144: Gone Fusion - Exciting Fusion Energy Startups

[Music] hey everybody in today's episode of still to be determined we're going fishing for some fission and an extended interview with David curtley from helion hey everybody as usual I'm Sean Farrell I'm a writer I write some stuff for kids I write some sci-fi and I'm just curious in general about technology and luckily for me my brother is Matthew I call him Matthew but you know I'm better as Matt undecided with Matt Farrell Matt how you doing today I'm doing pretty well how about yourself how's the weekend I'm doing okay we've got our first winter like weather moving in from the West pass through Buffalo dropping lots of snow and I'm not anticipating any snow here in New York City but we've got wind like you wouldn't believe and my little backyard which has a little tiny drain to make sure that little tiny raindrops have somewhere to go when they drop out of the sky is being plagued by leaves so after this recording guess who's going out in the backyard with a garbage bag to gather said leaves you're looking forward to it I bet uh it is having a yard that you have to rake is like understandably like it's work you wake up in the morning you look out you're like I gotta go rake those leaves my little patio is literally a little concrete block and somehow the way the wind Vortex vortexes work in this neighborhood we will get a million leaves in this little tiny concrete block but if you wait the wind might shift and then suddenly all the leaves will be gone who knows where they've gone who knows where they came from so it's all about it's like it's like a roulette wheel it's like gambling you like you see the marble bouncing along this the the circle of the roulette wheel and you're just hoping it comes up black so I'll look it out there and be like you got there's so many leaves out there and then I'm putting on my coat the other day to go out and clean up those leaves and my partner says oh they all blew away and I look out there and there's not a leaf in sight and then you just go job well done and like hang my coat back up and I'm like well I deserve a break so there's tons of leaves back there I keep my eye on the forecast like is rain in the offing because if it's not fingers crossed the wind shifts and poof they disappear but enough about that let's talk about some of our recent discussions we have some comments from a recent episode this is from our episode 143 Unity homes Matt's Factory built Net Zero home and there was this comment from helnut cron who wrote whenever I pass yet another Home Building site and see bricks hundreds and thousands of bricks I find myself wondering why are they still doing it this way always heartening to see human genius in rational people of Goodwill making the world a better place now and for the future interesting to note that when companies release open source source software and here's another instance it makes things better for everyone thanks for sharing your journey and your home build certainly looking forward to more and let me comment also on the naming of your channel it's brilliant it perfectly describes where an inquiring mind will find itself even after discussions are made and then he followed up a few comments later with this oops I was actually commenting on undecided as the title of your channel yeah but it applies equally here of course so I appreciate it helmet you coming in weighing in with such a positive response to Matt's video and then following up with a positive response to our conversation about said video and we hope you'll drop by again I appreciate that so for today's episode we have two things in the offing first a very brief discussion between Matt and me about why I'm such a great guy and then I'm sorry those are the wrong notes we're having a discussion about Matt's most recent episode which is why nuclear fusion is closer than you think this is from November 15th 2022. after our brief discussion on that we're going to drop in a long extended version of Matt's interview with David curtley from helion so yeah before we get to the helion interview I wanted to visit some of the conversation around the video itself around Fusion and there were some interesting discussion like this from Lawrence hunt who had a kind of beefy comment and I want to share it in its entirety because I think it's very interesting Lawrence writes thank you Matt I spent about three years studying 34 Fusion Energy projects around the world so first of all Matt Lawrence might be somebody to reach out regarding the variety of projects out there as you point out most are variations of the Taco Mac which has many inherent problems which you allude to in the present video the varying approaches of the three initiatives here are among those that caught my attention while doing my own research however the project I found to be the most promising wasn't mentioned by you today I'm referring to the hb11 energy in Australia while funded so far on a shoestring budget all the components of the model have been demonstrated in the lab in published peer-reviewed scientific papers using Nobel prize winning off-the-shelf chirped pulse Amplified Laser Technology hb11 proposes to produce electrical current rather than heat while this overlaps with helion it's fundamentally different why first Ponder motive Fusion of hydrogen and Boron 11 produces three helium nuclei the positive charge from instantaneous combination Fusion of the reactants the reaction is so rapid that heat is not a byproduct side note for myself I found that fascinating that it's too fast to generate Heat the positively charged alpha particles can be used to generate an electrical current through closing a circuit with the electrons separated from the atoms in the reaction second neither the reactants nor the products are radioactive contrast this to all the reactions using deuterium and tritium which emit Neutron radiation infusion reaction and also interact with carbon in the atmosphere and the human body three while a magnetic field is required to contain the channel and the products there is no plasma nor heat to contain Channel or stabilize to summarize you put in simple hydrogen no deuterium or tritium and Boron 11 and you get out an electrical current no heat is produced there are no steam turbines or plasma contained required there is no radioactivity going in or coming out and of course there's no carbon as an added node HP 11 energy is almost never mentioned by anyone seeking to educate the public about Fusion Energy I'd like to see you dig into the hb11 energy story particularly as you bring a particular brand of clarity to all of your stories I thought that was a fascinating rundown of this this Tech had you heard about this is there something about this that had caught or not caught your eye was there a reason why you didn't talk about it it had I had completely forgotten about it a few years ago I had read something about