A lot of forecasters estimate that energy production and demand on Earth will grow to roughly 2x from where we sit today by the end of the century. And I think that there's other ways to look at the demand forecast, which is that you can look at GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita over time, and you always see that for every 1% increase in GDP per capita, you see a 1.2% roughly increase in energy consumption per capita.

And by that measure, based on population and GDP growth through the century, we will need to produce five times more energy than we make on Earth today by the end of the century. And you can't do that by just pumping oil and gas out of the ground. We need another technology, or we need some renewable systems to scale up more quickly.

And fusion presents this great kind of sea-change opportunity moment for how we make energy, leveraging the technology of the sun. And so I'm really excited today to invite the two most funded, most high-profile fusion technology entrepreneurs, Bob Momgard and David Kirtley, CEOs of Commonwealth Fusion and Helion. Bob, as the founder of Commonwealth, spun out of MIT, where he got his PhD in applied plasma physics, and he's raised more than $2 billion from global investors.

You heard Vinod talk about his original investment in Commonwealth yesterday. After Bob, we'll hear from David, who founded Helion after 15 years as a principal investigator and fusion lead at MSNW, and before that, seven years as a scientist for the Air Force Research Lab. David got his PhD in aerospace engineering from Michigan.

Helion's raised about $2.2 billion since its founding, with a recent massive $500 million funding round, led by Sam Altman, who we all know is the CEO of OpenAI and formerly Ran Y Combinator. Sam invested $375 million personally in that round. So, please join me. They're each going to give a presentation, and then we are going to come back and have a conversation with both of them at the same time.

Please join me in welcoming Bob to the stage. (music) (music) (music) (music) (music) (music) - That's a lot of capital for fusion. It's exciting. So, I'm setting off, you know, our science morning. So, we're going to later hear about tiny things and viruses, and I'm going to start by talking about the biggest thing there is, which is the universe.

So, this is a picture from the James Webb Telescope, and what that is is the oldest galaxies that we can see. And really what the James Webb Telescope is is a really fancy, expensive camera to look at fusion power plants. Because that is everywhere you look is fusion power plants.

Fusion power plants are the things that built every single atom that's in all of you, that's in all these buildings, everywhere on Earth. And the reason it works that way is because the fusion reaction, the reaction that happens inside all the stars, it's actually the most prevalent reaction in the entire universe, that reaction produces energy that's about 200 million times more energy per mass used than a chemical reaction.

So, when you think about anything in your life that's chemical, oil, gas, 50 gigatons a year of CO2, divide it by, like, order 100 million. And if you replace that process with a fusion process, that's what you get at the end. And that's why we can have billions of years old of a universe and billions of years old of our own planet.

And so, what these companies are trying to do, there's like 70 fusion companies, is what we're trying to do is we're trying to take that reaction and put it in a bottle, in a machine that we can build here, and that we can build quickly. So, there's many different ways to build that type of machine.

We, I would say today, don't know what the penultimate or ultimate machine will look like, but we know that we're close enough to actually start building them. And if you do this, you end up with a new type of power plant. You end up with a power plant that looks like a power plant we already do, meaning you can put it somewhere, it generates electricity, it generates heat that you can take to electricity, you can plug it in the grid, you can finance it, you can use existing supply chains.

But now, it doesn't have emissions, and basically, it doesn't have any fuel. And every one of your energy uses for your entire life could be fulfilled with like a single glass of water. And so, that's like a sea change in how you think about the relation between our species, the planet, and energy.

So, the question is, can you actually build such machines? Well, right now, we're building them around the world. So, this is a picture of Commonwealth Fusion Systems site. It's in a suburb about an hour outside of Boston. And this, two years ago, was a forest, old military base. And in the upper side of this is a factory, a factory to make magnets, key pieces of fusion machines.

But down in front is a prototype fusion power plant. It's a machine we call Spark. And that machine is basically the culmination of about 60 years of science done around the world. We've been working on fusion since actually before we split the atom. And in that time, the scientists at national labs and universities have gotten better and better at building successive generations of those machines.

And in fact, the performance of those machines, and the metrics that you care about if you're into plasma physics like I am, that performance has gone up faster than Moore's Law. And it's now sitting at the point where you can almost get more power out from this reaction than it took to make the reaction start.

