All-In Summit: Nuclear fusion and the potential for energy abundance

00:00:00.000 | A lot of forecasters estimate that energy production and demand on Earth will grow

00:00:04.760 | to roughly 2x from where we sit today by the end of the century.

00:00:07.800 | And I think that there's other ways to look at the demand forecast,

00:00:11.160 | which is that you can look at GDP per capita

00:00:14.200 | and energy consumption per capita over time,

00:00:16.240 | and you always see that for every 1% increase in GDP per capita,

00:00:19.160 | you see a 1.2% roughly increase in energy consumption per capita.

00:00:23.400 | And by that measure, based on population and GDP growth through the century,

00:00:27.600 | we will need to produce five times more energy than we make on Earth today

00:00:32.360 | by the end of the century.

00:00:33.600 | And you can't do that by just pumping oil and gas out of the ground.

00:00:37.080 | We need another technology,

00:00:38.400 | or we need some renewable systems to scale up more quickly.

00:00:42.400 | And fusion presents this great kind of sea-change opportunity moment

00:00:46.200 | for how we make energy,

00:00:48.520 | leveraging the technology of the sun.

00:00:51.200 | And so I'm really excited today to invite

00:00:53.160 | the two most funded, most high-profile fusion technology entrepreneurs,

00:00:59.520 | Bob Momgard and David Kirtley,

00:01:03.040 | CEOs of Commonwealth Fusion and Helion.

00:01:07.920 | Bob, as the founder of Commonwealth, spun out of MIT,

00:01:11.080 | where he got his PhD in applied plasma physics,

00:01:14.000 | and he's raised more than $2 billion from global investors.

00:01:17.840 | You heard Vinod talk about his original investment in Commonwealth yesterday.

00:01:22.120 | After Bob, we'll hear from David,

00:01:23.560 | who founded Helion after 15 years as a principal investigator

00:01:26.880 | and fusion lead at MSNW,

00:01:28.960 | and before that, seven years as a scientist for the Air Force Research Lab.

00:01:33.320 | David got his PhD in aerospace engineering from Michigan.

00:01:36.560 | Helion's raised about $2.2 billion since its founding,

00:01:40.200 | with a recent massive $500 million funding round,

00:01:43.160 | led by Sam Altman, who we all know is the CEO of OpenAI

00:01:46.000 | and formerly Ran Y Combinator.

00:01:49.080 | Sam invested $375 million personally in that round.

00:01:52.640 | So, please join me.

00:01:54.200 | They're each going to give a presentation,

00:01:55.800 | and then we are going to come back and have a conversation

00:01:57.680 | with both of them at the same time.

00:01:59.560 | Please join me in welcoming Bob to the stage.

00:02:01.560 | (music)

00:02:04.560 | (music)

00:02:07.560 | (music)

00:02:10.560 | (music)

00:02:13.560 | (music)

00:02:16.560 | (music)

00:02:19.560 | - That's a lot of capital for fusion.

00:02:21.160 | It's exciting.

00:02:22.960 | So, I'm setting off, you know, our science morning.

00:02:25.840 | So, we're going to later hear about tiny things and viruses,

00:02:29.560 | and I'm going to start by talking about the biggest thing there is,

00:02:33.440 | which is the universe.

00:02:35.160 | So, this is a picture from the James Webb Telescope,

00:02:38.360 | and what that is is the oldest galaxies that we can see.

00:02:41.960 | And really what the James Webb Telescope is

00:02:43.960 | is a really fancy, expensive camera to look at fusion power plants.

00:02:48.080 | Because that is everywhere you look is fusion power plants.

00:02:52.560 | Fusion power plants are the things that built every single atom

00:02:55.560 | that's in all of you,

00:02:57.080 | that's in all these buildings, everywhere on Earth.

00:02:59.920 | And the reason it works that way

00:03:02.080 | is because the fusion reaction,

00:03:04.000 | the reaction that happens inside all the stars,

00:03:06.400 | it's actually the most prevalent reaction in the entire universe,

00:03:09.800 | that reaction produces energy

00:03:12.000 | that's about 200 million times more energy per mass used

00:03:16.520 | than a chemical reaction.

00:03:18.840 | So, when you think about anything in your life that's chemical,

00:03:21.440 | oil, gas, 50 gigatons a year of CO2,

00:03:24.920 | divide it by, like, order 100 million.

00:03:28.400 | And if you replace that process with a fusion process,

00:03:32.080 | that's what you get at the end.

00:03:33.880 | And that's why we can have billions of years old of a universe

00:03:39.320 | and billions of years old of our own planet.

00:03:44.240 | And so, what these companies are trying to do,

00:03:46.360 | there's like 70 fusion companies,

00:03:48.600 | is what we're trying to do is we're trying to take that reaction

00:03:51.720 | and put it in a bottle,

00:03:53.720 | in a machine that we can build here,

00:03:56.680 | and that we can build quickly.

00:03:58.480 | So, there's many different ways to build that type of machine.

00:04:01.920 | We, I would say today, don't know what the penultimate

00:04:04.680 | or ultimate machine will look like,

00:04:06.600 | but we know that we're close enough to actually start building them.

00:04:09.800 | And if you do this, you end up with a new type of power plant.

00:04:13.360 | You end up with a power plant that looks like a power plant we already do,

00:04:17.360 | meaning you can put it somewhere, it generates electricity,

00:04:19.560 | it generates heat that you can take to electricity,

00:04:21.520 | you can plug it in the grid, you can finance it,

00:04:23.320 | you can use existing supply chains.

00:04:26.200 | But now, it doesn't have emissions,

00:04:28.240 | and basically, it doesn't have any fuel.

00:04:30.600 | And every one of your energy uses for your entire life

00:04:34.080 | could be fulfilled with like a single glass of water.

00:04:37.800 | And so, that's like a sea change in how you think about

00:04:40.360 | the relation between our species, the planet, and energy.

00:04:44.680 | So, the question is, can you actually build such machines?

00:04:48.920 | Well, right now, we're building them around the world.

00:04:53.960 | So, this is a picture of Commonwealth Fusion Systems site.

00:04:56.800 | It's in a suburb about an hour outside of Boston.

00:05:01.280 | And this, two years ago, was a forest, old military base.

00:05:06.120 | And in the upper side of this is a factory,

00:05:09.440 | a factory to make magnets, key pieces of fusion machines.

00:05:14.840 | But down in front is a prototype fusion power plant.

00:05:19.440 | It's a machine we call Spark.

00:05:21.320 | And that machine is basically the culmination

00:05:25.320 | of about 60 years of science done around the world.

00:05:29.840 | We've been working on fusion since actually before we split the atom.

00:05:33.080 | And in that time, the scientists at national labs and universities

00:05:37.240 | have gotten better and better at building successive generations of those machines.

00:05:41.480 | And in fact, the performance of those machines,

00:05:43.520 | and the metrics that you care about if you're into plasma physics like I am,

00:05:47.000 | that performance has gone up faster than Moore's Law.

00:05:50.400 | And it's now sitting at the point where you can almost get more power out

00:05:54.560 | from this reaction than it took to make the reaction start.

