How Helion Energy Is Turning Nuclear Fusion Into Practical, Clean Power

Lex Fridman
Summary Date: 2025-11-18 20:05:07
# How Helion Energy Is Turning Nuclear Fusion Into Practical, Clean Power ### The Big Picture: Why Fusion Matters - Fusion powers the Sun and all stars, releasing energy by merging light nuclei (hydrogen isotopes) into heavier ones. - If harnessed commercially, fusion would provide virtually unlimited, carbon‑free electricity with no long‑lived radioactive waste and inherent safety (the reaction stops if conditions change). - Historically, fusion has been joked about as "always 30 years away." Recent advances, especially at private firms like Helion Energy, suggest that timeline is shrinking. ### Fusion vs. Fission: Core Differences - **Fission** splits heavy atoms (uranium, plutonium) to release energy; it runs at room temperature, creates a self‑sustaining chain reaction, and produces long‑lived waste. - **Fusion** merges light atoms (deuterium, tritium, helium‑3) at >100 million °C; it requires extreme temperature and confinement, but the reaction ceases automatically when fuel stops being supplied. - Fuel availability: fission fuel must be mined and enriched; fusion fuel (deuterium) is abundant in seawater, offering essentially a hundred‑million‑year supply for current global electricity demand. ### Helion’s Unique Approach: Pulsed Magneto‑Inertial Fusion (FRC) - Most fusion programs use **tokamaks** (donut‑shaped magnetic cages) or **stellarators** (complex twisted coils). Both aim to hold plasma steady for long periods. - Helion combines magnetic confinement with rapid compression – a **magneto‑inertial** or **field‑reversed configuration (FRC)**. The plasma itself generates a magnetic field that traps it, eliminating the need for massive external magnets. - The process: 1. Fill a solenoid with deuterium plasma. 2. Apply a strong magnetic field. 3. Reverse the field in ~1 µs, causing the plasma to self‑organize into a closed‑field “plasmoid.” 4. Quickly increase the magnetic field, compressing the plasma to >100 million °C. 5. Fusion occurs; the hot plasma pushes back on the magnetic field, inducing an electric current that can be harvested directly as electricity. - Benefits of the FRC method: * Direct conversion of charged fusion products to electricity (up to ~80‑85 % thermal‑to‑electric efficiency, plus ~95 % recovery of input magnetic energy). * Short pulse (micro‑ to millisecond) operation avoids the need for massive thermal‑steam cycles. * High plasma **beta** (ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure) close to 1, meaning the plasma pressure is comparable to the confining magnetic pressure, maximizing fusion yield. ### Safety and Waste - Fusion reactors are **self‑terminating**: if fuel injection stops, the reaction ceases instantly. There is never a runaway chain reaction. - Only a few seconds of fuel are ever present in the chamber, dramatically reducing accident scenarios (e.g., a meteor strike would not release stored energy). - Byproducts are primarily neutrons and X‑rays, which are shielded with concrete and borated polyethylene. No long‑lived radioactive waste is produced. - Regulatory path: In the U.S., fusion devices fall under NRC Part 30 (like particle accelerators) rather than Part 50 (fission reactors), simplifying licensing. ### From Heat to Power: Why Helion’s Design Skips the Steam Turbine - Traditional tokamak designs heat water to steam, driving turbines (30‑35 % efficiency). - Helion’s high‑beta FRC creates charged particles that directly induce electrical currents, allowing **direct‑drive generators** with far higher efficiency and no large thermal plant. - This also aligns well with data‑center power needs, which prefer stable DC or high‑frequency AC rather than steam‑based power. ### Engineering Challenges and Solutions - **Ultra‑fast switching:** Reversing magnetic fields in sub‑microsecond intervals requires gigahertz‑speed programmable logic and fiber‑optic control. - **Massive currents:** Systems handle hundreds of mega‑amps; thousands of parallel solid‑state switches are coordinated in real time. - **Diagnostics:** High‑speed cameras, spectroscopy, Rogowski coils, and real‑time fiber‑optic monitoring capture plasma behavior on µs timescales. - **Simulation:** Multi‑scale codes (MHD fluid models, particle‑in‑cell, SPICE circuit sims) guide design, while AI/ML accelerates parameter sweeps. - **Manufacturing philosophy:** Use off‑the‑shelf components, modular magnet stacks, and rapid prototyping (even sourcing used vacuum pumps from eBay) to keep costs low and iteration fast. - **Team composition:** Roughly half the staff are hands‑on technicians and machinists; the other half are scientists and engineers, enabling rapid build‑test‑learn cycles. ### Roadmap and Timeline - Helion has built seven prototype generations (named after coffee sizes: IPA, Grande, Venti, Trenta, etc.), each scaling up temperature, magnetic field, and fusion yield. - In 2023 Helion signed a power‑purchase agreement with Microsoft to supply a fusion‑generated grid for a data‑center, targeting **first electricity delivery by 2028**. - The long‑term vision is a “Gigafactory” of fusion generators producing 50‑MW units on the scale of a single acre, far smaller than the thousands of acres required for equivalent solar farms. ### Geopolitical and Societal Impact - Fusion fuel (deuterium) is globally available, eliminating the geopolitical leverage of uranium enrichment and reducing proliferation risks. - Fusion plants cannot be weaponized; the reaction does not produce the fissile material needed for bombs, and even a pure‑fusion bomb would still require a fission primary. - Abundant, cheap clean power could decouple energy supply from oil, gas, and coal politics, and enable massive AI compute, desalination, vertical farming, and deep‑space propulsion. - The technology could help humanity approach a **Kardashev Type I** civilization—producing energy comparable to the solar flux on Earth. ### Outlook and Philosophy - The team emphasizes a "build fast, iterate often" mindset, treating fusion more like an electrical‑engineering product than a decades‑long physics experiment. - Despite skepticism, the physics of fusion is sound; the remaining hurdles are engineering, manufacturing, and scaling. - Fusion’s ultimate promise: a clean, safe, virtually limitless energy source that reshapes civilization, from powering AI‑driven economies to enabling interstellar travel. --- *This article condenses a lengthy podcast interview with Helion Energy CEO David Kirtley, covering the science, technology, safety, economics, and future implications of commercial nuclear fusion.* Fusion, once dismissed as perpetually out of reach, is now on the cusp of becoming a practical, clean energy source thanks to Helion Energy's pulsed magneto‑inertial approach. By turning fusion directly into electricity, ensuring inherent safety, and leveraging abundant deuterium fuel, Helion aims to deliver low‑cost baseload power within the next few years—potentially reshaping global energy markets, reducing geopolitical tensions, and unlocking the next wave of technological progress.
Full Transcript

- The following is a conversation
with David Kirtley, a nuclear
engineer, expert on nuclear
fusion, and the CEO of
Helion Energy, a company working
on building nuclear fusion
reactors and have made incredible
progress in a short period of time
that make it seem possible, like
we could actually get there
as a civilization. This is
exciting because nuclear
fusion, if achieved commercially,
will solve most of our energy
needs in a clean, safe way,
providing virtually unlimited clean
electricity. The problem is
that fusion is incredibly
difficult to achieve. You need
to heat hydrogen to over 100
million degrees Celsius and
contain it long enough for
atoms to fuse. That's why the
joke in the past has been
that fusion is 30 years
away and always will
be. Just in case you're
not familiar, let me
clarify the difference between
nuclear fusion and nuclear
fission. By the way, I believe according
to the excellent subreddit post by
pmgoodbeer on this, the
preferred pronunciation
of the latter in the US
is nuclear fission, like
vision. And in the UK and other
countries is nuclear fission, like
mission. I prefer the nuclear
fission pronunciation because
America. So today's nuclear power plants
use nuclear fission.
They split apart heavy
uranium atoms to release energy.
Fusion does the opposite. It
combines light hydrogen atoms
together, the same reaction that
powers the Sun and the
stars. The result is that
it's clean fuel from water, no
long-lived radioactive waste,
inherently safe because a fusion
reactor can't melt down. If
something goes wrong, the reactor
simply stops. And there's
no carbon emissions. On
a more technical side,
Helion uses a different
approach to fusion than has
traditionally been done. Most
fusion efforts have used
tokamaks, which are these giant
donut-shaped magnetic containment
chambers. Helion uses
pulsed magnetoinertial
fusion. David gets into
the super technical
physics and engineering details
in this episode, which was
fun and fascinating. I
think it's important to
remember that for all of
human history, we've been
limited by energy scarcity.
And every major leap in
civilization, agriculture,
industrialization, information
age, came in part from
unlocking new energy
sources. If someone is
able to solve commercial
fusion, we would enter a new
era of energy abundance that
fundamentally changes what's possible
for us humans. I'm excited for the
future, and I'm excited for super
technical physics podcast episodes.
This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support
it, please check out our sponsors in the
description where you can also
find links to contact me, ask
questions, give feedback,
and so on. And now, dear
friends, here's David Kirtley. Let's start
with the big picture. What is nuclear
fusion, and maybe what is nuclear
fission? Let's lay out the basics.
- So fusion is what powers the
universe. Fusion is what happens in
stars and it's where the
vast amount of energy
that we use today here on Earth
comes from the process of
fusion. It also is what
powers plants. And those
plants become oil, and those
become fossil fuels that
then powers the rest of
human civilization for
the last 100 years. And so fusion really
underpins a lot of what has enabled us as
humans to go forward.
However, ironically, we
don't do it actively here on
Earth to make electricity
yet. And so fundamentally,
what fusion is, is
taking the most common elements in the
universe: hydrogen and lightweight
isotopes of hydrogen and helium,
and fusing those together to
make heavier elements.
In that process, as you
combine atomic nuclei and
form heavier nuclei, those
nuclei are slightly lighter
than the sum of the
parts. And that comes from a lot of
the details of quantum mechanics
and how those fundamental
particles combine and interact.
We also talk about the strong
nuclear force that holds the
atomic nuclei together as one of
the fundamental forces involved in
fusion. But that mass defect, E=MC²,
we know from Einstein, is also
energy. And so, in that process,
a tremendous amount of energy is
released. And the actual reactions, I think,
is a lot more interesting than simply it's a
little bit lighter, and therefore, energy
is released. But that's the fundamental
process in fusion as you're
bringing those lightweight atomic
nuclei, those isotopes
together. Fission is the exact
opposite, where you're taking the
heaviest elements in the universe:
uranium, plutonium, things
that are so heavy and have so
many internal protons and neutrons
and electrons, that they're
barely held together at all.
They're fundamentally unstable or
radioactive, and those elements
are very close to falling
apart. And as they do that,
if you take a uranium
235 or a plutonium 239
nucleus, and you add
something new, usually it's a
neutron, a sub-atomic particle that's
uncharged, that unstable, that
very large nuclei will then break
into pieces. Many pieces, a whole spectrum
of pieces. But if you add up all of those
pieces, they also have
slightly less mass than the
initial one did, the initial
uranium or plutonium. And in that
process, again, E=MC², a
tremendous amount of energy is
released. There's a very
famous curve in atomic
physics, fusion or fission, looking
at the periodic table. Going from the
lightest elements, hydrogen, to the heaviest
elements, those uranium, plutonium,
and others. And fusion happens
up to iron. Iron is the
magical point in between
where lighter elements than
iron fuse together, and
heavier elements fission
or are fissile and break
apart and release energy.
I think about and I
look at that process in
stars, in that our star is
fundamentally an early stage
star that's burning just hydrogens.
But when it burns and does
fusion, those hydrogens
combine into heliums, and
later stage stars can then burn those
heliums and they can fuse those
together to form even heavier elements
and carbons. And those carbons can fuse
together and form heavier
elements. And that
whole stellar process is something
that inspires us at Helion
to think about what are
fusion fuels, not just the
simplest ones, but more advanced fusion
fuels that we see in stars throughout the
- Okay, so there's a million things I want to
say. First, zooming out to the biggest possible
picture, if you look across
hundreds of millions, billions of
years, and all the, my opinion, alien
civilizations that are out there,
they're going to be powered
likely by fusion. So our advanced intelligent
civilization is powered by fusion in that
the sun is our power plant.
Then the other thing is the physics. Again,
very basic, but you said E equals MC squared
a couple times. Can you
explain this equation?
- E=MC squared is a fundamental relationship that a
patent clerk, Einstein, discovered and unlocked
an entire new realm of physics
and engineering and has shown us
engineering and has shown us
atomic physics, what happens inside the nucleus,
and unlocked our understanding of the universe
and paved the way for many of the
physics advancements that came after.
That we think about mass as these particles. But
in reality, at the same time, they're energy,
and there's a direct quantitative relationship
between how much energy is in all of that mass.
And in fact, all of the energy that is released,
even by atomic physics, certainly in atomic
reactions, is E=MC squared. I think most
people have heard of and are used to this.
But also in chemistry and in chemical bonds,
there is a change in mass. When you take a
those chemical bonds, there is a
change in mass. When you take a
hydrogen and an oxygen and you burn them and you
combine them into water, there's a change in mass.
Now, that change per atom and per molecule is
actually so small that it's extremely hard to
molecule is actually so small
that it's extremely hard to
measure, but it's still there. That's the energy
that is released, and you can quantify that.
We use units of electron volts as a unit of what
is the energy in atomic processes or chemical
processes.
- Can you also just speak to the different fuels
that you mentioned, both on the fusion and
fission side?
...fission side? So uranium, plutonium for the
fission, and then hydrogen isotopes for the fusion?
- So for fission, uranium and plutonium, we don't
make those nuclei. Those, right now for humanity,
make those nuclei. Those,
right now, for humanity,
those have been made in the primordial
universe through super-supernova and Big Bang
and the initial formation of the universe where
matter was created. And so we dig those up.
We dig up uranium, plutonium out of the ground.
And in fact, most plutonium we make from
uranium, and we can talk about how to enrich
uranium if we want to go down that road.
But that's how we get those molecules and nuclei.
For fusion materials, hydrogenic species, or
hydrogens are primordial in the universe.
Also, only the most common things that are in
primordial in the universe. Also
only the most common things
the universe. The suns and stars are made up
of hydrogens and heliums, and so the vast
majority of atoms in the
universe still are hydrogen.
- So the basic fuel for fission is already
in the ground, and then the basic fuel
for fusion is everywhere.
- Is everywhere, and we particularly
use a type of hydrogen
called deuterium, which
is a heavier isotope
of hydrogen. Hydrogen is
typically one proton and one
electron, atomic mass of one.
Deuterium is an atomic mass of
two, which is a proton, which is a
charged particle, and it has a neutron in
its nucleus, which is an uncharged
particle. And so that's deuterium.
As the fuel now, deuterium is also
found in all water on Earth, in the
water I'm drinking right now. It's in my
body. It's in Coca-Cola. It's everywhere.
And it's safe and clean and one of
those fundamental particles that was
born in the cosmos, and
we estimate that in
seawater here on Earth, we have,
if we powered at our current
use of electricity, all
of humanity on fusion,
somewhere between 100 million
years and a billion years of
fuel in hydrogen and
deuterium here on Earth.
- And how is that stored mostly?
- Mostly that's just in water.
Mostly it's a mix of, we
call this actually heavy water, where
you have normal water that you're
used to. We talk about and you
learn in school, is H2O, where
there's two hydrogens and
oxygen in a nucleus in the
molecule. And deuterium,
or heavy water, is
D2O, two deuteriums and
an oxygen. In reality,
it's actually an interesting
mix where you have some
HDO, so a mix of hydrogen and
deuterium. You also have other hydrogen
but also in chemistry and in chemical bonds, that
in those chemical bonds, there is a change in mass.
- ...fission side? So uranium, plutonium for the fission, and then hydrogen
isotopes for the fusion? In terms of fuel, is that correct to say?
- That's correct to say at today's power
level. I think what's interesting is
the idea that as we deploy the
same power source that powers the
universe here on Earth
as humans, can we do
more? Can we have access to much
more electricity, and much more
energy and do really interesting
things with that? And still there's
large amounts, millions and
millions of years of power even at
much higher output power
levels for humanity.
- Yeah, so the moment we
start running out of
hydrogen and helium, that means
we're doing some pretty incredible
things with our technology.
And then that technology is
probably going to allow us to propagate out into
the universe and then discover other sources.
Because you can also get
it on other planets.
Whatever planets have water, it looks
more and more likely like a lot of
them do. What an incredible future, just
out into the cosmos, nuclear power plants
everywhere. Okay, so to linger on
some of the technical stuff, you said
strong nuclear force. So
how exactly is the energy
created? So how does the E=MC
squared, the M go to the E infusion?