To do that, what you're building is you're building machines that literally, like, make star stuff. They're machines that have plasmas inside them that are 100 million degrees. It's like five times hotter than the center of the sun. You know, Fahrenheit, Celsius, doesn't really matter. 100 million, huge number. (Laughter) And they do this using basically stuff that we already know how to build.

It's kind of a unique situation. Like, this is the size of a Walmart built by companies that build Walmarts. And it's got buildings that house equipment that is like equipment that you use to do electrified natural gas or solar plants. And in the center, in that square in the center, is a room where you put the fusion machine.

And that's what that room looks like. And we just opened this room like four or five days ago. And that center hole in the middle is where we're going to start assembling a fusion machine that will make about 100 megawatts of heat at somewhere around, it'll be more power out than in, maybe even like 10 times more power out than in.

And that's based on all this science that's been done with a series of partners that include MIT, national labs around the world, all peer-reviewed, published, and what the predictions are going to be. And we think that this machine will be the first commercial machine to make more power out than in.

You can see on the bottom what it will look like when it's installed there. And we're about halfway through the manufacture and assembly of this machine. So when you think about $2 billion raised, and like tough tech, and like what it takes to actually bend curves in climate, this is the type of stuff that you have to be willing to do.

You have to be willing to take science, cutting edge, wrap it with the ability to execute things like manufacturing and construction in a package that you could scale. Because our climate crisis is going to require us to build somewhere on the order of 10,000 to 100,000 power plants. So today, there's about 60,000 power plants in the world.

And so you're not going to solve this by like making little things. You're going to solve this by making big bets, big changes. And that's even just through places that we have today. We talk about 5x-ing the amount of energy we're going to use on the planet Earth, humanity.

Like that's one of the largest construction booms in human history. And so we're trying to get it started here. And one of the great things that you can see about fusion is that once you get the formula figured out, once you figure out how to build one of these machines, you get a thing that makes a lot of energy out of a small thing that you manufacture, a thing that you build a factory to make more of.

And it's a factory that kind of looks like an automobile factory or like a rocket factory. And in fact, a lot of the people at this company came exactly from those areas, that were trained in new space, in new automotive. Which means like once you figure this out, you could build lots of these very quickly.

And so this is some pictures inside that factory on that site of us building the different pieces that go inside that fusion machine. And we'll start to assemble that machine later this year and turn it on in the sort of 2025 timeframe and get to Q greater than one, more power out than in for the first time, probably early 2026.

And that's part of a long-term plan that we've been on in the last five years since launching Commonwealth Fusion Systems. We start with the science that we already know how to do, that's today you can go and see fusion machines around the world. We've built about 150 fusion machines at national labs and universities, coupled with an entirely new type of technology, in our case, an extremely strong magnet.

A magnet's made out of a new type of superconductor, not the one that you read about recently, that was all bunk, but the one that was previous Nobel Prize, that allows us to go to extremely high magnetic fields, which allows us to build these machines that you could not have built five years ago.

They're 10 times smaller for the same performance, using the same science that we already know how to do. And they set up a power plant, like the one on the right, that is like a 400-megawatt power plant, like the size of a coal plant. So you can imagine going to a coal site, taking out the boiler, and putting in this new kit, once it's proven, and turning it on, pushing a button, and having a whole bunch of heat come out in a reaction that is the most common reaction in the universe, taking your hand off the button, stopping it, pushing again and going, and doing that in a way that you could then build over and over again.

That's like the big promise. In terms of where people are, it's the beginning of a race. About $6 billion invested in fusion, which means that one of the most invested of the new energy technology companies. So when you think about geothermal or batteries, this is actually a next-generation battery.

This is actually a similar scale. And it's going through a history of technology path that's well-worn. And we can actually milestone where all these companies are and all these techniques are. You know, today you can go and see lots of companies and lots of labs where they make plasmas that are sort of like the idea of an airplane.

There's some that can get plasmas pretty hot. There's a few, including the companies we're talking about here, who can actually get plasmas into the right conditions, the 100 million degrees, that are insulated well enough, that are in the conditions for that reaction to happen. And now we're at step four, which is to make these things make more power out than in, Q greater than one.

And we know that's doable because actually in December, a very large laser in California called NIF created those conditions, granted in a completely non-commercially relevant way, but in a scientifically relevant way, created for an instant, picosecond, those conditions. And now it's a race to build things like Spark to do that in a commercial way.