HB 11. head notes about it and then those got shuffled away and I completely forgot about it if I had remembered I probably would have included them in this video but from this comment and he wasn't the only one that brought this up the whole idea of lasers and uh fusion power like this I I definitely want to look into this more so for a follow-up video I I may actually do something on this because it's very interesting it's a it's a totally different approach and it's one of the reasons I made this video which was look at all the different ways that people are trying to approach this problem and how they're trying to get to it and it has nothing to do with uh what's the Q factor of you know because infusion they talk about Q factor and energy gain and you know engineering gain and all these other kinds of terms that for the public are like I don't understand it sounds like oh wow you're making huge progress and you actually look at what that means it's like Oh no you're still way far away yeah so it's there's a problem with the communication between the public and Academia and these companies and hb11 is probably one of those companies I would put in that group are trying to solve for positive electricity generation for the public is what they're trying to get to it's not about proving out different aspects of fusion it's about making something a reality and trying to solve those CL with clever engineering and figuring out the physics of what their approach is trying to make bring it sooner than later and HP 11 is definitely one of those groups yeah I'd be very interested if you were able to revisit this with another cohort of options you started with these three maybe there'd be an opportunity to do another two or three and include HP 11 at that time yeah so thank you so much Lawrence for that comment and then I also want to share this comment which was a direct response to Lawrence's comment this one came from Glenn Llewellyn who wrote I changed the oil in my lawnmower yesterday normally I'd go with five weight oil but as we were coming into summer I went with semi-synthetic 10 weight instead hope this helps so thank you for that Glenn I also wanted to share this comment from Scott's mad science and more Scott shared a few notes around some issues that he had with the physics of what you discussed as and he weighed in as a physicist and wrote these four basically correctives to things that you had said in your video fission reactors are not inherently susceptible to meltdowns and explosions breeder reactors could solve fission reactors waste issue these are things I know that you talked about in the past the overall safety of fission reactors the history of it we don't have a huge list of fission reactor problems but when we do have a fission reactor problem it's a huge problem so the handful of times that we've had those issues have been catastrophic that's the issue with the fission reactor and you have talked in the past about breeder reactors where they take the byproduct of the fission reaction feed it back use it as a fuel and reuse it and effectively can accelerate the use of the fuel down to almost zero is that correct correct yeah yes there was also this from Scott who wrote Fusion does actually create nuclear waste it releases neutrons that activate other materials so that was a point of clarity that I do believe you included in your video but he he wanted to hammer that home I I I will say we kind of glossed over it kind of quickly right so it's it was probably missed by some people and I probably should not have done that but that way he also wanted to point out that tritium is not a naturally occurring resource yep and finally he points out that all of these issues that he's just dealt with he believes science will be able to address them given the time and the resources so yes this was his comment was definitely not one of an aggressive contradiction to your video he was just weighing in with what he thought was dropping the knowledge providing some additional knowledge for your for your viewers I love it I love it when people like him come in and they drop that knowledge in that way it's super construction constructive super helpful and the audience members often know way dramatically more about this than I do and I love that they're contributing that way and on the note about radioactivity of their our radioactive elements that come out of fusion my understanding of this the lifespan of that radioactive element that's coming out of some types of fusion has a much shorter lifespan than a half-life than what's coming out of fission so you can have stuff coming out of fission that will last for thousands of years versus things that come out of fusion that might break down within 20 30 50 years and become safe to handle and dispose of so there's very different amounts of quantity and radioactivity that we're talking about here so it's it's not scale yeah yeah it's it's not completely apples apples yeah I appreciate seeing all the comments too from very knowledgeable viewers and I think that this is a good place to point out that the the place that Matt and I'm gonna put words into his mouth right now and he can tell me if I'm putting the wrong words into his mouth where Matt's Channel and where this channel as a byproduct of his channel stand is at the gap between the the knowledge base the scientists the researchers and the laypeople on the other side basically the general public and His Channel and this channel stand at that Gap hoping to be maybe a bridge to get some of that information from one side to the other as Matt pointed out a little bit earlier in this discussion just coincidentally there is a there is sometimes a communication failure between the people who are doing this work what they're trying to achieve what they think their their scope of time and effort looks like and what the public anticipates and what the public knows and assumptions are made on both sides and that lack of communication that lack of understanding leads to sometimes outright dismissal sometimes it leads to expectations that can never be met sometimes it leads to products that don't meet the expected goal and that confusion can derail a project and this becomes a problem when you're talking about projects that are going to require not only public support but public support that manifests as interests from policy makers legislators our political leaders if the public doesn't understand a thing then how is that public motivation going to turn into action that will support some of these new industries that we're talking about so I think that that's where Matt and I are trying to stand is to say like oh these people over here think something is happening is it actually happening or is there some miscommunication happening yep so in that vein I think it's a great opportunity for us now to jump into Matt's longer discussion with the individual from helion that would be David curtley