SPEAKER_00: 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, you know, 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 Momgaard 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,

SPEAKER_01: 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.

SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of capital for Fusion.

SPEAKER_12: 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. 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, 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, an 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 SPARC. And that machine is the, 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.

SPEAKER_13: It's, like, five times hotter than the center of the sun. You know, Fahrenheit, Celsius, doesn't really matter. 100 million, huge number.

SPEAKER_12: And they do this, they do this using, basically, like, 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 this, we just opened this room, like, three, four, 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, there'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, you know, bend curves and climb it, this is the type of stuff that you have to be willing to do. You have to be willing to take science at the 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 the place 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 time frame and get to Q greater than 1, more power out than n 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 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 that'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 the most common reaction in the universe. Taking your hand off the button, stopping it, putting it in 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 is it's the beginning of a race. About six billion dollars invested in fusion which means that one of like the most invested of the new energy technology companies. So when you think about geothermal or batteries, this is actually next generation batteries. This is actually a similar scale. And it's going through a history of technology path that's like 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 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 grid in 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, a 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

SPEAKER_13: 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, you know, really disrupt things. And I think,

SPEAKER_12: 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

SPEAKER_13: all working together. So, thank you. That's where we're at. I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you. And I'm excited to welcome a colleague here, David Kirtley, tell you the other exciting things about fusion.

SPEAKER_15: Perfect. Thank you very much, Bob. So, my name is David Kirtley.

SPEAKER_16: 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 the academic, 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. And 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, actually became an expert in some of the inertial type approaches like the laser systems. Actually, my specialty was antimatter. Antimatter's cool, but what I learned was that actually the technologies of the time when I was learning that I learned in school, those approaches, 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. And so I pivoted my career, went and built space propulsion systems and rockets, plasma thrusters, hull thrusters, ion engines, that kind of thing. And 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 of 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 where it 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 hundred million degrees, but rather than trying to hold onto 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 called 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, we may 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 that 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 dehelium 3 fusion where we actually took rare helium 3 and fused it with deuterium that 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 you're targeted you make design engineering decisions to get there faster. So that's what we've been 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 hundred million degrees that we did before and we started manufacturing 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 it's 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 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've 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

SPEAKER_17: for the future we need clean power and we need it now thank you very much

SPEAKER_00: thank you guys for being here this is obviously an exciting challenge a technically 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 think about it but dollars per kilowatt hour or pennies per kilowatt hour we buy power off the grid in the US for 12 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour where do you guys think these systems end up when you kind of think about the the amortization cost and what you're gonna 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

SPEAKER_26: I think that I think that's exactly the perfect question to lead in that if you're doing

SPEAKER_16: 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 and fusion has a nice opportunity to do that you talk about what's the cost of electricity it comes from OPEX and CAPEX and OPEX right our fuel for a 50 megawatt system you can with a pickup truck worth of fuel you can actually power that system for a decade and 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 and 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 and so then you're left with the capital and so I think that's been our focus is how do we minimize the capital of those systems and so we can get to a point where we can be really cost competitive and I'll give you straight answers is that our goal with our approach to fusion where we directly recapture the energy is to get to a cent a kilowatt hour or less

SPEAKER_28: and you can do that with OPEX

SPEAKER_30: I think an important point about this is you build these things they're CapEx you eventually get very good at building them and so when you look at the probability curve

SPEAKER_12: 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 and there's no operating cost there's no fuel and the capital you're building is an order of magnitude less stuff than say renewable so it allows you to get to these very low numbers

SPEAKER_00: so you guys have ever been on stage together before like this yeah

SPEAKER_35: that's sitting next to each other yeah

SPEAKER_23: right so I'm trying to yeah I'm trying to set up a little Tesla Edison rivalry here ACDC but no

SPEAKER_00: 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

SPEAKER_41: yeah it's a really good question first

SPEAKER_12: you have to make it work right like there's a lot of architectures and like the odds that they all work are low so we've taken the tact of like find the architectures

SPEAKER_43: 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 right 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 we have 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

SPEAKER_26: yeah I think our focus has been Bob's mind 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

SPEAKER_28: that's driving and there's a huge market you know 3,000 gigawatts of fossil power it's not necessarily