00:05:59.080 | To do that, what you're building is you're building machines

00:06:01.040 | that literally, like, make star stuff.

00:06:03.320 | They're machines that have plasmas inside them that are 100 million degrees.

00:06:07.680 | It's like five times hotter than the center of the sun.

00:06:10.400 | You know, Fahrenheit, Celsius, doesn't really matter.

00:06:12.360 | 100 million, huge number.

00:06:14.280 | (Laughter)

00:06:17.880 | And they do this using basically stuff that we already know how to build.

00:06:25.040 | It's kind of a unique situation.

00:06:26.440 | Like, this is the size of a Walmart built by companies that build Walmarts.

00:06:30.680 | And it's got buildings that house equipment

00:06:33.120 | that is like equipment that you use to do electrified natural gas or solar plants.

00:06:38.560 | And in the center, in that square in the center,

00:06:40.600 | is a room where you put the fusion machine.

00:06:44.840 | And that's what that room looks like.

00:06:47.400 | And we just opened this room like four or five days ago.

00:06:53.520 | And that center hole in the middle is where we're going to start assembling

00:06:57.560 | a fusion machine that will make about 100 megawatts of heat

00:07:02.120 | at somewhere around, it'll be more power out than in,

00:07:05.320 | maybe even like 10 times more power out than in.

00:07:08.360 | And that's based on all this science that's been done

00:07:11.240 | with a series of partners that include MIT, national labs around the world,

00:07:16.080 | all peer-reviewed, published, and what the predictions are going to be.

00:07:19.440 | And we think that this machine will be the first commercial machine

00:07:21.960 | to make more power out than in.

00:07:24.320 | You can see on the bottom what it will look like when it's installed there.

00:07:27.960 | And we're about halfway through the manufacture and assembly of this machine.

00:07:33.400 | So when you think about $2 billion raised,

00:07:35.440 | and like tough tech, and like what it takes to actually bend curves in climate,

00:07:40.880 | this is the type of stuff that you have to be willing to do.

00:07:43.920 | You have to be willing to take science, cutting edge,

00:07:48.160 | wrap it with the ability to execute things like manufacturing

00:07:52.160 | and construction in a package that you could scale.

00:07:55.760 | Because our climate crisis is going to require

00:07:58.440 | us to build somewhere on the order of 10,000 to 100,000 power plants.

00:08:05.440 | So today, there's about 60,000 power plants in the world.

00:08:08.800 | And so you're not going to solve this by like making little things.

00:08:11.760 | You're going to solve this by making big bets, big changes.

00:08:15.400 | And that's even just through places that we have today.

00:08:18.400 | We talk about 5x-ing the amount of energy we're going to use

00:08:22.320 | on the planet Earth, humanity.

00:08:24.760 | Like that's one of the largest construction booms in human history.

00:08:29.080 | And so we're trying to get it started here.

00:08:31.360 | And one of the great things that you can see about fusion

00:08:34.600 | is that once you get the formula figured out,

00:08:37.720 | once you figure out how to build one of these machines,

00:08:39.600 | you get a thing that makes a lot of energy out of a small thing

00:08:43.120 | that you manufacture, a thing that you build a factory to make more of.

00:08:47.800 | And it's a factory that kind of looks like an automobile factory

00:08:51.280 | or like a rocket factory.

00:08:52.760 | And in fact, a lot of the people at this company

00:08:55.440 | came exactly from those areas,

00:08:57.120 | that were trained in new space, in new automotive.

00:09:00.400 | Which means like once you figure this out,

00:09:03.040 | you could build lots of these very quickly.

00:09:04.920 | And so this is some pictures inside that factory on that site

00:09:08.120 | of us building the different pieces that go inside that fusion machine.

00:09:13.600 | And we'll start to assemble that machine later this year

00:09:19.680 | and turn it on in the sort of 2025 timeframe

00:09:23.240 | and get to Q greater than one, more power out than in for the first time,

00:09:26.800 | probably early 2026.

00:09:29.440 | And that's part of a long-term plan that we've been on in the last five years

00:09:32.520 | since launching Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

00:09:34.760 | We start with the science that we already know how to do,

00:09:37.800 | that's today you can go and see fusion machines around the world.

00:09:40.760 | We've built about 150 fusion machines at national labs and universities,

00:09:45.040 | coupled with an entirely new type of technology,

00:09:47.520 | in our case, an extremely strong magnet.

00:09:50.080 | A magnet's made out of a new type of superconductor,

00:09:52.720 | not the one that you read about recently, that was all bunk,

00:09:55.560 | but the one that was previous Nobel Prize,

00:09:59.840 | that allows us to go to extremely high magnetic fields,

00:10:02.880 | which allows us to build these machines

00:10:04.520 | that you could not have built five years ago.

00:10:07.280 | They're 10 times smaller for the same performance,

00:10:09.720 | using the same science that we already know how to do.

00:10:12.520 | And they set up a power plant, like the one on the right,

00:10:15.920 | that is like a 400-megawatt power plant, like the size of a coal plant.

00:10:20.800 | So you can imagine going to a coal site, taking out the boiler,

00:10:25.080 | and putting in this new kit, once it's proven,

00:10:28.400 | and turning it on, pushing a button,

00:10:30.960 | and having a whole bunch of heat come out

00:10:32.440 | in a reaction that is the most common reaction in the universe,

00:10:36.040 | taking your hand off the button, stopping it,

00:10:38.320 | pushing again and going,

00:10:40.320 | and doing that in a way that you could then build over and over again.

00:10:43.840 | That's like the big promise.

00:10:46.360 | In terms of where people are, it's the beginning of a race.

00:10:50.880 | About $6 billion invested in fusion,

00:10:52.960 | which means that one of the most invested

00:10:55.240 | of the new energy technology companies.

00:10:57.160 | So when you think about geothermal or batteries,

00:10:59.520 | this is actually a next-generation battery.

00:11:01.040 | This is actually a similar scale.

00:11:02.800 | And it's going through a history of technology path that's well-worn.

00:11:07.800 | And we can actually milestone where all these companies are

00:11:11.000 | and all these techniques are.

00:11:12.440 | You know, today you can go and see lots of companies and lots of labs

00:11:15.880 | where they make plasmas that are sort of like the idea of an airplane.

00:11:20.200 | There's some that can get plasmas pretty hot.

00:11:22.040 | There's a few, including the companies we're talking about here,

00:11:25.320 | who can actually get plasmas into the right conditions,

00:11:27.560 | the 100 million degrees, that are insulated well enough,

00:11:30.640 | that are in the conditions for that reaction to happen.

00:11:33.680 | And now we're at step four,

00:11:35.440 | which is to make these things make more power out than in,

00:11:38.640 | Q greater than one.

00:11:39.960 | And we know that's doable because actually in December,

00:11:43.080 | a very large laser in California called NIF created those conditions,

00:11:47.320 | granted in a completely non-commercially relevant way,

00:11:50.280 | but in a scientifically relevant way,

00:11:53.280 | created for an instant, picosecond, those conditions.