- So in fusion, you take these
lightweight isotopes like
hydrogen and deuterium, and as
you combine them and get them
closer and closer together, some really
interesting fundamental physics happens.
So first these atomic nuclei are
charged. They have an electric
these atomic nuclei are
charged. They have an electric
charge, and they like charges
repel. And I think everybody is
familiar with that, where you take two
positive charges, and you try to push them
together, and the electromagnetic
force between them repels them. So
you have a force that's actually
pushing against them. So in fusion,
you work to get your fuel very hot,
very, very high temperatures, 100
million degree temperatures. And
temperature really is kinetic energy. It's
motion, it's velocity. So that
these particles are moving so
fast that even though they're coming
together and there's this repulsive
electromagnetic force, they can still come
close enough that another force comes into
play, which is the strong
force. And then once you get
within a very close distance
on the order of the scale of
those nuclei themselves, of those atomic
nuclei. So the tiniest thing you could
imagine, and probably way smaller
than that, these particles then are
attracted to each other and
they combine and they fuse
together. At that point, you create
heavier atomic nuclei that have a
slightly less mass, slightly
less total mass in the system,
and that mass equals MC squared as energy.
- So extremely high
temperature, extremely high
speed. Maybe that's one of the
other differences also with fusion
and fission, is just the amount
of temperature required for the
reactions. Is that accurate to say?
- Yeah, and I think fundamentally
it's that in a lot of ways,
fusion is hard and fission is easy.
Nuclear fission happens at room
temperature, that this uranium
and plutonium is so likely
to break apart already that
simply the adding of one of
these neutrons, one extra
particle will then break it
apart and release energy.
And if you have a lot of them
together, it will create a chain
reaction. Fusion, that doesn't
happen at all. Fusion is actually
really hard to do. You have to overcome
those electromagnetic forces to have a
single fusion reaction happen. And
so it takes things like in our sun
we have what is called gravitational
confinement, where the
gravity, literally the
mass of the fuel itself is
pulling to the center of the sun
and it's pulling. And so there's a
large force that's pulling all
that fuel together and holding it
and confining it together such
that it gets close enough and
hot enough for long enough
that fusion happens.
- And then we have to figure out if we're
building fusion reactors, we have to
figure out how to do that confinement
without the huge size gravity of the sun.
- That's right. Obviously, the sun
is vastly larger than Earth, and
so we can't do that same
process here on Earth.
- Yet. No, I'm just kidding. All right.
- But we have other forces we get to use.
We can use the electromagnetic force,
which the sun doesn't get to
do, to apply those forces.
And I actually want to take a pause
right there and point out a word.
Historically, we've used the word reactor
around fusion, but I don't think that's
right. And for me, we're really
careful about this terminology.
When we look to how that word
is defined, and we can look
to how the experts define it, it
doesn't really apply to fusion.
So the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, the NRC, defines
reactor as, I have it
right here, "A nuclear
reactor is an apparatus
other than an atomic weapon,
designed or used to sustain
nuclear fission in a
self-supporting chain reaction."
And there's two big parts to
that. That one, fission
reaction. Obviously,
fusion is not that, and we've talked
about why, but also the self-sustaining
part. In that a reactor is
self-sustaining, you take
your hands off of it and it keeps
going. In fusion, that doesn't
happen. And we know because we have
to do it every day and it's really
hard to do. And so we actually
use the word generator, because
we don't talk about, for instance, a
natural gas reactor, is that if you
stop putting in fuel, it turns
off. And the same thing happens in
fusion. And so we're pretty
careful about making sure
we talk about that as a generator where
you're putting in fuel, you're getting
electricity out. And then when
you stop putting in fuel, it just
shuts off. And you can go even one step
further and say, "What am I going to do with
this fusion that powers the universe? And
what does humanity want out of this?"
And what we want is electricity.
We don't simply want a set of
reactions or even heat and
energy. That's great, but what
I really want is electricity.
- And yeah, we'll talk about the technical
details of one of the big benefits of
the linear design of the approach
that you do is you get to electricity
directly as quickly as possible.
And some of the other alternatives,
have an intermediate step, and
those again, are technical details,
but let me still linger on
the difference between...
fusion and fission. What are some
advantages at a high level of nuclear
fusion as a source of energy?
- fundamentally as a source of energy.
In fusion, you're taking these
lightweight isotopes, you're bringing
them together, you're releasing energy,
and that energy is in the
form of charged particles.
It's already in the form of
electricity. Fusion itself has
electricity built into it
without a lot of the steam or
thermal system requirements. And so,
that's a really nice fundamental
benefit of fusion itself.
Also, this reaction
that's really hard to do turns
itself off, so you end up with that
fusion is fundamentally safe, and
that's really a key requirement of
any industrial system is that it
turns itself off and is safe.
You turn the key off on your car,
you know it's going to turn off.
- I guess the flip side of that, just stating
the obvious, but it's nice to lay it out.
nice to lay it out. For nuclear fission, it's
a chain reaction, so it's hard to shut off,
reaction, so it's hard to shut off, and
it works by boiling water into steam,
by boiling water into steam, which spins
turbines and produces electricity.
and produces electricity. Can you talk through
this process in a nuclear fission reactor?
process in a nuclear fission reactor?
- In a nuclear fission reactor,
you put enough of this
fissile material, uranium or
plutonium, together such that
as these unstable molecules,
these unstable atoms
crack open and break apart,
they release heat, that the
component parts of those are
actually quite hot. And so
not only are the component parts that the uranium breaks into,
and it's a whole spectrum of different atoms and atomic nuclei,
and it's a whole spectrum of different atoms and
atomic nuclei, are hot, but it also releases neutrons.
are hot, but it also releases neutrons. It also
releases more of these uncharged particles.
more of these uncharged particles. And if you do it right,
this fissile material will be next to other fissile material,
this fissile material will be next to other fissile material,
and so that neutron will then go and bombard another
and so that neutron will then go and bombard another
uranium nucleus, again opening that up and releasing
uranium nucleus, again opening that up and
releasing more heat and more of these neutrons.
more heat and more of these neutrons. And that's how you
have those reactions of a self-supporting chain reaction,
those reactions of a self-supporting chain
reaction, and that chain reaction then continues.
and that chain reaction then continues. People design
fission reactors such that you have just the right balance
fission reactors such that you have just the right balance of
enough neutrons are made such that the reaction is continuing,
of enough neutrons are made such that the reaction is
continuing, but not so many neutrons are made that it speeds up.
because you don't want it to speed up.
- And there's some kind of cooling mechanisms also? Like,
that's part of the art and the engineering of it?
and the engineering of it?
- And then the key is at the same time, you want to make sure that
the whole thing is in water, is typically the cooling fluid.
whole thing is in water, is typically the cooling fluid. There's some
more advanced fission reactors that have different cooling fluids,
advanced fission reactors that have different cooling fluids,
but water typically, where then that absorbs that both the heat
but water typically, where then that absorbs that both the heat and
those extra neutrons. And so you use the water and the fluid to then
extra neutrons. And so you use the water and the fluid to then
run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation
run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation
and output electricity through your steam turbine.
and output electricity through your steam turbine. You end up
with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water,
up with complicated systems of flowing liquids
and flowing water, balancing the heat.
balancing the heat. A lot of fission reactor design
comes from that thermal balance of keeping this reaction
comes from that thermal balance of keeping this reaction
going, making sure it doesn't speed up, because that's
going, making sure it doesn't speed up, because that's an
uncontrolled chain reaction, which you would not want,
an uncontrolled chain reaction, which you would not want, and
balancing the cooling and the output of getting the water out of it.
want, and balancing the cooling and the
output of getting the water out of it.
- So we should say that for reasons you already
laid out, maybe you can speak to it a bit more,
maybe you can speak to it a bit more, is nuclear
fusion is much safer. So there's no chain
is much safer. So there's no chain reaction
going on. You can just shut it off.
You can just shut it off. But it should also be said that as
far as I understand, the current fission nuclear reactors
as far as I understand, the current fission
nuclear reactors are also very safe.
are also very safe. I think there's a perception that
nuclear fission reactors are unsafe, they're dangerous.
fission reactors are unsafe, they're dangerous. And
if you just look empirically at the statistics,
look empirically at the statistics, that the
fear is not justified by the actual safety data.
by the actual safety data. Can you
just speak to that a little bit?
- Yeah. We've been talking about the reaction
processes themselves, but I think fundamentally,
fundamentally, let's take a step back and look a little
broader and say, "Let's look at what we care about,"
look at what we care about, which is the power plant, making
electricity. And I look at this from a nuclear engineer's point of view.
this from a nuclear engineer's point of view.
I spent a lot of years studying these systems.
studying these systems. And modern fission
reactors, I believe, are engineered to be safe.
believe, are engineered to be safe. They're engineered
in ways where as those reactions maybe speed up
where as those reactions maybe speed
up and those systems get hotter,
and those systems get hotter, they actually are built
to expand and cool down passively and natively.
cool down passively and natively. And there's protection
systems in place that modern systems are quite safe
place that modern systems are quite
safe from an engineering perspective.
perspective. And so I believe that we have figured
out how to build nuclear fission reactors in a way
build nuclear fission reactors in a way where
the engineering of the power plant is safe.
plant is safe. I would say that I look back
at the history of what we've built over time,
of what we've built over time, and the challenge
hasn't come to the engineering actually.
engineering actually. I believe the engineers have
solved these problems. The problem comes from humans,
The problem comes from humans, and the problem
comes from other things around nuclear power.
comes from other things around nuclear power. You
have to enrich that uranium to put it in a plant.
enrich that uranium to put it in a plant. And the
plant's safe, but you had to enrich that uranium,
but you had to enrich that uranium, and that is
some of the problem. Or a plant is designed to run
Or a plant is designed to run for a certain number of
decades safely, but do we run it longer than that?
but do we run it longer than that? And so those
are where I think the real challenges happen,
the real challenges happen, is more with the humans around these
systems than the engineering of the power plants themselves.
than the engineering of the
power plants themselves.
- Well, I have to ask then, what do you think happened
in Chernobyl? What lessons do we learn from Chernobyl
What lessons do we learn from Chernobyl nuclear disaster
and maybe also Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents?
Fukushima accidents? I think you're suggesting
that it has to do with the humans a bit.
humans a bit.
- So with Chernobyl and Fukushima, I actually
put Three Mile Island in a different category.
in a different category. In fact, some of the recent news in the
last year is that we're gonna be restarting Three Mile Island,
year is that we're gonna be restarting Three Mile Island,
because there's such a need for clean base load power.
such a need for clean base load power. So that's actually
a very interesting other topic we should talk about,
interesting other topic we should talk about, is
why and how we're doing that. But more than that,
But more than that, going back to the accidents that
did happen in both of those systems, you can point to
in both of those systems, you can point to the human failure
rather than the engineering failures of those systems.
the human failure rather than the engineering failures
of those systems. That in Fukushima specifically,
That in Fukushima specifically, there were multiple nuclear
fission reactors on the same site that successfully
reactors on the same site that successfully kept
running through the tsunami, totally successfully,
the tsunami, totally successfully, and were only
later shut down for more political reasons.
more political reasons. But the old one, the oldest
of them that had been on site for long periods,
them that had been on site for long periods, and maybe, maybe
too long, I think some experts have looked at this in the past
I think some experts have looked at this in the past
was where some of the problems actually happened.
was where some of the
problems actually happened.
And so, I look to that less as a failure
of the engineering of the power plants,
engineering of the power plants, and
more of the humans around those systems.
around those systems. That we should be operating these
plants as designed, and then I believe they're safe.
these plants as designed, and then I believe they're safe.
And that gets to some of the atomic weapons questions
And that gets to some of the atomic weapons questions
that I think are the other part around nuclear reactors
are the other part around nuclear reactors and
fission reactors that are concerning for me.
- Can you speak to those? So, maybe this is a good place
to also lay out the difference between nuclear fission
lay out the difference between nuclear fission
power plants and nuclear fission weapons,
power plants and nuclear
fission weapons, and maybe
also nuclear fusion power plants
and nuclear fusion weapons. Like,
what are the differences here?
- Fusion power plants can't be used to
make nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, the
processes in fusion aren't the
same processes that happen
in nuclear bombs and nuclear
weapons. It's actually one reason
I started in fusion, and most of our team
thinks about the mission of fusion, of
delivering clean, safe electricity, is
it also can't be used to
make weapons. And I think
that's a little bit of a distinction
from traditional nuclear
fission reactors, is that
while I totally believe as a
nuclear engineer, we can build power
plants now that are safe, that
aren't going to have reactions.
They use a fuel, uranium
and plutonium, that can
be used to make nuclear
weapons. We know that if you
take enough fissile material
together, enough uranium and
plutonium, put it in a small volume,
that it will not just create a reaction,
but it will create a supercritical
reaction that will then continue and grow and
release a tremendous amount of energy all at
once. And that is a bomb. That is
a bad situation, and that is what
we want to avoid. A lot of the key is
recognizing that even though there are
things called fusion bombs,
the H-bomb, the hydrogen
bomb, the hydrogen bomb has
uranium in it. It's still a
fission bomb. So, fundamentally,
this works because you
have a fission reaction, a primary, and
that creates radiation that induces a
fusion reaction with a small
amount of fusion fuel that
then boosts that uranium
reaction again. And so
most of the energy, in fact 90%
of the energy in an H-bomb,
is all still from the uranium
reactions themselves.
- Yeah, I think people call it a
nuclear fusion bomb, a hydrogen
bomb, but really it's still a
nuclear fission bomb. It's just that
fusion is a part of the process to make it
more powerful, but you still need, like you
said, the uranium fuel. So it's
not accurate to think of it as a
fusion bomb really.
- And if you take away that
fissile material, that nuclear
fission reaction, the fusion
reaction doesn't happen at all.
In fact, researchers have
over the decades tried to make
an all fusion bomb and been very
unsuccessful at it. The physics and the
engineering don't support it can ever
happen with our understanding today.
The topic we're talking about is more
broadly called proliferation,
and this is the creation
of nuclear weapons in the
world and the distribution of
those weapons. And something
we know as physicists and
engineers is that fusion
can't be used to make
nuclear weapons. We know
that. But that is not
sort of widely known. And part
of what we went out to do
is work with the proliferation
experts in the world, the people who
work to prevent nuclear weapons from
being made, being created, being
shared throughout the world, because we know the
challenges, the geopolitical challenges that
happen. And we went to those
proliferation experts, and we were
worried they would have
the sort of the same
historical question of, like, "Well, the
word nuclear is in fusion, so therefore it
must be related." And,
and in fact, the total
opposite happened. What they
told us is, "Please, please go
develop fusion power plants
absolutely as fast as possible. The
world needs this." And the
proliferation experts were telling
us that otherwise people would
start enriching uranium throughout
the world, and we'd be building enriched
uranium power plants because we need
the electricity that's clean
and base load. But in those
processes, they'll be making fuel
that could be one day used for
atomic weapons, for nuclear weapons,
and they were worried that,
that the growth of this enriched
uranium, think about the
centrifuges, that having a lot more
centrifuges happening all over the
world would lead to more weapons,
at least the possibility of
it. And so they are pushing us
as fast as possible, go build
fusion generators and get them deployed
everywhere. Not just in the United States, but
all over the world so that
we're building fusion power
and that's meeting humanity's
needs, not this other thing. And
so I was really pleasantly surprised. We've
written a number of papers and worked with those
communities on this of
what does it mean, how is
fusion power safe and can't
be used for nuclear weapons.
- So, this might be interesting to
ask on the geopolitics side of
things. I have the chance to
interview a few world leaders coming
up. By way of advice, what
questions should I ask world
leaders to figure out the geopolitics
of nuclear, nuclear proliferation.
...nuclear weapons, nuclear fission power
plants, and nuclear fusion power plants?
What's the interesting, intricate
complexity there that you
could maybe speak to?
- The question I would want to ask is, "What
would you do if we could deliver for you
low-cost, clean, industrial scale, tens
or hundreds of megawatts of fusion power
that's low-cost, clean,
baseload and doesn't
have the geopolitical
consequences of uranium and
plutonium, of fissile
material, what would you do
there? How would that change
your view of the next 30 years?