SPEAKER_45: the case that one of you is going to win and one of you is going to lose

SPEAKER_46: no it's a huge market it's one out of every 12 dollars like so it's absolutely huge you think about the

SPEAKER_12: what's in front of us to redo all the infrastructure like we're 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 like the absolute ultimate you know optimized thing is going to win it's going to be a package thing like you know the car you buy today the way you control it the way you drive it

SPEAKER_51: looks like the car that Henry Ford built it's not optimized but not how you got there

SPEAKER_54: I have a two part question

SPEAKER_53: for you

SPEAKER_54: I think we all as you know lay people not in the industry and in the trenches in the arena with you doing this our question is just and 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 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

SPEAKER_57: in the next 20 or 30 years yeah

SPEAKER_47: 100%

SPEAKER_54: next 10 years if you had to

SPEAKER_47: scaling in the next 10 yep like because 3,000 gigawatts of replacement it's going to be hard

SPEAKER_54: okay 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 sorry what does

Chamath Palihapitiya: happen mean happen means net positive energy

SPEAKER_14: no no like buy power into your refrigerator from fusion

SPEAKER_54: 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 etc you guys are you know 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

SPEAKER_68: if the solution is here you know like and you guys are so confident it's going to be there it's a good question

SPEAKER_70: yeah good question 50 gigatons a year for 10 years is a lot of carbon in the atmosphere

SPEAKER_12: in a place where we are already at our limits so like 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 you you know we talked about earlier they're terrifying like if we need this solution

SPEAKER_73: for fusion

SPEAKER_54: but we also need the other thing got it 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 desalinization 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 you know food insecurity energy water all of these things you know seem to be really tied so should we be as pessimistic as I think people in the world right now are now how do you look at the world when you go to bed at night

SPEAKER_26: 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

SPEAKER_16: I believe anyway and David mentioned the power use is doubling over this decade I think that that doesn't include electrification carbon removal

SPEAKER_78: forecast is wrong

SPEAKER_28: 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

SPEAKER_12: 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 like with those two things notice it didn't say human creativity right like with those two things like you can do all these other stuff right and so like 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

SPEAKER_54: 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 Hail Mary but it's a long ball and 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 you know let's say they're delusional and they're 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

SPEAKER_00: 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 right 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 you know 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

SPEAKER_54: yeah so that would argue for one of the things I thought was inspiring Chamath about yesterday's discussion was you were talking about you know 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

SPEAKER_00: can we hear how the IRA serves this opportunity yeah

SPEAKER_16: 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 right delivering fusion power and it costs 10 cents 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 I mean a lot of its focus is manufacturing a lot of its focus is scaling manufacturing in the United States and so I think that is really valuable and more things like that that are less focused on demonstrating

SPEAKER_94: are you going to get some of those dollars

SPEAKER_16: we'll see

SPEAKER_94: you have to prove some stuff before you can access them right

SPEAKER_16: 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're 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

SPEAKER_00: and Bob you have your own magnet factory do you get funding is there funding opportunity for you to support that effort

SPEAKER_98: yeah there is but it's not nearly what you need and that's just you know overall like the energy transition needs somewhere various estimates

SPEAKER_12: put about 9 trillion dollars a year globally and we are at a tenth of that and so I often get frustrated with the capital allocation about like how we're splitting the small numbers that we're splitting now it's like no they just need to be bigger numbers right and it's not a question of do you invest in next generation technology versus stuff that you can like literally go today take a smokestack down and put a solar panel

SPEAKER_100: solar farm there it's not it's not either or here the whole pie has to go bigger

SPEAKER_54: Bob when you when you hear Freeberg's theoretical proposal is there a way to manifest that into an actual financial device of hey here's 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

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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 right 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 I'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

SPEAKER_107: whether it's his solution or your own and vice versa okay I'll start off so I look at it

SPEAKER_108: as a portfolio approach this approach right very interesting from a

SPEAKER_12: what's the final state look like it's a simpler machine right more interesting 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 right how's that going that's the type of data I'd ask for on our approach on our red team it's like can we get to the cost right 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

SPEAKER_108: you look at our factory right

SPEAKER_110: because that's where the risks are

SPEAKER_111: are you concerned about breeding time for you no

SPEAKER_110: no it's like we know the breeding works because that's the way the weapons work

