit in the regulatory landscape.
And our goal was that it fits somewhere. It mattered more that we fit in the regulations as
is and didn't need new ones more than it mattered exactly where we fit in those regulations.
So they announced the NRC commissioners voted unanimously earlier this year to that Fusion
B regulator under what is called Part 30, which is the particle accelerator and
hospital parts of the regulatory code for nuclear. What that really means for
us is that we're regulated by the state. So the state in Washington, the Department of
Health, regulates us rather than a federal body. And that's really good for Helion because we've
been working with them since 2018. So our previous systems have all been already regulated and
licensed, inspected, all of those things. Because we want to make sure that fusion gets to the world
quickly. That's great, but it's got to be safe. It has to be. That's an a priori requirement. And so
our goal is to work. And it's really great because we've been working with the state regulator for
years. And now we have the job of taking not just Washington, but all the rest of the states and
having to teach them around about fusion. And so we're working with the state regulators, all
the agreement states on how to actually regulate fusion and what it means and what's easy about
it, what's hard about it and how to do it safely. Packy: Move fast and safely. We talked a lot
about how regulation slows down construction projects when we talked about nuclear fission,
and that the regulatory burden is a big reason that nuclear plants end up being so expensive.
But we also discussed the negative impact that regulation has on iteration speed, and ultimately
safety. By making it harder to test and iterate, regulators impede the development of safer
nuclear reactors. That needs to change. Fortunately, it seems as if fusion
won’t hit the same roadblocks, and Helion is taking advantage of the
opportunity to test and iterate quickly. David told us that the secret to the
company’s speed is that it engineers systems that are easy to make in order
to get on the grid as soon as possible: David: A lot of us at Helion came out of some
of the scientific and academic programs where we were focused on discovering physics and doing
new diagnostics and learning what we could about fusion, but not delivering a product. When we spun
off Helion, our goal was make electricity on the grid as soon as possible, even if sometimes it's
not as fun, even if sometimes it's not as elegant. what shortcuts can you make to move
faster? And so things we really do, and that's part of been the mantra of Helion,
is how do we iterate really quickly, build now, we're building our seventh prototype for
Helion. How do we actually get electrons demonstrated and on the grid as fast as possible,
and engineer systems that are easy to make. And so that has been the mantra as we've built
all of these prototypes over the years. Packy: Helion’s approach isn’t without its
detractors. Its 2028 target date with Microsoft is wildly aggressive. Some in the industry see Helion
as a manifestation of a Silicon Valley company, but believe that in fusion, you can’t just
move fast and iterate your way to success. So we asked him what he thinks
the company’s doubters miss. David: A lot of it comes back to
looking at how modern hardware technology companies operate. Actually, it's
less on the physics and more on how are you building a company. Think about the SpaceX's
and the Tesla's of the world and many others, but a lot of the modern aerospace is a good
example of can you build and test as fast as possible and iterate. And where while in January
we were running our sixth generation system. while physically building the seventh
generation system and engineering the eighth generation system and doing
that all at the same time. That's how you speed up the process. And so
our first peer reviewed published, we did lots of thermonuclear fusion happened
in 2011 on a small scale system funded by the Department of Energy. And since then, we've
now built four more systems iterating on that, increasing the yield, increasing the neutron
output, increasing the fusion reaction rate. published about a year ago, that we had
been the first ones to do deuterium and helium-3 fusion at all in bulk fusion. We
were the first ones to do that, we think, ever. And then also that we were the first
private company to hit 100 million degrees, that operating temperature for fusion, that key
temperature. And so we've set those milestones and those metrics all along. But a lot of that
comes back to the philosophy, the philosophy of how can you build fast? Is that diagnostic
going to take you four years to build? Well, it's too long. We're not going to build
that diagnostic, even though it's the best one. Is there a cheaper diagnostic that's faster
that I could build in six months? That's the one I'm going to pick. And so we keep that at
every stage, even though sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's a bit chaotic to have all of
those parallel things happening all at once. Packy: Julia, you’ve got to be proud as a SpaceX
alum. The company came up a lot when we talked to fission companies, and here it is again as part
of a “why now” and “how so fast?” for fusion. Julia: I think the reason it keeps coming
up again and again is that, while fission reactors and fusion generators are both among
the hardest machines in the world to build, so are reusable rockets. What SpaceX
showed is that rapid experimentation and iteration times don’t just apply
to software or simpler hardware: a machine is a machine is a machine, and the same