- But also, there's a lot of geopolitics
connected to oil, natural gas-
...and other sources of energy which I
think are important in Saudi Arabia,
in the Middle East, in Russia. I mean,
all across the world. And that's interesting
too. So do you think actually if everybody has
nuclear fusion power plants, that
alleviates some of the geopolitical
tension that have to do
with energy, other energy sources?
- I certainly do, that the fuel
is in seawater all over Earth.
Everybody has deuterium.
And everybody has it.
And so you can't have a
monopoly on the fuel.
And no one can control the fuel and no one
can turn off the fuel, no one can cut a
pipeline. That just cannot
happen with fusion. And
so if we can deploy those plants
and we can deploy them quickly,
then it decouples the ability of any one
or any few countries to control energy.
- Okay, so let's sort of return to the
basic question, we already mentioned it a
little bit, but is nuclear fusion safe?
So the power plants that we're talking
about, fusion power plants, are they safe?
- Yes. Fusion power is
fundamentally safe. The
physics and the reactions
of the fusion system itself
means you don't have runaways. And so
we've talked about some of the human
factors around power plants and
power systems and industrial scale
systems. And that's something that
we build into the design of these
from today. We look at, "How
these systems might fail?" And in
fact, some of the analysis we do
is we did this analysis
for the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission over the last few years,
looking at how do you regulate
fusion power. As we're building the first
fusion power plant, we need to make sure we're
regulated safely. And so we
spent a lot of time doing the
technical case and the political
case in the United States, of how to
regulate fusion. And so the analysis
we did is assume you have a fusion
power plant that's operating. And
then at any one time, a meteor
strikes it. The whole thing is
vaporized. What is the impact of
that? So this is worse than you could
ever imagine an actual physical
scenario, but let's start
there. And the answer is, you
don't need to evacuate the
populace nearby the
fusion power plant. And
one of the keys, I think, that
I come to when I think about
this is the fuel. In that, in a fusion
generator, you are continuously feeding
in this hydrogen, these
deuterium fuels. And
at any one time in a Helion
fusion system, and most fusion
systems, you have one
second of fuel in that
system. And so what that means
is if you stop putting fuel into
that system, fusion just stops.
But what it also means is that
if something really catastrophic
happened and, for whatever
reason, you have all that fuel
that's not in the system. And
fusion is so hard to make happen.
You hit it with a meteor, you do
anything of that nature, and
fusion doesn't happen. That
hydrogen, that heavy water, that
deuterium, just goes back into the
environment safely and cleanly
without issue. And so that's the
fundamental safety mechanism of
fusion, and you can compare that
with other types of power
plants, oil or a coal power
plant. You might have a large pile of coal
that then catches fire and burns. And
it's not catastrophic, but you have a
large coal fire for a long time releasing
toxic fumes that you may have
to deal with. And in nuclear
power, in a fission power plant, you may
have several years of fuel sitting in the
core. And in that case, if something bad
happened, you have all that potential
energy for things to happen. But in
fusion, you have literally one
second of fuel at any time in the
system. And having a tank of deuterium,
which we have around all the time,
can't do fusion by itself. It
needs that complex system.
- I love that there's, like, a PowerPoint
going on in a secret meeting about
what happens if a meteor
hits a fusion power plant.
Okay, so that's really interesting. What
about the waste? What kind of waste
is there for fusion power plants?
- So the fusion reaction itself is
still fundamentally an atomic
reaction. And so during this
reaction, you do create ionizing
radiation. You create X-rays, you create
neutrons, and you create all these charged
particles. The charged particles
themselves for a fusion reaction are all
contained in the- the fusion system. And
the X-rays, similar to think
about a dentist office,
although a lot more than that,
but that type of same X-ray and
X-ray energy is absorbed by the fusion system.
But the thing we do care about is those
neutrons. And so we do have, in
a fusion system, activation.
We have, during its operation, neutrons
are made and leave, and so we have
to shield these fusion systems
during their operation.
and so this is very similar, in fact,
this is a lot of the work we did with the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission over
the last number of years. That
there was a landmark agreement that
happened for the NRC that then
was codified into law last year
called the ADVANCE Act, which
is really powerful because it says
for the very first time-... how the
US government, leading the way on
this, which I'm really proud of, will
regulate fusion. And this
gets into a little bit of the
details, but the way the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
regulates nuclear things
in the United States
is in these different sets
of statutes. And nuclear
is in these different sets of statutes. And nuclear reactors
are regulated under something called Part 50. And there's a
lot of variety of the regulatory
language around that, but most of it is
to handle special nuclear materials,
uranium and plutonium. But
fusion is not. Fusion is regulated
under something called Part 30.
And Part 30 is how hospitals
are regulated, particle
accelerators, other types
of irradiators where as
they're operating, you have very high energy
particles, ionizing radiation, and you have
to protect operators from it. And
you have to shield them, and so we
build concrete shields. And if you came
and visited Helion, you would see plastic,
Plastic, borated polyethylene
and concrete shielding,
To protect operators and equipment from
the fusion reactions while they're
happening. But again, you turn them
off, and those fusion reactions
stop. And that's really the key. There's
a funny story related to that. We,
We've been building fusion
systems that do fusion a
long time, and a- at
some level, we- they got
powerful enough doing enough fusion, we
started building these shields and- and
shielding them like a particle
accelerator. And I went
to the regulatory bodies
that regulate Part
30. This is in Washington state. It's the
Department of Health. And so I went to
the Department of Health and said, "Here's
an application for a fusion generator
shielding permit as- as
a particle accelerator."
And uh, the very first question I
got asked was, "Great, where do the
patients go?" Because the
standard form had a patient,
As a hospital, the patient dose for
the particle accelerator, and then the
shielding.
And we talked all about the shielding and the
operators, which is very similar for a Helion system.
We said, "No, no patients at all. No
one's inside this thing. Our goal is to
generate electricity one day."
This was a lot of years ago.
And we were able to go through and
work with the state agencies to
license these fusion particle
accelerators. We were, as far as we know,
the first licensed fusion system ever as
a particle accelerator for those first
systems. The first license
we had was in 2020.
We then have gone on and now license
several of our fusion systems that we've
built that do fusion, both the shielding
as well as some of the fuel processes.
- So high level, what are the
different ways to build a nuclear
fusion power plant? Can you explain
what a tokamak is, what a stellarator
is, and what's the linear
approach that Helion is using?
- So there are a number of ways to do
fusion. And fundamentally, in all fusion
approaches, you're trying to do
the same fundamental physical
process, which is take these
lightweight isotopes, heat them up, so
that they can move at high
velocity, over 100 million
degrees, bring enough of
them together. We call it
density. Enough of them together
in a certain volume, so that you
have reactions happening at
a higher rate, and keep them
together long enough that they are
able to collide into each other and do
fusion and release energy. That's
the fundamental core. Now,
how you do that, how you bring those
particles together, how you hold them
together long enough, there's a wide
range of technologies that, as humans,
we've been exploring since the 1950s.
And I think about several
main categories. If you look
at the fusion funding out there, government
funding in the world, private funding
actually has quite a different
profile, which is an interesting
thing to talk about. But in public funding, in
federal funding in the United States, there's
two mainline programs
called inertial fusion and
magnetic fusion. And in
inertial fusion, what
you're trying to do is bring
together and push together by a
variety of means, physical means,
those particles. You push them
together. The most common is
called laser inertial fusion.
Our colleagues at the National Ignition
Facility did this really well and
made world records in the last few years
for being able to demonstrate you can do
this and do it at scale. Where
you take very high power
lasers and pulse them together
to combine them to do
fusion for a pulse, for a
very short period of time.
Nanoseconds, billionths
of a second. The other
extreme, and you mentioned
tokamaks and stellarators.
Stellarators are actually my
favorite. So we'll talk about those.
As a graduate student in fusion, the
stellarator is the first thing you learn about.
Because there's a mathematical solution
for a stellarator that solves perfectly.
And you can write it out
and you can solve it, and
analytically, it's very
simple. Building one is very
hard. And so it's taken humanity a number
of decades to be able to build
stellarators and we can do it now
with the Wendelstein 7-X
that came online in the last
few years, being the premier
stellarator in the world.
- I should say, all the
different ways to do fusion
all just look so badass
in terms of engineering.
Creating this containment,
extremely high temperature,
high density. Everything's
moving super fast.
Everything is happening super fast. It's just
fascinating that humans are able to do it.
Like, there are certain things, accelerators
of that a little bit, but this is
even cooler, because you're generating
energy that can power humanity
with this machine. Anyway, can you
just speak a little bit more to the
inertial and the magnetic fusion systems?
- In a magnetic system, your goal is not to
push together those particles
as fast as possible. Your
goal is to hold on to them for as
long as possible. And to do that, we
use magnetic fields. So let's take a
step back. What is a magnetic field?
So in an electromagnet, there are a
variety of ways to make a magnetic field. One of
the most famous, I think everyone is familiar
with, is Earth itself.
Earth has what we call the
magnetosphere, which is the
magnetic protection that's
generated actually by the core
of the Earth. But we have a
magnetic field around the
Earth, and that magnetic
field protects us from
particles coming from
the galaxy, galactic cosmic
rays and solar particles that
would come to Earth. That magnetic field
when you run a compass, you see the
magnetic field from the Earth. So we know
it's happening. It's all over. But how we
generate it with electric currents
is a little bit different. And what
we do is that we have a loop of
wire, and the simplest way to think
about it is literally a round
loop. And in that loop, you have
electrons. You have electrical current that's
running. And when electrical current, this
is some of Maxwell's equations that
we discovered in the 1800s, that when
you have an electrical current in
a wire, it generates a magnetic
field inside that wire.
And so when you look
at fusion systems, you
always have these big
magnetic coils with large amounts of current.
We don't run a little bit of current.
In our systems, we have hundreds of
mega amps of current. If you think
about at your house, you have your
breaker box with 200 amps
or maybe a 400 amp breaker
box, and we run 100 million
amps of electrical current. So
massive amounts of electrical current
to be able to do this. So that
magnetic field that's
generated inside that magnetic
coil has some really special
properties, and we take advantage of
those properties to do fusion. And
some of those properties are not
intuitive. So here's one of my
favorites. When you have an
electromagnetic field, you have this
coil with electricity going around
it and you have a magnetic field
inside of it, and then you
have a test particle, a
charged particle, an electron
or an ion, which is, if you
imagine to generate this, I
have a coil with electrons moving around
it. But if I put one in the middle of
it, in this magnetic field, some
really interesting things happen.
That electron or that ion, that
charged particle is what's called
magnetized. And what
magnetized means is that it's
trapped on that field line. In
fact, even really more interesting
is that it oscillates around that
field line. And so the way I
think about this is if you think about the
Earth's magnetosphere again, and you think
about the charged particles, the
aurora, the northern lights, is a
charged particle trapped in the
Earth's magnetic field going around
the Earth's magnetic field. And in the same way,
in fusion, we do the same thing here on Earth,
but in a smaller direction where we
trap these particles on magnetic
fields, and they can go around and stay
trapped to that magnetic field line.
- How much of the physics
at this scale is understood here?
Like, how these systems behave
when you attract a magnetic field in this
way? Like, is this fundamentally now an
engineering problem, or is there a new
physics to be discovered about how the
system is behaving?
- In fusion, the physics we're
using is actually quite
old. The fundamental
electromagnetic physics is 1800s
physics. The fundamental atomic
physics is early 1900s. And
so the fundamental physics
of how these work is very
well understood. Putting them all
together into a power plant, that's
hard. You can do the
math. Every introductory
grad student does the math on a stellarator
and says, "This is all I need to
do. I just need to make a
magnetic coil in this very
complicated shape. And then
fusion will happen." However,
doing that in practice is
actually quite challenging.
- So maybe you could speak a little
bit more. So the stellarator and the
tokamak, what's the difference between
those two? They're both magnetic fusion
systems? And then what does Helion do?
- The tokamak and the stellarator
are both magnetic systems. Their
goal is to generate
this magnetic field and
hold onto the fusion fuel long
enough. Like I mentioned,
these charged particles are trapped on the
magnetic field. In fact, they're oscillating.
We call that a gyro orbit, is
the radius that they oscillate
around this magnetic field. And we've
been talking about atomic physics,
where everything is at this
nanoscale. But gyro orbits are
not. Gyro orbits for these fusion
particles are measured in inches.
And so they're in, on a
scale that we can see and
measure and understand
really intuitively. And in a
magnetic system, your goal is to simply
trap as many of these particles as
you can for long enough, and
heat them so they're hot
enough so that they bang into each other.
They collide enough that you're doing
fusion. And you're doing enough fusion
to overcome as fast as you're losing
those particles. And so that's what
happens when you put particles in a
magnetic field and you try to hold
onto it. The challenge is that it's
really hard to hold onto them long
enough. These particles are moving
around. They're moving at very high velocity,
millions of miles per hour. They're
colliding with each other and they're
getting knocked off and getting knocked
away. So we've talked about
inertial fusion, where you try
to confine a fusion plasma by crushing
it as fast as possible. And magnetic
fusion, where you just simply
have a magnetic field and your goal
is to hold onto it for as long as
possible. But there's another
way to do fusion, and
in some ways, it's one of the earliest
approaches for fusion that was
successful. As scientists and
engineers, maybe we're not too creative
with the terminology. We call the technique
We call the technique that Helion uses magneto
inertial fusion, because it does a little bit of both.
So to understand that, we can actually go back
in history a little bit and think about the
evolution of some of these approaches to
fusion. And so from our perspective, we
look at the technology
that we use as built on
physics experiments that were
very successful in the 1950s.
And in those systems,
the earliest pioneers of
fusion said, "I know, we
understand the physics.
We have to take these gases, heat
them to 100 million degrees, and then
confine them, push them together so
that fusion happens." And so, what
is the best way to do that? So some
of the earliest programs we call
them theta pinch. And what those
programs were, were a linear
topology, because we knew how to
build these magnets. It's called a
solenoid, where you take a series of
electric coils, you run electrical
current through them, that generates a
magnetic field. Great, so you have a magnetic
field. Now you add your fusion
particles. Okay? So you've added fusion
particles to this solenoid.
Here's the challenge. Those
particles, as they're sitting in that
magnetic field in this nice magnet,
escape. They leave out the ends, 'cause
there's nothing holding them in.
Great. So that makes sense.
And so that doesn't work,
okay? So then the next approach
is to say, "Well, one branch of
fusion said, 'Okay, well, to solve that,
why don't we take the solenoid and bend it
around? Let's just make it a big donut. So
as they're escaping, they go around and
around in a circle.' Great. That's a
great approach. And so one branch of
fusion went down that direction.
And that became, that evolved
into the stellarator and the
tokamak. Different ways of taking
those solenoids and wrapping them
around so that the plasmas go 'round and
'round in that magnetic field and are
held- those charged particles are held long
enough that fusion happens. But there's a
different way to do it. And so the
theta pinch was what was born in the
1950s of, "Take this magnetic
field and, oh, they're trying to
escape. Great. Let's not let
them escape. Let's close the
bottle-" Mm-hmm. "...let's close the ends."
And so we make the magnetic field much
stronger at the ends. This one was called
the mirror. And so the idea was that
the particles would bounce
in between. And that worked,
and they got hotter and hotter and hotter.
But guess what? As you kind of would imagine,
as this mirror topology,
this linear topology, the
pressure increased inside,
the particle pressure, the
particles tried to push back on the magnetic
field. They were trying to escape now.
They're trying, they're getting hotter and
hotter. And just as you imagine, hot gas in a
balloon tries to get out the ends,
you could not hold it tight enough
at the ends to keep those particles in. And
in fact, the problem is the hottest ones
were the ones that would escape. Mm-hmm. And so you do
a good job of heating it, and they'd all leave out the
ends. Okay? So then the next iteration
said, "Okay, well, why don't we just
not try to hold onto it very
long? Why don't we squeeze it?"
And so rather than just holding it
constantly, let's now crush it. So
we built this solenoid,
we pinched the ends, and
then we crushed it. And what
I mean by crushing it is
not actually, like, crushing any
magnets or changing the- the
topology or moving any
parts, but just rapidly
increasing the magnetic field. And so
going from a magnetic field that's
just holding it to now taking all
those particles, if you imagine they
if you imagine they were streaming around
together, and then rapidly increasing the magnetic field
so that those particles get closer and closer together.
So you increase the density. And
now fusion starts to really happen.