And after that, there'll be plenty left to do, but we'll know that we've taken a scientific idea and turned it into an engineering project and a scaling project. And we don't know what the world will do with that. It's potentially something that could really disrupt things. And I think, as I think about everyone planning, you've got to be able to plan for that.

You've got to be able to build a fast-track on-ramp to these extremely disruptive technologies. And whether it's fusion or gene editing, I think that's where the future is. And it's an interdisciplinary problem, and it's a problem that takes audacity, capital, smart people all working together. So thank you. That's where we're at.

I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. And I'm excited to welcome a colleague here, David Kirtley, to tell you the other exciting things about fusion. (Music) (Music ends) Hi. Perfect. Thank you very much, Bob. So my name is David Kirtley. I'm a founder of Helion Energy.

I'm excited to talk about our approach to fusion that we think rapidly accelerates the timeline for fusion. Bob, I think, did a great job of talking about the history of fusion, where we come from, and the speed of what we want to get there. I'm going to be a little more selfish and talk about myself today and give you a little bit of the fusion journey I've been on and why I've come from being a fusion skeptic that I think many people in this audience have.

So I went into school in my academic part of my career to do something, what I thought was important for the world, and David did a really great job of talking about the impact of energy and the cost of electricity on the world. So I said, "Great. I'm going to go solve that problem." I then a little naively looked to the universe and said, "Great.

There are fusions out there. It's where most of the mass and the energy in the universe comes from. I should do that, and we should bring that here on Earth." Got into it. I actually became an expert in some of the inertial-type approaches, like the laser systems. Actually, my specialty was antimatter.

Antimatter is cool. But what I learned was that, actually, the technologies of the time, when I was learning, that I learned in school, that if I could do something like this, and we all sort of see that in the world, they're going to work. But when they do, I will have already retired, if not actually be alive to turn on the machines I was going to go build.

So I pivoted my career, went and built space propulsion systems and rockets, plasma thrusters, hull thrusters, ion engines, that kind of thing. It wasn't until I met our core founding team that I saw another way to do fusion that potentially rapidly skips over some of the steps of what others are doing.

So that's what I want to introduce you to today. Our technology, the way we want to do fusion, that we believe gets humanity to fusion as soon as possible. So Bob did a great job of talking about magnetic confinements, steady fusion, trying to replicate what happens in the sun.

There's inertial confinement, which is very high-intensity, picosecond pulsed fusion. And we do something that takes some of both of those approaches. We cleverly call it magneto-inertial fusion, which does the sun in a bottle take a magnetic field to hold that 100 million degrees, but rather than trying to hold on to it, get it hot enough and ignite it, we actually then squeeze it as fast as possible with very large pulsed electric currents.

And so that's what we've been able to build today. One of the key--this is a picture of our sixth-generation machine that we have up in the Seattle area. And one of the keys to the approach to this fusion-- we're going to dig into the technology a little bit and then talk about the benefits-- but one of the keys is that what we focus on is the electricity part.

And I think that for me, getting into fusion wasn't to explore cool new technologies. It was actually to generate electricity. And so that's been our focus. And so how we do that is a little unique, and we believe that lets us build systems faster and smaller. And so let's dig into that.

You've seen some of the tokamak systems, which look like big donuts. The laser system is a giant sphere, so we decided we should go and do a cylinder. And so these systems are long, elongated cylinders where we have--on either end, we have our fuel injector-- call it formation--but this is where we put in the fuel, put in this mixture of hydrogen and helium that becomes the fusion fuel.

A center acceleration section where we accelerate that to a core, and in that core is where we compress. Think about a piston in a combustion engine where we can compress that fusion fuel. And then also number four on here is electricity recapture. For our systems, we require big capacitor banks.

It's actually one of the hardest parts of our technology, is the electronics, the power electronics. And so we have a dedicated system to do that. And it's one of the enabling technologies for this way to do fusion is that when this was first theorized in the 1950s, we had no idea how to build those pulse power systems that could reliably and repeatedly do this.

But we can do it today. So here's a little animation of how these systems work. On either end, we inject our fusion fuel. We heat it. At this point, it's relatively cold. It's about 5 million degrees or so. We accelerate to the center compression area where we then squeeze it, increasing pressure and density and temperature until we get to fusion conditions over 100 million degrees.