so we're happy to present you with that full discussion right now so hi David thank you for uh being willing to talk to me today I was hoping you could just kind of give a little introduction about yourself and helion how it got started hi there good morning yes I'm Dr David curtley CEO of helion energy helion was founded by a core team of four scientists and Engineers that had been working for a lot of years on related space propulsion Fusion for the Department of energy and Material Science development programs and we had an approach to Fusion which I'm sure we're going to get into today where we were able to for it in a small system show that we could do fusion and do it in a useful way for generating electricity so we spun off helion to go fully private raise venture capital and start building the big machines that we built today can you talk about the the technique that you're using for Fusion is a little different from what we typically think of when we think of fusion we think think of like iter and the gigantic like donut-shaped Tokamak reactors well you're using what is it what's it's field reverse configuration that's what you're using why did you settle on that yeah so this is I think a unique thing about helion and the way we approach and think about Fusion our goal is and I think everybody infusions goal but specifically at Helium we're focused on getting to electricity as soon as possible so we looked at the whole system and not just the specific physics around the fusion plasma physics for the fuel but the whole system to get to electricity as soon as possible so our approach to Fusion uses something called magnetic compression of field reverse configuration plasmas a lot of mouthful a lot of a mouthful of words there um but really our focus is how can we using pulsed magnetic fields um no so no moving Parts get to get energy into a Fusion fuel as efficiently as possible make fusion happen release energy from the fusion process and most importantly get electricity out of that whole system as efficiently as possible so that we can build Fusion systems smaller and faster and correct me if I'm wrong on my understanding of this is one of the ways that you're getting electricity is you're getting it directly from the reaction because you're getting it's I read a description where it was like like a piston it's like creating the magnetic field is getting adjusted and so that's creating an electrical field that you can actually turn into electricity directly is that correct that's correct um okay we know we know the physics of fusion we can see it in the Sun every day releasing energy but our goal here on Earth from Fusion is to make electricity with it helion's approach to what we call Direct Energy recovery is that we use a magnetohydrodynamic recovery but what that specifically means a good analogy is like a piston although no moving Parts in this case where we have large pulsed magnetic fields that compress effusion plasma adiabatically the Fusion fuel increasing pressure temperature Fusion starts to happen Fusion particles are born inside that magnetic field and they're they apply a pressure so that's where your piston analogy totally applies where that internal pressure pushes back on the magnetic field and then we recover that energy from that changing magnetic field directly and we've been able to in our previous system show that we can put energy into a magnetic field and recover it very very efficiently over 90 efficiency over 95 efficiency and that enables us to build Fusion systems a lot faster and smaller so are you also capturing the heat that's also generated from the reaction it's a very good question so infusion the actual and we can dig into the fusion physics but uh in Fusion a lot of what you're doing is you take taking lightweight isotopes of hydrogen in our case hydrogen and helium you fuse them into larger heavier atoms in this case helium atoms and as they're fused into these new atoms those atoms are born with a tremendous amount of energy of temperature and so you have the opportunity for these these charged particles these plasmas in a magnetic field that to take their temperature energy literally their motion and that is that pushes back on the magnetic field it applies a pressure and so in fact we are electromagnetically taking that energy but we're also taking it from the Heat I was correct me if I'm wrong here but like when I was I've been digging into this topic more about specifically like the FRC research that has been done in the past and it looked like it was really there's a lot of interest in it in like in the 60s 70s and 80s and then they kind of like waned and people weren't looking at it for power generation but we're looking at it for like propulsion why the why the sudden kind of like enter that sudden because in the past what decade or two why in the 2000s is there a lot more interest in FRC again like why the why did it fade away why did it come back were there advances that made it more viable a better understanding like what was it what I like to say is that our approach to Fusion using pulsed magnetic fields to compress fusion plasma and recover that energy directly is not a new idea in fact some of the earliest ideas of fusion were to do methods very much like this um in the 1950s and 60s before the transistor existed before large scale our ability to control electricity in significant ways happened and so it took the intervening decades Moore's Law even for us to get to a place where now we can control electricity in the magnitudes and the time scales you need to do Fusion so why we do why we're looking at this now is that large-scale semiconductors that can commute they can switch millions of amps of current at tens of kilovolts and do it in millionths of a second in microseconds that's the kind of switching and power technology we needed to be able to do pulsed magnetic Fusion the way we do okay so now we can buy AI early in in my career when we started this we just saw the curve of what was going to come and we started working on tabletop designs and Engineering anticipating they would be commercial products but now we can buy commercial technology so at The Cutting Edge of semiconductors that allow us to apply the millions of amps and tens of thousands of volts so literally gigawatts of peak power into these these to compressing effusion plasma to get it all the way up to Fusion conditions so it really does sound like it was it's you're always building on the shoulders of those that you came before you it's just that ever moving forward understanding and being able to pull this stuff off in an affordable way that's kind of we're at the point now where you were predicting you'd be probably 20 years ago the analogy I like to think about is the electric car is that people have envisioned the electric car since you know um before the gasoline engine the electric car was envisioned in fact we built some systems but it