And now fusion starts to
really happen. But they
ended up hitting a technological
limit. So this is the part
that- that I look back and
I'm, I look at the pioneers
that, in 1958, there was
some pioneering work
done. And this was in
California, what later became
Livermore Labs. There was also
some work done at other national
labs too. These were all federally
funded programs to explore
this theta pinch topology. Can you just squeeze
the plasma down fast enough, hard enough?
plasma down fast enough,
hard enough? This was
1958. The transistor was sitting in the
laboratory, and they were
commuting, they were turning
on millions of amps of electrical current. And they
were doing it, we haven't talked about the time scales,
time scales, but they were
doing it in millionths of a
second: microseconds, megahertz
speeds. And this was in 1958.
No transistor, no CPUs, and no electrical
switches, none of the things that I take for
and and no electrical switches,
none of the things that I take for
granted every day. And so they
were able to show at that time the
highest performing fusion systems. They
got to temperatures... They didn't get to
100 million degrees, not quite then, but
they got to 50 million degrees. They were
outperforming everything else in fusion, but they
reached the technical limit where they just could not
build it anymore. And so they, the-
those pioneers, went in a different
direction, and they started down the laser
inertial path of saying like, "Okay, well, we
can't do these electromagnetic
pinches, but we
now have inv- this new thing has invented
the laser," which turns on in nanoseconds.
It's fast. It's interesting. Let's go
down that path. And it's not... You
have to fast-forward a couple
of decades to researchers
found with some of these theta pinches
when they're operated in a very specific
way, something else happened,
something new happened, and
that these plasmas where
before they squeezed them
very hard, and just like squeezing a tube
of toothpaste, they squirted out the ends.
Now it didn't squirt out the ends.
It actually pushed back. It stayed
confined. It stayed trapped inside
that linear topology. Even though
the ends were open, the
plasma didn't leave. And so
there was a large amount of programs of, like,
"What is happening here?" This is an accidental
discovery in plasma physics that
something new is happening. And
what we discovered is we now call
the field reversed configuration.
there's numerous programs
of FRC, field reversed
configuration programs both at
national labs. There's actually a
number of private companies now
of people building field reversed
configurations. And they have some
really unique properties, but
fundamentally, talking about the main difference,
I describe the solenoid with magnetic
fields throughout the center
of that volume, and plasma
trapped going back and forth. But some other
things can happen, which is really interesting.
really interesting. And what
they discovered early is if
they have field going in one
direction, so the plasma, the
so the plasma, the electrical
current is going around the loop
and the plasma is going back and
forth along this magnetic field line
inside that solenoid,
inside that theta pinch.
But then they change the
direction of the magnetic field.
And this is what we call field
reversal, and this is really the key
is that you start with the plasma going
in one direction, and then very rapidly,
you change the direction. You change and
reverse the direction of that field.
And something really interesting
happens, which is the plasma,
this fusion fuel, these charged
particles which are trapped
on the magnetic field lines
that are moving back and forth,
you change the direction. What that
means is that you're trying to take
that electrical current and that magnetic
field and reverse its direction,
flip it, but it can't flip fast
enough. The plasma is sitting there
and you can't move the particles.
And so what's really interesting is
what happens is that because
the particles can't move,
but you've now flipped the direction of
the magnetic field, you've inverted it.
Something really, really unique
happens, which is that the plasma
itself reconnects internally. And
so now what you're left with is
an outside magnetic field,
an electrical coil,
and inside, the plasma,
where before it was moving
along, it's now moving internally.
- Rapidly reversing the magnetic field,
plasma self-organizes into a closed field.
What? So how...
- It sounds wild.
- It's, it's... Yeah. So, first of all,
there's a million questions I have.
So one of them, what's rapidly? What
time scale are we talking about here?
- Mm-hmm. You have to reverse
the electrical current
faster than a millionth degree, which
is a very hot gas particle, can move.
- Okay.
- And so that means we have to do it on
the order of a millionth of a second.
- Wow.
- We have to do it in a
millionth of a second.
- Wow.
- And, and so in practice... this is hard.
And it's only, we can only do it now
because of semiconductor switching.
Because we can move things,
we can switch things.
Like the transistor in every CPU in
a computer switches at a gigahertz,
that means in a nanosecond, it's
switching in a billionth of a second.
And so now, which we didn't in the 1950s
when these theta pinches were invented,
but now we have the semiconductors
to be able to do that.
- The self-organizing plasma.
Can you just speak to that? What the
heck is it doing? How do we discover,
how do we understand the self-organizing
mechanism, the dynamics of the
plasma that's able to contain itself?
- So what I like to do is use an
analogy here: once you've made it,
it's actually somewhat straightforward
to understand. Getting to it
is tricky, and how they discovered
it the first time is absolutely
amazing. But once you've made it, it's a
lot more straightforward to understand.
So it's a lot more
straightforward to understand.
In a magnetic coil, when you have
a round electrical coil, you have
electrical current
flowing in that coil. And
if you have a conductor, if you
have another, a metal inside that
coil, and this is called
Lenz's Law in one of the
Maxwell equations, is that as you
have electrons and you have current
flowing in that coil, an
equal and opposite electrical
current is induced in a piece
of metal nearby. This is
the same thing that happens in a transformer
where you have a primary on a transformer
and you have electricity flowing in it, and
you have a secondary where electricity flows
exactly the opposite direction. We
use this every day in our lives.
And so in this condition, you have
a conductor, an electrical conductor
where current can flow, and you
have an electrical current flowing on the
outside, electrical current flows on the
inside. And in that case, now, I've
described two pieces of metal.
Now let's go one step further and that inner
conductor is not a piece of metal anymore.
It's one of these high temperature
gases, this plasma, this charged
particles. So now you
have electrical current
flowing in the plasma. This is
really, really interesting. We
talked about these charges moving back
and forth. Well, moving electrical
charges is current. So in every plasma
condition we've talked about, the
tokamak, the theta pinch, the
stellarator, there's electrical
current flowing in the plasma.
But in the field-reversed
configuration, you have a lot of
electrical current flowing in the plasma,
massive amounts of it. And
that's the key. So you have
the center core where electrical
current is flowing in this
transformer, if you want to think about
it, primary and secondary. And here's the
craziest part of it. This electrical current
— Well, how did I describe a magnet?
An electromagnet is a loop that has
electrical current flowing in it that
generates a magnetic field.
And for a theta pinch,
and for a mirror and for a tokamak,
in that magnetic field, the plasma
gets trapped. But in an FRC, this electrical
current is the plasma. And that plasma
plasma then generates
its own magnetic field,
and it's then trapped on
its own magnetic field.
- That's fascinating.
- And that's the key. So, in your
tokamak, in your donut, in your stell-
in your funky donut, your stellarator-
...you make the magnets and
you trap your plasma in it.
In an FRC, you make the plasma,
which makes the magnets,
and it traps itself. The craziest part of
this, in my mind, is that we actually
see this in nature all the time.
If you look at the sun, we
see solar flares. In a solar
flare, we've all seen the pictures
of the photosphere of the
sun and this large arc of plasma coming
out. That plasma has current, electrical
current flowing in it, and then we see
this solar flare rip off of the sun.
And that solar flare then can
flow throughout and continue
into the solar system, and for a little
while anyway, it makes something called
a plasmoid. That plasmoid is
in fact electrical current
flowing in the plasma, generating
a magnetic field and holding it
for longer than it would otherwise.
So, we've observed these for 100
years, and we've known about these
plasmoids for a long time, and there's
researchers that have tried
intentionally to make them. But
fundamentally, that's what we
do every day, is make one of
these self-organized closed-field plasmas.
- in a more controlled way at this
rapid rate of one-millionth of a
second and being able to make sure
it's reliable, stable, and all
that kind of stuff. So, by the way,
how do you keep the thing stable?
- And there's the hard part, because
I just described a solar flare.
But, and yes, we've seen the pictures of
them, but we've also watched them, and they
appear. They fly away from the sun, and then
they go away, and that's not what we want in
fusion, right? We want to be able to
control this. That's the hard part of the
job. So, that's what we've
spent the last number
of years learning how to do,
ourselves and others, on these pulsed
closed-field FRC systems.
- Hm.
- Let's first talk about how to make them, and
then we'll talk about how to make them stable,
because they're two different things, and we
spend a lot of time on both. So, we talked about
timescales. You have to reverse the
field. You have to change the electrical
current in a millionth of a second.
So, how do you do that? So,
I've described this system as you
have a series of magnets. You have a
magnetic field on the outside, and then
on the inside of this, you have this
donut, this FRC that
has its own electrical
current. We didn't talk about this yet,
but it's generated a magnetic field,
and that magnetic field has pressure, and
this is the other thing that's really
interesting. We talked
about how this theta pinch
compresses a magnetic field.
It applies a pressure
on the outside. But the
plasma itself has a pressure
on the inside, and it has both a particle
pressure, literally the particles
bouncing. Think about hot gas
in a balloon. The particles
expanding, the ideal gas law expanding and
contracting inside a balloon. But they also have a
magnetic pressure. The
electromagnetism is pushing
back, and I like to think
about this as the motor in a
Tesla. In your electric car, you have a
motor, an electric motor, and what
that motor has is a series of
windings. Those windings, you flow electrical
current, in this case from a battery.
Hit the gas, electricity flows from
the battery into the motor into those
windings, and it generates an
electromagnetic force. A Lorentz
force is what it's technically
called. This electromagnetic
force induces an electrical current on the
armature, on the shaft. This is
getting into the details, but in
the armature of an electrical motor,
that actually is what spins. So the
outside of a motor doesn't spin. You flow
electrical current through it, and the inside
does spin. That electromagnetic
force is what is spinning
that armature. In our case,
we're inducing an electrical
force in that electromagnet, and
that's putting an electrical current,
just like in the armature, into
that plasma. And we can use
that force to do interesting
things. So that electromagnetic
force can compress the fusion
plasma. It can expand the fusion
plasma. But here's the problem,
it's unstable. So this is something
you learn very early in
your graduate work as
a student in fusion, is you learn about
plasmas that are called high beta plasmas.
- So I keep seeing this plasma
beta thing everywhere. What is
this ratio of plasma field energy
to confining magnetic field
energy? Please explain.
- Plasma beta is the ratio of the magnetic
pressure to the particle pressure.
What that fundamentally means is
I talked about how you have a
magnetic field, and in that
magnetic field, plasma is
trapped on that magnetic field. But
it's not very well trapped. It can
escape. It can leave either down the
ends, it can freely travel,
or it can also travel
across the magnetic field.
And so we have a term called
plasma beta, which gives
us an understanding of how
well trapped that plasma is.
So, as you apply a magnetic
pressure, a magnetic field to
this plasma, it pushes back, and
does it push back a little or
does it push back a lot? And for
a field-reversed configuration,
in one of our plasmas, beta
is very close to one. In
fact, usually by definition,
one at any point in the system,
which means that every time I
apply a magnetic force on this
donut to compress it, the
plasma particles on the inside push back.
What's really interesting is you have an
equation for magnetic pressure, which is B
squared over 2μ0. The magnetic field
squared is the external magnetic
pressure. Any magnetic field
anywhere generates this
pressure. But the plasma
particles themselves also have a
pressure. This is the ideal gas law, and
we use the definition NKT: density,
Boltzmann constant, and temperature
for pressure. And in high beta,
they're the same. B squared
over two mu naught is NKT.
So for a known magnetic field, I know
the density and temperature of the
plasma is. Just to circle back
to it, when we talked about
fusion, we talked about it having
to be hot enough and dense enough.
And that's N and that's T.
So now I have a very clear
equation between magnetic field
and density and temperature of the
fusion fuel, and that's really
critical. All plasmas have
some— all fusion plasmas
have some beta, some number.
The FRC has one of the highest
betas, beta equal one. However, what
you also learn in school when you learn
about beta the first time, is you
learn that high-beta plasmas
are typically unstable.
And so the good way to think
about this is a tokamak
is an accelerator that
is stable, because those
plasmas that are going around in
the donut, there's a force on
that donut. But that plasma
donut is very well held by
all those magnetic fields, by all
those magnetic coils. If it tried to
move, it would be confined by
that magnetic coil. But in an
FRC, it's unconfined. So the
plasma is confined, but the whole
topology can do something that
is called tilt, is that this
whole plasma donut, because it's
under pressure, can just turn
over. The way I think about this
is, think about a motor is a good
example. An armature in the center
of your motor, you have a spinning
armature. You have this
spinning magnet on the
inside, and it is held by the main axis
of the magnet. It can't go anywhere. We
don't have that axis. We don't have any
mechanical things inside these fusion systems.
They're 100 million degrees. You can't
put any mechanical things inside
them, and so we have nothing to hold
onto it, and so it's unstable. So when you
learn about the FRC, that's the first thing
you learn, and it took us a
number of years to learn about
a parameter of how to make
them stable, and that's
pretty fundamental, but most
people who've heard of an
FRC haven't understood this
really key fact. So we have a
parameter we call S star
over E. And we're getting
really into the physics weeds here, but
- Let's go.
- it's really important, and the
good analogy here is a top.
Literally a top, a spinning top, and
so you have a top spinning on your
desk. You know that it'll spin for a little
while and then it will fall over. It is
unstable. However, if you spin it
fast enough, if you take a top and
you spin it fast enough with enough
angular momentum, enough angular
inertia into that system,
it'll stay upright even
though it wants to just fall
over, even though it's unstable.
And we do the same thing in an
FRC, is if you can drive it fast
enough, if you can add enough
kinetic energy and inertia to the
particles, it will stay
stable. However, you
can do another really key
thing. We are not limited now
to having a very skinny top. We
can actually make it much bigger.
So the good analogy here is if you have a
coin and you know you're spinning that coin,
if you spin it faster and faster,
it'll stay spinning longer.
However, eventually it'll slow
down and fall over. But if you
had a roll of duct tape, if you had
something thicker and heavier and
longer, and it's spinning around
that same axis, it'll stay spinning
even longer, both because of
the inertia and because of the
geometry. So we have this
parameter called S star over E. S
star is the hybrid kinetic parameter which
tells you how stable it is from that top
point of view, and the E,
which is the elongation of how
long it is. Maybe fortuitously, thank
you nature, gave us a win here,
which is that how we make these in these
long solenoids is naturally very, very
these long solenoids is
naturally very, very
long. And so we can build
these with a very long
lengths, and if we can drive
them fast enough and hard
enough and drive the ions to
move at very high velocities, we
can stabilize against those
instabilities and hold them
stable. And so we now know we
can design with a given S star
over E parameter, we can design
these for very long lives. The
theory of the systems we
make say that they should
last for a few microseconds at most.
Us and others in the field have been
able to make them last for thousands of
microseconds, thousands of times
what the stability criteria,
the basic criteria would tell you. And
so we know now how to do this, and
so we just design them
with this built into them.
- Can you explain a little bit more
of the S star over E? Are you
given that, or is that an emergent
thing? So like at which stage, is
that the result or the requirement?
- It's a great question. So
it is a requirement of the
system, is that you must design
it with this parameter in mind.
- Got it.
- The hard part is you have to
design it with S star over
E being satisfied the whole time.
- Right.
- And here's the extra trick here. S star
over E is also a measure of temperature.
- Oh boy.
- And, and, and, yup, we're, this, it
all comes back to temperature. The
hotter you make them
is the same thing, temperature as kinetic
energy, is the faster you're spinning.
So if you take your top and
you spin it faster, it's more
stable. But you gotta make it
hot, and so here's the trick.
How do you make something hot that's
starting cold? And it has to be hot by
definition, and so that's
part of the challenge
of what we do day-to-day, is getting
to these hot plasmas, and where
people have, other people have tried
to make FRCs and not been very
successful, is because they couldn't get it
hot enough fast enough, is it fell over,
it tilted, before it got hot.
And so we spend a lot of our
electrical engineering... In some ways, Helion is
more of an electrical engineering company than
a fusion company some
days focusing on how to
make the electronics fast
enough to be able to get it
hot enough soon enough that you
can keep it stable the whole time.
- So you're trying to reach 100 million
degrees. How do you get to that temperature
fast? And by the way, what can you say
to help somebody like me understand
what 100 million degrees is
like? It seems insane.
What does that world look
like? I guess just everything is
moving really fast. Like you said, you
can't put anything mechanical in there.