00:11:56.760 | And now it's a race to build things like Spark

00:12:00.280 | to do that in a commercial way.

00:12:02.200 | And after that, there'll be plenty left to do,

00:12:05.200 | but we'll know that we've taken a scientific idea

00:12:08.000 | and turned it into an engineering project and a scaling project.

00:12:11.840 | And we don't know what the world will do with that.

00:12:15.040 | It's potentially something that could really disrupt things.

00:12:20.080 | And I think, as I think about everyone planning,

00:12:23.840 | you've got to be able to plan for that.

00:12:25.640 | You've got to be able to build a fast-track on-ramp

00:12:28.200 | to these extremely disruptive technologies.

00:12:31.200 | And whether it's fusion or gene editing,

00:12:34.760 | I think that's where the future is.

00:12:36.440 | And it's an interdisciplinary problem,

00:12:38.480 | and it's a problem that takes audacity, capital,

00:12:42.560 | smart people all working together.

00:12:44.320 | So thank you. That's where we're at.

00:12:46.600 | I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you.

00:12:49.040 | (Applause)

00:12:52.040 | Thanks.

00:12:54.440 | And I'm excited to welcome a colleague here, David Kirtley,

00:12:57.840 | to tell you the other exciting things about fusion.

00:13:00.680 | (Music)

00:13:04.680 | (Music ends)

00:13:07.680 | Hi. Perfect. Thank you very much, Bob.

00:13:11.680 | So my name is David Kirtley. I'm a founder of Helion Energy.

00:13:14.680 | I'm excited to talk about our approach to fusion

00:13:17.680 | that we think rapidly accelerates the timeline for fusion.

00:13:20.680 | Bob, I think, did a great job of talking about the history of fusion,

00:13:23.680 | where we come from, and the speed of what we want to get there.

00:13:26.680 | I'm going to be a little more selfish and talk about myself today

00:13:29.680 | and give you a little bit of the fusion journey I've been on

00:13:33.680 | and why I've come from being a fusion skeptic

00:13:37.680 | that I think many people in this audience have.

00:13:40.680 | So I went into school in my academic part of my career

00:13:44.680 | to do something, what I thought was important for the world,

00:13:47.680 | and David did a really great job of talking about the impact of energy

00:13:51.680 | and the cost of electricity on the world.

00:13:53.680 | So I said, "Great. I'm going to go solve that problem."

00:13:56.680 | I then a little naively looked to the universe and said,

00:13:59.680 | "Great. There are fusions out there.

00:14:01.680 | It's where most of the mass and the energy in the universe comes from.

00:14:04.680 | I should do that, and we should bring that here on Earth."

00:14:07.680 | Got into it. I actually became an expert in some of the inertial-type approaches,

00:14:12.680 | like the laser systems.

00:14:14.680 | Actually, my specialty was antimatter. Antimatter is cool.

00:14:17.680 | But what I learned was that, actually, the technologies of the time,

00:14:21.680 | when I was learning, that I learned in school,

00:14:24.680 | that if I could do something like this, and we all sort of see that in the world,

00:14:27.680 | they're going to work.

00:14:29.680 | But when they do, I will have already retired,

00:14:32.680 | if not actually be alive to turn on the machines I was going to go build.

00:14:35.680 | So I pivoted my career, went and built space propulsion systems and rockets,

00:14:39.680 | plasma thrusters, hull thrusters, ion engines, that kind of thing.

00:14:42.680 | It wasn't until I met our core founding team

00:14:45.680 | that I saw another way to do fusion

00:14:48.680 | that potentially rapidly skips over some of the steps of what others are doing.

00:14:53.680 | So that's what I want to introduce you to today.

00:14:56.680 | Our technology, the way we want to do fusion,

00:14:59.680 | that we believe gets humanity to fusion as soon as possible.

00:15:02.680 | So Bob did a great job of talking about magnetic confinements,

00:15:07.680 | steady fusion, trying to replicate what happens in the sun.

00:15:11.680 | There's inertial confinement, which is very high-intensity,

00:15:14.680 | picosecond pulsed fusion.

00:15:16.680 | And we do something that takes some of both of those approaches.

00:15:20.680 | We cleverly call it magneto-inertial fusion,

00:15:24.680 | which does the sun in a bottle take a magnetic field

00:15:28.680 | to hold that 100 million degrees,

00:15:30.680 | but rather than trying to hold on to it, get it hot enough and ignite it,

00:15:33.680 | we actually then squeeze it as fast as possible

00:15:36.680 | with very large pulsed electric currents.

00:15:38.680 | And so that's what we've been able to build today.

00:15:41.680 | One of the key--this is a picture of our sixth-generation machine

00:15:44.680 | that we have up in the Seattle area.

00:15:47.680 | And one of the keys to the approach to this fusion--

00:15:49.680 | we're going to dig into the technology a little bit

00:15:51.680 | and then talk about the benefits--

00:15:53.680 | but one of the keys is that what we focus on is the electricity part.

00:15:58.680 | And I think that for me, getting into fusion

00:16:01.680 | wasn't to explore cool new technologies.

00:16:04.680 | It was actually to generate electricity.

00:16:06.680 | And so that's been our focus.

00:16:08.680 | And so how we do that is a little unique,

00:16:10.680 | and we believe that lets us build systems faster and smaller.

00:16:13.680 | And so let's dig into that.

00:16:15.680 | You've seen some of the tokamak systems, which look like big donuts.

00:16:19.680 | The laser system is a giant sphere,

00:16:21.680 | so we decided we should go and do a cylinder.

00:16:24.680 | And so these systems are long, elongated cylinders

00:16:28.680 | where we have--on either end, we have our fuel injector--

00:16:31.680 | call it formation--but this is where we put in the fuel,

00:16:34.680 | put in this mixture of hydrogen and helium

00:16:37.680 | that becomes the fusion fuel.

00:16:39.680 | A center acceleration section where we accelerate that to a core,

00:16:42.680 | and in that core is where we compress.

00:16:44.680 | Think about a piston in a combustion engine

00:16:46.680 | where we can compress that fusion fuel.

00:16:49.680 | And then also number four on here is electricity recapture.

00:16:53.680 | For our systems, we require big capacitor banks.

00:16:55.680 | It's actually one of the hardest parts of our technology,

00:16:58.680 | is the electronics, the power electronics.

00:17:00.680 | And so we have a dedicated system to do that.

00:17:02.680 | And it's one of the enabling technologies for this way to do fusion

00:17:06.680 | is that when this was first theorized in the 1950s,

00:17:09.680 | we had no idea how to build those pulse power systems

00:17:13.680 | that could reliably and repeatedly do this.

00:17:15.680 | But we can do it today.

00:17:17.680 | So here's a little animation of how these systems work.

00:17:20.680 | On either end, we inject our fusion fuel.

00:17:23.680 | We heat it. At this point, it's relatively cold.

00:17:25.680 | It's about 5 million degrees or so.

00:17:27.680 | We accelerate to the center compression area

00:17:30.680 | where we then squeeze it, increasing pressure and density and temperature

00:17:34.680 | until we get to fusion conditions over 100 million degrees.