really took the modern lithium battery it took very high efficiency Motors uh energy recovery in fact being able to recover you know your regenerative braking and all of those Technologies to come together to make the electric car a commercially viable system and that's infusion and especially our approach to Fusion it took the physics work that we and others did in the field reverse configuration these high beta plasmas and a whole bunch of Technologies I even talked about fiber optics yet and the keys that that is enabling we can get to that too but there's a whole bunch of those engineering technologies that had to reach commercial maturity before we could we could really think of a making generators out of these systems well let's get to that right now what is it about fiber optics like how's that playing a role yeah so the uh fundamentally infusion physics when you have a few fuel that's operating and we didn't we we published last year that we had reached over 100 million degrees the first private company to to cross that threshold but fundamentally what that also means is that these high temperature gases move really quickly and plasmas that means you have to be very fast in millionths of a second be able to respond to the fusion plasma or you lose it and so you have to be able to to turn on systems and Trigger them essentially to to apply these magnetic compressing forces and do it in millionths of a second um and in less than a microsecond you have to be able to control these things so we talk about tens of nanoseconds and and so that's gigahertz now and it's all electromagnetic so a bunch of wires going everywhere it's actually really hard to do you have magnetic coupling and other concerns and so be able to do it via fiber optics fiber optic switching fiber optic Diagnostics really is is a key and so I mean I think we all know that that gigahertz networks gigahertz fiber optics nanosecond response times that's off the the Shelf technology now but 20 years ago it wasn't it was actually very very hard to do it took a lot of scientific uh rigor to be able to build systems that fast and 20 years before that it wasn't even theoretically possible um so in your your you currently are building was it Polaris it's your Seventh Generation uh reactor is that the case yes Polaris is our seventh generation our seventh generation prototype that will do Fusion we've had other prototypes in addition to that where we're subsystems and those things but this is our seventh one to few to to get up to the millions of degrees and up to 100 million degrees and higher temperatures do fusion and then measure the fusion products being made and this is the one that's gonna is this the one that's going to show a positive energy gain a positive electricity generation so our goal there is to show electricity and that's other people have showed positive energy in a in a format that's hard to capture or hard to use and our goal is let's focus all the way on electricity and do it from the beginning so that what we're making the physics we're proving gets electricity and so Polaris should show that we can make electricity from Fusion for the first time yeah that actually brings me a broader question ahead for you typically as a lay person on the outside what do you what are your feeling on how there's a lot of reporting around Q factor reporting and these scientific breakthroughs and Milestones that are hit that while they're huge from a layperson's perspective it's not clearly communicated and what you just talked about right there is you're focused on positive electricity generation which is the full cycle of everything what's your view on the reporting on Fusion that's been happening yeah I I think it is a it is a tough subject to talk about because there is a lot of complexity there this even this idea of when you fuse particle uh Fusion fuel together and you make and you it makes a heavier atom where is the heat where is the energy what is the energy in a Charged particle is hard to talk about and hard to describe so we've had over the last year a couple of years now the national ignition facility for instance has done has made breakthroughs now of energy greater than one getting to the hints of ignition for the first time but it opens up the scientific definitions that the field has been using for a long time of Q in the fuel Q plasma Q engineering Q there's many versions of it so when we talk about Fusion we try to stay away from those things and just say you know electricity we want to talk about joules of electricity and watts of electricity in that doing Fusion in a way that doesn't lead to a generator and do it quickly doesn't doesn't answer the climate change and the other are mission driven things that we care about the end result is you want to have a power plant that is using one of these producing electricity for the public that's right yeah so to back to Polaris when is it expect when are you expecting to have it up and running testing things and when are you what's your I know this is going to be a moving Target but what is your goal for what's the Milestone that you're looking for for achieving that goal of electricity production yep so we uh the polar system we broke ground on the building a little over a year ago finished the building this year and are in installing equipment now to to build the Polaris generator goal is that by the end of 2024 we have fully built that system we're running it we've been running it for a while um and showed that we can get electricity out enough to power a light bulb out of that system and show that the viability of the the fusion physics and the engineering of all of this energy recovery system that's a really a demonstration of that electricity component that paves the way for follow-on commercial systems we're not predicting yet and and how long that's going to take to get commercial electricity on the grid or being very thoughtful about those and over promising those but but that's our goal and then and moving as fast as we can to it are you already planning the next version beyond the seventh gen yeah so so that's that's a an approach that helion we focused on when we spun off helion is how do we move to solve climate change get electricity on the grid if that's our Focus as soon as possible and that means doing things in parallel so for instance our sixth generation system trend is still operational we run it multiple days a week in the evenings we're doing Fusion still learning as much as we can from that system while we're building the seventh generation and this early computer simulations of the eighth generation are being done right now and so it's it's a bit of a of a complex operation but the goal is the same way modern Aerospace is building Rockets the same way Silicon Valley is building cars we need to be doing a lot of those development efforts in parallel so that we can be moving as fast as possible still informing the Next Generation