- Yeah, so a couple of key things
happened. So when gas is that
hot, there's... We talk about
the states of matter. You have
solids, where ice, it's
cold. The atoms are
now bound in a lattice structure
together. They're held
together. And then liquid, you've broken a
lot of that lattice structure. They can move
around. They have some kinetic energy, but
they're still pretty contained, they stay in the
bowl. Keep heating it, now
you're in gas. And now these
particles are free to move around. They're
bouncing off of each other all the
time, and you can keep heating it from
there, and that's where we talk about
some more phases of matter. We
can add a little bit more physics
here. We talk about rarefied
gases. When we think
about most gases that humans
interact with, they act like a
fluid. And what I mean by that is that
they're colliding with each other so
often that the particles at any one place,
here the air is roughly the same temperature
here the air is roughly the same
temperature as the air here. These
particles are bouncing off of each other
as if you've put a really hot one right
here, it would then cool enough that
all the air is roughly on the same
temperature. But you can be what is called
rarefied, and this is like space. This
is where now you have particles
moving around, but they don't collide
with each other very often. And so you can
have one very, very high energy particle
and very cold energy particle, and they may not
even touch each other, but maybe occasionally
they bang into each other, they collide, and
then they transfer energy. That's where we
call rarefied. And then you can go even hotter
than that, and that's where now the actual
atomic states, which has the
nucleus, which is a proton
and a neutron, and an electron gets so
hot, that electron gets energized and
then escapes, leaves the system.
And now they're charged. You have a
positive nucleus and a negative
electron floating out, and that
happens on the order of 10,000 degrees.
So way hotter than what we're used
to. But now, we're gonna go hotter.
We're gonna take this plasma and go even hotter.
What does that mean? At that point, a lot of
the way we think about temperature doesn't
really apply. The idea that you have these
random motion of particles,
because now they're all individual
particles moving at very high velocities. So
there really is a measurement of its velocity.
So there really is a
measurement of its velocity.
It's really a measurement of how
fast is that particle moving.
And that's how I really
think about temperature when
you get to that 100,000,000
degrees. And so it does some
more complex things. If you have
this high energy particle...
This is why we like fusion. It's moving at a
high velocity and there's another one moving
at high velocity. They will come together,
they will collide, and they will fuse.
But other things will happen. You don't
want to touch that high-velocity particle
with any kind of material, 'cause it will
collide with that material, damage that
material and usually, like, blow
off some chunks of that material.
So we don't do that. We keep those charged
particles in a magnetic field. So they just
bounce around and they don't ever touch
anything. That's really important.
And so it's less thinking about it from
the way we normally think about hot and
cold, and more thinking about it
from a velocity point of view.
- So what we should be imagining is extremely
fast moving, what is it? 1,000,000
miles per hour? Is that accurate?
- That's the right kind of
order for these systems.
- Crazy. So you're looking for them
to collide. First of all, to
get back, is there some
interesting insights, tricks,
anything you could say to the
complexity of the problem of getting it
to that high temperature quickly?
- So, if temperature is velocity,
that means they're moving quickly
over a given amount of space. Speed
is distance divided by
time. And so if you have
a machine of a certain size and it's
moving very fast, that tells you the
time that that particle's moving
from place to place in that
machine. And, in fact, if it's
a million miles per hour,
these are on the order of
100 kilometers per second,
which you can flip that around and
you can say you're moving at meters
per microsecond. So feet
per millionth of a second.
And so that fundamentally tells you, and we've
known this, as soon as you say, "I want to do
fusion," you know you need to react
to the universe in microseconds
and be able to understand the system
in that speed. And if you get it
hotter, it goes even faster,
and you have to go faster.
And so we look at those and that's how
we think about the systems. We measure
everything in microseconds, not in
seconds. And so when you do fusion,
it's pretty wild. It's literally
a flash. Pshh, fusion happens.
And it's over. You start
it, you do a lot of fusion,
you recover energy from it, and
then you turn it off before the
human eye can really respond even.
- And there's a computer managing all this.
Like, how do you even program these
kinds of systems to do the switching? Is
there some innovation required there?
- So I'm continuously amazed by
what the pioneers in fusion were
able to do before the computer existed,
'cause they had to control things
at this scale. But maybe it was
pretty hard and why we've been
able to be... take what they did
and build on it, because now
we use modern gigahertz-scale
computing to be
able to do this. And so even when I
started my career, we talked about, like,
megahertz processors. Megahertz
is microseconds. That's great.
You're kind of at the border of
fast enough, but you can't do
computation at that speed if
all it can do is respond in one
microsecond. But now gigahertz
means I can do a thousand
operations in that one microsecond,
so I can do more useful
things. So we use mostly...
This is way too fast for any
human to respond to, so we use
what's called programmable
logic. So we program in
sequences to the fusion
system to be able to do this
reversal. We pre-program it and then
we run a sequence and then
fusion happens. And so
in this sequence programming language,
we use a variety of them. Some of the
fusion codes are actually
written in Fortran still.
- Nice.
- And though a lot is now, more and
more are run in Python. And so we do
a lot of Python. We do some Java,
and then we also have because of the
speed of this, it's a lot of
assembly language programming.
So we go right to the assembly
level of the programmable logic
FPGAs and we program those. And
so to be able to run one of these
systems, we typically have a series
of electrical switches that turn
on this electrical current.
Those are controlled via fiber
optic because the wires are just too
slow. So fiber optic I can respond, I
can send photons at the speed of light.
And so those fiber optics can respond in
nanoseconds. And then I trigger
those fiber optics with
programmable logic that we programmed
in the hardware assembly language.
- As a small tangent, let me do a
call to action out there. I'm
still looking for the best Fortran
programmer in the world. If people
to talk to them, 'cause so many of the
essential systems the world runs on is
still programmed in Fortran. I think
it's a fascinating programming language.
Cobol too, but Fortran even more
so. It's one of the great sort of
computational numerical programming
languages. Anyway, what in terms of the
sensors that are
giving you some kind of information
about the system, in terms of the
diagnostics, like what
kind, at this time scale...
...what can you collect about the
system such that you can respond
at the similar time scale?
- So I'm also calling out for Fortran
programmers, for different reasons.
- Yes, great.
- The diagnostic systems is
really one of the keys to how
we do this effectively, because
you need to be able to tell the
system, "We're going to trigger electrical
current and we're going to do it in a
microsecond, and we need to know
if it's working right." And
so in one of these FRC,
or these pulsed magnetic
systems, you won't have just one
electrical switch. I've mentioned 100
mega amps, 100 million amps of
electrical current. Even the big
transistors we use can
only run at 30,000 amps,
so you'll end up with tens of thousands.
In fact, the systems we build now, tens of
thousands of parallel electrical
switches all operating in harmony
together. And so you need to be able
to build a system, and this is what we
spend a lot of time with. And
I made the joke that in a lot
of ways Helion's an electrical
engineering company.
to be able to both program, control, and
then detect how they're
operating, and do it all very
fast. So in a typical
sequence, we will pre-program.
The operators will pre-program
a sequence usually fed
from a numerical simulation of
expecting how the fusion system will
perform. We start with a set
of calculations. We then
pre-program all of these electrical switches
to a certain sequence to be able to
inject the fuel, reverse
it, and then compress it up
to fusion conditions. And
then we trigger that,
and then let it go, and
measure fusion happening.
But during that process,
we have to be real time
recording and measuring all
of the semiconductors and all
of the switching in the system. I'm not going
to talk about measuring fusion diagnostics.
That's a whole other thing, which we can talk
about. This is just on the electrical control side.
And so some of the pioneering
things we've been able to
do is that real-time you're
monitoring all of these
switches. You're watching who is
triggering correctly, who is not
triggering correctly. And if systems
aren't working, you're shutting down
this because you want to make sure
that all the sequences are operating
correctly. So, some of the key
diagnostics, it's actually pretty
amazing that even early in
my career, we didn't have
a lot of fiber optics built into the
system. And now it's absolutely essential.
And so, every one of these electrical switches
has fiber optic signals going into it
and fiber optic signals coming
out, understanding how it's
actually operating. And real-time,
all of these systems are being
monitored by more fiber optics. We
call these Rogowski coils, but
they're electromagnetic coils
that are powered by the electrical current
themselves. So as the switches are
conducting, they broadcast a signal
that says, "Yes, I'm electrically
conducting an optical signal," fiber
optics that come back to a central
repository where we detect
those signals. And so,
real-time, we're monitoring all of this
so that we know that these systems
are behaving and operating at
their optimal performance.
- What's the role of numerical simulation in
all of this? Sort of, I guess, ahead of
time, how much numerical
simulation are you doing
to understand how the system is going to
behave, how the different parameters all come
together? The electrical
system and how that all maps
to the fusion that's actually generated?
- Yeah. The operation of a fusion
system is pretty fascinating because
all of this happens on a time scale where
human operators cannot be involved.
cannot really be involved. And so,
you have to have pre-programmed
the majority, we call them shots. You're going
to do a shot, and when you're operating them
repetitively and you're running long periods
of time, you still have all computers
doing both the triggering and
the measuring of how they're
performing, real-time the whole time. And
so, how this typically
works, at least in our
systems, is that we will
design a system with a
combination of some numerical
simulation tools that
we've developed based off
of decades and decades of
amazing government programs.
National programs developed these
numerical codes. We use a code called an
MHD, magnetohydrodynamic code. And that's,
for people, for the engineers
out there who are used to
CFD, computational fluid dynamics.
This is very similar where
you take the same sets of
equations actually and add
electromagnetic equations on top of those.
And so you get magnetohydrodynamic.
- Are you simulating at the level of a particle?
Is there some quantum mechanical aspects
to this also? How low does it go?
- Yeah, we have multiple codes at
different levels, because one of the
main computational challenges is, amazingly,
even given all that we have been,
have built, for fusion systems,
computers are still not fast enough
to measure, to simulate
everything. And so, we
have a number of codes that we use. One
we call fluid codes, where you treat the
ions, the electrons, all these
fusion particles. You treat them as
as fluids, as gases, ideal
gas law, with electromagnetic
forces. In those, we can
simulate not just the
fusion fuel, which is important, but all of
the electrical circuitry. We talked about
capacitors and magnetic coils, and
the electrical current and the
switches. We actually simulate the full
thing, starting literally with a SPICE
model. More of that electrical
engineering. We start with the SPICE
model and use that to drive the
plasma physics model, and that's
one level of simulation. We use that to
do design work, and then also to try to
understand how we think the machine will
run. But then we go one level deeper
and we start thinking about particles, and
we think about the ions, and we treat the
ions as particles, and we look at
the ion behavior. For that one, the
computational resources are several
orders of magnitude larger.
Luckily, a lot of the work in GPUs, the AI
data center work is directly
applicable to those simulations.
It's been able to speed up our work, which
is pretty fascinating. That's a whole other
tangent we can go down.
Those hybrid codes we call them,
particle and cell codes now
treat the ions as particles,
and that lets us measure and
simulate the behavior. I mentioned the
stability criteria, S star over E, the
top behavior. That behavior, we now need
these more advanced codes to be able to
simulate, and those are more modern.
We've only been able to apply
in practice for the last few years,
actually, which is pretty fascinating.
The old stability rules were built off
of testing, empirical tests,
where now we can simulate
that, and we know why they work and how they
work, and we can do some predictions on them.
And so, that's really fascinating that
we've been able to push those boundaries.
- And what are the different variables you're
playing with? Are you still playing with like
topology? Like, what are the
different variables in- in play here?
- Yeah. Each of the different
simulations we analyze and use
it to design different parts of
the machine. So, at the MHD level
where we have the SPICE, where we
actually have the circuit model, our
design team uses this to design
the circuitry, where we're
designing which capacitor to use,
which switch to use, how many
cables to use, literally to that level,
how big of a cable to use. So as
we're doing power plant designs right now,
those are the tools we're using today,
every day, the team is using.
Then you can go one level
deeper and say, "Okay, let's use these
more advanced computational tools
about stability to say, "Okay,
great, but I now know the
circuitry, but let's look at the magnetic
field topology. How do I design the
magnet, the shape of the magnet
exactly, the timing of the magnet
exactly? I have to trigger one magnet, and the
next magnet next to it, and the next magnet
next to it. How do I
have that shape and that
design?" And so that's where you're using
those more advanced tools. Now, those
unfortunately, those are still
too slow. And so, those
simulations may take a day or two
to run. And so, an operator
right now does a lot of
simulations ahead of time, then
collects data through their
operations of the machines,
making these field-reversed
configurations, going through
parameter sweeps. And then the
simulation team then goes back and
looks at that data and compares it with
simulations. I'm really excited about
some of the things we're seeing in
artificial intelligence and
reinforced learning to be able to
speed up that process. So we're
watching and starting to work
on that now: can we now, rather than
using it where we use it today,
where we do a simulation
to design a machine or a
test, run the test, and then over
the next couple of days compare the
testing with the simulation and use that to
inform what we're going to run for the next set
of tests. But in fact, do it more
real-time, where an operator
can pull up what the AI or what
the machine learning would have
predicted it should have done. And then
use that to understand what's happening
in the actual programs, in the
actual generators themselves.
- All right. So there's a million
questions there. So first of
all, how much understanding
do we have about how many
collisions happen? Can
we go to the fusion?
How many collisions are
there and how does that map
to the electricity? And maybe
can you just even speak
to the directly mapping to the electricity,
which is one of the differences
between this approach and
the tokamak approach?
- So how much fusion do you get out
from these systems? And that's really
the right key question. So we
already talked about beta, that
B squared, the magnetic pressure,
is equal to NKT, N being the
density, T being temperature.
And then we talked about fusion,
where your goal for fusion
is to get particles
hot, high temperature, get
enough of them together,
density. And then you want to get
them together long enough. We
call that tau. So N, T,
and tau, long enough that
fusion happens, and a lot of fusion
happens, more than any of the loss
rates that are happening, NTT.
And in beta with B squared, you
know already two of those
parameters, NNT, are
equal. And so that tells you right
away the goal is to maximize magnetic
field, absolutely maximize magnetic
field. And most folks in magnetic
fusion, whether it's a tokamak or
it's Theta Pinch or it's an FRC, are
attempting to do that, maximize the
magnetic field. So we're all pushing to
that. What's really nice in pulse systems
is that we know how to do that. In fact,
In a pulse system, researchers
in pulsed magnetic fields have
demonstrated over 100 tesla
magnetic fields in pulsed
magnets. That's much
higher than you can get in
a steady magnet, or what's
been demonstrated so far.
- Just a clarification question.
So maximizing magnetic field
is about the N and the T, the beta?
So we're not talking about tau yet.
- Not yet, but we need to, because
that's really important.
We can even talk a little bit further
about how fusion scales. And so
in fusion, the hotter you get
the fuel, the more fusion you
get. And we know that by
increasing the magnetic
field, B squared as NT, you
increase density and temperature
together. More density, more temperature is
more fusion, plus more temperature is even more
fusion. And so what we see is
that in our, in these types
of systems, a scaling
very clearly of magnetic
field to the 3.75 power, or even in a lot
of demonstrations, 3.77.
That specific scaling.
That's a very strong scaling
of fusion power output,
and fusion reactions. And so that
tells you you want to go to a maximum
magnetic field as you can. Pulsed systems
are really powerful. Pulsed systems
have showed when you do pulsed magnetic
fields compared to a steady magnetic field,
researchers have shown over
100 Tesla magnetic fields.
Where in a steady system, people
have showed in the 20, maybe high
20 Tesla systems. And
if it's B to the 3.77
power, already you can see massive fusion
power outputs by doing a pulsed system.
- Okay, got it. So we're maximizing
the magnetic field. So that's
going number go up, super up. How
do you get the duration, the tau?
- But then I said pulsed, and pulsed
already implies shorter tau.
- Yes.
- And so that is in the fusion
field the name of the
game. Folks will have a very inertial
fusion. We'll have a nanosecond
tau. Very short, but then
very high pressure. They don't have
magnetic fields, but very high pressure.
And then in stellarators
and Tokamaks, your goal is
very long tau, but you'll
have much lower density
and you can't really go too much in
temperature, but they'll have much lower
density. And so where we live
in the pulsed magnetic, or the
magneto-inertial fusion
is in the middle, is in
extremely high magnetic fields, increasing
pressure as much as you can, and
then keeping them around long
enough. And so that gets to the
tau. That gets to that
energy confinement lifetime,
and also, it gets to stability.
And so this is the thing
that this field-reversed configuration,
which has showed that we can
build. These plasmas can last for hundreds
or thousands of times the
basic theory has shown
that now you can have long enough
lifetimes. So what that means is in
a practical fusion system that
there are lifetimes of these
high beta pulse systems
between 100 microseconds and a
few milliseconds, thousandths of a
second. And you hold onto it for a few
thousandths of a second. You do
fusion, and then you exhaust it.