00:17:37.680 | These helions and deuterons fuse to form helium or alpha particles

00:17:42.680 | and protons.

00:17:44.680 | Those are trapped in that magnetic field.

00:17:46.680 | And as that heat, that hot plasma expands,

00:17:49.680 | we pull that energy out directly,

00:17:51.680 | directly recapturing that electricity.

00:17:53.680 | Sounds pretty fantastical.

00:17:55.680 | I'm showing you a lot of 3D drawings and all that stuff.

00:17:58.680 | The fact is, though, we built this.

00:18:01.680 | And this was the key for me.

00:18:03.680 | This is when I went from-- I was a skeptic,

00:18:06.680 | and then we had this cool idea, and we went out to try to build it.

00:18:09.680 | But we actually had to build the thing.

00:18:11.680 | We had to build it, turn it on, prove that technology.

00:18:14.680 | And so we did that.

00:18:15.680 | In 2008, we built a machine that did thermonuclear for fusion

00:18:18.680 | for the first time.

00:18:20.680 | That machine was about a million and a half bucks,

00:18:23.680 | and it set records for temperature, density, pressure.

00:18:27.680 | I personally helped build that thing a little bit.

00:18:29.680 | They don't let me touch wrenches too much.

00:18:32.680 | And actually produced fusion reactions with it

00:18:35.680 | and measured those reactions.

00:18:37.680 | And at that point, I said, "Look, holy shit.

00:18:39.680 | I have the answer to this.

00:18:40.680 | Let's go try to figure out how to build a business around it."

00:18:42.680 | And as I think we'll probably talk today,

00:18:44.680 | it turns out that's hard too.

00:18:46.680 | But in the process of doing that,

00:18:48.680 | we've now built six machines that do fusion.

00:18:51.680 | The latest one we call Trenta,

00:18:53.680 | that one exceeded 100 million degrees.

00:18:55.680 | We're the first private company to do that.

00:18:58.680 | We did DD fusion.

00:19:00.680 | We actually did D-helium-3 fusion,

00:19:02.680 | where we actually took rare helium-3 and fused it with deuterium.

00:19:05.680 | But again, we think we're the first company to ever do that,

00:19:07.680 | maybe even the first group to ever do that.

00:19:09.680 | And then the most important thing, I think,

00:19:11.680 | is we need to recapture this electricity.

00:19:14.680 | And so that's the first machine we built with private funding in 2014,

00:19:18.680 | was a machine that took energy from those capacitors and those pulse power

00:19:21.680 | and then very quickly in microseconds put that energy into a magnetic core,

00:19:25.680 | and then we then recovered that magnetic energy back to the capacitors.

00:19:30.680 | The key there is we did that at 95% efficiency.

00:19:34.680 | And if you can do that, that means the fusion only has to do the 5%.

00:19:37.680 | And so we believe that means that you can build fusion systems

00:19:40.680 | orders of magnitude smaller and faster

00:19:42.680 | and skip over some of the big steps of cooling towers and steam turbines

00:19:46.680 | and inefficient systems you have to do.

00:19:48.680 | And a lot of that comes from looking at fusion,

00:19:50.680 | not from just looking at the science, which is really critical,

00:19:54.680 | but also looking at the engineering.

00:19:55.680 | I want to build power plants that make electricity.

00:19:58.680 | And if that's your singular focus, if that's your goal,

00:20:00.680 | if that's where you're targeted,

00:20:02.680 | you make design engineering decisions to get there faster.

00:20:06.680 | So that's what we were able to do.

00:20:07.680 | I think that a lot of the private fusion companies in the world

00:20:09.680 | are also now targeting electricity.

00:20:11.680 | How do we get there and how do we get there fast?

00:20:14.680 | So that's what we're doing now.

00:20:15.680 | We're building actually--so in the pictures you see here on the top right,

00:20:18.680 | that's our seventh generation machine.

00:20:20.680 | We call this one Polaris.

00:20:21.680 | We're building that system today up in Everett, Washington,

00:20:24.680 | outside of Seattle and installing it in our generator building.

00:20:28.680 | We actually have an operational plasma injector machine.

00:20:31.680 | I love saying plasma injector machine.

00:20:34.680 | To actually do the fusion, to start that fusion process,

00:20:37.680 | to try to get to even higher temperatures

00:20:39.680 | than that 100 million degrees that we did before.

00:20:41.680 | And we started mass manufacturing those key components

00:20:44.680 | that we can't get anywhere else in the world of capacitors.

00:20:48.680 | And so we're, we believe, the first U.S. manufacturer in decades

00:20:51.680 | to start manufacturing capacitors here in the U.S.

00:20:54.680 | Maybe we'll sell them one day,

00:20:55.680 | but right now we're using everything we can make for Polaris,

00:20:58.680 | for that next system.

00:21:01.680 | And the exciting announcement, announcing thing--

00:21:04.680 | exciting thing we announced earlier this year

00:21:07.680 | is that we had our first customer.

00:21:08.680 | It's kind of a good thing for a fusion business.

00:21:11.680 | And so we have--our first customer is Microsoft.

00:21:14.680 | We have a power purchase agreement to build a power plant with them

00:21:17.680 | to come online in 2028.

00:21:19.680 | This is 50 megawatts.

00:21:20.680 | 50 megawatts is about 40,000 homes.

00:21:23.680 | And to do that in Washington state.

00:21:25.680 | It's a pretty audacious goal.

00:21:26.680 | Five years--it's five very short years--

00:21:29.680 | to go build a system that makes commercial electricity.

00:21:32.680 | We believe we can do that because we built all these fusion systems.

00:21:35.680 | We have an approach that actually radically shrinks

00:21:37.680 | the amount of capital and the timeline to build these.

00:21:40.680 | And more importantly, we have that singular goal of making electricity

00:21:43.680 | and getting it on the grid as absolutely as fast as possible.

00:21:48.680 | So that's a picture of the new generator building we just built.

00:21:51.680 | You can't see all the manufacturing on the side there.

00:21:54.680 | But I'm excited to be able to talk today about the fusion business,

00:21:58.680 | the fusion industry, and how we get from being a fusion skeptic like I was

00:22:03.680 | to being a fusion optimist, and really an optimist for the future.

00:22:07.680 | We need clean power, and we need it now.

00:22:09.680 | Thank you very much.

00:22:10.680 | [applause]

00:22:16.680 | [music]

00:22:35.680 | Thank you guys for being here.

00:22:37.680 | This is obviously an exciting challenge,

00:22:42.680 | a dramatically difficult one, an important one, and an expensive one.

00:22:46.680 | I just want to talk a little bit about the end state

00:22:49.680 | for each of you, your point of view.

00:22:51.680 | We think about energy prices--there's a lot of ways to think about it--

00:22:54.680 | but dollars per kilowatt hour, or pennies per kilowatt hour.

00:22:57.680 | We buy power off the grid in the U.S. for 12 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour.

00:23:02.680 | Where do you guys think these systems end up

00:23:07.680 | when you think about the amortization cost

00:23:10.680 | and what you're going to have to charge to build these systems?