These helions and deuterons fuse to form helium or alpha particles and protons. Those are trapped in that magnetic field. And as that heat, that hot plasma expands, we pull that energy out directly, directly recapturing that electricity. Sounds pretty fantastical. I'm showing you a lot of 3D drawings and all that stuff.

The fact is, though, we built this. And this was the key for me. This is when I went from-- I was a skeptic, and then we had this cool idea, and we went out to try to build it. But we actually had to build the thing. We had to build it, turn it on, prove that technology.

And so we did that. In 2008, we built a machine that did thermonuclear for fusion for the first time. That machine was about a million and a half bucks, and it set records for temperature, density, pressure. I personally helped build that thing a little bit. They don't let me touch wrenches too much.

And actually produced fusion reactions with it and measured those reactions. And at that point, I said, "Look, holy shit. I have the answer to this. Let's go try to figure out how to build a business around it." And as I think we'll probably talk today, it turns out that's hard too.

But in the process of doing that, we've now built six machines that do fusion. The latest one we call Trenta, that one exceeded 100 million degrees. We're the first private company to do that. We did DD fusion. We actually did D-helium-3 fusion, where we actually took rare helium-3 and fused it with deuterium.

But again, we think we're the first company to ever do that, maybe even the first group to ever do that. And then the most important thing, I think, is we need to recapture this electricity. And so that's the first machine we built with private funding in 2014, was a machine that took energy from those capacitors and those pulse power and then very quickly in microseconds put that energy into a magnetic core, and then we then recovered that magnetic energy back to the capacitors.

The key there is we did that at 95% efficiency. And if you can do that, that means the fusion only has to do the 5%. And so we believe that means that you can build fusion systems orders of magnitude smaller and faster and skip over some of the big steps of cooling towers and steam turbines and inefficient systems you have to do.

And a lot of that comes from looking at fusion, not from just looking at the science, which is really critical, but also looking at the engineering. I want to build power plants that make electricity. And if that's your singular focus, if that's your goal, if that's where you're targeted, you make design engineering decisions to get there faster.

So that's what we were able to do. I think that a lot of the private fusion companies in the world are also now targeting electricity. How do we get there and how do we get there fast? So that's what we're doing now. We're building actually--so in the pictures you see here on the top right, that's our seventh generation machine.

We call this one Polaris. We're building that system today up in Everett, Washington, outside of Seattle and installing it in our generator building. We actually have an operational plasma injector machine. I love saying plasma injector machine. To actually do the fusion, to start that fusion process, to try to get to even higher temperatures than that 100 million degrees that we did before.

And we started mass manufacturing those key components that we can't get anywhere else in the world of capacitors. And so we're, we believe, the first U.S. manufacturer in decades to start manufacturing capacitors here in the U.S. Maybe we'll sell them one day, but right now we're using everything we can make for Polaris, for that next system.

And the exciting announcement, announcing thing-- exciting thing we announced earlier this year is that we had our first customer. It's kind of a good thing for a fusion business. And so we have--our first customer is Microsoft. We have a power purchase agreement to build a power plant with them to come online in 2028.

This is 50 megawatts. 50 megawatts is about 40,000 homes. And to do that in Washington state. It's a pretty audacious goal. Five years--it's five very short years-- to go build a system that makes commercial electricity. We believe we can do that because we built all these fusion systems. We have an approach that actually radically shrinks the amount of capital and the timeline to build these.

And more importantly, we have that singular goal of making electricity and getting it on the grid as absolutely as fast as possible. So that's a picture of the new generator building we just built. You can't see all the manufacturing on the side there. But I'm excited to be able to talk today about the fusion business, the fusion industry, and how we get from being a fusion skeptic like I was to being a fusion optimist, and really an optimist for the future.

We need clean power, and we need it now. Thank you very much. Thank you guys for being here. This is obviously an exciting challenge, a dramatically difficult one, an important one, and an expensive one. I just want to talk a little bit about the end state for each of you, your point of view.

We think about energy prices--there's a lot of ways to think about it-- but dollars per kilowatt hour, or pennies per kilowatt hour. We buy power off the grid in the U.S. for 12 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour. Where do you guys think these systems end up when you think about the amortization cost and what you're going to have to charge to build these systems?