but not waiting on um on the typical the historical design build cycle reporting cycle and then start again design build that that that in in we found that that really stretches out timelines are you using any machine learning and computer modeling to help in the design of those future systems like iterating things quicker in the computer versus building it out yeah so that's a very good question and we think about how again if speed and getting electricity on the grid is our goal how do we speed these systems up and so modern optimization and machine learning is really is is important um what we found is it's not ready at the place where we can dynamically control the system in a that has to happen less than a millionth of a second there's a lot of computation that has to happen so we can't dynamically control those systems yet but in the design of them we can and so we do have uh several several engineers and scientists on a program to how to optimize our electrical circuits our timing so all those fiber optics I talked about have to all be triggered in these sub nanosecond time scales and so being able to to do that do the optimization and the development for the design and then once we're operating the machine trying to get predictive about how to operate all these machines and make sure that they're optimizing they're working as efficiently as possible I think for healing on one of our goals has been efficiency efficiency of energy and efficiency of electricity out and so being able to optimize circuits magnetic topologies Geo physical geometries those things we spend a lot of effort doing so that we don't have to have harder physics the fusion physics is the hard part we want to minimize the heart the fusion physics by doing good engineering I've actually listened to something that's there was somebody else I was talking to that brought up when it comes to all these different ways that we're coming at Fusion depending on which one you choose one may have more engineering knowns and more physics unknowns and then there are other paths that are more physic unknowns you know it's it's like flips depending which it's either physics or engineering that you're having to spend more time on because there's more unknowns around one side or the other where where for you would you say helion is is it more physics unknowns or is it and you've got the engineering nailed or is it more engineering on knowns and you kind of have the physics at hand yeah I think our Focus has been on leveraging hard engineering as much as possible to reduce the unknowns of the fusion physics we've been building Fusion systems a varieties of magnetic topologies and and types for a long time so we know how the fusion physics works up to a level so for instance the national ignition facility is getting to ignition for the first time but what happens after ignition is still a big Fusion physics unknown so helium's goal was we don't want ignition I don't want to have to get to even as far as the national ignition facility is trying to do I want to focus on on Modern Electronics which are very efficient high speed Electronics which are very fast focusing on taking those Technologies from all Industries applying them to Fusion so that I can build systems that are don't require the hard physics of ignition don't require a lot of those things that the fusion physics Community is still trying to understand and model correctly that's fascinating so you already kind of touched on this you said that you're running the existing prototype you have now several times a week uh how oft like I've been trying to wrap my head around like when you have a finished thing that's working and it's a commercial plant how often is this thing going to have to fire that to create this reaction to create a consistent amount of power coming out of it like how fast will this be working yep perfect question and this comes to a lot of the the methodology of focusing on the engineering so that you can minimize the physics risk um and in a pulsed magnetic system one of the unique benefits in both the design the operation and then eventually in the commercial operation the system is that it's pulsed itself and so you can do a single pulse and learn everything you want to know about the physics of the fusion reaction and not help to address a lot of the challenging engineering thermal concerns lifetime concerns all of those types of materials things that we we you know we focus on in the engineering development a lot so Trenta is running right now uh we fired about every 10 minutes so about about every 600 seconds we fire that machine doing fusion um compressing a fusion plasma over 100 million degrees taking data on it learning about how it operated optimizing it tweaking parameters um that it for our Fusion systems a commercial system will want to get from once every 600 seconds to at least once a second that's a big that's a big engineering jump and so we have we have a whole team of thermal Engineers Structural Engineers reliability Engineers looking at how to build these systems repetitively pulsed and running steady we have um shown in the past at subscale we can run for months on end at tens or hundreds of times a second at subscale and so now we're working on okay we have great let's we did it at subscale now let's do it at full scale running once a second and then and then start doing the fusion physics once a second too and so that's that that allows us and as we stage our prototypes that's one of the main differences between Polaris which we're building now and what comes after is how long it's designed to run how many pulses how fast those pulses sell not how much and how much total electricity it puts out going from yeah I've also been seeing that there's in the past decade or two there's been a lot of private funding in diffusion there's been a huge influx of cash you know from Jeff Bezos you know Bill Gates all basically the billionaires are helping to fund a lot of This research where government agencies have not been putting a ton of money into Fusion research over the past decades why do you think there's this sudden interest over the past 10 20 years I say sudden I'm talking decades over the past 10 to 20 years why is there more money funneling in through private right now what do you think is what do you think is the reasoning for that a tremendous increase in private funding infusion uh helion announced last year that we had raised 500 million in fusion and at the time it was yeah 500 million in fusion and then and then several billion and follow-on commercialization money is available also as part of that fundraise and in fact last year there was over 2 billion in the United States a private funding put into Fusion that's yeah and and that's a tremendous amount more and it's more than all of the the US government programs combined in Fusion only in private and so it's a great question of why are we why now um and and I