Speaker 1: Welcome to zero I am Akshatrati this week a different
Speaker 1: kind of solar power. Nuclear fusion is a reality. It's
Speaker 1: how the Sun produces energy, but trying to replicate what
Speaker 1: the Sun does here on Earth has been, to put
Speaker 1: it mildly, a challenge for a long time. Nuclear fusion
Speaker 1: as an energy source has been in the realm of
Speaker 1: science fiction. One can imagine powering civilizations that move across
Speaker 1: planets and maybe even galaxies, but bringing it back down
Speaker 1: to Earth to our current climate predicament. Fusion power could
Speaker 1: also provide emissions free, unlimited energy, and wouldn't that be nice. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: after more than fifty years of trying, there is some
Speaker 1: success to report on. In fleeting experiments, scientists have been
Speaker 1: able to generate more energy from fusion reactions than the
Speaker 1: energy put into making them happen in the first place. Now,
Speaker 1: someone just needs to do it at scale, and there
Speaker 1: are dozens of startups trying to do just that. One
Speaker 1: of the most promising ones is CFS, or Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Speaker 1: The startup CEO Bob Mumguard began his work at MIT,
Speaker 1: where he worked with researchers studying plasma science. They designed
Speaker 1: a reactor called Spark, which could become the first large
Speaker 1: scale reactor that generates more energy than it consumes. CFS
Speaker 1: has now raised more than two billion dollars in venture capital.
Speaker 1: That's more than any other fusion startup. Clearly, investors are
Speaker 1: betting that if CFS succeeds, there's a big return to
Speaker 1: be made. How exactly well to find out, I caught
Speaker 1: up with Bob at the break Through Energy Summit in June.
Speaker 1: We neded out about the science behind fusion, how CFS's
Speaker 1: bagel shaped reactor or Tokomac works, and how the company
Speaker 1: is going to put the billions of dollars it's raised
Speaker 1: to work. Bob, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Great to be here.
Speaker 1: Even those who don't know anything about nuclear fusion benefit
Speaker 1: from it every day. The Sun is the largest nuclear
Speaker 1: fusion reactor. If we could replicate that process on Earth,
Speaker 1: we could have unlimited energy. And we really started thinking
Speaker 1: about this about one hundred years ago. So let's just
Speaker 1: start with the history of nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you know, basically humans have looked at the
Speaker 2: Sun since humans existed, and they've wondered, well, how does
Speaker 2: that work? And you had before we even understood that
Speaker 2: the nucleus was a thing. Right before we had any
Speaker 2: of that, people thought, well, the sun must be burning wood, right,
Speaker 2: and you can like calculate it up and say, well,
Speaker 2: if the sun we figured out in like the fifteen
Speaker 2: hundreds how heavy the sun was. He said, okay, if
Speaker 2: the sun was burning wood, it would have burned out
Speaker 2: in like five thousand years. And so that was actually
Speaker 2: like a big deal to everyone because scientists were saying, well,
Speaker 2: things can't be old. They must all be like five
Speaker 2: thousand years old. The sun would have burnt out, and
Speaker 2: so there's a big question, well, how's the sun still around?
Speaker 2: Like once you like found out that things were old,
Speaker 2: like the Earth was old, and fossils and dinosaurs and
Speaker 2: all that stuff, you're like, well, what was powering the stars?
Speaker 2: And it wasn't until about nineteen twenty that you had
Speaker 2: a combination of things. You had one we found how
Speaker 2: atoms were built. They had a nucleus, and then you
Speaker 2: also had equals mc squared.
Speaker 1: And you have famous Einsteining question, yeah, which said energy
Speaker 1: and mass can be converted into.
Speaker 2: Each other exactly. And then guy Arthur Eddington, who we're
Speaker 2: in the UK right now, a UK guy astronomer. He
Speaker 2: realized that the helium which they just discovered in the sun,
Speaker 2: only in the sun, was kind of like four hydrogens
Speaker 2: but slightly light. Yeah, And he postulated, out of nothing,
Speaker 2: just a pure inference, the inside the stars, they must
Speaker 2: be taking hydrogen, combining it to helium and converting mass
Speaker 2: to energy. And if they did that, that that would
Speaker 2: explain how the stars could be old, and not only that,
Speaker 2: but billions of years old.
Speaker 1: It's not a bad hypothesis. If you're starting to build
Speaker 1: a periodic table. The first element is hydrogen, the second
Speaker 1: element is helium. Hydrogen is only one unit of mass.
Speaker 1: Helium is four units of mass. And you go, why
Speaker 1: is there that big a jump?
Speaker 2: And yep, and you can look at it and you
Speaker 2: can calculate it up. And he does it in a
Speaker 2: seven page paper, publishes it, and sure enough he got
Speaker 2: it like spot on. And then the paper even says,
Speaker 2: if we could do this on Earth, we would be
Speaker 2: able to solve a whole bunch of problems.