Once you're at scale, once you're rolling these systems out at scale, what's your end goal for price per kilowatt hour? I think that's exactly the perfect question to lead in, that if you're doing a new technology like this and your goal is electricity, it has to be competitive, and it has to be competitive at scale, at large scale.

Fusion has a nice opportunity to do that. You talk about what's the cost of electricity. It comes from OPEX and CAPEX. OPEX, our fuel for a 50-megawatt system, with a pickup truck worth of fuel, you can actually power that system for a decade. It's clean, and it's safe, and it's low cost.

We don't even include it in the OPEX budget. The fuel cost is so low. If we can get to a state where we have less of PhDs in the control room, the actual operating cost then becomes pretty negligible for those systems. Then you're left with the capital. I think that's been our focus, is how do we minimize the capital of those systems, so we can get to a point where we can be really cost competitive.

I'll give you straight answers. Our goal with our approach to fusion, where we directly recapture the energy, is to get to a cent a kilowatt hour or less. You can do that with OPEX. I think an important point about this is you build these things, they're CAPEX. You eventually get very good at building them.

When you look at the probability curve, you have very, very low numbers. Eventually, a system like this is basically what the interest rate is, is what the price of power is, because you're just building capital. There's no operating cost, there's no fuel. The capital you're building is an order of magnitude less stuff than, say, renewable.

It allows you to get to these very low numbers. So you guys have ever been on stage together before like this? Yeah, I think so. We're sitting next to each other. I'm trying to set up a little Tesla-Edison rivalry here, AC/DC. But no, seriously, there is a-- different architectural approaches.

You each have fairly distinct approaches to getting these plasma to a dense enough, high enough energy state condition so that they fuse and produce energy. Very different approaches. And there are other approaches. I think there's, by my track, roughly six general architectures for fusion technology, and you guys are the experts.

Tell me if I'm wrong. How do we know you guys win? Why does Tesla win? Why does Edison win? And isn't it the case that ultimately the price of power is going to win? And so whatever architecture gets to the lowest price of power is going to take the whole market.

Yeah, it's a really good question. First, you have to make it work, right? There's a lot of architectures, and the odds that they all work are low. So we've taken the tact of, like, find the architectures that you know are going to work. What's the lowest science risk that you can do?

Because that price of power, it's not so much architecture-dependent, it's learning rate-dependent. At the end of the day, the amount of stuff in these things is all about the same. And so the faster you get there, the better your cycles are, the lower you're going to drive that cost.

And there's a time component to that too. We don't have the time to wait. So if Fusion was available today, we'd be buying it. Like, you know, no shortage of customer interest. But the real energy transition is in the next decade. So we need something that we can get there, like, now, as soon as possible.

So it's not so much like that end state. It might be interesting from a futurist standpoint what that end state is. It's the path to get there that's going to really determine it. Yeah, and I think our focus has been-- and Bob's is mine as well--is how do we move as fast as possible?

How do we iterate? How do we test? How do we build these? Because it's that time that's driving. And there's a huge market, you know, 3,000 gigawatts of fossil power. It's not necessarily the case that one of you is going to win and one of you is going to lose?

No, it's a huge market. It's one out of every $12. So it's absolutely huge. You think about what's in front of us to redo all the infrastructure. There's no way a single company is going to be able to address that entire thing. And also it's not the case that the absolute ultimate optimized thing is going to win.

It's going to be a packaged thing. The car you buy today, the way you control it, the way you drive it, looks like the car that Henry Ford built. Not optimized. How you got there. I have a two-part question for you. I think we all, as laypeople, not in the industry and in the trenches, in the arena with you doing this.

Our question is just very brief on this answer from each of you because the second part is more important, I think. What are the chances that collectively, you know, half a dozen startups actually get this done in our lifetimes? What do you put that at? You know, let's say in the next 20, 30 years, what are the chances we actually--this is a meaningful part of our energy mixture?

In the next 20 or 30 years? Yeah. 100%. I agree. Next 10 years if you had to-- Scaling in the next 10. Yep. Because 3,000 gigawatts of replacement is going to be hard. Well, that's the need for it, but okay. You're both convinced it's going to happen. So then, knowing that you know that, how do you advise the world to look at global warming, fossil fuels?