think it's it's a Confluence for helium specific specifically it's complex of a couple of things one we're seeing more and more need and we're seeing more and more need to really address climate change in a way um that is base load power large scale and Deployable throughout the world and fusion is one of the few things maybe the only thing that can act that can do that and in parallel to that is we're seeing all of the physics work that we've been doing for all of those years we're getting closer and closer to answering all those key physics questions so we can start building real machines the engineering behind them that that make fusion practical so advancements in fiber optics switching cryogenic magnets for other people uh Advanced Computing all of those things are all coming together now with all of the physics work we've been doing for decades and decades together can't can't have one without the other but those are all coming together here so that you're seeing faster are timelines to where now you're on the timelines of private capital and where they can get start thinking about Returns on their investment and and I think all of those are coming together and for healing particularly we built now six prototypes that have done Fusion increasing in scale each time and we're at that point where okay great we've shown we can do it at scale we've shown we can do some of the key engineering for limited pulses now let's go and start building big steady systems do you think government support is still important as a part of this because like even though you like you just mentioned which I find disturbing that the private investment is like dwarfs all the investment of the the US government uh combined what do you think do you think it's still important to have that support from government agencies and I think I saw a report that there was a letter that some Senators sent out recently showing support for increasing funding for for Fusion research yes so they're while private capital is really great at accelerating timelines yeah pushing engineering getting systems built getting them deployed there is still a major role for for the government and I can talk to the US government which is who are of the majority of our interaction we want to make sure we're building and deploying these things safely so that means the regulatory picture uh and so that was there was a letter uh an excellent letter by uh Senator Carper and others on how on on enabling the regulating agencies to start looking at Fusion in a practical way um and and focusing on on doing it in a way that gets it commercially deployed fast uh there's also things we don't get to spend a lot of time on so things like scientific Diagnostics some of the advanced Computing things that we don't because we're building as fast as we can iterating on prototypes there are a lot of Diagnostics we would like to have that we can't do and so there's um the rpe programs and the US government there's some excellent rpe research programs and and diagnostic development programs that are actually out Building Systems to support the view the private Fusion industry gotcha so so what we're seeing is we're seeing the government roll transition from being the lead of Building large-scale Systems and and driving everything around fusion and private companies building support Hardware flipping that around where now the government's being the supporter at supporting the industry around Fusion and the companies around Fusion to move forward as fast as they can but make sure they're still doing it safely make sure they're understanding the science and the engineering of what they're building so being a supporter and enabler of the Private Industry is essentially what they're taking the role as right now that's what we're seeing there was a in March the executive branch got involved for the first time in a major way there was a White House Event that we were able to participate a bold to Candle vision for Fusion in order to get Fusion out in the next decade and get it commercially deployed in the United States and so so seeing support from the executive branch of the of the US government at that level has been pretty tremendous and and not to just say the limit to you to the U.S

through through the European governments the UK government um we are seeing a lot of a lot of exciting work and interest and support of private Fusion happening right now I like asking this question what is the biggest challenge ahead of you and helion right now like what are the biggest challenges yeah so um as we're building these systems and focus on the engineering of building these complex uh electrical systems uh and moving from this once every 600 seconds to now moving it to once every every few seconds to less than once a second the engineering challenges of that are pretty tremendous and so we're having to we're engaging a lot of really interesting engineering and coupling it with the fusion work that we've done in the past and so keeping that moving and growing the company at the same time to support those efforts where now we've passed over 100 people in the last month and um and we're hiring as fast as we can and sourcing from all over the United States or all over the world to be able to build these systems so it's that it's the the engineering challenge and supply chain Challenge and the hiring challenge of building these complex businesses that and Technologies and the thing about helium that's really Drew my attention is how aggressive of a timeline you guys are trying to make this happen and clearly you're highly motivated to help with the climate change issue but what how do you respond to Skeptics that are like never gonna happen it's no way can happen that fast it's always 30 years away that common joke we typically hear like how do you respond to Skeptics I was a skeptic too um I started my career my academic career looking at hey we know fusion um in theory can do this console can solve these big problems let's go learn about it um and what I saw in Fusion was that the approaches that others were taking were gonna be too slow they're big giant systems that had like multinational Investments and oh and and just we're the scale the efficiency of engineering the physics unknowns were just too big and too slow uh so I changed my career went off and did um a plasma physics so a lot of the same physics and Engineering but around space propulsion for instance and came back to Fusion as we started to demonstrate that you could build the key Technologies the direct energy recovery speeds you up by generations of machines because you're just directly harnessing the electricity from the beginning rather than having to learn how to build the big steam turbine systems or other things that other people are doing so that's a big one I'm building multiple systems in parallel well accelerates your timeline in a very in a very unusual way historically for fusion um and then