tight feedback loops should benefit all of them. Packy: It makes sense when you take a step back: go fast to go fast. That doesn’t mean
that what Helion is doing is easy, though. It’s doing a few things that are
really, really hard, all rolled into one. Julia: First, it’s using magneto-intertial confinement fusion - a hybrid of magnetic
confinement and inertial confinement. David: The goal is to take the best of magnetic
confinement, which is that keeps that 100 million degree fuel from touching the wall, because you
don't want that hot fuel to ever touch the wall, and the best of inertial confinement, which is
don't hold on to it forever. Nature is unstable and doesn't like that. Instead, squeeze it and
get to fusion as fast as possible. And then adds that third one that most people aren't doing,
which is directly extract that electricity. The trade-off of it is, the big trade-off is that
all this has to happen fast. So it's all pulsed. That's the inertial part. The beauty is you get
to do it fast. The trade-off is you have to, which means now you need, you need,
uh, triggering systems that respond to nanoseconds in billions of a second,
um, technology didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago. Um, and you need massive pulse power
systems, big high voltage electronics. Uh, and so that's, that, that's the big trade-off
there. So we have to design and run these big. Power electronics, in some way, Helion is
more an electronics company than it is a fusion company and that's where a lot of our
technology and our team focus on is those big power electronics. So that's one of the big
trade-offs we do in those systems. So yeah, I think those are probably
the two I would focus on. Packy: Then there’s the fuel. Helion is using
Helium-3, an element that I learned is common on the moon by watching For All Mankind,
but that is not common here on earth. David: Yeah, I love for all mankind. I
do say that if you need to start your business by going to the moon, you probably
have a rough business model ahead of you and a rough road ahead of you, as maybe
was seen in the TV show. But for Helion, in fact, what we named the company after,
the nucleus of a Helium-3 is called a Helion. The helium-3 fuel is one of the older fuels,
actually. And the brilliant scientists that did a lot of the early work in fusion recognize
helium-3 would be a really great fuel because you take a deuterium and a helium-3, and when you
fuse it, it forms a helium-4, regular old balloon helium and a proton, but all charged particles,
all electricity, all trapped in the magnetic field. Two challenges. One, just like you pointed
out, there isn't a lot of helium-3 on Earth. So how are you going to even get helium-3
to test it? And then how are you going to generate it in your system? And the other is that
it requires higher temperatures to operate. So both of those are two negatives that you have
to overcome. The first one we solved with, we patented this, but we solved this by
essentially the high efficiency of this energy recovery. What it really lets you do is
do fusion a lot cheaper. And this is the thing. that we got really excited about, you take two
deuteriums, not a deuterium and a helium-3, but two deuterium atoms, two deuterons,
they're called, you fuse them together, and they make helium-3 in gas form.
So if you have fusion already, then you can make helium-3 to do helium-3
fusion. But the key to that, unlocking that, is having really efficient fusion, and
really efficiently putting electricity in, and recovering it out. And if you're not doing
that process, it's hard to make helium-3. And then it's hard to burn the helium-3 to make
electricity. And so it was a little chicken and egg problem that required modern high-speed
transistors and fiber optics to unlock that. Julia: And finally, it’s doing fusion
in a way that it can directly harness the electricity. Remember on Episode 7
when Casey Handmer told us that nuclear reactors were stuck in the stone age? No? Ok,
we’ll play it again because it’s a good clip: Casey: At the end of the day, if you
are boiling water to make energy, you can make heat however you want. You can make
it with nuclear power, you can make it with coal, you can make it with gas. But at the end of the
day, you're still boiling water. It's like, it's like, you know, Stone Age, like, oog, oog make
water hot, boil water, turn turbine, right? Julia: Turns out, most fusion generators
do something similar. David and Helion are trying to skip that step, and just
capture the electricity from the source, which is only now possible because of
all sorts of technological advances. David: We've done fusion a long time, and
our goal is to do fusion in a way that's different than other people. Our goal is to take
lightweight isotopes of hydrogen and helium, fuse them together under intense
pressure, and form heavier atoms, and release a tremendous amount of energy. But
we don't want to release heat energy, we want electricity. And so our goal is to do fusion in a
way where we can directly harness the electricity. from that fusion reaction as electrons and get it
out on the grid as soon as possible. So there's a whole bunch that goes into there. Our systems
are pulsed and electromagnetic, but really always the focus is how do we get electricity out of
fusion as fast and efficiently as possible. it takes a level of technology before
it actually can happen. So this is this is something I think about a lot in that the
first cars were electric cars. In the 1800s, there were these electric cars in New
York. They were a commercial product. But the batteries didn't exist. The motors
didn't exist. The the transistor didn't yet exist. And so they couldn't actually make