Because we're having this very vibrant debate. What does happen mean? Happen means net positive energy? No, no, like buy power into your refrigerator from fusion. Got it. So then, how would that inform how we should look at fossil fuels? Because you have a group of people who are debating fossil fuels, and it's become quite religious with global warming, et cetera.

You guys are scientists who understand global warming and everything. Do we need to even worry about the energy mixture today if you're going to get this done? And should we be sweating global warming as much as we are fossil fuel use if the solution is here? And you guys are so confident it's going to be there.

It's a good question. 50 gigatons a year for 10 years is a lot of carbon in the atmosphere, in a place where we are already at our limits. So we need to do this transition, and we need to be ready to build out at a very large scale every zero-carbon energy source that you have because the energy needs that we talked about earlier, they're terrifying.

If we need this solution for fusion, but we also need the other thing. So it's not even going to be enough to solve that problem. And then two of the biggest problems the world faces, getting this carbon out of the atmosphere, and I guess water, and both of those, a lot of the taking carbon out of the atmosphere is an energy question, and desalination is obviously an energy question because you're going to push water through screens.

So maybe just briefly from each of you, your optimism for the world, knowing what you know from being in the trenches every day, food insecurity, energy, water, all of these things seem to be really tied. So should we be as pessimistic as I think people in the world right now are?

How do you look at the world when you go to bed at night? So long term, I mean, I think we should be very optimistic, but those problems exist today, and we need to be moving as fast as we can to get there. So where the sun is shining, we should have solar panels.

Where the wind is blowing, we should have wind power, and that's still not enough, I believe, anyway. And David mentioned power uses doubling over this decade. I think that that doesn't include electrification, carbon removal. Forecast is wrong. I think it way underestimates what we actually can do and what we can do if the cost of power is low enough, and it sidesteps the geopolitics and some of the other challenges of other low-cost sources of carbon-free power.

So on the question about how it all ties together, I look at it as in the end, there are only two fundamental markets-- energy and creativity. And with those two things-- notice I didn't say human creativity. With those two things, you can do all these other stuff. And so the faster we get to the things that have massive scale in those two things, the better off we're going to be.

Are we investing enough in fusion right now? Because you guys are working with the venture community, I think, largely. I don't understand why we're spending all this money on renewables, debating fossil fuels, all this stuff, and not really going for this-- I don't want to call what you're doing a hell, Mary, but it's a long ball.

Why are we not just pushing a lot more government funding into this project if it even had-- we talked about implied odds yesterday over and over-- if this does have-- let's say they're delusional and what's going to happen is because they're founders. What do you put it at, the chances that they succeed in the next 10 to 20 years?

Well, I've told investors that I've spoken with that I think there's a 100% chance that the portfolio of 70 fusion companies that exist today that are pursuing this technology will succeed and that we will get low-cost power in the next 20 years at scale. So I don't know which architecture wins.

I don't know which company wins. I don't know who gets there first. I don't know how quickly each of them can scale. It's hard for me to handicap that, and I don't have a sovereign wealth fund's capacity to build a portfolio of these investments, but that would be the right strategy.

I've told folks I think that the index on where things are valued today-- if you took all the fusion companies and their total market value today, I would 100% buy that fucking index. Yeah, so that would argue for-- one of the things I thought was inspiring, Chamath, about yesterday's discussion was you were talking about how do we allocate resources, and then we were being challenged by some of the speakers, "Well, what can you do?" And I think this framing where you're talking about capital allocation, you guys are convinced you're going to do it.

It feels like there's a disconnect between the politicians and how they're spending the resources that we are all giving them. I don't know. Can we hear how the IRA serves this opportunity? So I want to make sure that just throwing money at a problem, unlimited money at a problem-- I was actually just having a conversation with Sam Altman about this-- doesn't actually always speed it up.

You actually have to do it in the right way with the right targets. Delivering fusion power and it costs $0.10 a kilowatt hour doesn't actually solve the problem. It's got to be that low-cost solution. So we need to make sure we're focused on how do we do that. For the IRA, a lot of its focus is manufacturing.

A lot of its focus is scaling manufacturing in the United States. So I think that is really valuable. And more things like that that are less focused on demonstrating-- Are you going to get some of those dollars? We'll see. You have to prove some stuff before you can access them, right?