And so the whole process
in this is we start with
a magnetic field that fills the
full chamber. You then inject
fusion fuel. You ionize
it, superheating it now
to a nice, cold one
million degrees. But hot
enough that you have charged
particles. You have plasmas.
You can then start increasing
the magnetic field. You
form a field-reversed configuration,
and then rapidly increase the
magnetic field further.
Increasing from one to five to
10, 20, to even higher magnetic
fields. And as you do
that, the plasma heats.
You compress it, increasing
the field and pressure.
Fusion is now happening. New
charged particles are being born
inside this system with a tremendous
amount of heat and energy.
but in charged particles.
This is where the beta
really, really works to your advantage, is
that just like magnetic pressure on
the outside, magnetic pressure is NKT
compresses
compresses the fuel in increasing pressure
and temperature. When the pressure and
temperature of the plasma
increase, NKT increases. It
pushes back on the magnetic field,
increasing the magnetic field
on the outside of the plasma,
and what that does is
magnetic field is electromagnetic current,
and current running in a wire. And
what that does is pushes current
back in the wire. So the plasma
itself now pushes back on the magnetic
field, pushing electrical current
out of the system and recharging the
capacitors where we started this whole
process.
- all in a self-organizing way.
So I think it's good to sort of
clarify how fusion usually
generates energy, where this
intermediate step of heating
up water, then the steam
is the thing that leads to
electricity. And then, of course, the
FRC method that you use leads directly
to electricity. I was wondering if
you could describe the
difference between those two.
- Yeah. I like the analogy of the
match and the campfire, and I hear
that a lot in fusion. Where a lot of what
steady fusion, think a stellarator
or a Tokamak, is attempting to do
is take a little bit of fuel,
that match, and then add
heat to ignite that match, and
then put it with enough fuel
and in the right conditions and
hold onto it for a long time that
it grows into a campfire. Even if
they do a good job, a bonfire.
It's creating a tremendous amount
of energy in that steady system.
Burning fuel in the same
place, generating some ash,
generating a lot of heat
in that reaction. And in
a traditional, in a Tokamak or
a stellarator, that's a lot of
what you're doing, is you're holding
onto the heat as much as possible to
keep that reaction going. And the
optimal fuel is called deuterium
and tritium, where you have...
Deuterium is a heavy isotope of
hydrogen where you have an extra
neutron, and tritium is a
very rare form of hydrogen
that's an unstable form. It's so
rare it's hard to get. Where it has
two neutrons and a proton, and
when you fuse those together
at very high temperatures at very high
densities or high enough densities
and very high temperatures they
make helium, which is a charged
particle, which stays inside the
campfire, inside the
Tokamak continuing to heat
it and stoke the flames, and
it makes a neutron which
leaves the system because it's
uncharged. It has no charge, and in
that system, it's actually ideal. It's
really great because in a campfire, you
have this reaction going and you want to
get the energy out of it. You wanna use
it, and you don't want to just burn up all
the fuel and do nothing. That's not really
valuable. What's really valuable is to
stand next to the campfire and get the
heat, get what comes off of it.
And then use that in a
traditional fusion system to...
boil water, to heat the
water, and then at 30, 35%
efficiency, then convert that through
a steam turbine into a cooling
tower, and cool off the fuel
and extract electricity.
And we know steam turbines.
Coal plants do this. Nuclear
fission reactors do this. And so
we know how to do that, and that's
the traditional way of doing it. But
I think there are other ways to
do it with a pulsed magnetic
system. There's one more thing you get
to do because you have this high beta
where there's an electric field and
an electromagnetic force that's now
compressing the fusion
fuel. It's increasing in
temperature. It's getting hotter. It's
increasing in temperature. Density fusion is
happening. New fusion particles are
being born, and those particles are
not just stoking the flame. They're not
just holding onto the campfire like in the
Tokamak, but they're doing another thing which is
really powerful, which is they're pushing back on the
magnetic field. They're applying a pressure.
That pressure induces a current. We can
extract that electrical current.
But it takes you into another direction,
so your analogy of the campfire now
breaks down, because now the campfire is
expanding. It's pushing back on something,
and so now it's the analogy
of the piston engine.
As you move from the match,
the campfire, to now pistons.
And so, in a piston engine,
you use the motion of the
piston, the pressure on it and
the motion of it to do something
useful, and in a piston engine,
it's to turn a crankshaft and
turn a crankshaft and run a... Run wheels,
or maybe even a piston engine to turn a
crankshaft and run a generator
and make electricity.
And in fact, you can do it
pretty high efficiency.
and a generator using
that method, using the
expansion of that piston, and what
we do is use the expansion of the
magnetic field to extract that
electricity, and we believe you can do it
at much, much higher efficiencies.
In fact, there have been theoretical
papers that show not 30 to 35% efficiency
like a steam turbine can
do, but 80% efficiency.
85% efficiency, extracting much more of
the energy of the fuel in that process.
- Can you actually just take a tiny
tangent... On the word efficiency here?
So, yeah, so you said 30%, so it's
inefficient, and that efficiency
measure is how much of the
energy is actually
converted to electricity?
- That measure is how much of
the thermal energy that gets
outside of the system is then converted into
electricity, which is the thing we care
about. We want... we're not in this
to make fusion. We're in this to make
electricity.
And we're using fusion to make electricity,
and so from my point of view, that
should be the focus: how do we get to
that? So that's the efficiency of that
thermal energy that makes
it out to electricity. What
it is not a measure of how much energy you
put into the system and what happens to
that in terms of you started
this campfire with a
blowtorch. What about all that blowtorch
energy? What are you getting for
that? And so I think that's something
that high beta is one more side benefit
that it turns out is actually maybe the
tail that wags the dog, is that not
only do you at high efficiency get out any of
the new fusion energy, which is great, because
that's what you want, make electricity from
fusion, but you also get to recover all
of that magnetic energy
you put back into it.
And that's the really powerful one,
and that's something that folks have
demonstrated over 95%
efficiency, that you can put
electricity into fusion and then
get that electricity back out at
95% efficiency, plus some very high
efficiency, maybe 80%, maybe higher
of all the fusion product electricity
too. So now you're making a tremendous
amount of electricity in one of these
systems, and that has all kinds
of performance and engineering
benefits that are really powerful, but
it also pushes you to other fuels.
So we talked about how deuterium and
tritium fuels make this neutron,
which leaves the system to
boil water, to run steam
turbines, but it doesn't push back on
the magnetic field. So in one of these
high beta systems, it's actually
not a great fuel at all, and so
the other fuels that are out there are
even more interesting, and one of the
candidate fuels that's really interesting
is called deuterium and helium-3.
And we talked about deuterium,
heavy hydrogen. Well, helium-3,
the nucleus is also called a helion.
That's why we named the company that.
is light helium, which is... In normal
helium, which is what you find in a
balloon, there's two protons, two neutrons.
It's very stable and found
commonly. Helium-3 is also
stable, but it's not found commonly.
Fortunately, it's lightweight,
so it leaves. It literally leaves
the atmosphere and goes into
space. So we don't have a lot of it here
on Earth, and so you have to make it,
or you have to go into space, and there's a
whole other thing about where do you get it?
Do you get it from the moon? Jupiter
has, it turns out, massive amounts of
helium-3. But when you take deuterium and
helium-3 and you fuse those
together, you also get that
helium particle, that alpha
particle, what we call that in
fusion. But instead of the neutron,
you get a proton, and that
proton is a charged particle.
It's a hydrogen nucleus. That
proton is now trapped in the magnetic
field, pushes back, and you can
extract that electricity. Now, there are some prices to be
paid for this helium-3 fuel. But for a high beta system
for this helium-3 fuel. But for a high beta system like a
pulsed magnetic fusion system, that's really the ideal fuel.
like a pulsed magnetic fusion system,
that's really the ideal fuel.
- When you say prices, what are the
prices? What shape do the prices take?
What, what are the prices? What shape
do the prices take? prices take?
- All kinds of shapes: physics, engineering,
technical, and business costs.
And so, let's dive in.
So, we talked about how helium-3 is...
From the fusion physics point of view,
from the fusion physics point of view,
we talked about 100 million degrees.
That's the temperature that deuterium and tritium
fusion works really well. And that's the temperature
fusion works really well. And that's the temperature
that traditional fusion folks have really focused
that traditional fusion folks have really
focused on getting to. That's the threshold.
When you get to 100 million degrees, you're at the operating
point of fusion, and you know it works, colloquially anyway.
of fusion, and you know it
works, colloquially anyway.
Helium-3 requires higher temperatures.
That's not enough. Fusion happens
That's not enough. Fusion happens for
deuterium and helium-3 at 100 million degrees,
degrees, but it's not its optimal temperature.
And in fact, in a high beta system, the optimal
the optimal temperature is higher: 200,
even sometimes 300 million degrees.
So you have to get to even higher temperatures.
Temperature's hard, and so you have to push
Temperature's hard, and so you have to push to
even higher temperatures than you had before.
And so that's one of the downsides. The
other downside can be, as you get to those
The other downside can be, as you
get to those higher temperatures,
we talked about B squared is NT. B
squared is density times temperature.
is density times temperature. Well, for a given magnetic
field, density and temperature are now inverse.
field, density and temperature are now inverse.
So as I increase temperature, density decreases.
So as I increase temperature, density
decreases. And so now you have an issue
An issue of you may have less particles to
do fusion, which means your fusion system
to do fusion, which means your fusion system
has to get bigger than it was before.
So for the same reaction
rates, a helium-3 system
compared to deuterium-tritium, has to operate
at a higher temperature and be bigger.
However, the flip side is if you
can now recover energy at 80,
recover energy at 80, at three times the
energy efficiency, at 80 some percent
at 80 some percent versus 30 some percent,
and recover all your input energy,
then now it's actually
about the same size.
Because they're the same electricity output, not
energy. It's not energy that we're worried about.
It's electricity we're worried about.
Electricity output, now you can actually
actually build systems of similar size and similar
energy. Only they're now at this much higher efficiency.
Only they're now at this
much higher efficiency.
- Got it. Can you say more about size?
What are we talking about here?
Why is size an important constraint?
- And that gets to one of the other
prices. That gets to money.
Our goal is we want to build clean, low-cost
electricity and get it out in the world.
low-cost electricity and get it out in the
world, but that means it needs to be low-cost.
That's fundamental. If it's really
expensive, no one's going to buy it. And,
while it can be clean, it's not
going to be deployed. And so that
is always has to be a part of why, what the
promise of fusion is that can be low cost.
So how do we know how much fusion
systems cost? That's a really great
question. And a lot of it
comes down to fundamental
size, that you have to just build
things. And so there's some really first
principles, cost engineering
you can do around power plants
for fundamentally what do they
cost? How much concrete went into
it? Fundamentally, how
big is it? And that, and
that if you're doing a
good job of manufacturing,
you are, your goal is to
manufacture a product
for as low of cost as you can so you
can sell it for as low price as you
can. It asymptotes to the material cost.
- Ah.
- Because you never get cheaper than that.
- So this literally, in some sense,
some sort of first principle
sense is how much concrete-
- How- how-
- ...goes into building the power plant.
- How much concrete, how
much steel, how much,
copper and aluminum. Different
materials cost different amounts,
but at the end of the day, the cheapest
function is the least amount of materials.
- Wow. Okay.
- And so that's, we think a lot about that
and how we can make these systems smaller
so they can be developed at lower cost. Now,
there's a flip side. You still need to produce
electricity.
So if you make them really small and they don't
produce electricity, and there is some minimum size to
fusion, and that's really important.
Fusion scientists and engineers
don't see you'd ever have a
fusion generator on the back of
your DeLorean, for instance. The
physics doesn't let that one happen, at
least physics as we've understood for
the last, you know, 100 or 200 years.
- Well, there's a lot of really interesting
business questions here, because you're
basically at the cutting edge of science,
of technology, of physics, of engineering
trying to basically innovate into
the future rapidly. How do you
how do you do that? Because the R&D here,
the research alone is a lot of money.
So what's, I mean, what can
you say about that? How
to be bold and fearless in pushing this
technology into the future when so
much is unknown and it costs so
much to just do the research?
- So I think about this in a couple of ways.
One, the need. We look to the world and
we know the world needs clean,
low-cost, safe electricity. And
just to meet our needs today,
and not to even talk about the
needs of tomorrow or the needs of
AI or any of the growth that's probably
coming. Just to meet today. And so, but
fundamental to that is it has to
be a product that people will
buy. It has to be a generator that
is making that electricity at
low cost. And it's got to be soon. And
so a lot of what I think about
is how do we do those two things
together? And a lot of that is scale,
and a lot of that is thinking about... And
not big scale. In fact, it's the opposite
of that. It's small scale. It's how
do you build a product that's mass
producible, that you can build
quickly and learn quickly?
And what I've found in my career at this
is that they're actually
the same thing. And that
the faster you can build a thing,
the faster you can learn if that
thing works, the faster
you can now you can
actually iterate on that and
build the next thing. And so
what I have spent my career building is
teams of humans and a company that are
builders, that can build
high technology things
quickly. That if you want
to do R&D, you don't want
large scale, multinational, complex, huge
systems. You want to actually take
the smallest thing you can build
that accomplishes the mission, and
in fusion, there is a minimum size,
but accomplishes the mission, and then build it
quickly and build whole teams around building
it quickly and incentivize
folks to move quickly,
iterate and learn. And the irony I think
of one of the things that I've
discovered is that by focusing
on manufacturing, by
focusing on low cost, very
rapid manufacturing, you
actually get to do science
faster, and at the beginning of my
career, I would never have guessed
that. I would have thought the way
to do science is to make a giant
demonstration particle accelerator
somewhere. Like to make a large complex
science experiment is the best way to
do science. And what I've found is
actually small iterative, just
building as fast as possible
gets you there faster, because you can learn,
you can build, you can iterate. You can
solve the problems, and then
you can learn the fundamental
physics, learn the scaling,
learn the FRC, and
the B to the 3.77 power
and learn those things
way sooner than if you would have
just started on one mega project
and then waited decades
to get to the answer.
- There's a profound truth in that,
something about the constraints
of pushing for the simple,
for the low cost, for the
manufacturable. That pushes everything,
pushes the science, pushes the
innovation. In fact, you should maybe
explain that you're, I believe, on
the seventh prototype.
This is insane. The rate
of innovation here is
insane. Can you maybe speak
to all the different prototypes
you went through, what it took
to just iterate rapidly? And maybe
it would be really interesting for
people, like what can you
say about the teams that's
required to make that
happen? Like what kind of
people are required to make
that happen at that fast
rate? And we're not talking
about, like, software here.
We're talking about
everything, the full stack.
All the way down to the physics
at 100 million degrees.
At speeds of one million miles per
hour. It's insane. Anyway, so what,
How do you iterate the prototypes, and
what kind of teams make it happen?
- So at Helion, we've- we've built seven
systems. The first six were a series of
prototypes that we built end
to end that were focused on
scaling the process of
making these field- reverse
configurations, compressing
them to thermonuclear fusion
conditions, and demonstrating that you
can do fusion and then increasing the
scale, increasing the temperature
and the energy. The very first ones
were named after beer. Actually the most
successful was the inductive plasmoid
accelerator, the IPA. And it
was the first system that
showed that the team could make these FRCs
and hold onto them and
understand some of the stability
criteria, the heating
criteria. And then we started
increasing the field. Now, okay,
great, we can hold onto one of these
FRCs. We know how long and how to make them,
but now can we squeeze on them and start
doing fusion? Increasing in
pressure and temperature. What we
noticed is- is you know, machine
after machine, we always
used Starbucks. We were in
Redmond at the time, Redmond,
Washington, and Starbucks cups
sitting on top of the machine
as the, this is the scale.
They were too small to have a human really
in the picture all the time, so the
Starbucks cup was enough. And so
then we switched to Tall, Grande,
venti. And then the
biggest, trenta, was the
biggest system that came online in 2020.
That was a system that showed 100
million degrees and was the first system
that did deuterium and helium-3 fusion.
In fact, as far as we know, the
only bulk deuterium-helium-3
fusion that has been done and
also showed the 100-million-degree
fusion temperatures from an
FRC. And throughout that time, the earliest
work was government funded, government
grants, SBIRs and other type of
government grants. And- and actually the
team involved myself and the
rest of the founding team
were really good at winning
government programs, doing
fundamental science, but
moving very quickly.