and then and then fundamentally the physics if you can build these systems higher energy density we haven't talked about beta too much but at high beta so they get smaller they get more compact that means they're easier to build you can build multiple of them and you can build Manufacturing Systems and we're doing a lot of that work now in in the space that you can see behind me a building Manufacturing Systems to support rapid Development building and deployment of these so we're just we're trying to hit every single vertical of how do you speed these up um and then and then at that point I can say that's the best we're going to do and we're going to push really hard to get it done and kind of related to that I've talked to other companies not Fusion but trying to get new energy generation systems online as fast as possible and some of them are taking the approach of not trying to go straight into utility scale but going to private businesses like partnering with companies that build data centers because they want reliable power for themselves are you looking at that approach or are you are you aiming more at going straight for utility once you're ready for it yeah it's it's I think that's a great business question that we looked at very early on at helion where is the first place you want to deploy fusion and what we found was that private industry has a tremendous need for Power Systems data center is a very good example or even a small data center maybe a hundred megawatts of power and a large scale one is gigawatts of power and so they need they have they're motivated for clean technology and they need lots of power and we cite data centers now where the power is not where the people or the information is and so that doesn't really jive with me as an engineer we should be focused on putting data centers where they need to be and have the power technology to support them so we believe that Fusion for a whole bunch of political and business reasons and Engineering reasons even which we can I'd love to dig into are are would be a good fit for Private Industry well before and Commercial power uses well before they get they need into the public grid well so you should dig into that engineering perspective why is that why would you say that so in our specific case for instance we take electricity we compress a fusion plasma we extract that electricity back out directly um and we do it in a way where it's already now at kilovolts of power uh kilovolts of voltage and and it's DC and so there's some really interesting opportunities in if you're doing Fusion a little differently and you're generating energy not through a rotating turbine but through Direct Energy of does this DC power allow you to do interesting things where you have data centers that are mostly DC already can you get rid of AC conversion systems and just stay DC um charging cars DC power at high voltage there's all kinds of really interesting applications of can you then speed up and remove Engineering Systems remove development cycles and get right to commercial power for some applications as fast as possible still focused for us on electricity and not on any of the heat related things so it's basically about stripping away some of those engineering constraints to help speed up the the design and Engineering of it because you're you're simplifying the entire system essentially and and if we do it right maybe we can simplify other systems to simplify the data centers also and bring all that together um so there's some there's some interesting opportunities to innovate there I would say the main focus however is if our goal is to move fast then the engaging with large-scale industrial customers will be faster than than big utilities that not to say that we're not talking with utilities we've been working with the local utilities here and we moved our headquarters up to Everett Washington this year and we're working with the local utilities here to pave the way of what is it going to take to get into their power grid as soon as possible and starting those processes conversations and and studies right now this is a kind of a random question but what's your overall impression and feeling of the fusion industry in sector in general like where are you optimistic about obviously gonna be optimistic about helion but like I'm curious about like the entire industry not not asking you to call out specific companies or Technologies but like just in general how do you feel about where things are right now with Fusion yeah as a human I can see most of the universe is powered by Fusion maybe all of the universe every Sun every every star system uh is powered by Fusion Energy the physics of fusion and you kind of know that as humans we should be able to harness this this is where what we should be doing and it's it's clean and it's safe and it doesn't generate carbon dioxide so let's do it and and and I as a human I'm very excited by what I'm seeing of this tremendous growth in investment in technological growth in in different ideas to get to fusion and so my optimism that not only are we going to have fusion in our future but we're gonna have Fusion very soon in our future I obviously I believe it's going to be helion but but as a human I'm very excited by what I'm seeing across the industry is there is there anything we haven't touched on with helion specifically that you'd want to touch on I think just just to reiterate that and and this this Builds on your previous question and that as we're seeing this growth of the the fusion industry and these new technologies that that I'm excited to be able to watch helion grow as it has both in people but also in technology and be able to demonstrate these key Fusion Milestones of a 100 million degrees 500 million dollars raised we passed a 100 head count be able to to see the the growth of that and I just personally am very excited about about seeing that and watching that growth happen and then as we're building a full industry and all the manufacturing we haven't touched on any of the manufacturing Parts if you if we wanted to well the new industry we have to build to support Fusion yeah let's talk let's touch on that like like what what do we have to build out to be able to support what we're talking about building here like yeah I'm imagining there's an entire industry that has to form around this to support it yeah so infusion the the industry the manufacturing to support it doesn't really exist yet and so it's one of the the exciting other exciting things we get to do and if our goal is to move fast which it is then we need to be developing this the electronic Technologies the high power switches so our semiconductor switches are a custom design and we're having and we're learning how to mass produce semiconductor switches lots of people know how to do that but these are a little bit of an evolution now that now that we're big enough and we need to buy enough of them that we