Speaker 1: And so over the next one hundred years, theory is
Speaker 1: then converted into some amount of practical work, and what
Speaker 1: we now understand is to be able to replicate what
Speaker 1: the sun does on Earth. We need to do it
Speaker 1: a little bit differently. The temperature of this hydrogen mass
Speaker 1: has to be ten times more than what happens at
Speaker 1: the core of the Sun. So the core of the
Speaker 1: Sun is fifteen million degrees celsius. You need something like
Speaker 1: one hundred or a hundred and fifty million degrees celsius
Speaker 1: for it to happen on Earth. And of course at
Speaker 1: that temperature, you have to do something to hold it
Speaker 1: all together. Because you heat stuff, it evaporates, it becomes
Speaker 1: stuff that you can't hold, So you have to hold
Speaker 1: it all together. And only then can you fuse these
Speaker 1: atoms and these nucleus going from hydrogen into helium. All
Speaker 1: of that is going to take a lot of energy,
Speaker 1: and there have been a bunch of reactions that have
Speaker 1: been done, but only one facility on planet Earth has
Speaker 1: ever got more energy out of that system than put
Speaker 1: in it. So, before we understand what your company does,
Speaker 1: could you just talk us through the main ways in
Speaker 1: which we can make that reaction happen.
Speaker 2: Right, So, you know, we just jumped over here about
Speaker 2: one hundred years of work where we realized, oh okay,
Speaker 2: that's the reaction, and we confirmed it on Earth that
Speaker 2: that's the reaction. In the thirties and then the fifties
Speaker 2: we calculated, oh, if you want to do it on Earth,
Speaker 2: you would need to hold it all together. You need
Speaker 2: to insulate it very very well. And then we built
Speaker 2: machines in the fifties and sixties or guess and try,
Speaker 2: and it turns out that that was way way harder
Speaker 2: than we thought it was going to be, and so
Speaker 2: we had to make big computers and we realized, well,
Speaker 2: there's maybe these few classes of ways you could hold
Speaker 2: it all together. So if you needed to reach the
Speaker 2: right conditions, which really are as you said, hot like
Speaker 2: one hundred million degrees, dense enough of it and insulate
Speaker 2: it so doesn't cool off too fast.
Speaker 1: Or doesn't burn everything around it too quickly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and really, you know, if it got too hot
Speaker 2: and touch stuff around it, that would just cool it off.
Speaker 2: And so it's it's a double edged piece that if
Speaker 2: you needed to get those conditions, there was like a
Speaker 2: few physical forces that you could use to do it.
Speaker 2: And it turns out that you can sort of roughly
Speaker 2: categorize all different ways to reach those conditions into first
Speaker 2: order two branches, and there's some stuff in between but
Speaker 2: largely two poles, and one of them is you could
Speaker 2: use magnetic fields. So you can basically build a bottle
Speaker 2: using magnetic fields and be different shapes and.
Speaker 1: The advantages you don't touch it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the Menet field's basically I mean it's almost
Speaker 2: like a force field, not not quite, but like you
Speaker 2: basically build a magnetic bottle, so no materials touch it.
Speaker 2: And then the other way to do it is just
Speaker 2: make it happen so fast that it can't get out
Speaker 2: of its own way. So you make a pulse that
Speaker 2: happens so fast that before the fuel, the plasma, the hydrogen,
Speaker 2: before it moves out of its own way, reacts.
Speaker 1: It's like taking something and firing bullets at it from
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty degrees simultaneously. The thing in the
Speaker 1: middle just gets compressed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and it compresses and it compresses, and then
Speaker 2: fusion happens because you reach the conditions, and then the
Speaker 2: fusion converts the fuel into two energy. And all that
Speaker 2: happens so fast that you don't need to insulate it.
Speaker 2: It just happens in a splink of nine.
Speaker 1: So CFS Commonwealth Fusion Systems, your company does magnetic fusion.
Speaker 1: But the thing that has achieved more energy out than
Speaker 1: in is inertial fusion. Can you talk us through the
Speaker 1: facility that has done it multiple times and the only
Speaker 1: facility on planet.
Speaker 2: Ar Right, So all of these fusion ways to do
Speaker 2: it all have at the heart of it the same
Speaker 2: basic physics, right, and it actually goes that physics from Eddington,
Speaker 2: the nuclear physics of how the reaction happens, and then
Speaker 2: the plasma physics of how do you have these very
Speaker 2: hot states of matter if you take something and you
Speaker 2: melt solid to liquid and evaporate solid to gas. Well,
Speaker 2: if you keep putting energy and you get gas to
Speaker 2: plasma and that's the state that the stars and everyone.