So on the manufacturing side, there's lots of opportunities to actually bring manufacturing. So capacitors are a good example. Our current system, 90% of the capacitors that we are going to put into it were purchased overseas because we weren't able to scale our manufacturing internally fast enough to build them all ourselves.

Bob, you have your own magnet factory. Is there funding opportunity for you to support that effort? There is, but it's not nearly what you need. Overall, the energy transition needs somewhere-- various estimates put it about $9 trillion a year globally, and we are at a tenth of that. So I often get frustrated with the capital allocation about how we're splitting the small numbers that we're splitting now.

It's like, no, they just need to be bigger numbers. And it's not a question of do you invest in next-generation technology versus stuff that you can literally go today, take a smokestack down, and put a solar farm there. It's not either/or here. The whole pie has to go bigger.

Bob, when you hear Freeberg's theoretical proposal, is there a way to manifest that into an actual financial device of, hey, here are 70 private companies. I'm going to get 5% of each and put it into a private company index? No. No, it's not possible. The problem is that the amount of capex that we will need to make this a reality is so gigantic, and I think you guys are honest about that, that unfortunately you eventually replace the venture capitalists with tens or hundreds or even a few billion dollars with the sovereign wealth funds that you need with hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.

And what happens when you get there is that you replace technical people with non-technical people who have to then determine which is going to win. And the way that they do that--and this is sort of my question for you guys because you'll have to get prepared for this, so you might as well take a shot at it today-- they'll hire consultants and they'll hire other people and they'll say, "Red team, the alternative." They'll look at you and they'll say, "It's tritium breeding rates." They'll look at you and they'll say, "Well, it's a probabilistic generation of protons and who the fuck knows." All this stuff is what they'll say.

Some will be right, some will be wrong. It would be great, whatever you're comfortable doing. You can either red team him or you can red team yourself, but I would love to understand the rate-limiting technical thing that you're the most worried about, whether it's his solution or your own, and vice versa.

Okay, I'll start off. So I look at it as a portfolio approach. This approach, right? It's coming from a "What's the final state look like?" It's a simpler machine. But the question is, "Can you make it work from a plasma physics standpoint?" So that says, "What's the data look like on the plasma?

How is that going?" That's the type of data I'd ask for. Our approach on a red team is, "Can we get to the cost? Can we simplify it? Plasma looks pretty good. It's at the right parameters already. Well, how simple can you make that machine?" So you look at our receipts, you look at our factory, because that's where the risks are.

Has that ever happened about breeding time for you? No, we know the breeding works because that's the way the weapons work. And that breeding is at 1.1 times, roughly, no? So it's 20 years then to get basically-- No, you have enough to start now that you go on an exponential.

Okay. And that's your first couple systems you said, right? Yeah, you have enough to do the first 10 systems at least. And David, how would you-- Yeah, so I would-- By the way, I appreciate the intellectual honesty. Thank you for that. I don't do that, but thank you. And I actually kind of agree with Bob's assessment that our approach to fusion, the FRC compression, was invented in the '80s, not in the '60s.

And so, yes, there's been lots of scientists and lots of published papers, including by us, a decade ago on this, but there's still work to be done as we're going to push those boundaries and prove in our system, the thing I worry most about, is, "Okay, great. We have these beautiful energy recovery systems operating at 95% efficiency that cut the cap-backs in half or more.

But they have to work at that high efficiency. And if we fail, if it's operating at 5% less efficiency, that means I have to do more fusion now. They get bigger. They get more expensive." Is there enough of these specific helium isotopes on planet Earth that you can actually generate?

Yeah. So, I think both of us think about the fuel system in terms of the tritium or the helions, and where does that come from. For us, we make it, deuterium plus deuterium fusing, and you make helium. That presupposes you have a very efficient way to do fusion. Exactly.

And so, that again comes back to what we-- Just to connect for everyone, deuterium is a hydrogen atom with an extra neutron in the nucleus, and some percentage of water has deuterium in it. So, it's relatively abundant. Is that fair to say? Yeah, one out of every 6,000. Tritium is less abundant, so we need to make tritium in order for systems that rely on tritium for their technology fusion to work.