00:23:12.680 | Once you're at scale, once you're rolling these systems out at scale,

00:23:15.680 | what's your end goal for price per kilowatt hour?

00:23:19.680 | I think that's exactly the perfect question to lead in,

00:23:23.680 | that if you're doing a new technology like this

00:23:25.680 | and your goal is electricity, it has to be competitive,

00:23:28.680 | and it has to be competitive at scale, at large scale.

00:23:31.680 | Fusion has a nice opportunity to do that.

00:23:33.680 | You talk about what's the cost of electricity.

00:23:36.680 | It comes from OPEX and CAPEX.

00:23:38.680 | OPEX, our fuel for a 50-megawatt system,

00:23:41.680 | with a pickup truck worth of fuel,

00:23:44.680 | you can actually power that system for a decade.

00:23:47.680 | It's clean, and it's safe, and it's low cost.

00:23:50.680 | We don't even include it in the OPEX budget.

00:23:52.680 | The fuel cost is so low.

00:23:54.680 | If we can get to a state where we have less of PhDs in the control room,

00:23:58.680 | the actual operating cost then becomes pretty negligible for those systems.

00:24:01.680 | Then you're left with the capital.

00:24:03.680 | I think that's been our focus,

00:24:05.680 | is how do we minimize the capital of those systems,

00:24:08.680 | so we can get to a point where we can be really cost competitive.

00:24:11.680 | I'll give you straight answers.

00:24:13.680 | Our goal with our approach to fusion,

00:24:15.680 | where we directly recapture the energy,

00:24:17.680 | is to get to a cent a kilowatt hour or less.

00:24:20.680 | You can do that with OPEX.

00:24:22.680 | [applause]

00:24:24.680 | I think an important point about this is

00:24:27.680 | you build these things, they're CAPEX.

00:24:29.680 | You eventually get very good at building them.

00:24:31.680 | When you look at the probability curve,

00:24:34.680 | you have very, very low numbers.

00:24:36.680 | Eventually, a system like this is basically what the interest rate is,

00:24:40.680 | is what the price of power is,

00:24:42.680 | because you're just building capital.

00:24:44.680 | There's no operating cost, there's no fuel.

00:24:47.680 | The capital you're building is an order of magnitude less stuff

00:24:51.680 | than, say, renewable.

00:24:53.680 | It allows you to get to these very low numbers.

00:24:55.680 | So you guys have ever been on stage together before like this?

00:25:00.680 | Yeah, I think so.

00:25:02.680 | We're sitting next to each other.

00:25:04.680 | [laughter]

00:25:06.680 | I'm trying to set up a little Tesla-Edison rivalry here, AC/DC.

00:25:10.680 | [laughter]

00:25:13.680 | But no, seriously, there is a--

00:25:16.680 | different architectural approaches.

00:25:18.680 | You each have fairly distinct approaches

00:25:20.680 | to getting these plasma to a dense enough,

00:25:23.680 | high enough energy state condition

00:25:25.680 | so that they fuse and produce energy.

00:25:28.680 | Very different approaches.

00:25:30.680 | And there are other approaches.

00:25:32.680 | I think there's, by my track, roughly six general architectures

00:25:36.680 | for fusion technology, and you guys are the experts.

00:25:38.680 | Tell me if I'm wrong.

00:25:40.680 | How do we know you guys win?

00:25:42.680 | Why does Tesla win? Why does Edison win?

00:25:44.680 | And isn't it the case that ultimately the price of power is going to win?

00:25:48.680 | And so whatever architecture gets to the lowest price of power

00:25:51.680 | is going to take the whole market.

00:25:53.680 | Yeah, it's a really good question.

00:25:55.680 | First, you have to make it work, right?

00:25:58.680 | There's a lot of architectures,

00:26:00.680 | and the odds that they all work are low.

00:26:03.680 | So we've taken the tact of, like,

00:26:05.680 | find the architectures that you know are going to work.

00:26:07.680 | What's the lowest science risk that you can do?

00:26:09.680 | Because that price of power, it's not so much architecture-dependent,

00:26:12.680 | it's learning rate-dependent.

00:26:14.680 | At the end of the day, the amount of stuff in these things

00:26:17.680 | is all about the same.

00:26:19.680 | And so the faster you get there, the better your cycles are,

00:26:23.680 | the lower you're going to drive that cost.

00:26:25.680 | And there's a time component to that too.

00:26:27.680 | We don't have the time to wait.

00:26:29.680 | So if Fusion was available today, we'd be buying it.

00:26:32.680 | Like, you know, no shortage of customer interest.

00:26:35.680 | But the real energy transition is in the next decade.

00:26:40.680 | So we need something that we can get there, like, now, as soon as possible.

00:26:44.680 | So it's not so much like that end state.

00:26:46.680 | It might be interesting from a futurist standpoint what that end state is.

00:26:49.680 | It's the path to get there that's going to really determine it.

00:26:52.680 | Yeah, and I think our focus has been--

00:26:54.680 | and Bob's is mine as well--is how do we move as fast as possible?

00:26:57.680 | How do we iterate? How do we test? How do we build these?

00:27:00.680 | Because it's that time that's driving.

00:27:02.680 | And there's a huge market, you know, 3,000 gigawatts of fossil power.

00:27:05.680 | It's not necessarily the case that one of you is going to win

00:27:08.680 | and one of you is going to lose?

00:27:10.680 | No, it's a huge market. It's one out of every $12.

00:27:13.680 | So it's absolutely huge.

00:27:15.680 | You think about what's in front of us to redo all the infrastructure.

00:27:18.680 | There's no way a single company is going to be able to address that entire thing.

00:27:22.680 | And also it's not the case that the absolute ultimate optimized thing is going to win.

00:27:27.680 | It's going to be a packaged thing.

00:27:29.680 | The car you buy today, the way you control it, the way you drive it,

00:27:32.680 | looks like the car that Henry Ford built.

00:27:34.680 | Not optimized.

00:27:36.680 | How you got there.

00:27:38.680 | I have a two-part question for you.

00:27:40.680 | I think we all, as laypeople, not in the industry and in the trenches,

00:27:44.680 | in the arena with you doing this.

00:27:47.680 | Our question is just very brief on this answer from each of you

00:27:52.680 | because the second part is more important, I think.

00:27:55.680 | What are the chances that collectively, you know, half a dozen startups

00:28:00.680 | actually get this done in our lifetimes?

00:28:03.680 | What do you put that at?

00:28:04.680 | You know, let's say in the next 20, 30 years,

00:28:06.680 | what are the chances we actually--this is a meaningful part of our energy mixture?

00:28:11.680 | In the next 20 or 30 years?

00:28:12.680 | Yeah.

00:28:13.680 | 100%.

00:28:14.680 | I agree.

00:28:15.680 | Next 10 years if you had to--

00:28:16.680 | Scaling in the next 10.

00:28:17.680 | Yep.

00:28:18.680 | Because 3,000 gigawatts of replacement is going to be hard.

00:28:21.680 | Well, that's the need for it, but okay.

00:28:23.680 | You're both convinced it's going to happen.