Speaker 2: So that means that the underlying science of everything is
Speaker 2: those fields nuclear physics and plasma physics, and they're just
Speaker 2: different ways to apply that science. And the facility Niff
Speaker 2: that has reached more power out than in the way
Speaker 2: it did it is it took a tiny, tiny pellet
Speaker 2: that had the fuel in it, that was in a
Speaker 2: gas and.
Speaker 1: It used how about.
Speaker 2: Two millimeters so like the top of a pin rhythm. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I like it. Yeah, it took a tiny pellet and
Speaker 2: then it used one hundred and ninety two of the
Speaker 2: world's largest lasers and fired those lasers with the precision
Speaker 2: of like one part and a billion timing onto this
Speaker 2: pellet and compressed the pellet like a factor of several hundred.
Speaker 1: So tiny pellet, it's two millimeter pellet becomes pointed time.
Speaker 2: Yes, it might even be more. I can't remember that exactly.
Speaker 2: It's all in the papers. They publish it all in
Speaker 2: peer review, which is exactly what should be done. And
Speaker 2: when that happens, it compresses, it heats up, the density
Speaker 2: goes up, the temperature goes up, and the whole thing
Speaker 2: has a bang of fusion and all happens super fast.
Speaker 1: Right, this is micro.
Speaker 2: And so that reaches the right conditions. When you calculate
Speaker 2: how much energy the lasers put into the pellet, and
Speaker 2: you then measure the amount of fusion power the energy
Speaker 2: that came out, and you divide the two, you get
Speaker 2: the game. Right.
Speaker 1: And that happened almost exactly one hundred years since Arthur
Speaker 1: Eddington produced his paper. And so after one hundred years,
Speaker 1: we've been able to show this can be done on Earth.
Speaker 1: But all we've been able to show is we could
Speaker 1: make enough energy to heat a cup of coffee. Right now,
Speaker 1: Your company wants to do this so that it can
Speaker 1: produce power that can be put on the grid, and
Speaker 1: you want to do it before twenty thirty.
Speaker 2: Right, And so there's a couple of things that are
Speaker 2: important there. One, NIFF was never designed to be a
Speaker 2: power plant. It was designed to show the science worked.
Speaker 2: And so in that way, you know how much energy
Speaker 2: it made. Its immaterial right, it reached the right conditions,
Speaker 2: things went according to plan, and that was the big achievement,
Speaker 2: Like science works. Right now, the step is how do
Speaker 2: you turn that science that's been validated that we've you know,
Speaker 2: in those one hundred years, and we came like somewhere
Speaker 2: around like fifteen orders of magnitude and performance faster than
Speaker 2: More's law for most of those one hundred years. So
Speaker 2: that's huge deal. And now we're at this cusp where
Speaker 2: you can start to think about how to make that practical.
Speaker 2: So how to make it so it's not just you know,
Speaker 2: a few times power out over in or energy out
Speaker 2: over in, but like more than that ten. How to
Speaker 2: make it so it's not just mega jewels but gigagules,
Speaker 2: and how to make it continuous. So the plant is
Speaker 2: making megawatts. You know, those are the types of engineering
Speaker 2: type challenges, and what we're trying to do at Commonwealth
Speaker 2: Fusion Systems is to demonstrate in a facility that you
Speaker 2: can handle those challenges.
Speaker 1: And you're doing it through magnetic fusion. So talk us
Speaker 1: through exactly what that is and what is CFS's approach.
Speaker 2: So in magnetic fusion, you build this magnetic bottle using
Speaker 2: very high strength magnets and that can hold plasma. Plasma
Speaker 2: is charged, so it responds to magnetic fields and in fact,
Speaker 2: that's like why the northern lights are so pretty. And
Speaker 2: it turns out if you build the right shape of
Speaker 2: magnetic bottle, the simplest shape is a shape that's kind
Speaker 2: of like a doughnuts, like a bagel. You can use
Speaker 2: strong magnets and you can have a bagel of plasma,
Speaker 2: and the performance of that plasma, how hot and how
Speaker 2: dense and how insulated it is, that will go like
Speaker 2: the menetic field to the about fourth power. So it's
Speaker 2: very strongly dependent on the strength of the magnet. And
Speaker 2: we know this because we've built about one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty of these machines that are these donut shape machines.
Speaker 2: And they have a name called a Tokmac from a
Speaker 2: Soviet discovery where they really figured out these machines in
Speaker 2: the sixties and then everywhere around the world and the
Speaker 2: seventies they were.
Speaker 1: Built and if Americans had done it before, maybe they
Speaker 1: would have been called bagel reactors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who knows, But you know, at the time, it
Speaker 2: was actually a cool story of you know, we were
Speaker 2: in the Cold War and fusion was something that everyone
Speaker 2: had agreed they were all going to work on together
Speaker 2: because it's so hard, right, We've been at it at
Speaker 2: that time, like forty years and it's kind of like, well,
Speaker 2: we're going and slower then we want, let's all work together.