And there's a lot of ways to think about how to iterate
and how to build quickly. I want to talk about the
teams first, and then we can talk
about some of the technology-
...uses to do that. But a lot of it is
thinking about if your goal is to
get the product, electricity out
to the world as soon as possible,
then you should be looking at
everything you do towards that
lens. And so that's thinking
about the materials you choose.
You want to, at every turn, choose
commonly available materials. If
you have to wait for supply chain
for an ultra-rare material, it's gonna
take you a lot more time. And so
do everything you can to engineer
a system that uses simple aluminum
alloys, simple copper alloys. And
if you have to use tungsten, and
maybe you have to use tungsten in some of
your systems, which is a hard-to-find alloy-
make sure you're using commonly
available thicknesses of tungsten sheet.
You know, those kinds of engineering
analyses and thought processes at every
step. And that's how we
built these systems, from
IPA to Venti up to Trenta, was always
looking at, "How do we build
systems that are easy to build
and mass produced?" Because this is the other
thing that I don't know that early in my career
I'd have predicted is that by making a
hundred of a thing, you can actually make
it faster than if you go make one of
a thing. And that's because
when you look at our
fusion systems, we talked about these
big magnets. You could build one giant
big, complex, hard-to-make magnet that's
heavy and you have to move it around with a
crane and requires very complex machining
by ultra-rare CNCs. Or, you could then
make that out of a composite
of 100 smaller magnets.
Each of those magnets now can be made on a
simple machine. Each of these magnets can be
picked up by a human, they're
light enough. They can be made and
manufactured and mass produced. And
that's what we did. And that was
our whole design philosophy on
these machines is, at every
turn, how do we go faster? A classic one
that still to this day I push the team on
is, again, thinking about how do you move
fast, eBay. We buy, and I don't know
that I've ever said this publicly,
- Oh boy, here we go. This is great.
- we spend a lot of time on eBay.
- You've got to find a way, yeah.
- You've got to move. And here's
an example. We use a vacuum pump
because in these systems you've
got to pull out all the air.
So we use a vacuum pump called a
turbomolecular vacuum pump. This is a
commodity. This is used in a variety
of particle accelerators, scientific
applications. There are many of them.
They're robust. They last a long
time. They also have a very small supply
chain. So if you want to buy a
brand new turbomolecular pump,
you can, and you might wait nine
months from the manufacturer
to go make one for you and deliver
it for you. But I can go today
and get the same model that was made
10 years ago and get it on eBay
today, right now. However, it might not
work. Like you don't know how well it works
or how clean it is, or
any of those things. And
so what we do is, you don't go to eBay
to save money. It does. It's cheaper,
turbo pumps that are sitting
in eBay right now, bring those
Bring those in-house, test them. Maybe only
one of them meets the specifications you need,
but guess what? You just got a pump
in two weeks instead of nine months.
And you got it, and it's in the door,
and it's operational, and it's running,
and you're moving.
- See, I love this. I love that
kind of stuff. One of the only
people I've really seen do that
is Elon. He put together that
cluster in Memphis in a matter of weeks, which
is nothing like that has ever been done before.
And this eBay
way is really the kind of thing that's
required to make that happen, as
you shortcut the supply chain.
- And everywhere you can, you still have
to deliver the working product, right?
- Right.
- That is, you cannot
sacrifice the quality. But
do you really need the shiny
brand-new one when the used one is
going to do the job? And we think
about that across the board.
Do we take the best plasma
diagnostic, the most sophisticated
plasma diagnostic in the world that
is 3%, that has an accuracy of within
3%? And it's going to take me three
years and maybe a few million
dollars to go build? Or do I
take a technology from 10 years
ago that's 5% accurate,
that's good enough, that I
can go build in a month?
And the answer for us, at
Helion and for the team that we've
put together, is that scrappy,
"I want to just solve the problem.
I don't need necessarily the best
solution, but let's go make it
happen." And so that's something that we
routinely do. I think sometimes I have
challenges with my academic
colleagues on this, is that we have
a difference of opinion. Because that
3%, well, that's way better than 5%.
So shouldn't you do that? You'll know
your data better. But 5% is good enough.
Now, 50% would not be
good enough. And so that
technology wouldn't have been applicable.
And so finding that middle ground
is a hard thing to do, and never
compromising on the quality and the
safety. Like, it's got to work and it's
got to be safe. But can you still go fast?
- But in general, just having a culture
of pushing the rate of iterations here.
- Mm-hmm. And building the team
that wants to go build things.
Everyone at Helion, or at least
the vast majority of Helion,
we hire engineers, scientists
and technicians and
machinists are hands-on
builders. The company at Helion
is very weird for a fusion company. Today,
we are 50% technicians, not scientists.
- Nice.
- And we have a ton of scientists, because
the science is critically important too,
but they're supported by a
huge manufacturing company.
And our goal is to build as fast as
possible. Some of the other things we try to
do there, vertically integrate.
And this is to your point on Elon
Musk, this is one of the things he's
focused on at his companies, has been
how do you bring inside
the critical things that
are going to drive timelines, the things
you can't just go buy as a commodity
product and get it here soon, and make
sure that you can go build those fast.
And so we've done now a number
of key vertical, integrated
manufacturing lines at
Helion. I think we may be the
only fusion company with a conveyor
belt. Actually, our second one just
came online now, where we
literally have our production
line manufacturing power
supplies at Helion, so
that we can move at maximum
velocity, rather than
finding an external consultant or an
external supplier to go do those.
- Well, I love it. Builder-first
company, and you're also
thinking about manufacturing...
...throughout all of this. I'm looking
at the photo of Trenta. It's beautiful.
- And you can actually, I can point
out on this picture one perfect
example of what I'm talking
about. So on the end
is a green structure, green
fiberglass. This is called
G10. Actually, ironically, one
of the main structural elements
we use is this G10 fiberglass material.
It's the same thing that's in PCB boards.
It's the same substrate that's in every
circuit board. And so we know it's
strong, it's good with
electricity, only we get big
pieces of it and machine it. But even
in the end, you can see the bolts
halfway through. There's nine
bolts in the middle there.
The standard piece of G10 was not
big enough to fit the end of the
machine, and so we could have
had one custom manufacturer
manufacture a brand-new piece
of a custom size, build a new
mold and a new machine. It would have taken,
I don't remember anymore now, but probably
on the order of, usually these are
about six to 12 months. Or I could
go to a supplier off the shelf,
have that delivered in a
week, and now machine it with
all the bolts in between.
And then in-house, have
the G10 machine shop that
can now machine the bolt holes, to
actually bolt those pieces together. And
so that's, that took extra engineering
and having really clever and
brilliant mechanical and structural engineers
to figure out how to do that and still meet the
needs of the fusion
system. But that's what we
tried. That's the kinds of teams we
try to build at Helion, is folks that
want to really get their
hands dirty, get hands-on,
build things, move quickly.
And everywhere you
can, without sacrificing quality or
safety, take shortcuts. That's the
name of the game. We've got to get
fusion online as soon as possible.
- Yeah, this is really exciting and really
inspiring. So, I have to ask then,
what timeline do you think, like first
working, out there, nuclear fusion power
plant? When do you think?
- Yeah, so what we've been able to do is
build, rapidly build, every
few years, bring a new fusion
system online. In 2023, we signed a
deal with Microsoft to build a power
plant for Microsoft, for one of
their data centers. And this is a
power plant that is plugged into the
grid, generating electricity
from fusion. And
with a very, very tough
ambitious timeline of 2028 for
the first electrons from that power plant.
- And that power plant will
be powering a data center.
- That power plant will be powering the grid
that the data center is plugged into.
And we can get into the details
of how the power grid works.
But yes, so Microsoft will be buying
the power from that power plant.
- Props to Microsoft for creating
a hard deadline. I love it.
- They are. They are. And it is
daily that we think about that
deadline. We had been working with them
on and off through all of those
machines, through Grande, Venti,
Trenta. So they had seen us build, hit
milestones, show that we can do
fusion, scale up by orders of
magnitude, and then access these
advanced fusion fuels. So they had seen
all of those things and seen
the manufacturing we built.
We're already, right now,
building the manufacturing to
support that power plant.
We're doing that today.
We started two years ago
on doing the work around
siting, around the interconnects.
How do you plug fusion in?
What does it look like? How do you
site it? What are the environmental
consequences? Who's gonna regulate it?
All of those things. So we spent a lot
of time already and we're on our way, and
it's gonna be hard. No joke about it.
This is tough, and it's something
that I think about every day.
- I'm sure you've had a bunch of people
probably still tell you that this is a
pipe dream. Like, this is impossible.
Are there days that you and the team
think that this is indeed impossible?
Then you wake up the next day and
you're like, "All right,
we're gonna do it anyway."
- I mean, that's the thought process.
That's the mentality. We're gonna do it
anyway, let's go do it. The world needs it.
There's no physics reason this can't be done.
Now it's a question of how fast can
you build it? And can you engineer it
to be as efficient as it
needs to be? And those are
engineering and manufacturing are
ridiculously hard challenges. So do not
short sell that. But that's the goal,
and that's what we get up every
day thinking about. This is something I was
actually just thinking about and talking
with some of my team in the last few days.
We certainly have people that say,
"No, this can never be done."
And we had that before.
We had that at the very
beginning of, "I want to
go merge these plasmas
together," and folks said,
"Nope, that can never happen."
And we went off and did it. And, "You can't
compress an FRC because it's unstable."
In fact, I actually still hear
that, "FRCs are unstable." And I
say, "Yes, I know. Now let me
introduce you to S* over E,
and 20 years of studies on what
we know about that and how we can
combat that." And so we've been
able to show, through lots of
skepticism that we can still build and
iterate. And there are things I don't know.
Let's just be totally honest. As we're
going to go build these things, we're gonna
new hard problems. If
we're not doing our job,
if we're not discovering new hard problems,
we probably didn't push hard enough.
We probably didn't push fast enough.
And I think that's really critical.
That we build the team
and we do the hiring
to make sure that everybody is doing
their problem. Now that doesn't mean it's
not a hard challenge, and to
keep folks motivated. Helion
now is over 500 people. But when we
built Trenta, we were 50 people.
- Okay.
- So now there's, you know, over 300 humans
working at Helion that didn't see us
build a system from a
computer model, bring it
online and do fusion with it. But even
already for Polaris, there are
lots of humans that started
for our seventh generation system.
When we were running Trenta, doing
fusion, you know, they were able to see that,
see the measurements, know we were doing
fusion. But yet, this next
machine was just a simulation.
And so, seeing that get built,
seeing that, like, it's just
awe-inspiring for folks. And I'll tell
you, the first time that it comes
online and flashes pink
and you see that fusion
glow, it's awe-inspiring.
It's awe-inspiring.
- I love that.
- I've...
- The fusion glow, yeah. Yeah.
- Everybody changes their Windows
desktop backgrounds to the
fusion background, the plasma glow.
- So how can you actually see it?
- A couple of things. So one, to get
access to it, we have windows.
We have small windows all the way
around that we look into with cameras,
spectroscopy, lasers, other kinds of
scientific diagnostics that we use to
measure. And so you see the
light emission through that.
But also, it's very bright.
And so, the actual vacuum vessels
themselves that we use are
ceramic. There are some
versions of silicon
and oxygen, typically quartz, but
there's also some other sintered
materials. And it's so bright
that they can shine through those
materials, and so what you see
is the light of not fusion. When
fusion's happening, thermonuclear fusion
is so hot that the light is in the
X-ray spectrum, and the human
eye can't see that. But
as your ice-cold, one million-degree
plasma, when you're just
getting started, it's emitting photons
in a range and light in a range
that humans can see. And so you see
that bright, purple, fuchsia color.
- And this would be, if you're doing actual
cameras, this would be like extremely high-speed
cameras, that kind of thing?
- We have high-speed ones and
low-speed ones. The traditional SLR
cameras, which are the ones
that represent the right color,
all they catch is the light, the
integrated light, the flash.
They don't know, they can't
see the plasma forming,
accelerating, compressing. They
can't see any of those things.
They just see all of it integrated into
one bright flash. But the high-speed
cameras, they can see that. And so the
high-speed cameras we can use to actually
measure that. In fact, we put special
filters on them to measure different
wavelengths of light, so we can
tell, is it the hydrogen? Is it the
helium? Is it the helium-3? Who's
emitting the light? When are
they emitting? What particles
are emitting the light and when?
And so, by using those advanced diagnostics,
we can now take movies of that.
Though it's not as great
as just seeing that flash.
- Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful, right, that human
beings are able to create something like that.
It's truly beautiful. Just out
of curiosity, are there some
interesting intricacies connecting
nuclear fusion power plant
to the power grid? Like, are there
some constraints to the old-schoolness
of the power grid in, let's say, in the
United States? How do you get that-
that Microsoft thing you mentioned,
how do you get from the nuclear
fusion power plant to a
computer with some GPUs?
How do we make that connection?
Or is that a trivial thing?
- None of this is trivial.
But there are, I think, simple
ways, and there are some really
interesting engineering ways to do this.
So, just from the fundamental basics,
as we're doing fusion, we push
back on the magnetic field. We
recharge these capacitors that
started where the electricity
started from. And that electricity
then sits on a capacitor at
high voltage, DC voltage, that's steady.
At that point, it's reasonably easy to
make 60 hertz power, make traditional
AC power. It's the same way as
you can take electricity in a battery and
use an inverter and just invert that to
AC power. And large-scale grid
inverters, we know how to do pretty
well. One of the sort of
unique things about a
pulsed version of this, because it's
pulsed and a repetition rate between
one and ten times a second, we
can adjust the power output.
And so as the grid needs more power,
we can actually dial it up and
down. And we've been able to demonstrate that
with our fusion systems. The smaller ones,
the smaller plasma systems,
we've gone from zero, from off,
to all the way to 100 times a second,
and shown we can do 100 hertz
operation. In fact, that system we ran
for over a billion operations, and
just ran it steady all day long.
- So each individual pulse is
independent in some sense.
- Each individual pulse is different. Where
you put in your fuel, you do fusion, you
exhaust it...
- Cool
- ...through those pumps from eBay, and then
and then power output
and electricity output.
- Oh, wow.
- But there's probably some more
clever ways to do this, and when we
founded Helion, the goal was
to build low-cost baseload
electricity. And what we started
to see working with Microsoft,
working with others now, that data
centers are going to be one of the
biggest power needs in the
future. We know that's coming
up. And what's really unique is
that power in this form is direct
recovery, not the steam turbine
part, but direct electricity
is already DC, which is steady, which is
what computers really want anyway.
So are there really unique
ways to take DC power sitting
on this capacitor, and rather
than going AC to the grid and
having all these transmission
losses, just going direct DC to the
data center? Can you plug right
in? And so that's some of the things
that my team is looking at now,
is, can you do that direct
DC conversion at super
high efficiencies and run those
GPUs directly? That would be
really powerful if we could figure out how to do
it. But those are some of the things that I think
there might be some unique ways
that fusion and data centers
can really couple together. There's
a whole cooling part to it too.
Most of my cooling is cooling
semiconductors and cooling power switching,
just like a data center. So
there's a lot of interesting
engineering ways that we can
bring those two together.
- So a deeper integration between the
power plant and the thing that
it's powering. And it does
seem like the future, quite possibly,
a lot of the energy that's needed
will be for compute, for
AI-related applications.
So if you just look out into the
future 10, 20, 50 years from
now, do you see nuclear
fusion as a thing that powers
these gigantic data centers
of millions of GPUs? Just
basically, the surface of the Earth
covered in compute and nuclear fusion
power plants. Maybe that's 100 years out.
- So when I talk to AI experts, they
talk pretty routinely about
the power needs for AI.
And in fact, in the same way
in manufacturing that the
cost of any one thing
asymptotes to the raw material,
for AI, the cost of computation
asymptotes to the power
to the cost of the electricity. And even
more, that electricity's concentrated.
It's in that AI data center, that
brain where all the power is,
where all the power is,
and you really want a lot
of high-energy density. You want
power generation right there
on site. So it seems like, take those two
facts, a really nice match
between fusion, which is base
load, high energy density,
can be sited most places,
and a data center, which is going
to be high energy requirements
in a local location, and
large amounts of it.