00:28:26.680 | So then, knowing that you know that,

00:28:29.680 | how do you advise the world to look at global warming, fossil fuels?

00:28:33.680 | Because we're having this very vibrant debate.

00:28:36.680 | What does happen mean?

00:28:37.680 | Happen means net positive energy?

00:28:39.680 | No, no, like buy power into your refrigerator from fusion.

00:28:43.680 | Got it.

00:28:44.680 | So then, how would that inform how we should look at fossil fuels?

00:28:48.680 | Because you have a group of people who are debating fossil fuels,

00:28:54.680 | and it's become quite religious with global warming, et cetera.

00:28:57.680 | You guys are scientists who understand global warming and everything.

00:29:01.680 | Do we need to even worry about the energy mixture today

00:29:04.680 | if you're going to get this done?

00:29:06.680 | And should we be sweating global warming as much as we are fossil fuel use

00:29:10.680 | if the solution is here?

00:29:12.680 | And you guys are so confident it's going to be there.

00:29:14.680 | It's a good question.

00:29:16.680 | 50 gigatons a year for 10 years is a lot of carbon in the atmosphere,

00:29:21.680 | in a place where we are already at our limits.

00:29:23.680 | So we need to do this transition,

00:29:25.680 | and we need to be ready to build out at a very large scale

00:29:28.680 | every zero-carbon energy source that you have

00:29:30.680 | because the energy needs that we talked about earlier,

00:29:34.680 | they're terrifying.

00:29:36.680 | If we need this solution for fusion, but we also need the other thing.

00:29:40.680 | So it's not even going to be enough to solve that problem.

00:29:43.680 | And then two of the biggest problems the world faces,

00:29:47.680 | getting this carbon out of the atmosphere, and I guess water,

00:29:51.680 | and both of those, a lot of the taking carbon out of the atmosphere

00:29:56.680 | is an energy question,

00:29:58.680 | and desalination is obviously an energy question

00:30:01.680 | because you're going to push water through screens.

00:30:03.680 | So maybe just briefly from each of you,

00:30:06.680 | your optimism for the world,

00:30:09.680 | knowing what you know from being in the trenches every day,

00:30:13.680 | food insecurity, energy, water,

00:30:17.680 | all of these things seem to be really tied.

00:30:21.680 | So should we be as pessimistic as I think people in the world right now are?

00:30:25.680 | How do you look at the world when you go to bed at night?

00:30:27.680 | So long term, I mean, I think we should be very optimistic,

00:30:30.680 | but those problems exist today,

00:30:32.680 | and we need to be moving as fast as we can to get there.

00:30:34.680 | So where the sun is shining, we should have solar panels.

00:30:36.680 | Where the wind is blowing, we should have wind power,

00:30:38.680 | and that's still not enough, I believe, anyway.

00:30:41.680 | And David mentioned power uses doubling over this decade.

00:30:45.680 | I think that that doesn't include electrification, carbon removal.

00:30:49.680 | Forecast is wrong.

00:30:51.680 | I think it way underestimates what we actually can do

00:30:55.680 | and what we can do if the cost of power is low enough,

00:30:58.680 | and it sidesteps the geopolitics and some of the other challenges

00:31:01.680 | of other low-cost sources of carbon-free power.

00:31:03.680 | So on the question about how it all ties together,

00:31:06.680 | I look at it as in the end, there are only two fundamental markets--

00:31:11.680 | energy and creativity.

00:31:13.680 | And with those two things-- notice I didn't say human creativity.

00:31:16.680 | With those two things, you can do all these other stuff.

00:31:20.680 | And so the faster we get to the things that have massive scale

00:31:24.680 | in those two things, the better off we're going to be.

00:31:27.680 | Are we investing enough in fusion right now?

00:31:29.680 | Because you guys are working with the venture community, I think, largely.

00:31:32.680 | I don't understand why we're spending all this money on renewables,

00:31:38.680 | debating fossil fuels, all this stuff, and not really going for this--

00:31:42.680 | I don't want to call what you're doing a hell, Mary, but it's a long ball.

00:31:46.680 | Why are we not just pushing a lot more government funding into this project

00:31:50.680 | if it even had-- we talked about implied odds yesterday over and over--

00:31:53.680 | if this does have-- let's say they're delusional

00:31:56.680 | and what's going to happen is because they're founders.

00:31:59.680 | What do you put it at, the chances that they succeed in the next 10 to 20 years?

00:32:02.680 | Well, I've told investors that I've spoken with that I think there's a 100% chance

00:32:06.680 | that the portfolio of 70 fusion companies that exist today

00:32:09.680 | that are pursuing this technology will succeed

00:32:12.680 | and that we will get low-cost power in the next 20 years at scale.

00:32:16.680 | So I don't know which architecture wins.

00:32:19.680 | I don't know which company wins. I don't know who gets there first.

00:32:21.680 | I don't know how quickly each of them can scale.

00:32:23.680 | It's hard for me to handicap that, and I don't have a sovereign wealth fund's

00:32:27.680 | capacity to build a portfolio of these investments,

00:32:30.680 | but that would be the right strategy.

00:32:32.680 | I've told folks I think that the index on where things are valued today--

00:32:35.680 | if you took all the fusion companies and their total market value today,

00:32:38.680 | I would 100% buy that fucking index.

00:32:40.680 | Yeah, so that would argue for--

00:32:42.680 | one of the things I thought was inspiring, Chamath, about yesterday's discussion

00:32:45.680 | was you were talking about how do we allocate resources,

00:32:49.680 | and then we were being challenged by some of the speakers,

00:32:51.680 | "Well, what can you do?"

00:32:52.680 | And I think this framing where you're talking about capital allocation,

00:32:56.680 | you guys are convinced you're going to do it.

00:32:58.680 | It feels like there's a disconnect between the politicians

00:33:01.680 | and how they're spending the resources that we are all giving them.

00:33:04.680 | I don't know. Can we hear how the IRA serves this opportunity?

00:33:09.680 | So I want to make sure that just throwing money at a problem,

00:33:13.680 | unlimited money at a problem--

00:33:15.680 | I was actually just having a conversation with Sam Altman about this--

00:33:18.680 | doesn't actually always speed it up.

00:33:20.680 | You actually have to do it in the right way with the right targets.

00:33:24.680 | Delivering fusion power and it costs $0.10 a kilowatt hour

00:33:27.680 | doesn't actually solve the problem.

00:33:29.680 | It's got to be that low-cost solution.

00:33:31.680 | So we need to make sure we're focused on how do we do that.

00:33:33.680 | For the IRA, a lot of its focus is manufacturing.

00:33:36.680 | A lot of its focus is scaling manufacturing in the United States.

00:33:39.680 | So I think that is really valuable.

00:33:41.680 | And more things like that that are less focused on demonstrating--

00:33:45.680 | Are you going to get some of those dollars?

00:33:47.680 | We'll see.

00:33:48.680 | You have to prove some stuff before you can access them, right?

00:33:51.680 | So on the manufacturing side, there's lots of opportunities

00:33:53.680 | to actually bring manufacturing.