Speaker 2: So fusion's always been declassified, it's always been open. And
Speaker 2: the Soviets made this machine they called it a Tokamac,
Speaker 2: and it suddenly was ten million degrees. They measured it
Speaker 2: was ten million degrees and the world was like, no way, right,
Speaker 2: So they sent the scientists from the UK with the
Speaker 2: laser which had just been invented, over to measure the
Speaker 2: temperature of this new fangled device in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: Right, clearly, like this is temperature we've never experienced. We
Speaker 1: don't even know what a thermometer would look like to
Speaker 1: actually measure it, and so you had to invent a
Speaker 1: thermometer as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they go and they measure it in like
Speaker 2: sure enough, it's ten million degrees. And that threshold of
Speaker 2: ten million degrees is still today like an important threshold
Speaker 2: in judging where fusion ideas are. It was such a
Speaker 2: big leap at the time, and they published it in
Speaker 2: peer view journals and like everyone's like, oh, awesome, big breakthrough. Right,
Speaker 2: we have these tokemax they can get hot, and the
Speaker 2: world like went and built a bunch of tokemacs. And
Speaker 2: what we saw then in the seventies and eighties is
Speaker 2: a bunch of to camacs that got higher and higher performance.
Speaker 2: But because of this magnetic field, they sort of ran
Speaker 2: out of headroom and how to make them higher performance
Speaker 2: because they ran into limits on the magnets. And the
Speaker 2: other way around that is to build them bigger.
Speaker 1: Right, And this is where the biggest nuclear fusion experiment
Speaker 1: in the world comes into picture. It's called Eater is
Speaker 1: being built in France. It's already spent twenty billion euros.
Speaker 1: It's still not done right.
Speaker 2: And so eventually it gets so big that you know,
Speaker 2: you learn a lot and you say, well, I only
Speaker 2: have access to a certain magnetic field. Because of the
Speaker 2: magnet technology, I can solve the science equations. And it says,
Speaker 2: I gotta build it big, like office block big, and
Speaker 2: so that's gonna be expensive. Let's get all the world's
Speaker 2: governments together. You remember, we've been doing fusion out in
Speaker 2: the open. Will make it a big science project like CERN.
Speaker 2: And you go out and you try to build this
Speaker 2: giant fusion machine. And it turns out that took longer
Speaker 2: than anyone thought and was more expensive than anyone thought.
Speaker 2: Some of it's technical, a lot of it is organizational.
Speaker 2: You can imagine a un of science trying situation right,
Speaker 2: and so they're they're part way through building it and
Speaker 2: it's continually delayed's.
Speaker 1: And Bob the PhD student thinks, you know what, guys,
Speaker 1: this is too much. We should just make a small
Speaker 1: version of this and make this reaction actually work. Is
Speaker 1: that how CFS was born, Not not quite, but the
Speaker 1: parts of that that are accurate was that we had
Speaker 1: known that if you had better magnets, you could make
Speaker 1: it much smaller.
Speaker 2: And that was an idea that was not a controversial
Speaker 2: idea at all that that was an idea that people
Speaker 2: at MIT had worked on and people in Germany and
Speaker 2: the UK, and so we knew that was a possibility,
Speaker 2: but we didn't have the technology. And what changed is
Speaker 2: we in the about twenty ten timeframes suddenly had a
Speaker 2: material science, a superconductor that was practical that you could
Speaker 2: begin to think about, Oh, I could build really strong magnets,
Speaker 2: a new generation, a new class of very strong magnets.
Speaker 2: And if I did that, I know I can make
Speaker 2: those fusion machines, those tokemacs much smaller. And that's what
Speaker 2: really underpinned the effort that became CFS, and still is.
Speaker 2: The fundamental technology inside CFS and.
Speaker 1: The magnets that enabled you to be able to make
Speaker 1: this tookmac smaller are called high temperature superconducting magnets. Now
Speaker 1: those are lots of words, but superconducting is kind of
Speaker 1: self explanatory, which is that conductors are things that carry electricity.
Speaker 1: When they carry electricity, they typically lose some of that
Speaker 1: in the form of heat because there is resistance as
Speaker 1: the electrons are flowing through that cable. Then you can
Speaker 1: make it a superconductor by trying to reduce that resistance
Speaker 1: to zero, and that was shown to happen by reducing
Speaker 1: the temperature to almost zero. But that's not great because
Speaker 1: getting to almost zero temperature takes a lot of energy,
Speaker 1: so if you want more energy out, that's a bad idea.