Chamath Palihapitiya: and that breeding is at like 1.1 times roughly no so it's 20 years then to get basically

SPEAKER_65: no you start it's like a you have enough to start now that you go on

SPEAKER_108: an exponential okay

SPEAKER_112: and that's your first

SPEAKER_114: couple systems you said right

SPEAKER_108: yeah

SPEAKER_113: yeah enough to do the first 10 systems at least

SPEAKER_114: and David how would you

SPEAKER_113: yeah so you know I would by the way

David Friedberg: I appreciate the intellectual honesty thank you for that like it's hard to do that but thank you

SPEAKER_26: and I actually kind of agree with Bob's assessment

SPEAKER_16: that our approach to fusion the FRC compression was invented in the 80s not in the 60s and so like 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 CapEx 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 fair enough and so

SPEAKER_117: of these specific helium isotopes on planet earth that you can actually like generate

SPEAKER_16: yeah so both I mean both 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's that again comes back to what we just to connect

SPEAKER_23: for everyone deuterium is a hydrogen atom with an extra neutron in the nucleus

SPEAKER_45: and some percentage of water has deuterium in it so it's a it's relatively abundant is that fair to say and yeah tritium tritium is less abundant so we need to make tritium in order for systems

SPEAKER_42: that rely on tritium for their technology diffusion to work all the water you drank out there has got deuterium in it

SPEAKER_120: and my final question and it's safe

SPEAKER_122: and in your body and none of those challenges you wouldn't work without it actually yeah that's great

SPEAKER_107: tritium a little different but

Chamath Palihapitiya: how do you guys think assuming that the technical issues are sort of 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 how does that part work which has nothing to do with science unfortunately

David Friedberg: and it's very emotional and it's very you know there's a lot of regulatory capture there

SPEAKER_127: when we broke ground on that facility I showed that's a bedroom community of Boston we had no agreement

SPEAKER_12: of who would even regulate it because it's totally open field right entirely new technology and so you have a social acceptance angle you also have just a pure like legally who's going to be the person that's going to tell you to shut it down right and you have to solve both of those and they're different they're related but they're different and 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 ten million dollar 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 right public acceptance we've done we've done polls as an industry association that show that the public acceptance so avoiding trigger word and things like that that people

SPEAKER_110: kaboom is a trigger word they become pretty excited

SPEAKER_134: about it

SPEAKER_13: you have this moment of conversion where people go

SPEAKER_12: from curious to like yes we need that now and that's been a broadly seen phenomenon we've got to get it right right and like the chattering classes and you know the opposition is going to eventually come when these things are more real we have time today

SPEAKER_46: to like set the momentum and lay the groundwork

SPEAKER_16: and I can add two more details on that in 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 like Helion's been regulated by the state since 2018 and our permits take six or nine months we are licensed we're inspected whole nine yards and it all exists it's not new regulation it totally exists it's 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 hide away and say don't worry about what's happening here like 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

SPEAKER_112: let me ask one more question which I think

SPEAKER_00: I have a final one but go ahead okay that 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 so 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

SPEAKER_45: why this isn't just BS because it's always been 20 years away from having free abundant energy what's changed

SPEAKER_12: yeah so one the science the science has advanced tremendously we have predictive capability of these machines the same way that we have predictive capability of like how to build a plane right two the adjacent technologies it's like 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've basically been warehouse they're now being applied and three the idea that like software is eating the world well it didn't really like you need the mouth and like that mouth is advanced manufacturing that mouth is how to turn a software business into the ability to manifest hardware like it works those are all combining here with this very big pull

SPEAKER_16: and I would just I love all the technology answer but also there's a various 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

SPEAKER_00: I've talked to a lot of investors

SPEAKER_54: we're having an interesting discussion amongst the besties of you know obviously applications on earth for energy but you know when we get out into the stars and you know the mission that Elon's working on to get to Mars Freberg was wondering and Sachs particularly will this technology help us get to Mars or perhaps even Uranus

SPEAKER_148: please join me

SPEAKER_150: in thanking Bob and David

SPEAKER_03: brain man

SPEAKER_04: David Sachs

SPEAKER_06: love you especially queen of and we'll see you