00:33:55.680 | So capacitors are a good example.

00:33:57.680 | Our current system, 90% of the capacitors that we are going to put into it

00:34:01.680 | were purchased overseas because we weren't able to scale

00:34:03.680 | our manufacturing internally fast enough to build them all ourselves.

00:34:06.680 | Bob, you have your own magnet factory.

00:34:08.680 | Is there funding opportunity for you to support that effort?

00:34:11.680 | There is, but it's not nearly what you need.

00:34:13.680 | Overall, the energy transition needs somewhere--

00:34:16.680 | various estimates put it about $9 trillion a year globally,

00:34:19.680 | and we are at a tenth of that.

00:34:21.680 | So I often get frustrated with the capital allocation

00:34:24.680 | about how we're splitting the small numbers that we're splitting now.

00:34:26.680 | It's like, no, they just need to be bigger numbers.

00:34:28.680 | And it's not a question of do you invest in next-generation technology

00:34:31.680 | versus stuff that you can literally go today, take a smokestack down,

00:34:35.680 | and put a solar farm there.

00:34:38.680 | It's not either/or here.

00:34:40.680 | The whole pie has to go bigger.

00:34:42.680 | Bob, when you hear Freeberg's theoretical proposal,

00:34:45.680 | is there a way to manifest that into an actual financial device of,

00:34:50.680 | hey, here are 70 private companies.

00:34:52.680 | I'm going to get 5% of each and put it into a private company index?

00:34:55.680 | No.

00:34:56.680 | No, it's not possible.

00:35:00.680 | The problem is that the amount of capex that we will need

00:35:04.680 | to make this a reality is so gigantic,

00:35:06.680 | and I think you guys are honest about that,

00:35:09.680 | that unfortunately you eventually replace the venture capitalists

00:35:13.680 | with tens or hundreds or even a few billion dollars

00:35:17.680 | with the sovereign wealth funds that you need

00:35:19.680 | with hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.

00:35:22.680 | And what happens when you get there is that you replace technical people

00:35:26.680 | with non-technical people who have to then determine which is going to win.

00:35:31.680 | And the way that they do that--and this is sort of my question for you guys

00:35:34.680 | because you'll have to get prepared for this,

00:35:36.680 | so you might as well take a shot at it today--

00:35:39.680 | they'll hire consultants and they'll hire other people

00:35:41.680 | and they'll say, "Red team, the alternative."

00:35:43.680 | They'll look at you and they'll say, "It's tritium breeding rates."

00:35:46.680 | They'll look at you and they'll say, "Well, it's a probabilistic generation

00:35:48.680 | of protons and who the fuck knows."

00:35:50.680 | All this stuff is what they'll say.

00:35:52.680 | Some will be right, some will be wrong.

00:35:54.680 | It would be great, whatever you're comfortable doing.

00:35:56.680 | You can either red team him or you can red team yourself,

00:35:59.680 | but I would love to understand the rate-limiting technical thing

00:36:02.680 | that you're the most worried about, whether it's his solution or your own,

00:36:05.680 | and vice versa.

00:36:07.680 | Okay, I'll start off.

00:36:09.680 | So I look at it as a portfolio approach.

00:36:12.680 | This approach, right?

00:36:14.680 | It's coming from a "What's the final state look like?"

00:36:16.680 | It's a simpler machine.

00:36:19.680 | But the question is, "Can you make it work from a plasma physics standpoint?"

00:36:22.680 | So that says, "What's the data look like on the plasma?

00:36:25.680 | How is that going?" That's the type of data I'd ask for.

00:36:28.680 | Our approach on a red team is, "Can we get to the cost?

00:36:31.680 | Can we simplify it? Plasma looks pretty good.

00:36:34.680 | It's at the right parameters already.

00:36:36.680 | Well, how simple can you make that machine?"

00:36:38.680 | So you look at our receipts, you look at our factory,

00:36:40.680 | because that's where the risks are.

00:36:42.680 | Has that ever happened about breeding time for you?

00:36:44.680 | No, we know the breeding works because that's the way the weapons work.

00:36:49.680 | And that breeding is at 1.1 times, roughly, no?

00:36:52.680 | So it's 20 years then to get basically--

00:36:55.680 | No, you have enough to start now that you go on an exponential.

00:36:59.680 | Okay. And that's your first couple systems you said, right?

00:37:02.680 | Yeah, you have enough to do the first 10 systems at least.

00:37:05.680 | And David, how would you--

00:37:07.680 | Yeah, so I would--

00:37:09.680 | By the way, I appreciate the intellectual honesty. Thank you for that.

00:37:11.680 | I don't do that, but thank you.

00:37:13.680 | And I actually kind of agree with Bob's assessment

00:37:16.680 | that our approach to fusion, the FRC compression,

00:37:19.680 | was invented in the '80s, not in the '60s.

00:37:22.680 | And so, yes, there's been lots of scientists

00:37:24.680 | and lots of published papers, including by us, a decade ago on this,

00:37:27.680 | but there's still work to be done as we're going to push those boundaries

00:37:30.680 | and prove in our system, the thing I worry most about, is,

00:37:33.680 | "Okay, great. We have these beautiful energy recovery systems

00:37:36.680 | operating at 95% efficiency that cut the cap-backs in half or more.

00:37:40.680 | But they have to work at that high efficiency.

00:37:43.680 | And if we fail, if it's operating at 5% less efficiency,

00:37:46.680 | that means I have to do more fusion now.

00:37:48.680 | They get bigger. They get more expensive."

00:37:50.680 | Is there enough of these specific helium isotopes on planet Earth

00:37:54.680 | that you can actually generate?

00:37:56.680 | Yeah. So, I think both of us think about the fuel system

00:38:00.680 | in terms of the tritium or the helions, and where does that come from.

00:38:04.680 | For us, we make it, deuterium plus deuterium fusing,

00:38:08.680 | and you make helium. That presupposes you have a very efficient way to do fusion.

00:38:12.680 | Exactly.

00:38:13.680 | And so, that again comes back to what we--

00:38:15.680 | Just to connect for everyone, deuterium is a hydrogen atom

00:38:18.680 | with an extra neutron in the nucleus,

00:38:21.680 | and some percentage of water has deuterium in it.

00:38:25.680 | So, it's relatively abundant. Is that fair to say?

00:38:28.680 | Yeah, one out of every 6,000.

00:38:30.680 | Tritium is less abundant, so we need to make tritium

00:38:33.680 | in order for systems that rely on tritium for their technology fusion to work.

00:38:37.680 | All the water you drink out there has got deuterium in it.

00:38:40.680 | My final question--

00:38:42.680 | And it's safe in your body, and none of those challenges.

00:38:46.680 | You wouldn't work without it, actually.

00:38:48.680 | Yeah, it's great.

00:38:49.680 | Tritium, a little different, but--

00:38:51.680 | How do you guys think, assuming that the technical issues

00:38:55.680 | are packaged in a way where now we have this repeatable thing,

00:38:59.680 | how do you get the local politician to approve

00:39:04.680 | what they will look at as a nuclear reactor

00:39:07.680 | and what, unfortunately, the blob will have their own viewpoint on

00:39:12.680 | from being installed all around the country?