Speaker 1: And so they came up with high temperature superconductors, which
Speaker 1: are not absolute zero, but they're still pretty cold.
Speaker 2: Right. Oh yeah, So in the eighties they discovered and
Speaker 2: this is one of these things that was completely discovered experimentally,
Speaker 2: I mean, it was not predicted at all, like the
Speaker 2: opposite of edding t.
Speaker 1: Wait, so why is that the case? Because you know
Speaker 1: there's a conductor and it has resistance, why can't you
Speaker 1: theorize that there could be zero resistance at some point?
Speaker 2: Well, it turns out that you need in that conductor
Speaker 2: to be a very specific type of material that has
Speaker 2: some quantum mechanical effects, so effects that are not classical
Speaker 2: that would make it so that the resistance is zero,
Speaker 2: and it is identically zero. It's not like approaching zero.
Speaker 2: It drops from finite and actually pretty high to zero.
Speaker 1: So it goes from sort of Newtonian science and then
Speaker 1: breaks it and goes to Einsteinian science and says yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just a new way of actually running this material.
Speaker 2: And when they discovered that, a guy named Henrik Ohms
Speaker 2: discovered that and he won the Nobel Prize for that,
Speaker 2: And so that's exactly what happens that you switch to
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics because of the materials and it's cold, and
Speaker 2: all of a sudden it's a super nuctor the limitation
Speaker 2: that needs to be very cold, and like those are
Speaker 2: like a few degrees calvin, a few degrees above zero.
Speaker 2: But what they discovered in the eighties is there was
Speaker 2: a new class of material material that like people didn't
Speaker 2: even think would be a superconductor, and it was a
Speaker 2: superductor at like eighty kelvin and so that's a huge
Speaker 2: deal and they called that high temperature and they won
Speaker 2: the Nobel Prize the year after they discovered that.
Speaker 1: Right, that's adye kelvin is about minus two hundred degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: Think kelvin is about what you can do with liquid nitrogen.
Speaker 2: So that's like high school physics demonstration classroom.
Speaker 1: You take rose, you dip it in liquid nitrogen, and
Speaker 1: then you pull it out and then you smash it
Speaker 1: and it.
Speaker 2: Breaks into pieces exactly dippin' dots.
Speaker 1: And so high temperature superconductors are discovered in the eighties.
Speaker 1: You only started building your company in the twenty twenties, really.
Speaker 2: Right, And so it's one thing to discover in material,
Speaker 2: it's some other thing to make that material practical. And
Speaker 2: so really what the high temperature superneutor folks were doing
Speaker 2: is they were figuring out, well, how do I even
Speaker 2: grow this material? How do I make it? How do
Speaker 2: I make it into wires? Right, it's a supernutor so
Speaker 2: you need wires. And it wasn't really until about twenty
Speaker 2: ten that you could even see wires out of this
Speaker 2: material of any appreciable length and anything that approached the
Speaker 2: quality you would need to make practical things. And so
Speaker 2: it wasn't until we saw that that we realized, oh,
Speaker 2: now we can build a magnet technology on that material.
Speaker 2: Continue to evolve them material as well, and that really
Speaker 2: was at the period where we started to lay the
Speaker 2: groundwork for CFS.
Speaker 1: And what is this material?
Speaker 2: This material it's called rare earth barium copper oxide, But
Speaker 2: what it really is is it's a crystal and it's
Speaker 2: a ceramic that's grown. It's like grown like silicon. Computer chips,
Speaker 2: and most of it's copper, barium and oxygen has a
Speaker 2: dope into a tiny tiny amount of a rare earth
Speaker 2: yttrium usually, And it turns out when you grow that
Speaker 2: crystal and you grow it really well, like nearly perfect,
Speaker 2: it will be a supergductor when it's cold. But importantly
Speaker 2: for us, it's not just that it's higher temperature. In fact,
Speaker 2: that's actually not that important. The thing that's important is
Speaker 2: that all the other superconductors they had this limitation that
Speaker 2: when they were in a menetic field, the menetic field
Speaker 2: would break the quantum mechanical effect, and so they would
Speaker 2: stop being a superinductor if they were in a menetic field,
Speaker 2: particularly if the menic field got too high. And so
Speaker 2: here you're trying to build an electromagnet, a wire that's
Speaker 2: making magnetic field that limits itself by making magnetic field,
Speaker 2: and that means that you have a hard limit. You
Speaker 2: can basically build magnets that were like tennish tesla.
Speaker 1: So a material that breaks itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so not a great thing if you want to
Speaker 2: like build the highest magnet fields in the world. But
Speaker 2: the high tempered supernuctors also had a feature that they
Speaker 2: were high magnetic field super nuctors. They didn't have this limit.