can um design our own systems and our own semiconductors and mass manufacture them energy storage we build we use capacitors instead of batteries and those capacitor manufacturing we're making more capacitors than anybody else and so we need to be building the line the the manufacturing lines in the United States so that helion can be producing those capacitors so we're not waiting on anyone else or Global Supply chains or any of those other things and so a lot of what we're doing in Everett in the the arm our facility we call this one on Antares behind behind me is building out those manufacturing lines of electronics semiconductors we just opened up a large scale machine shop with our our big 15 foot long cncs to start Machining all the big parts that we need for the the big high power magnets do you see this as a potential like limiting factor for the rollout of fusion like you could you could prove that you could do Fusion next year but if we it could be a decade more before we can actually start rolling it out in a meaningful way because there's no industry around it to support it we are us and our investors are definitely looking at what it's going to take to um get Fusion out in the world and not a single system but to to answer the thousands of gigawatts of fossil fuel power we have out in the world that means we need to be producing gigawatt level production per day of electrical generating capacity that's a huge undertaking and we're putting a lot of those systems in place at least thought processes in the beginning the manufacturing lines to be able to do that interestingly a lot of the timeline challenges that I look back earlier in my career were weirdly supply chain challenges not physics challenges we knew how to build a fusion system but it took three years to get all the parts in the door and and then a lot of and then years to assemble all those parts and so by by attacking that manufacturing today speeding that up starting to build system while we're buying from one manufacturer an existing manufacturer we're building manufacturing lines ourselves in-house to be able to to answer the need today and then get ready for the need in the future um I think honestly I think it also comes to a lot of the engineering is that you should be fusions companies and helion focuses on this on designing systems that can be Mass manufactured commercially and so that should be in our Forefront when we make engineering decisions sometimes we say well that would be really nice to have but I can't Mass manufacture that XYZ component and so I need to redesign this into a smaller system or segments or some other thing so that I could put this on a truck for instance and make sure everything can can be deployed as fast as possible so so it comes into even the engineering of building Polaris we think about making sure we're building in a way that you can always put it on a truck you can always deliver to a site install it at the site as fast as possible so we talk about gigafactories to to use that word a fusion of building Fusion generators you're looking at the entire ecosystem around the the Prototype itself not just the Prototype you're looking at making sure that you can roll it out efficiently in time which is something that I haven't seen a lot of fusion companies doing a lot of there's people I've spoken to in the past that have been very it's very still very academic of they're still trying to prove out the physics and they're still moving forward but helion seems to be taking the approach of kind of like Tesla for Fusion you're you're looking at the entire picture you're building the machine that will build the machines and when we started helion we thought about it as we're just gonna we're gonna focus on thinking about we want to get electricity out at a worldwide scale so we need to be thinking about those Manufacturing Systems and designing and Engineering that way in practice actually we've found that even these first generation demonstration systems these prototypes by working on how to manufacture faster right now it actually speeds us up today that I can build Parts in parallel I can have redundancy I can do all that stuff today so when things happen in a global supply chain that slow everything down like we've seen in the last two years we're already positioned to keep moving at maximum speed and so it's a little bit of more upfront capital investment and intellectual investment of thinking about those systems holistically and the whole ecosystem has paid off even today in these first first of a Kind systems this all plays back into what you were talking about how how you're iterating through different prototypes at the same time the speed at which you're moving is part of your answer to Skeptics it's because you're looking at the whole picture in your engineering for the whole picture which is why you're going to be moving faster than a lot of people expect you to be able to move and and then we try to to talk about it show pictures of it you can and show pictures of the systems we built in the crane as it goes in and as we start putting coils together and assembling them so you can see and you can come along with helion on the journey of what we're building and and then also come join us and just as a plug of we're hiring lots of of talented engineers and scientists to come join us on on this adventure well I covered all the questions I had if there's anything else you want to touch on we can we can talk about anything you want is there anything else no I think we got it all and our goal is to have Polaris up and running in 2024 showing that we can make electricity from Fusion for the first time I cannot wait I'm very excited me too I hope you all enjoyed that discussion with Mr kirtley and thank you to Matt for including that in this episode I think that this program that we have here is a great place for some of that longer information so let us know you the the viewers on YouTube or the listeners on the podcast did you find that a a good use of your time here on this episode would you like to see more of that let us know you can either jump into the comments on YouTube directly below the video or if you're listening to us as a podcast go back to your podcast provider look for the contact information in the podcast description and while you're there back on Apple or Google or Spotify or wherever it was you found this podcast leave a review subscribe and recommend this to your friends all that really does help and if you'd like to more directly support the channel go to stilltbd.fm click on the become a supporter button it allows you to throw coins at our heads we appreciate the welts and if you're on YouTube you can just click the join button there and you'll be able to do the same thing the welts hurt just as much but we appreciate them just as much thank you so much for listening everybody we'll talk to you next time foreign [Music]

2022-11-25 13:13

Other news