All the water you drink out there has got deuterium in it. My final question-- And it's safe in your body, and none of those challenges. You wouldn't work without it, actually. Yeah, it's great. Tritium, a little different, but-- How do you guys think, assuming that the technical issues are packaged in a way where now we have this repeatable thing, how do you get the local politician to approve what they will look at as a nuclear reactor and what, unfortunately, the blob will have their own viewpoint on from being installed all around the country?

How does that part work, which has nothing to do with science, unfortunately, and is very emotional, and there's a lot of regulatory capture there? When we broke ground on that facility I showed-- That's a bedroom community of Boston. We had no agreement of who would even regulate it because it's a totally open field, right?

It's an entirely new technology. So you have a social acceptance angle. You also have just a pure, like, legally, who's going to be the person who's going to tell you to shut it down. You have to solve both of those, and they're different. They're related, but they're different. So it's been an interesting experience to do that at that site.

Something that just happened is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States just made a ruling after two years of review that all fusion power plants will be regulated like particle accelerators, not like fission plants. That goes from a billion-dollar regulatory overhead to a $10 million regulatory overhead.

So that machine I just showed, that's regulated by the state of Massachusetts the same way that a hospital cancer treatment center is. So boom, legal piece way down. Public acceptance. We've done polls as an industry association that show that the public acceptance of fusion, if messaged the right way-- so avoiding trigger words and things like that-- that people-- "Kaboom" is a trigger word.

They become pretty excited about it. You have this moment of conversion where people go from curious to like, "Yes, we need that now." And that's been a broadly seen phenomenon. We've got to get it right. The chattering classes and the opposition is going to eventually come when these things are more real.

We have time today to set the momentum and lay the groundwork. And I can add two more details on that, that our goal is not just the cost of the regulatory path, for instance, it's speed. We went from 10 or 20 years for a nuclear reactor in Georgia where helium has been regulated by the state since 2018.

Our permits take 6 or 9 months. We are licensed, we're inspected, whole nine yards. And it all exists. It's not new regulation. It totally exists just for hospitals. And then the public acceptance piece is, again, speed. And so what we do is try not to do what the nuclear industry did as hideaway and say, "Don't worry about what's happening here." What we try to do is we show hardware.

We tweet about it. Social media is here now, and that helps. And so we're out there showing hardware, what we're building, how we're building it, what the dangers are. Let's be honest about it so that we can actually address those intellectually, honestly with everyone. And then talk about the benefits.

Let me ask one more question, which I think-- I have a final one, but go ahead. I think everyone's asked, which is, "Why now?" We've talked about this for 70, 80 years. This has been theorized. This has been part of an experimentation program somewhere-- everywhere for a long time.

Can you talk a little bit about what's changed in technology, all the underlying technologies that allow us to do this today? Is it electronics, photonics, software and AI, low-cost electronic components? We talked about this back in March, David, but Bob, why don't you kick it off and just help us understand why this isn't just BS, because it's always been 20 years away from having free, abundant energy.

What's changed? One, the science. The science has advanced tremendously. We have predictive capability of these machines the same way that we have predictive capability of how to build a plane. Two, the adjacent technologies. And those adjacent technologies, whether it's magnets or high-power electronics, they've all benefited from huge investments in the last 30 years.

They basically have been warehoused and are now being applied. And three, the idea that software is eating the world, well, it didn't really. You need the mouth. And that mouth is advanced manufacturing. That mouth is how to turn a software business into the ability to manifest hardware that works.

Those are all combining here with this very big pull. And I would just-- I love all the technology answer, but also there's a very famous quote in the 1980s of what it would take to get fusion, and they put budgets forward, and nobody wanted to do it. There was no investment.

And the quote is, "The world will have fusion when it needs it." And look at the capital investment in fusion, and the companies that are moving fast. It is pretty striking. I've talked to a lot of investors who are throwing whatever they can at it because the world needs it.

When we're doing the prep call for this, we're having an interesting discussion amongst the besties of-- obviously, there's applications on Earth for energy, but when we get out into the stars and the mission that Elon's working on to get to Mars, Freiburg was wondering, and Sachs particularly, will this technology help us get to Mars or perhaps even Uranus?

Okay. That's a joke. It's a tradition here. By the way, if you guys have not listened to our podcast-- Sorry, Bob. I apologize if you haven't followed us. It's a tradition with scientists. Well, 2,000 of us, we apologize. Every science corner, the nerds have to get-- Set it up in Starfix.

Please join me in thanking Bob and David.