that small niche product into a widespread car. Then gasoline engines took over and
we had 100 years of gasoline engines. And we're only now at the place where we have
the power electronics that are efficient. We have regenerative braking and electric regenerative
braking. We have lithium batteries. Finally, now the electric car makes sense. And
so if I was doing fusion in the 1950s, I'd be doing thermal fusion too. I'd be using
the energy conversion that we could do then, even though fusion makes all charged particles and
electrons already, but I'd be using those, those technologies. So it's taken modern high voltage
power electronics, fiber optics, gigahertz speed computing, before we can really, you do fusion in
the way that harnesses the electricity directly. Packy: I’ve written about this idea before, but
there’s something magical to me about the fact that these disparate branches on the tech tree
– high voltage power electronics, fiber optics, gigahertz speed computing, machine learning,
magnets, and more – all developed for completely non-fusion-related reasons, all turn out to be
critical to making fusion happen, and potentially to making fusion happen in time to be a serious
weapon in the fight against climate change. There’s this physical phenomenon – two light atoms
fusing together to produce a heavier atom and a lot of energy – that occurs naturally in the sun,
that physicists figured out about eighty years ago and that researchers have been working on over
those past eight decades, that startups may now finally be able to do in an energy-profitable way
because of all of these other seemingly random developments. I’m not a religious man, but at the
very least, capitalism works in mysterious ways. Julia: Amen. And as we’ve discussed
throughout this season, for an energy source, no matter how magical, to work in the
capitalist system, it’s got to compete by doing something that no other energy source
can, or by being cheaper than the alternative. Fusion generators will live inside of power
plants – companies need to convert the energy from the reaction into electricity, which
they can sell directly to customers or into the grid. And while it’s early – none of these
companies have yet achieved Q>1 – these aren’t just research projects. These startups have had
to design their companies with unit economics in mind. So we asked them to describe what the
unit economics of a fusion plant might look like. JC at Fuse told us that he
looks at three variables. JC: So I'll preface this by saying different
fusion concepts may have slightly different way to think about it. But in my mind, there's like
three variables. The first variable is how much does it cost you to create the fusion conditions,
which is like the dollars per joule delivered on the target. How much does it cost you? Like NAF,
for example, they have this 400 megajoule laser and then it deposits roughly 2 megajoules
to the target. And what's the cost of... The laser is like a few billion dollars.
And so their cost per joule delivered on target is roughly like 2000 roughly dollars
per joule delivered on target. So that's the first function that I look at. And how can you
minimize that dollar per joule delivered? And so we think fuse can get, we believe that fuse
can get at some point to $40 per joule and even lower. That the second variable is, you've
delivered this much energy to the to the target and how much can you produce or to the plasma
and how much can you produce I think is a more, you know engineering function So it's
like the more efficient this reaction becomes You know the more energy you get
which will decrease your cost because you have the same cost You just can get more
power and if you think about now if they haven't upgraded their laser So it's the
same laser that they've built that over 10 years. They've increased the efficiency
of the target by a thousand X right, so like And it's the same laser, they just improved like
the target design and engineering and physics, and they've improved the efficiency by 1000x. Then the third variable is like how much does
it cost you to take the fusion output and turn it into electricity, which I think this is more
predictable because there's essentially looking at fusion as a heat source and converting a heat
source into electricity. Unless you're doing direct and electricity conversion, which I think
there's not much precedence, precedent. So like, I can talk about that. But in our
case, these are the three functions that we think about dollar per joule
delivered to the target. And then like, how much is the fusion gain? And then what's the
cost to convert the fusion gain into electricity, which is more predictable. And so if you're
focusing like, intensely on just decreasing the dollar per joule delivered to the target, and
then obviously, like improving the efficiency. Packy: JC lists three factors: How expensive is it to
deliver energy to the target? What’s the fusion gain, or Q, once you do? And how efficiently can you convert
that fusion gain into electricity? It’s a kind of bottoms-up approach. Ryan at Zap Energy explained how they
think about unit economics coming top-down, using “overnight capital costs.” Overnight
capital costs are the hypothetical costs if the project were completed overnight and is
often used in large infrastructure projects to normalize for the impact of time, including
things like inflation and interest payments. Ryan: Yeah, and I'll caveat these with no
one's yet built a commercial fusion plant, right? And so we're all doing our best
to estimate the costs. And so we're doing things like class four, class five estimates.