Speaker 2: The quantum mechanics was different, and once you realize that,
Speaker 2: you could immediately say, oh, if I had a bunch
Speaker 2: of this material and then I figured out a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of other technology, I could build really really strong magnets.
Speaker 1: And so on the basis of that, CFS is now
Speaker 1: among only a handful of climate tech startups that have
Speaker 1: raised billions of dollars in money. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: money for a climate tech startup, not for Microsoft, but
Speaker 1: for a climate tech startup, a lot of money. Few
Speaker 1: startups even need that much money to reach commercial viability.
Speaker 1: So before we come to how you're planning to spend
Speaker 1: it all, tell us how did you convince private investors
Speaker 1: who back ideas that actually become commercial reality and want
Speaker 1: return on these ideas, not just scientific work, to give
Speaker 1: you all that money.
Speaker 2: Right, So at this point you have the fact that fusion.
Speaker 2: We always knew it was a big deal. Right, if
Speaker 2: you had a fusion power plants, that could potentially be
Speaker 2: a huge business, That could be a business, you know
Speaker 2: scale of the oil industry, right, huge business. We knew
Speaker 2: that it was scientifically possible. Not you're done, but like
Speaker 2: scientifically possible. And we knew that if you could build
Speaker 2: very strong magnets, you can make it much smaller and
Speaker 2: it would put it in the realm of commercially doable.
Speaker 2: And you basically had like a fifty billion dollar statement
Speaker 2: of conviction by the governments that the TOKENMAC and eater
Speaker 2: was going to work if you could build it. And
Speaker 2: now all of a sudden, you have this material that hey,
Speaker 2: all that and puts it within the reach of something
Speaker 2: that would look kind of like a SpaceX, right in
Speaker 2: terms of scale and engineering, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Right, So if Eater is NASA CFS's SpaceX.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, certainly people had boiled it down to that.
Speaker 2: I wouldn'tess to say that, but other people have, and
Speaker 2: so all that came together. It's at INT you know,
Speaker 2: it's all peer reviewed, and it makes a really you know,
Speaker 2: pretty simple roadmap. Go build that magnet technology, show it works.
Speaker 2: Go build a TOKENAC that makes a lot of energy,
Speaker 2: more power out than in using the science we already know,
Speaker 2: and then go build power plants based on that machine.
Speaker 2: And that's a digestible, falsifiable, peer reviewable path. And that's
Speaker 2: the path that we've been on since before the company
Speaker 2: was a company. That's been a path that we've been
Speaker 2: on for about ten years now. And through that, you
Speaker 2: know you look and say, okay, each execution stage, how
Speaker 2: is it going? Is the team actually doing what said
Speaker 2: is going to do? And by twenty and twenty one,
Speaker 2: we had taken two hundred million dollars, we had spun
Speaker 2: out a mit, we built a team, and we had
Speaker 2: demonstrated that magnet technology and shown that it could scale,
Speaker 2: and we designed the fusion tokemac Spark and peer reviewed it,
Speaker 2: done the engineering, found the site, figured out how we
Speaker 2: were going to go build that machine. And that's when
Speaker 2: we're raised the one point eight billion dollars to go
Speaker 2: and build it. And now we're we're about halfway through building.
Speaker 1: That and what does it look like building it?
Speaker 2: Well, it's big, like it's smaller than either, but you know,
Speaker 2: you're still talking about having to build a factory to
Speaker 2: make those magnets. So we have a factory that runs
Speaker 2: three shifts, that is full of hundreds of people, that
Speaker 2: makes supermufic magnets that simply did not exist before, based
Speaker 2: on materials that won the Nobel Prize multiple times. You
Speaker 2: do that, you have to find a place where they're like,
Speaker 2: let you do that. And so we own a fifty
Speaker 2: acres outside of Boston on an old military base, and
Speaker 2: on that site with the factory, we have a fusion
Speaker 2: prototype power plant and you know, it's buildings that are
Speaker 2: made to hold fusion machines, and in there is we
Speaker 2: haven't yet started assembling. We're getting ready to start assembol
Speaker 2: of pokemac which we've built one hundred and fifty before,
Speaker 2: but never one that was this powerful, and never one
Speaker 2: that had these magnets in it. And so it looks
Speaker 2: like a big construction project, that looks like a big
Speaker 2: engineering project, that looks like a manufacturing project. And I
Speaker 2: think that looks like actually what climate tech is going
Speaker 2: to look like for just about every climate tech innovation
Speaker 2: at scale.
Speaker 1: And so you're waiting to learn this joke, which is
Speaker 1: nuclear fusion, great idea, it's the future, it's always in
Speaker 1: the future, and you're going to go, ha ha, we
Speaker 1: made it happen.