00:39:15.680 | How does that part work, which has nothing to do with science, unfortunately,

00:39:19.680 | and is very emotional, and there's a lot of regulatory capture there?

00:39:23.680 | When we broke ground on that facility I showed--

00:39:26.680 | That's a bedroom community of Boston.

00:39:28.680 | We had no agreement of who would even regulate it

00:39:31.680 | because it's a totally open field, right?

00:39:33.680 | It's an entirely new technology.

00:39:35.680 | So you have a social acceptance angle.

00:39:37.680 | You also have just a pure, like, legally,

00:39:39.680 | who's going to be the person who's going to tell you to shut it down.

00:39:42.680 | You have to solve both of those, and they're different.

00:39:44.680 | They're related, but they're different.

00:39:46.680 | So it's been an interesting experience to do that at that site.

00:39:49.680 | Something that just happened is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

00:39:52.680 | in the United States just made a ruling after two years of review

00:39:55.680 | that all fusion power plants will be regulated like particle accelerators,

00:39:59.680 | not like fission plants.

00:40:01.680 | That goes from a billion-dollar regulatory overhead

00:40:03.680 | to a $10 million regulatory overhead.

00:40:06.680 | So that machine I just showed, that's regulated by the state of Massachusetts

00:40:09.680 | the same way that a hospital cancer treatment center is.

00:40:12.680 | So boom, legal piece way down.

00:40:14.680 | Public acceptance.

00:40:16.680 | We've done polls as an industry association

00:40:19.680 | that show that the public acceptance of fusion,

00:40:21.680 | if messaged the right way--

00:40:23.680 | so avoiding trigger words and things like that--

00:40:25.680 | that people-- [laughter]

00:40:27.680 | "Kaboom" is a trigger word.

00:40:29.680 | [laughter]

00:40:32.680 | They become pretty excited about it.

00:40:34.680 | You have this moment of conversion where people go from curious

00:40:38.680 | to like, "Yes, we need that now."

00:40:40.680 | And that's been a broadly seen phenomenon.

00:40:43.680 | We've got to get it right.

00:40:45.680 | The chattering classes and the opposition is going to eventually come

00:40:48.680 | when these things are more real.

00:40:50.680 | We have time today to set the momentum and lay the groundwork.

00:40:55.680 | And I can add two more details on that,

00:40:58.680 | that our goal is not just the cost of the regulatory path,

00:41:01.680 | for instance, it's speed.

00:41:03.680 | We went from 10 or 20 years for a nuclear reactor in Georgia

00:41:06.680 | where helium has been regulated by the state since 2018.

00:41:10.680 | Our permits take 6 or 9 months.

00:41:12.680 | We are licensed, we're inspected, whole nine yards.

00:41:14.680 | And it all exists. It's not new regulation.

00:41:17.680 | It totally exists just for hospitals.

00:41:19.680 | And then the public acceptance piece is, again, speed.

00:41:22.680 | And so what we do is try not to do what the nuclear industry did

00:41:25.680 | as hideaway and say, "Don't worry about what's happening here."

00:41:28.680 | What we try to do is we show hardware.

00:41:31.680 | We tweet about it. Social media is here now, and that helps.

00:41:33.680 | And so we're out there showing hardware, what we're building,

00:41:36.680 | how we're building it, what the dangers are.

00:41:38.680 | Let's be honest about it so that we can actually address those

00:41:40.680 | intellectually, honestly with everyone.

00:41:42.680 | And then talk about the benefits.

00:41:44.680 | Let me ask one more question, which I think--

00:41:46.680 | I have a final one, but go ahead.

00:41:48.680 | I think everyone's asked, which is, "Why now?"

00:41:51.680 | We've talked about this for 70, 80 years.

00:41:56.680 | This has been theorized.

00:41:58.680 | This has been part of an experimentation program somewhere--

00:42:01.680 | everywhere for a long time.

00:42:03.680 | Can you talk a little bit about what's changed in technology,

00:42:07.680 | all the underlying technologies that allow us to do this today?

00:42:11.680 | Is it electronics, photonics, software and AI,

00:42:16.680 | low-cost electronic components?

00:42:18.680 | We talked about this back in March, David,

00:42:21.680 | but Bob, why don't you kick it off and just help us understand

00:42:24.680 | why this isn't just BS, because it's always been 20 years away

00:42:27.680 | from having free, abundant energy.

00:42:29.680 | What's changed?

00:42:31.680 | One, the science. The science has advanced tremendously.

00:42:33.680 | We have predictive capability of these machines the same way

00:42:36.680 | that we have predictive capability of how to build a plane.

00:42:40.680 | Two, the adjacent technologies.

00:42:42.680 | And those adjacent technologies, whether it's magnets

00:42:45.680 | or high-power electronics, they've all benefited

00:42:48.680 | from huge investments in the last 30 years.

00:42:50.680 | They basically have been warehoused and are now being applied.

00:42:53.680 | And three, the idea that software is eating the world,

00:42:56.680 | well, it didn't really. You need the mouth.

00:42:58.680 | And that mouth is advanced manufacturing.

00:43:00.680 | That mouth is how to turn a software business

00:43:03.680 | into the ability to manifest hardware that works.

00:43:06.680 | Those are all combining here with this very big pull.

00:43:10.680 | And I would just-- I love all the technology answer,

00:43:13.680 | but also there's a very famous quote in the 1980s

00:43:17.680 | of what it would take to get fusion,

00:43:19.680 | and they put budgets forward, and nobody wanted to do it.

00:43:22.680 | There was no investment.

00:43:24.680 | And the quote is, "The world will have fusion when it needs it."

00:43:27.680 | And look at the capital investment in fusion,

00:43:29.680 | and the companies that are moving fast.

00:43:31.680 | It is pretty striking. I've talked to a lot of investors

00:43:33.680 | who are throwing whatever they can at it because the world needs it.

00:43:36.680 | When we're doing the prep call for this,

00:43:39.680 | we're having an interesting discussion amongst the besties of--

00:43:42.680 | obviously, there's applications on Earth for energy,

00:43:45.680 | but when we get out into the stars and the mission that Elon's working on

00:43:48.680 | to get to Mars, Freiburg was wondering, and Sachs particularly,

00:43:52.680 | will this technology help us get to Mars or perhaps even Uranus?

00:43:57.680 | [laughter]

00:43:59.680 | Okay. That's a joke. It's a tradition here.

00:44:03.680 | By the way, if you guys have not listened to our podcast--

00:44:06.680 | Sorry, Bob. I apologize if you haven't followed us.

00:44:08.680 | It's a tradition with scientists.

00:44:10.680 | Well, 2,000 of us, we apologize.

00:44:12.680 | Every science corner, the nerds have to get--

00:44:15.680 | Set it up in Starfix.

00:44:17.680 | Please join me in thanking Bob and David.

00:44:19.680 | [applause]

00:44:21.680 | [music]

00:44:23.680 | [music]

All-In Summit: Nuclear fusion and the potential for energy abundance

Chapters