That's a terminology from the Association for Cost Estimating of different ways to price out
what you think your enthepokine commercial unit might be versus what you think your pilot plant
might be. So as we've gone through that with ZAP, We've started to see overnight
capital costs in the range of something like $3,000 to $4,000 per
kilowatt. What does that mean? Well, that's about half the overnight capital cost
of advanced nuclear today or of solar thermal, but it's still significantly more than one
would pay for like a natural gas turbine, which might be closer to $1,000 to $1,500
per kilowatt of overnight capital cost. What that leads to is a power plant that
you've spent money upfront to build, but now your operations and maintenance are
quite affordable, right? Our fuel costs are practically negligible, right? When it comes to
a fusion power plant, fusion is such an energy dense fuel that you measure the annual input of
fuel in, in kilograms, not in train cars. Right. And so I can kind of ignore the fuel costs
when it comes to operations and maintenance. But that leads me to levelized costs
of electricity that are in the range of something like $30 to $60 per megawatt hour
in terms of our estimates today based upon different kind of input assumptions
that we can make. So that makes me competitive. It's not the cheapest
electricity source today. But again, what I think the market's going to be in drastic
need of as we look towards the 2030s and beyond is an on-demand carbon-free source, right? And
renewables just don't get us there by themselves. And so I'm comfortable that
a 30 to 60 megawatt, $30, $60 per megawatt hour is a competitive LCOE for
what the market will need in that timeframe. Julia: Francesco at Proxima points out that
while being cost-competitive is important - and the company’s models suggest that it can
be – getting it to be cheap enough works out in the short-term because fusion
energy is so compelling and versatile. Francesco: Yeah, the cost of energy that can
come up of fusion is, of course, uncertain. What our system analysis says is that this could
be cheap. That is not a statement to say that it has to be cheap. Fusion is so compelling that if
you get it done as a safe, abundant, clean source of electricity, process heat, possibly making
hydrogen, you think about all the possibilities. then it doesn't really have to be the
cheapest thing. We don't have to make it cheaper than photovoltaics today. We're
not competing for that kind of market. So if you get to a power plant that makes order of a
gigawatt with $3 billion and you're in business, what you really want to look at is not actually
the overnight cost of a new power plant. It's rather the levelized cost of electricity, this
LCOE as it's called. The models tell us that we can achieve five cents per kilowatt
hour electric, which will be extremely compelling. If we manage to be anywhere
in that order of magnitude, that's great. Julia: Ian Hogarth of Plural,
Proxima’s co-lead investor, added that thinking of fusion in a vacuum
undersells its strategic importance and the role that governments will play
in supporting its initial growth. Ian: The thing that I would add just
beyond the kind of thinking about it as a comparator to say solar or fossil fuel
generation, it's just that it's such a deep strategic technology. There's going to be a
race for fusion power globally in the 2030s where people are going to try to have fusion
connect to the grid faster in their country than other countries because it's going to
be a massive new industry. It's going to be. it's going to underpin a lot of progress and
a lot of opportunities. And so I think you're going to have very significant subsidies
emerge in the first chapter of kind of getting fusion on the grid. You know, if you're
thinking like a state or seeing like a state, you're sort of thinking, you know, how much would
I pay to get the world's fusion industry to be based in my country, you probably pay quite a
bit because it's actually going to be pretty strategic in lots of ways. And so I think,
I don't think the economics are going to be You know, I think there's going to be some
very significant state involvement in fusion in the early days as there has been up
until now with the likes of, you know, Max Planck and the Mendelstein 7X. Um, and I think
there may also be a role that some of the largest technology companies in the world will play, like
the off take agreement that Microsoft has agreed with Helion, which I think is a bit of bespoke
thing due to Sam Altman's kind of relationship with Microsoft. But I think this question of
kind of, you know, AI requiring, requiring more and more energy and fusion as a kind of base
load source of energy that doesn't have some of the downsides of fission, it's going to sort of
move up the agenda of large corporations as well. Julia: That point that Ian just made is a good
one – we’re going to need a lot more energy, thanks in large part to companies like
Microsoft that are building power-hungry data centers to support the growing
demand for AI. Clea at Lowercarbon said that estimates of 5x electricity demand
in the US by 2050 are probably conservative. Clea: ultimately, the demand for
electricity in the US alone is going to grow at least 5x by 2050. And I'm