Speaker 2: We're going to go and say, look, show up at
Speaker 2: this place, push a button and make a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of heat from a reaction that built all the atoms
Speaker 2: on Earth. That powers the sun, and do that with
Speaker 2: a team that built it all quickly out of sight
Speaker 2: in a factory with blueprints, and we think that's fair.
Speaker 1: You're also going to not just make fusion reaction. You
Speaker 1: are going to turn it into power at that facility,
Speaker 1: and you're going to do it before twenty thirty.
Speaker 2: So that facility will make fusion reactions, it will make
Speaker 2: a bunch of heat, so we won't turn it into electricity.
Speaker 2: But if we had turned it into electricity, which means
Speaker 2: basically making that heat go into steam and turning a
Speaker 2: steam turbine, if we've done that with stuff that ever
Speaker 2: exists off the shelf, stuff, that facility would be able
Speaker 2: to have sold some electricity. But we didn't demonstrate those pieces.
Speaker 1: But it took a mac reactor. This bagel shaped machine
Speaker 1: building will produce heat. Nobody has yet shown how to
Speaker 1: capture all that heat turn it into steam to generate power.
Speaker 1: So there's still one more step beyond the hardest step
Speaker 1: that still needs to be shown to work.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, But that step is fairly conventional. You know.
Speaker 2: That's a step that say a coal power plant does.
Speaker 2: It captures heat and turns it to steam and turns
Speaker 2: that steam turbine, and the electricity confusion in that way
Speaker 2: is not that dissimilar then other ways to boil water.
Speaker 1: Well. Sure, but the whole point of a nuclear fusion
Speaker 1: reactor that you want to build is one that will
Speaker 1: continuously generate heat. A continuously heating unit needs to take
Speaker 1: that heat away. And so if you are not readying
Speaker 1: yourself to do that, regardless of whether you want to
Speaker 1: turn that heat into power or not, you're not going
Speaker 1: to run this reactor on a continuous basis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the one in that we're building right now,
Speaker 2: we'll run it for short periods because it does get
Speaker 2: hot and you can't take the heat out at the
Speaker 2: rate that you generate it. It's basically too small to
Speaker 2: take the heat out. But we have then in parallel
Speaker 2: efforts that are like, well this is how you take
Speaker 2: the heat out, and those are fairly conventional.
Speaker 1: And so when will we have a CFS blant that
Speaker 1: actually generates power.
Speaker 2: That's the next piece in the milestone. So you know,
Speaker 2: what we are right now is to build a machine
Speaker 2: that does the really fusion specific pieces and does it
Speaker 2: in a way that's like that's a snapshot of how
Speaker 2: a plant would work.
Speaker 1: And that will be ready and doing it when we
Speaker 1: think that'll.
Speaker 2: Be ready in like twenty twenty seven. So right now
Speaker 2: we're about halfway through building it and sort of the
Speaker 2: end of twenty twenty four will be manufacturing the parts,
Speaker 2: and in twenty twenty five will be starting to assemble
Speaker 2: all the parts and the big pieces of equipment will
Speaker 2: be installed in the buildings, and in twenty six we'll
Speaker 2: start to turn on individual subsystems that support the fusion
Speaker 2: machine and eventually at twenty six and twenty seven the
Speaker 2: fusion reactions and more power, more power out than in
Speaker 2: Q grade and one in twenty seven, and so that's
Speaker 2: a very fast timeline compared to what we've used to
Speaker 2: doing in infusion. Right, So you know, big effort, but
Speaker 2: you know the talent that is at CFS. That's the
Speaker 2: type of challenge that they live for. And then after that,
Speaker 2: the next step is to do that same thing a
Speaker 2: little bit bigger, make more power, but very similar in
Speaker 2: its parameters, and then put that out a site that
Speaker 2: has the ability to turn that heat into steam to
Speaker 2: electricity and then sell the electricity. And that is our
Speaker 2: next machine, a machine we call.
Speaker 1: ARC and how many more billions. Is that going to take.
Speaker 2: That's going to take a similar amount to what we've already.
Speaker 1: Raised, So about two billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I give it to it, you know, right.
Speaker 1: And the aim to have the arc reactor generating power
Speaker 1: is by what date?
Speaker 2: So we want to do that, so it's in the
Speaker 2: early twenty thirties. You know, a lot of that depends
Speaker 2: on when we start, which depends on things like, well,
Speaker 2: how confident are we in Spark? Do we wait to
Speaker 2: finish all of Spark? Do we get started a little early?
Speaker 2: You know? Do we wait to get more results out
Speaker 2: of it? You know, there's some sort of a start
Speaker 2: date that you have to figure out, and there's how
Speaker 2: long will it take to build? And that's one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that we're building Spark is we're getting how
Speaker 2: long it takes? You know, what are the challenges? What
Speaker 2: a supply chain look like? How much does it cost
Speaker 2: the receipts in addition to the actual science of how
Speaker 2: it works.