There's been predictions
recently from energy institutes
that suggest we will have growth
that, rather than a 2% growth
per year in electricity, may
be a 4 or a 6% growth in
electricity due to data center
use. I think that is probably
wildly underestimating
where we're moving. And so,
- Oh, man.
- And so the idea that AI
can grow human cognition,
and our ability to solve problems,
we can't let it be limited by power.
And so I'm going to push as hard as I
can so that that's not the limit.
- Do you ever think about, like,
2050 or something like that?
I know you're focused on a
few years out, just getting
a fusion power plant working. But do you
ever think about, like, even longer term
future? By what year do you
think there'll be over 1000
nuclear fusion power plants?
- So I tell the team that if we
demonstrate fusion one time,
and that's it, then we failed.
But that's not enough. The universe
is powered by fusion. Humans
need to be harnessing
this, and can harness this
for our society, for the good
of society, for the good of
technology. And so that's
something that we push
towards. And in fact, it's baked
into how we design these machines.
Coils are mass produced. Capacitors
are mass produced, and we make
them all. All across the board is thinking
about not what the next system's
going to be, but making sure we're
building the manufacturing and the
infrastructure to build all those systems.
So we had a call from the White House a
number of years ago for
the Bold Decadal Study in
Fusion of how do we get fusion? And it was
Helion and a variety of other companies
from the fusion industry.
And it's pretty awesome to be able to say
there's a fusion industry now. It's not
just a one-off thing, or there's a fusion
experiment, or somebody has a prototype.
But like, there's an industry. That
Helion has competitors. That's great.
- I've never heard anyone so excited
to have competitors. But yes, that's
like a serious thing. That's
a real possibility. Yeah.
- And the goal was how do we not just
demonstrate fusion in the next
decade, but meaningfully
deploy it and start to
answer... We have 4000 gigawatts
of installed fossil fuel capacity.
How do we start replacing that with
fusion in a meaningful way? And how do we
get to not just making a generator
every few years? But we want a
factory, a Gigafactory of these
fusion generators rolling off
the line, one a month, one a
week, one a day? That's the kind of
plans that I task my supply
chain team with. Like,
how do you do this? How do we actually
go build this? How do we go build a
Gigafactory so we can have
50-megawatt generators coming off the
line, being deployed on a
truck, and then driving off the
factory every day? And it's a tough
challenge. I see what others have been able
to do in rockets, in electric
vehicles, turning around
huge factories. We know
this can be done, and so
for fusion, the call is there, and
the market is there too. If you can
get electricity generators cheap
enough, then it's worth doing.
- Yeah. All of this is really exciting
and inspiring what you're doing.
And obviously the world needs it, and the
more cheap energy we have
of this kind, that we
described, clean, and it's
not constrained to geo-
locations and so on, first
of all, that alleviates a
lot of the tension that in
geopolitics. But second of all, it
enables a lot of the technological
breakthroughs on the AI side.
on all the different things that we use
compute for. It's really, really exciting.
So yeah, hope there's like millions
of them in the coming decades.
- And so if we can get to that, if we can get
to making a generator a day, you're not
now talking about hundreds a
year, and you're deploying them.
And deploying them is
also hard at this scale.
How do you go and deploy power plants and
deploy generators at this scale and do it
quickly? Interestingly, data centers are
a little bit of a nicer challenge in that
way, because I wouldn't, we wouldn't build
one 50 megawatt system and have to
go build a site for it. We'd build a
site and put 100 of them on that
site and have large amounts of power
for that large data center. And so,
so that in some ways is actually
in the chicken and egg problem of how do you
go deploy hundreds or thousands of fusion
generators. Data centers are an
interesting application where
very immediately you need a lot
of power in a very small area.
And you can go, you can go do that. Now,
what does that mean? That means I'm going to
need more than two conveyor
belts, that's for sure.
- Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have to... I
mean, manufacturing is really hard. But
like you said, the fascinating thing
is it's hard but as you're doing it
you figure out all the other things: the
science and the physics and everything.
Everything... The innovation is
accelerated when you have to
manufacture at scale. It's actually
fascinating to watch. You see that in the
space industry as well. When do we humans
get to Kardashev Type One
civilization status? And when
do we get to a Kardashev Type Two?
- So the Kardashev scale, Kardashev
Type One civilization is
when humans are either catching or
generating as much power
as what's incident on the
Earth from the sun. Type
Two is the next big one,
where you're catching as much energy
from all the way around the sun, so
massive amounts of energy. And a lot
of times, people talk about it as
incident, as in you had solar panels
the size of the entire planet
blocking all of the sun. But I think really,
you should be thinking about it as what
can we generate? What can
we make here on Earth? And,
What we know is that, you know,
we're only a fraction right now of
Kardashev Type One, and
we got some work to
do. And there's not a lot
of technologies that can
get there, just from the
point of view of the fuel.
- Right.
- But if, as some research
say, that there's 100
million to a billion years of fusion
fuel on the Earth, we have room to
go, and that's at today's use.
So 100 times today's use, we
still have tons of fuel. Let's go
do it. And what does that unlock?
What does it unlock to have
power 100 times the output that we
actually do here on Earth right now?
And I think that's pretty
transformational. Do we have those huge AI
data centers? Do we have
brains that can now think at
rapid speeds and now innovate? I think
that's a pretty powerful future.
- Yeah, I can just imagine a
giant AI brain and rockets
just constantly shipping more and
more humans out into space, into
colonizing space, and we're expanding
out into the universe. I
mean, it's a obviously
there's a lot to be concerned about.
Technology in itself is always a
double-edged sword.
There's always a concern that we humans,
in the power we create, will also
destroy ourselves in obvious ways and less
than obvious ways. I've been spending a
lot of time in nature. Of time in nature.
And you become distinctly aware that
there's something truly special
about the simplicity, the
balance that is achieved by
nature. And in some sense, we
disturb that balance by creating
sophisticated technologies. But in
another sense, we're building something
in the spirit of nature that's more and
more beautiful and allows us humans to
flourish in a richer and richer
way. So, a double-edged sword.
- I think a lot about what does vast amounts
of low-cost energy, low-cost electricity
enable, and how does that work with nature?
And if you have power, and this is why,
one of the reasons we love fusion, is that's
energy-dense. So, a 50-megawatt facility
we believe fits in a 27,000 square
foot building, on the order of
an acre, for 50 megawatts.
Compare that to solar
would be 2,000 acres, at
least in Seattle. And what
you can do there is transformational.
And a lot of folks talk about
desalination and clean water so that we
can be in places where
there's not a lot of water
and those things. I actually think about
food, ironically, is that how much of
the Earth's surface that used
to be nature is now farmland?
And we need it. We're going to grow
food because humans need to eat,
and that's really critical,
but it's about 5 feet tall
all over the Earth. Why can't you do
it at 500 feet? Why can't you build a
building where you're actually growing?
In the building, you're growing
plants. I spend a lot of time thinking
about growing plants, ironically.
At high densities, of food
densities, so that we can eat and
we can exist and we can
coexist in a way that's
energy-dense and rich. You
mentioned actually going to space.
You know, how do we go to
space now? We take methane
fuels, or hydrogen fuels, and we
burn them and we launch a rocket.
There are all kinds of cool
beamed rocket technologies that
I looked at early in my career, where
you can, like, beam microwaves, and
so you have a microwave craft that
doesn't have to burn any fuel. And so if
you have really dense, really good
power on Earth, you can beam it to
that microwave craft. It
can now use electricity
as its rocket fuel. And so there are some
really powerful, interesting things you
can do. Even deep space, it
gets also more enabling,
but even just launching from
Earth. And so I think it
opens up things we don't really even think
about, but it's just been theorized,
"Wow, if I had massive amounts
of power in a small place that
is low cost, this is what
it could do." But I'm
excited by what it can unlock that even we
can think about now, but even what we can't
think about or we don't know yet.
- Since you mentioned propulsion,
is there some interesting use,
possible use of nuclear
fusion in propulsion, whether
it's getting off of Earth or
in going into deep space?
- I mean, that's... Honestly, in a lot of
ways, that's how I got into fusion is
thinking about that intersection
of energy and space travel.
And when you are in the solar system,
around Earth's orbit, collecting the sun's
energy makes a lot of sense. And it's
there. It's free. When you're in
space, you get a lot more of it because the
atmosphere is not blocking it. And so that's why
spacecraft run on solar panels. But if
you want to go further out, the sun's
irradiance falls off as R-squared,
radius squared. And it's a
long way out there. It doesn't take
very long before there's not a
lot of energy anywhere from the sun.
And so you have to bring it with
you, and in space, mass is expensive.
Mass is hard. That's the rocket equation.
And so being able to bring
high energy density fuel
is really exciting, and that's what fusion
enables. But here's one of
the challenges. If you make
electricity from fusion
using a steam cycle,
you now need to have
somewhere. You need something
cool, so you get hot water, you now
have to be able to cool it. And in
space, there's nothing to cool.
There's no working fluid to cool
off of. And so actually, a lot
of the steam-based systems in
fusion don't make sense for space.
And so that's where some of this
direct energy, this energy
efficiency matters. It actually
comes to some of the origin story
of the team that founded Helion.
Before spinning off
Helion to focus only on
fusion, we worked on a mix of things:
advanced materials, rocket propulsion,
fusion, fusion rockets, fusion
materials, all of those things.
- Nice.
- And one thing that people
in the aerospace field
especially if you're in deep space,
is you can't waste anything.
Every watt of electricity you make, you better
use, 'cause it was expensive to get it,
or the solar panel. Every ounce of every
joule of heat, every watt of heat you make,
every ounce of every joule of
heat, every watt of heat you make,
you have to reject with a radiator,
and it's super expensive and heavy.
And so you build in space as efficient as
possible. You recirculate your water and your air,
You recirculate your water, and your air,
and all of those things, you're efficient. And
it's something we brought into thinking about
thinking about fusion energy efficiency.
is that you want to... If my goal is to make the
product, what's the product? The product is electricity.
The product is electricity. Don't waste any of it.
Recover every watt you can by recovering electricity
Recover every watt you can by
recovering electricity directly.
Recover every electricity from the fusion
process as efficiently as you can.
and you end up with, just like in space, systems
that are smaller, have higher performance,
smaller, have higher performance, and can
deliver more, whatever the mission is.
And in our case, the
mission is electricity.
- When you look out there at the stars, I'm
really confused by what's going on,
because I think there is for sure
thousands, if not millions, of
advanced alien civilizations
out there. I'm really confused why we
have not, in a definitive way, met
any of them. So again, continuing
the pothead questions, what energy
source do you think they're using? If what I'm
saying is true, that there is alien civilizations
out there, do you think it's,
like, pretty certain that they, in
order to expand out into the cosmos,
they would be using nuclear fusion?
- It's hard to imagine anything else.
That right now, what ... where does
energy in the universe come from? And it
comes from fusion. It comes from stars
and- and we- we know that that's
the process. And so whether they're
harnessing the star itself,
Kardashev type two, or
are they bringing fusion along 'cause they
want to go somewhere and they're bringing it
with them to go visit. I think
that that's pretty likely.
That's pretty likely. You bring up the Fermi
paradox. How come we don't see alien civilizations?
How come we don't see alien civilizations?
Even if it's an infinitesimally small chance
if it's an infinitesimally small chance
that there is life on any one planet,
and infinitesimally small that
life grows into intelligent life,
there are, however, almost infinite planets
around infinite stars in our galaxy
infinite planets around infinite stars in our
galaxy that have been around for vastly longer
that have been around for vastly longer than
we've been around. But we don't see it,
But we don't see it, and I think that's a question
that many scientists and everyone has wrestled with
that many scientists and everyone
has wrestled with over the years.
- I mean, I'm very scared by
the implications of that.
The scary thing is that, to the
point that we made earlier, as we
become more and more
technologically advanced, we end up
destroying ourselves. Like,
there could be things we unlock,
like nuclear weapons, but plus plus.
Like, new things that happen as you develop super
advanced systems that close to 100% probability
that close to 100% probability destroy
ourselves, destroy any intelligent being.
destroy ourselves, destroy any intelligent being. The
kind of intelligent being that's ambitious enough
The kind of intelligent being that's ambitious enough
to keep innovating will eventually destroy itself,
will eventually destroy itself, will
be one explanation. And that's scary.
That should be a sobering thought. That's at least
an inspiring, sobering thought to be careful
an inspiring, sobering thought, to
be careful with the stuff we create.
create. But I also just look at
humans. We create dangerous stuff-
and then figure out, sometimes almost last
minute, how to not destroy ourselves.
minute, how to not destroy ourselves.
We're good with deadlines.
- We're good with deadlines. Ah, we-
- And we're good at, like, surviving.
I mean, life as we know it on Earth
seems to find a way, and intelligent life
as we know it, human life, seems to
find a way. We do a lot of painful
things along the way, but in the end, we
somehow survive. It's interesting.
There's something in the human spirit-
that allows us to survive. So I
have a lot of optimism about the
super powerful technologies that we
create will eventually lead to us
still surviving for thousands of
years. But then, like, why are the
aliens not here, though?
So maybe it's also possible that
it's really difficult to traverse
space. Maybe it really is that
difficult. The physics makes it
not easy. There's a lot of space, and
it's just hard to- hard to travel.
- I think I, as I have gone further and
further in building fusion systems that work
I've become more optimistic around
the Fermi Paradox specifically. And
there's- there is the, uh ... There's
several of them. The ... I think
you're referring to something called the
great filter. S- something happens that
filters out life. The
dark forest is another
philosophy around, sure, it's out there,
but everybody's hiding 'cause they
won't- don't want to be noticed. But I think about
something else, actually. The philosophy that I've
always loved, and I'm going to pronounce this
wrong, so I apologize, Matrioshka brains.
... is that ... And that's Kardashev
level two, that civilizations
get so advanced, and they
focus not on expanding
physically, and expanding
in space, and expanding
their reach by planting
flags in new places,
but grow their cognition,
grow their ability to
think. They grow their brain.
They grow their intellect. And
I- I feel like in the last few
years, we've seen a massive
trend that maybe this is
the thing that happens,
and that we do grow our intellect, and we
grow the- the intellect of the species by
AI and advanced tools. And- and as a
society can just get smart enough that we
don't need to go plant those flags
everywhere. And so the Matrioshka brain
is a Dyson sphere where a civilization
has covered the entire sun
in essentially solar panels
or collects its light in some way
and uses all of that power to
power intelligence, to power
computers and to power
brains. And I think we're a way
from that, a ways away from that,
but maybe AI and fusion
together gets you actually
along that path sooner. And
I'm- I'm excited by that
outcome of the Fermi paradox.
And then at that point, those
civilizations have a- a star that you
can't find anymore 'cause it's all
covered and are there
thinking and growing their
intellects rather than actually
having to physically expand.
- Yeah. Exploring and
expanding in the realm of
cognition and consciousness
versus in the realm of space and
time as we- we 21st
century colonizer humans
Think like. Maybe 22nd
century humans will be
thinking fundamentally differently.
Yeah, that's a beautiful, beautiful
vision of the future.
Speaking of beauty, you've
been doing a lot of really interesting
things in a lot of interesting
disciplines. What to you is...
ridiculous question, is the most
beautiful idea in physics and
nuclear engineering, in nuclear
fusion and power plants? What ideas
you just step back are and are in awe of?
- I'm continuously in awe that it works.
And I know that sounds
a little silly to say.
But the more that I learned in my career
around the balance of exactly the right
temperatures where life works, exactly the
right balance between the electromagnetic
force and the strong force.
Those are things that it's hard
to imagine are accidental.
And so we talk about how beautiful
nature is, but then you look at
what each of the leaves on the
tree really is, and each of the
cells and each of the atoms and each
of the quantum substructure of that
atom, and I'm just amazed that
all the pieces come together.
- we humans are somehow able to find that
perfect balance where it just works.
- Just works. Last minute
sometimes, but it does work.
- The kind of deadlines
you're operating, your
the group of brilliant people that you're
working with or operating under, it just
stresses me out, but it excites me. So I'm
deeply grateful that you're doing this
work. You're one of the people
building an exciting future.
So thank you for doing that, and
thank you so much for talking today.
- Thank you very much. It's been fun.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation with David
Kirtley. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description where
you can also find links to contact
me, ask questions, give
feedback and so on. And
now, let me leave you with some
words from the great John F.
Kennedy. "We choose to do these things,
not because they are easy,
but because they are
hard." Thank you for listening,
and hope to see you next time.
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