pretty sure that's insanely conservative, because when you look at computing demand
alone, you need about 10 years for that to be effectively the same demand of the
entire US from an electricity standpoint. So we're set up for a lot of electricity
demand and enter fusion. Don't really know exactly where that's going to be in 2050, but
right now we're really excited about a lot of technologies that are going down the learning
curve and could represent a really significant piece of that energy pie in 2050. And a lot
of those projected to be, you know, sub- $70 per megawatt hour and that's really valuable
in terms of a firm source of electricity. Some might project that somewhere between 10 to
30 percent of the overall energy source pie. Julia: Make no mistake, though. Ultimately, the
goal for fusion is to come down the learning curve to the point where fusion can replace
fossil fuels globally, whether that happens by 2050 or some time later. That’s going to mean
rolling out fusion plants across the globe. We asked David at Helion what he
thinks the rollout will look like once they demonstrate Q>1 and
he was clear about the goal. David: in the world, there's over 4,000
gigawatts of installed fossil fuel capacity out there. And our goal is to replace it
all. And I don't think one type of fusion probably is enough to do all that. We're
going to try. We're going to move as fast as we can. But I think that you're going to have
different kinds of power in different locations. And you're going to need those, whether
it's remote, whether it's military bases, whether it's giant factories, whether it's
data centers. And they're going to require different kinds of power. And so our plan is,
yes, we demonstrate electrons on the grid in 2028. And then we have to scale manufacturing
as fast as possible and start manufacturing the systems to deploy them. And so we're
going to do that as fast as possible. Our goal is to get to by 2030. We're now making
generators. And we're making it. We're making. generators per day rather than generators every
few years. That's a big scale. That's a big lift. And so as a human, I want other fusion and other
types of advanced carbon-free power out there in the world too, because we just have that big of
a need and we need to move that fast. So that's my view. We're gonna move as fast as we can
though. And we engineer that into the systems, behind me here in Everett, Washington, we engineer
the mass manufacturing into the systems right now. Packy: And because Helion plans to directly
convert the fusion reaction into energy, cutting out that third leg of the
cost structure that JC mentioned, it believes it can make fusion, really, really
cheap. So cheap that it can compete directly with all of the other energy sources
and win. We asked him what the world looks like when we have abundant fusion
energy, and this is what he told us. David: The whole team thinks about this a lot.
That we believe we have an approach to fusion that can be low cost and generate electricity
at a cent a kilowatt hour. Eventually, we want to get there. That's radically low
cost. And what that means is that we can go out and replace fossil fuels. We can go out and stop
climate change eventually. But what it also opens up new things. We're looking at all those many
parts of the world that don't have the amount of. low cost electricity we do. And so the standard
of living throughout the world in India and Africa and Asia, those are the markets we really
want to address. And then the big ones, like our first customer is data centers. We're seeing
AI growing at an enormous rate and it's going to need power. And our data center and computer
infrastructure is going to require massive amounts of power. And we want to be able to support
that. We want to be able to support that world. And so that's what we look towards.
And we look towards what that world could look like when you have massive computing available for everyone in their pocket
at home. And can we help support that? Julia: I think that’s why we’re all in
this, and why using atoms to generate clean energy is worth doing even though
it’s so hard. We can stop climate change, open up new use cases, and bring energy
to parts of the world that don’t have access to it. I think it’s one of the most
important projects humanity can undertake. Packy: It’s not going to be easy. Every
person in fusion we spoke to pointed to challenges and risks that their companies
face, and they’re non-trivial. Achieving Q>1, and eventually Q infinity is one of the biggest
challenges humanity has ever undertaken. We don’t mean to gloss over them – and we’ll release full
episodes with some of the founders so you can hear more details – but I think the world’s assumption
is that fusion energy is practically impossible and impossibly far away, and we wanted to do this
episode to show you that that’s simply not true. I kind of got fusion-pilled when I
wrote The Fusion Race in May, but Julia, I’d love to hear how your thoughts on fusion
have changed after having these conversations. Packy: On the next, and last episode,
of season one of Age of Miracles, we’ll look to the future and discuss
what the world might look like if everything goes just right, if
we have cheap, abundant energy. Julia: I’m sad this season is ending, but I’m so
excited for this one. We’ll see you next week.