Speaker 1: After the break? Are there too many fusion startups? And
Speaker 1: if you've been enjoying this episode, please take a moment
Speaker 1: to rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple or
Speaker 1: now YouTube. It helps other listeners find the show. There
Speaker 1: are now fifty nuclear fusion startups by one count total,
Speaker 1: they've raised about six billion dollars, which means CFS alone
Speaker 1: has raised about a third of all that. Are there
Speaker 1: too many nuclear fusion startups?
Speaker 2: Well, I think what you're seeing is you're seeing a
Speaker 2: growing ecosystem. So in those that count, many of those
Speaker 2: are are companies that aim to build power plants. Like
Speaker 2: you know, if you think what CFS is, we would
Speaker 2: consider CFS like a tier one integrator. You know, we're
Speaker 2: like a Ford, right, but Ford buys parts from people
Speaker 2: that like ac Delco that make parts that go into Ford,
Speaker 2: but also go into Chevy. And so we're starting to
Speaker 2: see now in fusion the emerging of those tier two suppliers.
Speaker 2: And in the continuing the car analogy, you know, there's
Speaker 2: people that make high end cars that fit that market,
Speaker 2: pickups in Sedan's, and you see that in fusion as well.
Speaker 2: You see, okay, can you make a really small fusion machine,
Speaker 2: a fusee machine that just generates heat, A future machine
Speaker 2: that might be more speculative scientifically, so maybe it's a
Speaker 2: next generation one. And so while there's a lot when
Speaker 2: you actually break them down you say, are we out
Speaker 2: of good ideas? No? Are we done building new future machines.
Speaker 2: I don't think we ever will be. But is it
Speaker 2: an ecosystem. Yes, you can start to see the emergence
Speaker 2: of an ecosystem and eventually, like in a world where
Speaker 2: there's a fusion industry, you know, that's a standalone industry,
Speaker 2: that's an important industry. It's an asset class and so
Speaker 2: you know my history of technology hat, it's like, no,
Speaker 2: this is this feels about right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we put it on the climate timeline,
Speaker 1: and that raises a bunch of questions about whether if
Speaker 1: you build it by say twenty thirty five, will we
Speaker 1: be able to build one hundred of them by twenty
Speaker 1: fifty or thousand of them if we need right, because
Speaker 1: we want clean firm power and we want lots of it.
Speaker 1: But if you're thinking about it from a species perspective,
Speaker 1: from a planet that has intelligent beings perspective, you would
Speaker 1: want to give them nuclear fusion power. That would be
Speaker 1: pretty useful, regardless of what problems they have. Having access
Speaker 1: to unlimited clean energy is very useful.
Speaker 2: Right. If you think about like technology, and you know
Speaker 2: we're sitting here at a conference. It's about innovation and climate.
Speaker 2: The crazy thing about technology is that once you have
Speaker 2: it and know it, it takes on a life of
Speaker 2: its own, and it could scale way faster than we thought.
Speaker 2: I really doubt that when Henry Ford was building the
Speaker 2: Model T, which you know, cars existed before the Model T,
Speaker 2: I'm sure there was there was doubters like, oh, you
Speaker 2: know that's going to grow at like twenty percent. I mean,
Speaker 2: the Model T production grew at one hundred percent year
Speaker 2: over year for ten years. Like if you did that
Speaker 2: in climate, in any of the climate technologies, not only
Speaker 2: do you solve climate in ten years, but like you
Speaker 2: basically like lead to an entirely different civilization. Right, And
Speaker 2: so that's the cool thing about technology and the idea
Speaker 2: that you could have a technology like fusion that basically
Speaker 2: uses an entirely new process in a machine that we
Speaker 2: basically manufactured. That's like why it's an intellectually and wide
Speaker 2: open space. Very cool.
Speaker 1: Thank you both, all right, thank you, thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to zero And now for the sound of the week.
Speaker 1: That's the sound from inside a fusion reactor, not at CFS,
Speaker 1: but at another nuclear fusion startup called Zapp Energy, which
Speaker 1: I visited two years ago and which is also racing
Speaker 1: to bring fusion power onto the grid. If you like
Speaker 1: this episode, please take a moment to rate or review
Speaker 1: the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode
Speaker 1: with a friend or with someone who loves science fiction.
Speaker 1: You can get in touch at Zero pod at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot net. Zero's producer is Mithy Lirau. Bloomberg's Head of
Speaker 1: podcast is Sage Bowman and head of Talk is Brendan
Speaker 1: nunan Ar. Theme music is composed by Wonderly. Thanks to
Speaker 1: break Through Energy for the space to record this episode.
Speaker 1: Special thanks also to Kira Bindram and Monique Mulima, i
Speaker 1: am Akshatrati back Soli