🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #30

Nuclear fusion holds the potential to provide the world with cheap, clean, virtually inexhaustible energy for the future. For decades, the technology was dismissed as sci-fi fantasy. But a series of recent technological breakthroughs — including a net-energy gain ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last December — and spate of startups have made both government and investors increasingly optimistic. To talk about the state of the fusion industry, I’ve brought on Andrew Holland, chief executive officer at the Fusion Industry Association. In This Episode * The importance of recent fusion breakthroughs (1:17) * What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion? (5:58) * Environmentalism and fusion energy (14:09) * Will fusion be the main energy source of the future? (18:57) Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation The importance of recent fusion breakthroughs James Pethokoukis: Until recently, fusion energy was a government science project that you didn’t hear much about. But now we have dozens of startups involved and frequent media coverage of big breakthroughs. What happened? Andrew Holland: It's results. Results, results, results. Science is progressing. Things have happened on both sides of the science of fusion. Plasma physics has been around for 60 years. It's really hard. It's really challenging. And they had to create a whole new area of physics, plasma physics, to be able to understand how to do fusion. They did that for 60 years, and it was continued short progress here and there, two steps forward, one step back. Until we got to the point probably about five or 10 years ago where the scientists said, “We think we know how to make this work.” But then what's happened is that startups and new thinking came in and applied all of the other technological advances that were out there—things like material science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-speed computing—as well as new business practices, putting those in effect onto what had been this kind of staid field of government science. Putting those two together, and that's where the real developments and changes and things are happening. In fact, there are 38 members of the Fusion Industry Association now, with a few others around the world that are stragglers. And it's been just this almost Cambrian explosion of different technologies and ways forward and paths to get there. And everybody is competing to be the one to get there first and the one to get there best. So it is an exciting time. And we're seeing the effects of all of this other technology coming into plasma physics. Things have really changed. So how significant was that breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore last year, both for the technology and also for investor and public awareness? Yeah, it is significant in the kind of public awareness and public assessment of it. I can tell you that our website had its highest day ever in December when the announcement from the NIF happened. And I can tell you just kind of anecdotally a lot of that awareness came about. But the nature, I think, of an exponential curve, a Moore's law–type thing where it doubles every year, doubles every so often—is that when it's exponential, it's going straight up, but for a long time it looks pretty flat. So a long time below the level, it's been doubling and doubling and doubling over a number of years. It just started from a very low point. Those inside the field knew that something was happening, but it never broke out. It never got into the New York Times. It never got into Twitter discussions. It was all sort of inside baseball discussions. It's been a completely new thing for the fusion community to now have a lot of interest coming into it. That said, though, the investors were a little keyed in a little bit earlier. Since the NIF announcement, we've seen some new deal flow. We've got about $6 billion invested in private fusion. Of that, most of it came in before the NIF announcement. Investors were looking at this. Investors were aware of it. We are still seeing some of the deal flow that post-NIF takes some time. There's a lot of due diligence that investors do and stuff like that, so we haven't yet seen the real explosion from NIF of investment and running. But I think we're due to pretty soon. We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion? What is the policymaker awareness and action on this technology? We're getting there. In March of 2022, the White House held an event calling for a “bold decadal vision on commercial fusion,” basically saying, can you get to commercial fusion in 10 years? It's an aggressive target. Our company said, yes, we can—with your help. The White House put in not an aggressive amount of budget in the scheme of billions and trillions even in the IRA and various other subsidy measures. Instead what they've started up is what's called a new milestone-based public-private partnership. The government gives pay-for-performance metrics on how to invest in fusion companies. Basically, the companies will say, “We think we can do this, this, and this.” And then the government says, “Okay, we'll pay you X amount for each of these milestones when you reach them.” Instead of the old way of doing a public-private partnership, which is you have to account for all the money you put in and we'll give you a fixed dollar amount and all this sort of stuff. This is actually the way that NASA invested in SpaceX. It's a way to promote innovation in the companies while also protecting the taxpayer, because it is still risky in a business sense to put money into fusion. It's a really innovative new model for getting there. The DOE just put out these awards a couple of weeks ago in late May. It's gone to eight companies fusion companies, all doing work here in the United States. We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. The Brits have an aggressive program for a commercial fusion pilot plant. The Germans just put out a roadmap for how to get there. The Japanese have one. For a long time, the government science people have been cooperating together at ITER, which is the publicly funded science experiment in the south of France. It will get net energy when it turns on, and will be a significant experiment, but it's different than a commercial direction. And now we see all these countries and companies racing towards this. And honestly, we also see the Chinese making aggressive plans and moving forward on their own internal pathway as well. The NIF, in many ways, was kind of a starting gun for this process, and we're seeing it happen around the world. You have diversity: You have government, you have the private sector, and there's also a diversity of technological approaches as well. It’s not just one thing, right? Yes. There is a huge diversity in technological approaches. Of the 38 member companies you have of the FIA, none of them are taking the exact same technological pathway. It is, instead, a broad family tree of fusion with, at one end, laser-inertial fusion—which is like what the NIF did: taking lasers and firing them on a tiny pellet of fuel—and on the other end is magnetically confined fusion energy—which is using giant magnets to confine a plasma at extreme temperatures to get fusion out that way. And then in between, there are all sorts of other magneto-inertial types, which is a mix of one or the other. Some use electric pulses, some use giant pistons, some use plasma guns: all sorts of different ways of confining and controlling the plasma. And this is kind of what you'd expect in a new technology: We just don't quite know yet which is the one that will get there first—well, NIF got there first—but which is the one that will get there first in a commercially relevant manner. And then which one will then also show that it's the most commercially competitive as well. While you shouldn't pr… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe