Kind: captions
Language: en
The following is a conversation with
David Curtley, a nuclear engineer,
expert on nuclear fusion, and the CEO of
Helium Energy, a company working on
building nuclear fusion reactors and
have made incredible progress in a short
period of time that make uh it seem
possible like we could actually get
there as a civilization. This is
exciting because nuclear fusion, if
achieved commercially, would 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° C 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 fision. By the way, I
believe according to the excellent
sample size subreddit post by PM
Goodbeear on this, the preferred
pronunciation of the latter in US is
nuclear vision like vision and in the UK
and other countries is nuclear fishision
like mission. I prefer the nuclear
fision pronunciation because America.
So uh today's nuclear power plants use
nuclear fision. They uh 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 longived radioactive
waste. inherently safe because a fusion
reactor can't melt down. If uh something
goes wrong, the reactor simply stops and
there's uh no carbon emissions. On a
more technical side, Helium uses a
different approach to fusion than has
traditionally been done. Most fusion
efforts have used Takamax, which are
these giant donut-shaped magnetic
containment chambers. Helium uses pulse
magneto inertial 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, the 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 uh
podcast episodes. This is the Lex
Freeman 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 Curtley.
Let's start with the big picture. What
is nuclear fusion? And maybe what is
nuclear fusion? Uh 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 even 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
hundred 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. Um, we also talk about the
strong nuclear force that holds the
atomic nucleuses 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 is
you're bringing those those lightweight
atomic nuclei those isotopes together.
Fision 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 subatomic 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 fision 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 fizz or uh are fizzile and
break apart and release energy.
I think about and I look at that process
uh in stars and that our star is
fundamentally an early stage star that's
burning just hydrogens. But when it
burns and does fusion, those hydrogens's
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 um that whole
stellar process is something that
inspires us at helon to think about what
are fusion fuels not just the simplest
ones but more advanced fusion fuels that
we see in stars throughout the universe.
Okay. So there's a million things I want
to say. So first maybe zooming out to
the biggest possible picture. If we 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.
>> Uh then the other thing is the physics
again very basic but you said E= MC² a
couple times.
>> Can you explain this equation? Equals
mc^ squ is a fundamental relationship
that a patent clerk Einstein discovered
and unlocked an entire new realm of
physics and 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 also 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 by atomic
physics sure certainly in atomic
reactions is equals mc^2 and that that I
think most people have heard of and are
used used to but also in chemistry and
in chemical bonds that in 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 measure, but but it's still
there and that's the energy that is
released and you can quantify that. We
use uh units of electron volts um as a
unit of what is the energy in atomic
processes or chemical processes. Can you
also just speak to the the different
fuels that you mentioned both on the
fusion and the fision side? So uranium
plutonium for the fision and then
hydrogen isotopes for the fusion. So for
fision, uranium and plutonium, we don't
make those nuclei. Those right now for
humanity, those have been made in the
primordial universe through super
supernova and big bang um 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. Um and in fact, most
plutonium we make from uranium. And we
can talk about how to enrich uh uranium
if if we want to go down that road. But
that's how we get those molecules and
nuclei. For fusion materials,
hydrogenetic species or hydrogens um are
primordial in the universe. Also only
the most common things that are in the
universe. The sun suns and stars are
made up of hydrogens and heliums. Um and
so the vast majority of atoms in the
universe still are hydrogen. So the
basic fuel for vision 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 dutyium which is a heavier
isotope of hydrogen. Hydrogen is
typically one proton and one electron
atomic mass of one. Dutyium is an atomic
mass of two which is a proton which is
charged particle and it has a neutron in
its nucleus which is an uncharged
particle. And so that's dutyium as the
fuel. Now, dutarium 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. Um, it's it's it's
everywhere.
>> Um, and and safe and clean and 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 dutarium
here on earth
>> and how is that stored mostly
>> and mostly that's just in water mostly
that it's a mix of we we call this
actually heavy water where you have
normal water that you're used to we talk
about and you learn in pool is H2O where
there's two hydrogens's and oxygen in a
nucleus in the molecule and dutarium or
heavy water is D2O two dutariums and an
oxygen um in reality it's actually an
interesting mix where you have some HDO
so a mix of hydrogen and dutarium you
also have other hydrogenic species
tridium is another one where you add a
second neutron to that hydrogen and then
you can have T2O tridiated water um and
that's something that that comes up and
and and we need to talk about at some
point. Um and there's other as you go up
the periodic table, you get add two
protons and you get helium. And so
helium, the most common helium is is
helium 4, which is two protons and two
neutrons. And then we use an isotope of
helium. The nucleus is called helion,
which is what we base the company after,
which is two protons and one neutron.
It's a light helium molecule. So the
number you mentioned in terms of uh how
much fuel is available basically the the
takeaway there is it's a nearly endless
resource 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 um even at much higher output
power levels for humanity. Yes. So the
moment we start running out of uh
hydrogen and helium, we're that means
we're doing some pretty incredible
things with with with our technology.
And then that technology is probably
going to allow us to propagate out into
the universe and then discover other
sources cuz you can also get it on other
planets, whatever planets have water,
and it looks more and more likely like a
lot of them do. What a incredible future
just out into the cosmos. Nuclear power
plants everywhere. Yeah. Okay. So, uh to
linger on the some of the technical
stuff, you said uh strong nuclear force.
So, how exactly is the energy created?
So, how does the E= MC² the the M go to
the E uh in fusion? So in fusion you
take these lightweight isotopes like
hydrogen and dutyium and as you combine
them and get and take these molecules
and get them closer and closer together
some really interesting fundamental
physics happens. So first um 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. Um 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
MC² is energy. So extremely high
temperature extremely high speed. Uh
maybe that's one of the other
differences also with fusion and fision
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 fision is easy.
>> Nuclear fision 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.
Um 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. Um 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 in there. So
there's a large force that's pulling all
that fuel together and and 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 uh
building fusion reactors, we have to
figure out how to do that confinement
without the huge
uh 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. I 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. Um, 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.
Um, so the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, the NRC, uh, defines reactor
as I have it. I have it right here. A
nuclear reactor is an apparatus other
than an atomic weapon designed or used
to sustain nuclear fision in a
self-supporting chain reaction. And
there's two big parts to that. That one
fision reaction, obviously fusion is not
that. 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 uh
and we know cuz we have to do it every
day. And it's really hard to do. And so
we actually use the word generator
because you 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'll we're 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.
Um 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 um or even heat
and energy. That's great. But what I
really want is electricity. And uh 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
um have a intermediate step and those
again are are technical details. Let me
sort of still linger on the difference
between fusion and fision. Uh what are
some advantages at a high level of
nuclear fusion as a source of energy?
>> Fundamentally as 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
the flip side of that, just sort of
stating the obvious, but it's nice to
lay it out for nuclear fision, it's uh
chain reactions, so it's hard to shut
off. And it works by boiling water into
steam, which spins turbines and produces
electricity. Can you talk through this
process in a nuclear fision reactor? In
a nuclear fision reactor, you put enough
of this fizzile 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 are
hot, but it also releases neutrons. It
also releases more of these uncharged
particles. And if you do it right, this
file material will be next to other
fizzile material. And so that neutron
will then go and bombard another uranium
nucleus again opening that up and
releasing more heat and more of these
neutrons. And that's how you have those
reactions of a self-supporting chain
reaction. And that chain reaction then
continues. People design fision reactors
such that you have just the right
balance of enough neutrons are made such
the reaction is continuing but not so
many neutrons are made that it speeds up
cuz you don't want it to speed up.
>> And there's some kind of cooling
mechanisms also like that's part of the
the art 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. There's some more advanced fision
reactors that have different cooling
fluids, 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 run a steam
turbine to do traditional electricity
generation and and output electricity
through your your steam turbine. You end
up with complicated systems of flowing
liquids and flowing water, balancing the
heat. A lot of fision reactor design
comes from that thermal balance of
keeping this reaction going, making sure
it doesn't speed up because that's
that's an un uh controlled chain
reaction which you would not want and
balancing the 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 a bit
more is nuclear fusion is much safer. So
there's no chain reaction going on. you
can just shut it off. But it should also
be said that as far as I understand the
current fision nuclear reactors are also
very safe. I think there's a perception
that nuclear fision reactors are unsafe.
They're they're dangerous and if you
just look empirically at the statistics
that the fear is not justified 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
let's take a step back and look a little
broader and say, let's 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.
I spent a lot of years studying these
these systems. Um, and modern vision
reactors, I believe, are are engineered
to be safe. They're engineered in ways
where as those uh reactions maybe speed
up and those systems get hotter, they
actually are built to expand and cool
down passively and natively. And there's
protection systems in place that modern
systems are quite safe from an
engineering perspective. And so I
believe that we have figured out how to
build nuclear fision reactors in a way
where the engineering of the power plant
is safe. I would say that I look back at
the history of what we've built over
time and the challenge hasn't come to
the engineering. Actually, I believe the
engineers have solved these problems. Uh
the problem comes from humans and the
problem comes from other things around
nuclear power. You have to enrich that
uranium to put it in a plant and the
plant's safe, but you had to enrich that
uranium and that is some of the problem.
or a plant is designed to run for a
certain number of decades safely, but do
we run it longer than that? And so those
are where I think the real challenges
happen is more with the humans around
these systems than the engineering of
the power plants themselves.
>> Well, I have to ask then uh what do you
think happened in Chernobyl? What
lessons do we learn from Chernobyl
nuclear disaster and maybe also three
Mile Island and Fukushima accidents? I
think you're suggesting that it has to
do with the humans a bit. So with
Chernobyl and Fukushima, I actually put
Three-Mile Island in a different
category. In fact, um some of the recent
news in the last year is that we're
going to be restarting Three-Mile Island
because there's such a need for clean
base load power. So that's that's
actually a very interesting other topic
we should talk about is is why and and
how we're doing that. But more than
that, going back to the accidents that
did happen, um, in both of those
systems, you can point to the human
failure rather than the engineering
failures of those systems that in
Fukushima specifically, there were
multiple nuclear fision reactors on the
same site that successfully kept running
through the tsunami totally successfully
and were only later shut down for more
political reasons. But the old one, the
oldest of them that had been on site for
for long periods and maybe maybe too
long, I think some experts have looked
at this in the past, um was where the
some of the problems actually happened.
And so I look to that less as a um
a failure of the engineering of the
power plants and more of the humans and
around those systems that if we that we
should be operating these plants as
designed and and then I believe they're
safe and that gets to some of the atomic
weapons questions that I think are the
other part around nuclear reactors and
fision 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 fision
power plants and nuclear fision weapons
and maybe also nuclear fusion power
plants and nuclear fusion uh weapons
like what are the differences here?
fusion power plants can't be used to
make nuclear weapons like fundamentally
that the the processes in fusion aren't
the same processes that happen in
nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons and so
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 that also
can't be used to make weapons and I
think that's a little bit of a
distinction from traditional nuclear
fision reactors is that while I totally
believe as a nuclear engineer you can
you we 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 be made to make
nuclear weapons that we know that if you
take enough fizzile material together
enough uranium 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 fision bomb. And so how
this fundamentally works is that you
have a fision 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 Hbomb is all still from the uranium
reactions themselves. Yeah, I think
people call it sort of the nuclear
fusion bomb, hydrogen bomb, but really
it's still a nuclear fusion 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 sort of
think of it as a fusion bomb really. And
if you take away that that fizzile
material that that nuclear fision
reaction, the fusion reaction doesn't
happen at all. Um, in fact, there's been
researchers that 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 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
that 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
it's it 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 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 this just in
the United States, but all over the
world so that we're building fusion
power and 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 um 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
fision power plants and nuclear fusion
power plants? What's the in interesting
intricate uh complexity there that you
could uh maybe speak to? The question I
would want to ask is what would you do
if we could deliver for you lowcost
clean industrial scale tens or hundreds
of megawws of fusion power that's
lowcost clean base load and doesn't have
the geopolitical consequences of uranium
and plutonium of file 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
source of energy, which I think are
important in Saudi Arabia, in the Middle
East, in Russia,
uh, 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
dutarium
>> 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 like that just cannot
happen with fusion. And so if we can
deploy those plants and we can deploy
them quickly, then it 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, uh 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 PL power systems and
industrial scale systems. Um and that's
something that we build into the design
of these from today. Um we look at uh
how these systems might fail. And in
fact, some of the analysis we do is um
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.
Um 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. Um and the answer is
you don't need to evacuate the populace
nearby the fusion power plant. Um 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 fe feeding in this hydrogen
these dutarium fuels and at any one time
in a helon fusion system and most fusion
systems you have 1 second of fuel in
that system. And so what that means is
if you stop turning on if you stop
putting fuel into that system, fusion
just stops. But what also means is that
if something really catastrophic
happened and for whatever reason, um you
have all of 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 in that nature and fusion
doesn't happen. That hydrogen, that
heavy water, that dutarium just goes
back into the environment safely and
cleanly without 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. Um, and in nuclear
power, an efficient 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 of for for uh things to happen.
But in fusion you have literally 1
second of fuel at any time in the
system. And having a tank of dutarium
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 like what happens if a
meteor hits a fusion power plant. Okay.
So that's really interesting. Uh what
about the waste? what kind of waste is
there for uh 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. Um the charged
particles themselves for a fusion
reaction are all contained in the the
fusion system. Um and the X-ray is
similar to think about 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. Um and so this
is very similar and in fact this is a
lot of the work we did with the nuclear
regulatory commission over the last
number of years um 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 reactors
are regulated under something what's
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 uh plastic
bored polyethylene and concrete
shielding um to protect operators and
equipment from the fusion reactions
while they're happening. Um but again,
you turn them off and those fusion
reactions stop and that's really the
key. Um there's a funny uh story related
to that. We um sto we've been building
fusion systems that do fusion a long
time and at some level we they got
powerful enough doing enough fusion we
started building these shields and and
shielding them like a particle
accelerator. Um and I went to the uh
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 um as a as a
particle accelerator." And um uh the
very first question I got asked was
great, where do the patients go? Because
the standard form had a patient uh 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 helon system. And we
said, "No, 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. Um and and we were
able to go through and work with state
agencies to license these fusion
particle accelerators. We were as far as
we know the first licensed fusion system
ever. Um as a particle accelerator for
those first systems. Um first license we
had was in 2020. Um we then have gone on
and now licensed several of our fusion
systems that we've built that do fusion.
both the shielding as well as um some of
the the fuel processes.
>> So high level what are the the different
ways to build a nuclear fusion power
plant?
So can you explain what a takamacha is,
what a stellarator is and what's the
linear approach that uh helon is using?
So there are a number of ways to do
fusion. Um and fundamentally in all
fusion approaches you're trying to do
the same phys same fundamental physical
process which is take these lightweight
isotopes heat them up so that they can
um 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 um 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. Um that's the
fundamental core. Now how you do that,
how do 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 um 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 uh profile which is an
interesting thing to talk about. But in
public funding and 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 laser lasers and
pulse them together to combine them to
do fusion for a pulse for a very short
period of time nanoseconds billionth of
a second. the other extreme and you
mentioned tokamax and stellarators.
Stellarators are actually my favorite.
So we'll we'll talk about those graduate
student infusion. The stellarator is the
first thing you learn about
>> because there's a mathematical solution
for a stellarator that solves perfectly
>> and and um and 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 uh humanity a a
number of decades to be able to build
stellarators. And we can do it now. Um
with the Windstein 7X that came online
uh in the last few years being the
premier uh stellarator in the world. I
should say all the different ways to do
fusion all just looks 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
like there's 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 way. Can you just speak a
little bit more to the inertia in 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, um
there's 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 of
wire. And the simplest way to think
about it is literally a round loop. And
in that loop, you have electrons. You
have an 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, uh, 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
um, uh, 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. Um, so that
magnetic field that's generated inside
that magnetic coil has some really
special properties and and we take
advantage of those properties to do
fusion. And some of those properties are
not intuitive. So here's 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 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 attracted to that magnetic
field line. How much of the physics
at this scale is understood here? Like
how these systems behave when you when
when you um trap the 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 in fusion? The
physics we're using is actually quite
old that the fundamental electromagnetic
physics is 1800's 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. And so you can do
the math. You can do the math. Every uh
introductory grad student does the math
on a stellerator and say this is all I
need to do. Um I just need to make a
magnetic coil in this very complicated
shape and then fusion will happen. Um,
however, doing that in practice is
actually quite quite challenging.
>> So, maybe you can speak a little bit
more. So, the the accelerator and the
TOK, what's the difference between those
two? They're both magnetic fusion
systems. And then what is helon do?
>> The tokamac and the accelerator are both
magnetic systems. Their goal is to
generate this magnetic field and hold on
to 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 as the radius that they oscillate
around this magnetic field. Um, and
we're we've been talking about atomic
physics where everything is uh at this
nano scale. But gyro orbits are not gyro
orbits for these fusion particles are
measured in inches. And so they're
they're in on a scale that that that we
can see and measure and and understand
really intuitively. Um, and in a
magnetic system, your goal is to simply
trap as many of these particles as you
can for long enough that 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 what happens when you put
particles in a magnetic field and you
try to hold on to it. The challenge is
that's really hard to hold on to 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 on to 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. Um, as
scientists and engineers, maybe we're
not too creative with the terminology.
We call the technique that Helon 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. Um 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 the some of the
earliest programs we called them the
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 because there's nothing holding
them in. Great. So, that makes sense.
Um, and so that doesn't work. Okay. So
then the next approach I say, well, one
one branch of fusion said, "Okay, well
to solve that, why don't we take this
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 and that became that evolved into
the stellarator and the tokamac.
different ways of taking those solenoids
and wrapping them around so that the
plasmas go around and round in that
magnetic field and are those charged
particles are held long enough that
fusion happens. But there's a different
way to do it. And so the theta pench 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.
>> 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 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 the
particle pressure, the the particles
trying 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. and 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.
>> And so you do a good job of heating it
and they'd all leave out the ends. Okay?
>> So then the next iteration is said,
"Okay, well, why don't we just not try
to hold on to 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 when what I mean by crushing it is
not actually like crushing any magnets
or changing the the the topology or 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 were in a
a streaming around together and then
rapidly increasing the magnetic field so
that those particles get closer and
closer and closer together. So you
increase the density and now fusion
starts to really happen.
>> But they ended up hitting a
technological limit.
>> So this is the part that that um I look
back and I'm I look at the pioneers that
in 1958 there was some pioneering work
done um and this was in California what
later became Livermore Labs. There was
also some work done at other national
labs too. These were all fedally funded
programs to explore this uh theta pinch
topology of can you just squeeze the
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, but they were doing it
in uh millionths of a second,
microsconds, megahertz speeds. Um and
this was in 1958. no transistor, no
CPUs, and um 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. Um 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 a technical
limit where they just could not build it
anymore.
And so they th 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
in this new thing has invented the laser
which turns on in a nancond. It's fast.
It's interesting. Let's go down that
path. Um and it's not you have to fast
forward a couple of decades to
researchers found with some of these
theta penches 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
reverse configuration. Uh there's
numerous programs of FRC, field reverse
configuration programs, um both at
national labs, there's actually a number
of private companies now of people
building field reverse configurations.
Um and they have some really unique
properties. But fundamentally talking
about the main difference, I described a
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. And what they discovered
early is if they have field going in one
direction. So the plasma the uh
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
patch. 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 the direction 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 um
that are moving back and forth. You
change the direction. What that means is
that they're you're trying to take that
electrical current and that magnetic
field and reverts its direction, flip
it, and but it can't flip fast enough
that 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 you've inverted
it, something really really unique
happens, which is that the plasma itself
can reconnects internally.
And so now what you're left with is an
outside magnetic field, an electrical
coil, and inside the plasma where now it
was before it was moving along, it's now
moving internally. rapidly reversing the
magnetic field. Plasma self-organizes
into a closed field.
>> What?
>> Yep.
>> So,
>> it sounds wild.
>> It's it's it's Yeah. So, first of all,
there's a lot of there's a million
questions I have. So, one of them,
what's rapidly?
>> What time scale are we talking about
here?
>> Mhm. You have to reverse the electrical
current faster than a million degree
which is a very hot gas particle can
move. 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 [laughter]
>> this is hard and it's only we can only
do it now because of semiconductor
switching
>> because we can 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 nancond 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 it's able to contain itself? So,
what I like to do is use an analogy here
of 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 it's a lot
more straightforward to understand. So
in a magnetic coil, when you have an 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 Lind'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 uh where
you have a primary on a transformer and
you have electricity flowing it and you
have a secondary where electricity flows
exactly the opposite direction. We use
this every day in in in our lives. And
so in this in 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. Um and in that case now you I
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
current, 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 tokamac, um the theta pench,
the stellarator, there's electrical
current flowing in the plasma. But in
the field reverse configuration, you
have a lot of electrical current flowing
in the plasma, massive amounts of it.
And that's the key. So you have this
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, 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 pench and for a mirror and for a
tokamac in that magnetic field the
plasma gets trapped. But in an F FRC,
this electrical current is the plasma.
And that electric that plasma then
generates its own magnetic field
and it's then trapped on its own
magnetic field.
>> That's fascinating.
>> And and that's the key. And so in your
tokome, in your donut, in your st and in
your funky donut, your stellarator, you
make the magnets and you trap your
plasma in it. In an F FRC, you make the
plasma which makes the magnets and it
traps itself. And 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. And 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. And so
we've observed these for hundred years.
And we've known about these plasmoids
for a long time. And there's researchers
that have tried intentionally to make
them. Um, 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 1 millionth of a second and
being able to make sure it's reliable
and stable and all that kind of stuff.
So, by the way, how do you keep the
thing stable? And 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 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. And so that's the hard part of the
job. Um, and so that's what we've spent
the last number of years learning how to
do ourselves and others on these pulse
closed field FRC systems. M
>> 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 spent a lot of
time on both. So we talked about time
scales. You have to reverse the field.
You have to you have to change the
electrical current in a millionth of a
second. And 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
and 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. So we talked about how this
theta pench compresses a magnetic field.
It applies a pressure on the outside.
Um, 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. They have the
electromagnetism is pushing back. And so
I like to think about this as the motor
in a Tesla. In your electric car, you
have a motor, 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 lorren force is
what it's technically called. This
electromagnetic force induces an
electrical current on the armature on
the shaft. And this is getting into the
details, but it's the armature of an
electrical motor. That actually is what
spins. And 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 a
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. And so this is
something you learn very early in your
graduate work uh 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 uh 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. And
so what that fundamentally means is I
talked about how you have a magnetic
field and in that magnetic field plasma
is trapped in on that magnetic field. Um
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 um 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 reverse
configuration in one of our plasmas, uh
beta is very close to one by usually by
definition one at any point in in the
system. Which means that every time I
apply a magnetic force on this doughut
to compress it, the plasma particles on
the inside push back. And what's really
interesting is you have an equation for
magnetic pressure which is B^2 over 2 m.
Um the magnetic field squared is the
external magnetic pressure. Any magnetic
field anywhere generates this pressure.
Um but the plasma particles themselves
also have a pressure. This is the ideal
gas law. And we use the definition in KT
density Boltzman constant and
temperature for pressure. And in high
beta, they're the same. B ^2 over 2 mu
KN is N KT. So for a known magnetic
field, I know what the density and the
temperature of the plasma is. And just
to circle back to it, when we talked
about fusion, we talked about it had to
be hot enough and it had to be dense
enough. And that's N and that's T. And
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. Um the F FRC has one of the
highest betas beta equal one. However,
what you also learn in school when you
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 tokome is an accelerator are 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 F FRC
is unconfined. So the plasma is confined
but the whole topology can do something
what 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 um think about the uh a
motor is a good example an armature in
the center of your motor you have a
spinning armature you have this 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
access. 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 on to
it. And so, it's unstable. So, when you
learn about the F FRC, that's the first
thing you learn. Um, and it took us a
number of years to learn about a
parameter of how to make them stable and
and and that and and that's pretty
fundamental, but most people who've
heard of an FRC haven't understood this
really key fact. Um, and so we have a
parameter we call SAR over E. Um, and
we're getting really into the physics
weeds here, but but let's go.
>> But it's really important. And the good
analogy here is a top.
>> Mhm.
>> Literally a top spinning top. And so you
have a 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, put 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 F 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, um if you spin it
faster and faster, it'll stay spinning
longer. Um, however, uh, 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. And so we have this
parameter called SAR over E. Sar is the
hybrid kinetic parameter which tells you
how um stable it is from that top point
of view. and the E which is the
elongation of how long it is. And so
maybe fortuitously, thank you, nature,
uh gave us a win here, which is that how
we make these in 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 SAR 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
microsconds at most. Us and others in
the field have been able to make them
last for thousands of microsconds.
Thousands of times what the stability
the the basic un the basic criteria
would tell you. And so we know now how
to do this. And so we just designed them
with this built into them. Can you uh
explain a little bit more that star over
e are you given [snorts] that or is that
an emergent thing? So like at which
stage is that the result or the 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.
>> The hard part is you have to design it
with Sar over E being satisfied the
whole time, right? And here's the extra
trick here. Sar over E is also a measure
of temperature.
And and yeah, we're it all comes back to
temperature. The hotter you make them is
the same thing. Temperature is kinetic
energy is the faster you're spinning. So
if you take your your top and you spin
it faster, it's more stable. But you got
to 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
the challenge of what we do daytoday is
getting to these hot plasmas. And where
people have other people have tried to
make FRC's and not been very successful,
it's 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.
some ways Helon is more of an electrical
engineering company than a fusion
company some days. Um, 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. Uh like you said,
you can't put anything mechanical in
there.
>> Yeah. So, a couple of key things happen.
So, when gas is that hot, there's uh 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 moving 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 um some more
phases of matter. Um we can add a little
bit more physics here. Uh we talk about
rarified gases. So when we think about
most gases that 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 as the
air here. That these particles are
bouncing off of each others that if you
put a really hot one right here, it
would then cool enough that all the air
is roughly on the same temperature. Um,
but you can be what's called rarified.
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 and that's
where we call rarified and then you can
go even hotter than that and that's
where now the actual atomic states which
has uh the nucleus which has a proton
and a neutron and an electron gets so
hot that electron gets energized and
then escapes leaves the system um 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 going to go
hotter. We're going to take this plasma
and go even hotter. And 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, what it's
really is a is a is a a measurement of
is velocity.
It's really a measurement of how fast is
that particle moving. Um, and and that's
how I really think about temperature
when you get to that 100 million
degrees. And so, it does it does some
more complex things. If you have this
high energy particle, it's why we like
fusion is moving at 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 because 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. And that that's that's
really important. Um, and so it's 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 uh extremely fast moving.
What is it? 1 million miles per hour. Is
that accurate?
>> That's the right kind of order for these
systems.
>> Crazy. And so you're looking for them to
collide. Well, 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 um if you have a
machine of a certain size and it's
moving very fast, that tells you the
time that that particle is moving from
place to place in that machine. Um, 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 microscond.
>> Mhm.
>> 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 microsconds
and 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 micros
secondsonds, not in seconds. And so when
you do fusion, it's pretty wild. It's
literally a flash. 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 cuz they had
to control things at this scale but
maybe it was pretty hard and and 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. U megahertz is
microsconds. That's great. You're kind
of at the border of fast enough, but you
can't do computation at that speed if if
all it can do is respond in one
microcond. But now gigahertz means I can
do a thousand operations in that one
microcond. 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. Um and
so in this sequence uh programming
language we use a variety of them. Some
of the fusion codes are actually written
in forran still.
>> Nice. And though a lot is now more and
more run in Python and so we do a lot of
Python, we do some Java and then we also
have uh 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. And so fiber optic I can respond I
can send photons at the speed of light.
And so those fiber optics can respond in
nanconds and then I trigger those fiber
optics with programmable logic that
we've programmed in the hard hardware
assembly language. As a small tangent,
let me do a uh call to action out there.
I'm still looking for the best for
programmer in the world if people uh to
talk to them cuz so many of the
essential systems the world runs on is
still programmed in 4R. I think is a
fascinating programming language. Cobalt
too, but Forran even more so. It's one
of the great sort of computational
numerical programming languages.
Uh anyway, what uh in terms of the
sensors
that are giving you some kind of
information about the system in terms of
the diagnostics
like what kind of 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 four trend
programmers so [laughter]
>> for different reasons. Yeah. 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
microcond. And we need to know if it's
working right. And so in one of these F
FRC or these pulseed magnetic systems,
you won't have just one electrical
switch. I mentioned 100 megaamps, 100
million amps of electrical current. each
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 be build a
system. And this is what we spend uh a
lot of time with. And I made the joke
that in a lot of ways Helon'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. Um so in a
typical sequence, we will pre-program.
The operators will pre-program a
sequence um usually fed from a numerical
simulation of expecting how the fusion
system will perform. We start with a
calc 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 and
then let it go and and and measure
fusion happening. um but during that
process have to be real time recording
and and measuring all of the
semiconductors and all of the switching
in the system. I talk about measuring
fusion diagnostics. That's a whole
another thing which we can talk about.
This is just on the electrical control
side. Um 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 are 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. Um, and real
time all of these systems are being
monitored by more fiber optics. Um, we
call these Rowski coils, but they're
electromagnetic coils that are powered
by the electrical current themselves.
So, as these 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." Um and so real time
we're monitoring all of this so that we
know that these systems are behaving and
operating at their their optimal
performance. What's the role of
numerical simulation in all of this sort
of
I guess ahead of time?
Uh how much numerical simulation are you
doing to understand how the system is
going to behave? how the different
parameters all come together, the the
electrical system and how that all maps
to the the the fusion that's actually
generated.
>> Yeah, the operation of a fusion system
is is pretty fascinating because all of
this happens on a time scale where human
operators cannot be cannot really be
involved.
>> Um and so uh 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 times, you still have all
computers doing both the triggering and
the and the measuring of of how they're
performing real time the whole time. Um,
and so, um, how this typically works, at
least in our systems, is that we will
design a system with a combination of
with with some numerical simulation
tools that we we've developed based off
of decades and decades of amazing
government programs. National Lab
Programs developed these numerical
codes. Um, we use a kind of a code
called an MHD, magneto hydrodnamic code.
Um and that's uh for people for the
engineers out there who are used to CFD
computational fluid dynamics. This is
very similar. You take the same sets of
equations actually and add the
electromagnetic equations on top of
those and so you get magneto
hydrodnamic.
>> Are you simulating at the level of a
particle? Is there some quantum
mechanical aspects to this also? Does
how low does it go?
>> Yeah, we have multiple codes at
different levels. Um because one of the
the main computational challenges is um
amazingly even given all that we are
have been have built for fusion systems
computers are still not fast enough to
measure to simulate everything. Um and
so we have uh a number of codes that we
use. Um, 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 fu 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.
Well, we actually simulate the full
thing starting literally with a spice
model. uh 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 and for that one the
computational resources are several
orders of magnitude larger. Uh 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. Um that's a whole another
tangent we can go down. Those
hybrid codes we call them particle and
cell codes uh now treat the ions as
particles and that lets us measure and
and simulate the behavior. I mentioned
the stability criteria SAR over E the
top behavior. that behavior. We now need
these more advanced codes to be able to
simulate and those are more modern.
Those we've only been able to apply in
practice for the last few years
actually, which is pretty fascinating.
Um that 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 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
spike where we actually have the circuit
model now we uh our design team uses
this to design the circuitry where we're
designing which capacitor to use which
switch to use uh 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 to 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 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 a data
an operator right now does a lot of
simulations ahead of time then collects
data uh through their their operations
of the machines making these field
reverse configurations going through
parameter sweeps and then the simulation
team then goes back and looks at that
data and and compares it with
simulations. Um, 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. And so I'm I'm we're watching
and starting to work on that now of 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 you're now an operator can pull up
what the AI or what the m the machine
learning would have predicted it should
have done and then use that to
understand what's happening in in the
actual programs and 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 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 the Tucker
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^2 the magnetic
pressure is equal to N KT 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 toao
so n t and toao long enough that fusion
happens and a lot of fusion happens more
than any of the loss rates that are
happening in t and in beta with b ^ squ
you know already two of those parameters
n and t 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 tokamac
or it's a theta pench or it's an f frc
are attempting to do that maximize the
magnetic field and so we're all pushing
to that um what's really nice in pulse
systems is that we know how to do that
in fact um in a pulse system uh
researchers in pulse magnetic fields
have demonstrated over 100 Tesla
magnetic fields in pulse magnets that's
much higher than you can get in a steady
magnet or what's been demonstrated so
far
>> just a clarification question uh so
maximizing magnetic field is about the n
and the t the beta
>> so we're not talking about towel yet
>> not yet but we need to because that's
really important
>> um and so we can even talk even a little
bit further about how fusion scales and
so in fusion the hotter you get the fuel
the more fusion you get. Um and we know
that by increasing the magnetic field B
^2 is in T you increase density and
temperature together more density more
temperatures more fusion plus more
temperatures even more fusion. And so
what we see is that in our in the in
these types of systems uh a scaling very
clearly of magnetic field to the 3.75
power or even uh in a lot of a lot of
demonstrations 3.77 that that specific
scaling. That's a very strong scaling of
fusion power output um and fusion
reactions. And so that tells you you
want to go to as a maximum magnetic
field as you can. Pulse systems are
really powerful. Pulse systems have
showed when you do pulseed magnetic
fields compared to a steady magnetic
field researchers have shown over a 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
pulse system.
>> Okay, got it. So we we're maximizing the
magnetic field. So that's going number
go up super up. How do you get the
duration the towel?
>> But then I said pulsed and pulse already
implies shorter towel.
>> Yes.
>> And so that is in the fusion field the
name of the game.
>> Folks will will have a very uh inertial
fusion will have a nancond towel very
short but then very high pressure. They
don't have magnetic fields but very high
pressure. Um, and then in stellarators
and tokamax, your goal is very long tow,
but you'll have much lower density and
and and you can't really go too much in
temperature, but they'll have much lower
density. And so, where we live in the
pulse magnetic or the magneto inertial
fusion is in the middle um is in
extremely high magnetic fields,
increasing pressure as much as you can
and then keeping them around long
enough. Um and so that gets to the tow
that gets to that energy confinement
lifetime and also it gets to stability.
And so this is the thing that this field
reverse configuration which has showed
that we can um build we that 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 in
a practical fusion system uh that there
are lifetimes of these high beta pulse
systems between a 100 microsconds and a
few milliseconds, thousands of a second.
And you hold on to it for a few thousand
of a second. You do fusion and then you
exhaust it. And so the whole process in
this is we start with uh a magnetic
field that fills the full chamber. You
then inject fusion fuel. You ionize it,
superheating it now to an ice cold 1
million degrees, but hot enough that you
have charged particles. You have
plasmas.
You can then in start increasing the
magnetic field. You form an F a field
reverse 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 it 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. And
this is where the beta really really
works in in in your advantage is that
just like magnetic pressure on the
outside magnetic pressure is in KT
compresses
the the fuel and increasing pressure and
temperature. When the pressure and
temperature of the plasma increase in KT
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. And 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 F FRC method that you use
leads directly to electricity. I was
wondering if you could describe sort of
the difference between those two. Yeah,
I I like the analogy of
the match and the campfire. And I hear
that a lot in fusion where um a lot of
what steady fusion, think a stellarator
or tokamac, is attempting to do is take
a little bit of fuel that match and then
add heat um to ignite that match and
then put it with enough fuel and in the
right conditions and hold on to it for a
long time that it grows into a campfire.
Even if you're doing if they do a good
job a bonfire, it's creating a
tremendous amount of of energy in that
steady system, burning fuel in the same
place, generating some ash, generating a
lot of heat in that reaction. Um, and in
a traditional in a in a in a tokamac or
a stellarator, that's a lot of what
you're doing is you're you're holding on
to the heat as much as possible to keep
that reaction going. Um and in that the
optimal fuel is called dutyium and
tridium where you have dutyium is a
heavy isotope of hydrogen where you have
an extra neutron and tridium is a very
rare form of hydrogen um that's an
unstable form. It's 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 uh at
at very at very high densities or high
enough densities and very high
temperatures um they make helium which
is a charged particle which stays inside
the campfire inside the tokamac um
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're have
this reaction going and you want to get
the energy out of it. You want to 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. um
and then use that in a 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 um nuclear vision reactors do
this um and so we know how to do that
and and and that's the traditional way
of doing it but what I think there's
other ways to do it with pulse magnetic
system. There's an one more thing you
get to do because you have this high
beta where there's an electric field and
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 on the
campfire like in the tokamac, 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 then but it takes you into another
direction. So your analogy of the 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 you use 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 in a piston engine, it's to turn a
crankshaft and and and and uh run uh a
turn a crankshaft and 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 in a generator
using that method um 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 much much higher
efficiencies. In fact, um there's been
theoretical papers that show not 30 to
35% efficiency like a steam turbine can
do, but 80% efficiency, 85% efficiency,
extract 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, 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 to make
fusion. We're in this to make
electricity and we're using fusion to
make electricity. And so from from my
point of view, that should be the focus
is how do we get to that? So that's the
efficiency of that thermal energy that
makes it out to electricity. What it is
is not a measure of how much energy you
put into the system and what happens to
that. Um in terms of you started this
campfire with a blowtorrch, what about
all that blow torch 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. Um, and that's the really
powerful one and that's something that
um, 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 just
making a tremendous amount of
electricity in one of these systems. Um,
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 dutarium and
tridium 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 dutyium and helium
3.
>> And we talked about dutarium heavy heavy
hydrogen. Well, helium 3 uh the nucleus
is also called a helium. That's why we
named the company that um is light
helium which is in normal helium which
is what you find in a balloon. It's two
protons, two neutrons. It's very stable
um uh and found found commonly. Um,
helium 3 is also stable. Um, but it's
not found commonly. Fortunately, it's
lightweight. So, it it leaves it
literally leaves the atmosphere and goes
into space. Um, so we don't have a lot
of it here on Earth. Uh, and so you have
to make it or you have to go into space.
And there's a whole another thing about
how where do you get it? You get it from
the moon. Jupiter has it turns out
massive amounts of helium 3. And so but
when you take dutyium and helium 3 and
you fuse those together you also get
that helium particle that alpha particle
that we call that infusion but instead
of the neutron you get a proton and that
proton is a charged particle. It's a
helium a hydrogen nucleus that proton is
now trapped in the magnetic field pushes
back and you can extract that
electricity. Now, there's some prices to
be paid for this helium 3 fuel, but for
a high beta system like uh a
pulseagnetic fusion system, that's
really the ideal fuel.
>> When you say prices, uh what what is the
Yeah. Is there like technical costs or
what what what are the prices? What
shape do the prices take?
>> All kinds of shapes. Um a physics, an
engineering, a technical, and a business
cost. Um and so let's let's dive in.
[laughter]
>> Great. Great.
>> So yeah, so we talked about how helium 3
is. So from the fusion physics point of
view, we talked about 100 million
degrees. That's the temperature that
dutyium and tridium fusion works really
well. And that's the temperature that
traditional fusion folks have really
focused on getting to. That's the
threshold of when you get to 100 million
degrees, you're at the operating point
of fusion and you know it works. Um,
colloquially anyway. Um, helium 3
requires higher temperatures. That's not
enough. Yes, fusion happens for helium
dutyium and helium 3 at 100 million
degrees, but it's not its optimal
temperature. And in fact, in a high beta
system, the optimal temperature is
higher 200, even sometimes 300 million
degrees. So, you have to get to even
higher temperatures. Temperature is
hard. And so, you have to push to even
higher temperatures than you had before.
And so, that's that's one of the
downsides. Um the other downside can be
as you get to those higher temperatures
we talked about B ^2 is NT B ^2 is
density time temperature. Well for a
given magnetic field density and
temperature are now inverse. So as I
increase temperature density decreases
and so now you have an issue of you may
have less particles to do fusion which
means your fusion system has to get
bigger than it was before. Mhm.
>> So for the same reaction rates, a helium
3 system compared to dutarium tridium
has to operate at higher temperature and
be bigger. However, the flip side is is
if you can now recover energy at 80 at
three times the energy efficiency 30 at
80 some% versus 30 some% and recover all
your input energy then now it's actually
about the same size
>> because for 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 build systems of similar
size and similar energy only they're now
at this much higher efficiency Okay, got
it. What can you say more about size?
What are we talking about here? Like
what why is size an important constraint
>> and that gets to one of the other price
that gets to money. So
>> our goal is we want to build clean
lowcost 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
uh while it can be clean, it's not going
to be deployed. And so that is always
has to be a part and uh of why what the
promise of fusion is that can be low
cost. Um so how do we know how much
fusion systems cost? It's a really great
question. Uh 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? Um and that
and that if you're doing a good job of
manufacturing
the you are your goal is to manufacture
a product for as low of cost as you can
so you can sell it for as for as low
price as you can. It asotes to the
material cost because you never get
cheaper than that. So it's literally in
some sense some sort of first principal
sense is how much concrete
>> it goes into into building the power
plant.
>> How much concrete? How much concrete?
How much steel? How much um copper and
aluminum? Different materials cost
different amount 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 uh fusion generator on the
back of your Delorean, for instance. The
physics doesn't let that one happen. At
least physics is as we've understood for
the last oh you 100 or 200 years. Well,
there's a lot of really interesting
business questions here because you're
basically at the cutting edge
of uh science, of technology, of
physics, of engineering, uh trying to
basically innovate into the future uh
rapidly. How do you uh [sighs]
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? like 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. Um, we look to the world and
we know the world needs clean, lowcost,
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 or 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, so a lot of what I
think about is how do we do those two
things together? Um, and and a lot of
that is scale and 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 have 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 the faster you can
now you can actually iterate on that and
build the next thing. And so what what I
have spent my career building is teams
of humans and a company that or builders
that can build high technology things
quickly that if you want to do R&D
you don't want largecale multinational
complex huge systems you want to
actually take the smallest thing you can
build that 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. Um, and kind of the
irony I think of one of the things that
I've discovered is that by focusing on
manufacturing, by focusing on lowcost,
very rapid manufacturing, you actually
get to do science faster.
And 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 uh to make a
large complex
science experiment is the best way to do
science and what I 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 ther FRC
C and the B to the 3.77 power and
learned 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 that pushes everything, pushes the
science, pushes the innovation. In fact,
you should maybe explain that you're I
believe on the seventh prototype. Like
this is insane. The [snorts] rate of
innovation here is insane. Um, can you
maybe speak to all the different
prototypes you went through, what it
took to just iterate rapidly and and
maybe it'd be really interesting for
people like what can you say about the
teams that's required
uh to make that happen? Like what kind
of people are required to make that
happen at that fast rate? And we're not
we're not talking about like software
here. We're talking about everything. A
full stack.
>> Mhm.
>> All the way down to the physics at a 100
million degrees
[laughter]
at speeds of 1 million miles per hour. I
mean, it's insane. Anyway, so what uh
how do you iterate the prototypes and
what kind of teams make it happen?
>> So, at Helon, we've we've built uh seven
systems. Um 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 F FRC's
and hold on to them and understand some
of the stability criteria the heating
criteria um and then we started
increasing the field now okay great we
can hold on to one of these FRC's we
know how long and how to make them but
now can we squeeze on them and start
doing fusion um increasing in pressure
and temperature well we noticed is is um
you know machine after machine we always
used Starbucks we were in Redmond at the
time Redmond Washington and uh Starbucks
cups sitting on top of the machine as
the this is the scale um uh they were
too small to have a human really in the
picture all the time so the Starbucks
cup was enough and uh and so then we
switched to Tall Grande Venti um and
then the biggest Trena was the biggest
system that came online in 2020 20.
>> Mhm.
>> That was a system that showed 100
million degrees and was the first system
that did dutarium and helium 3 fusion.
In fact, as far as we know, the only
bulk dutarium helium 3 fusion uh that
has been done and also showed the 100
million degree fusion temperatures from
an F FRC.
And throughout that time, the earliest
work was government funded government
grants, SBIRS and other type of
government grants. And actually the team
involved uh 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 pieces to do that. Um, but a
lot of it is 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 a
ultra rare material, it's going to take
you a lot more time. And so do
everything you can to engineer a system
that uses simple aluminum alloys, simple
copper alloys. Um, 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 uh analyses
and thought processes at every step. Um
and and that's how we built these
systems from IPA to Venti up to Trena
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 um by
making a hundred of a thing you can
actually make it faster
>> than if you go make one of a thing.
>> Yeah. And that because
when you look at our fusion systems, we
talked about these big magnets and 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 CNC's. 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 and
that's what we did. And that was our
whole design philosophy on these
machines is every at every turn, how do
we go faster? Um a classic one that uh
still to this day I push the team on is
again thinking about how do you move
fast? eBay. Mhm.
>> We buy and and u I don't know that I've
ever said this publicly.
>> Oh boy. Um
>> there we go. This is great.
>> We spend a lot of time on eBay.
>> You got to you got to find a way. Yeah.
>> You got to move. And here's an example.
Uh we use a vacuum pump because in these
systems you got to pull out all the air.
>> So we use a vacuum pump called a turbo
molecular 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
turbo molecular pump, you can and you
might wait 9 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 yet. There's some, you 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 and that's great.
But you can also go and get three of
those turbo pumps that are sitting on in
eBay right now. 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 2 weeks
instead of 9 months.
>> Yeah.
>> And you got it. It's in the door and
it's operational and it's running and
you're moving. See, I love that that I
love that kind of stuff. Um, one of the
only people I've really seen do that is
Elon. He he put together that cluster in
Memphis in in a matter of weeks, which
isn't
nothing like that has ever been done
before. And this this eBay
way is is really the kind of thing
that's required to make that happen as
you shortcut the the supply chain and
everywhere you can. You still have to
deliver the working product. That is
cannot sacrifice the quality. But
do you really need the shiny brand new
one when when the used one is going to
do the job? Um, and we think about that
across the board. Do we take the best
plasma diagnostic, the most
sophisticated plasma diagnostic in the
world that that's 3% um 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 and the answer for at for us for
Heliana and for the team that we put
together is that scrappy I want to just
solve the problem I don't need
necessarily the best solution
but let's go let's go make it happen and
so that's something that we routinely do
I think uh sometimes I have challenges
with my my academic colleagues on this
is that we have a difference of opinion
because at 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 that technology
wouldn't have been applicable. And so
finding that middle ground is is is a
hard thing to do. Um and never
compromising on the quality and the
safety like it's got to work and it's
got to be safe. Um but can you still go
fast? But in general, just having a
culture of pushing uh the rate of uh
iterations here
>> and building the team that wants to go
build things like everyone at Helon uh
or at least the vast majority of Helion,
we hire engineers and scientists and
technicians and machinists are hands-on
builders. The company at Helon is very
weird for a fusion company. Today we are
50% technicians, not scientists.
>> Nice. and and we have a ton of
scientists because the science is
critically important too, but they're
supported by a huge manufacturing
company. Um, 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 to to your
point on Elon Musk like this is one of
the things he's focused on at his
companies has been how do you bring it
in inside the critical things that are
going to drive timelines the things you
can't just go buy as a commodity product
and 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
manu integrated manufacturing um lines
at Helon uh I think we may be the only
fusion company with a conveyor belt.
Actually, our second one just came
online now where we have uh so we have
literally our production line
manufacturing power supplies at Helon.
Um so that we can move at maximum
velocity rather than finding an external
consultant or an external supplier to go
do those. Uh well, I love it. Builder
first company and you're also thinking
about manufacturing throughout all of
this. I'm looking at at the photo of
Trena.
>> It's beautiful. And you can actually I
can point out uh on this picture one
like perfect example of what I'm talking
about. So uh on the end is a green
structure green fiberglass. This is
called G10. Um 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
every circuit board. And so we know it's
strong. It's good with electricity. um
only we get big pieces of it and machine
it, but even in the end you can see the
bolts halfway through.
>> Um there's nine bolts in the middle
there. [laughter]
>> 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 manufacturer 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
6 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.
>> Mhm.
>> And then in house, have the G10 uh
machine shop, they 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. And but that that's what we try
to 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 and move quickly.
Um and everywhere you can without
sacrificing quality or safety, take
shortcuts.
>> That's the name of the game. We got to
get Fusion online as soon as possible.
>> Yeah, this is really exciting and really
inspiring. Uh so the I have to ask then
what uh what timeline do you think like
first working out there nuclear fusion
power plant when do you think
>> yeah so um what we've been able to do is
build rapidly build every few years
bring a new fusion system online um 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 um that is plugged into the
grid generating electricity from fusion
and um 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
of how how the power grid works and and
such but yes so Microsoft will be buying
the power from that power plant.
>> Props to Microsoft for like creating a
hard deadline. I love it.
>> They are. They are. And uh it is daily
that we think about that deadline. Um we
had been working with them on and off
through all of those machines through
Grande, Venti, Trenta. Um so they had
seen us build, hit milestones, show that
we can do fusion, scale up by orders of
magnitude, and then and then access
these advanced fusion fuels. So they had
seen all of those things um and seen the
manufacturing we've built. We're already
right now building the manufacturing to
support that power plant. We're doing
that today. Um we started two years ago
on doing the work around sighting,
around the interconnects. How do you
plug fusion in? What does it look like?
How do you sight it? What are the
environmental consequences? Who's going
to regulate it? All of those things. So,
we spent a lot of time already and we're
we're on our way. And it's going to be
hard. Like, no joke about it. This is
this is tough. And it's something that
we think 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? And then
you wake up the next day and you're
like, "All right, we're going to do it
anyway." I mean, that's that's the
thought process. That's the mentality.
We're going to do it anyway. Let's go do
it. The world needs it. Um 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 and
and those are
engineering and manufacturing are
ridiculously hard challenges. So do do
not short sell that. But that's the goal
and and that's that's what we 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 we certainly have people that say
like no this can never be done. Um and
uh 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 F FRC because it's unstable.
In fact I actually still hear that F
FRC's are unstable and um and I say yes
I know. Now let me introduce you to SAR
over E and 20 years of studies on what
we know about that and 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. I like, let's
just be totally honest. As we're going
to go build these things, we're going to
discover new hard problems. Um, if we're
not doing our job, if we're not if we're
not discovering new hard problems, we
probably didn't push hard enough. We
probably didn't push fast enough.
>> Um, and and I think that's that's really
critical. um that that we build the team
um and we do the hiring to make sure
that like though everybody is is doing
that problem. Now that doesn't mean it's
not a hard a hard challenge and to keep
folks motivated. Helion now is over 500
people but when we built Trena we're 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.
Um, but even already for Polaris, there
were 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 all
inspiring to for folks. Um, and I'll
tell you, the first time that it that it
comes online and flashes pink and you
see that fusion glow, uh, it's all
inspiring. It's all inspiring.
>> I love that the fusion glow. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Yeah,
>> everybody changes their desktop, their
Windows desktop backgrounds to now the
the fusion background, the 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 it with cameras, uh,
spectroscopy, lasers, other kinds of
scientific diagnostics that we use to
measure. Um, and and so, so you get you
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. They're uh some
versions of silicon and oxygen,
typically quartz, but there's also some
other centered materials. And it's so
bright that they can shine through those
materials. And so what you see is you
see the light of not fusion. When
fusion's happening, thermonuclear fusion
is so hot that the light is in the X-ray
spectrum and and the human eye can't see
that. Um, but as you're as you're as
you're that ice cold 1 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 be like extremely high-speed
cameras, that kind of thing.
>> We have high-speed ones and low speed
ones. the uh traditional SLR cameras,
which the ones that represent the right
color, all they catch is the light, the
integrated light, the flash. Um they
don't know, they can't see the the
plasma forming, accelerating,
compressing. They can't see any of those
things. They just see all of it
integrated into one bright flash. Um 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 heliums, is it the helium 3, who is
emitting the light, when are they
emitting, what what particles are
emitting the light and when. And so by
using those advanced diagnostics, we can
now take movies of that. Um though
they're it's not 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 it's truly
beautiful. Just out of curiosity, are
there some interesting intricacies
connecting the nuclear fusion power
plant to the power grid? Like is there
some like constraints to the old
schoolness
of the power grid, let's say in the
United States? Like how do you get that
that Microsoft thing you mentioned? How
do you get to the 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. [laughter]
Um but there are I think simple ways and
there's some really interesting
engineering ways to do this. So just
from the the fundamental basics um as
we're doing fusion we push back on the
magnetic field we recharge these
capacitors that that start where the
electricity started from. Um and that
electricity then sits on a capacitor at
high voltage DC voltage that's steady.
Um, at that point it's reasonably easy
to make 60 Hz power, make traditional AC
power 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. The one of
the sort of like unique things about a
pulseed version of this because it's
pulsed and a repetition rate between one
and 10 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 up to 100 times
a second and shown we can do a 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 through
those pumps from eBay, and then um and
then power output and electricity
output.
>> Wow.
>> But there's probably some more clever
ways to do this. And and when we when we
founded Helon, the goal was to build
lowcost base load electricity. And what
we started to see working with Microsoft
um working with others now that data
centers are going to be one of the
biggest power needs in the future. and
and and and we know that's coming up. Um
and what's really unique is that power
in this form, this direct recovery, not
the steam turbine part, but direct
electricity is already DC, which is
steady, which is what computers really
want anyway. And 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? Um, 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. Um, that would be really
powerful. We could figure out how to do
it. Uh, but but that 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 uh
engineering ways that we can bring those
two together.
>> So a deeper integration
between uh the power plant and the thing
that it's powering and it does seem like
the future quite possibly
um a lot of the energy that's needed
will be uh for compute for AI related
applications. Uh 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 asmmptotes to the raw material
for AI the cost of computation
asmmptotes to the power
>> to the cost of the electricity um and
even even more that electricity is
concentrated it's in that AI data center
that brain where all the power is and
you really want a lot of high energy
density. You want power generation right
there on site. Um so it seems like just
take those two facts a really nice match
for between fusion which is base load
high energy density can be cited 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, maybe a four or
6% growth in electricity due to data
center use. I I think that is probably
wildly underestimating
where we're moving. Um and and so
>> Oh man. And so the idea that that AI can
grow human cognition and our ability to
solve problems,
it we can't let it be limited by power.
And so I'm I'm going to push as hard as
I can so that so that that that's not
the limit.
>> Do you ever think about like 2050 or
something like that? just I I know
you're focused on a a few years out just
getting [snorts]
>> a fusion power plant working, but do you
ever think about like even longer term
future? You see, by what year do you
think there'll be over a thousand
nuclear fusion power plants? So, I tell
the team uh that if we demonstrate
fusion one time and that's it, then we
failed. But that's not enough. That's
not the 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 the technology.
And so that's something that that we
push towards. And in fact, it's baked
into how we we design these machines.
Mhm.
>> 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 of those systems. So we had a
U call from the White House a number of
years ago for the bold decal study in
fusion um of how do we get fusion and it
was it was helon and 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 that
it's not 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 that Helion has competitors that's
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 and start
to answer we have 4,000 gawatts of
installed fossil fuel capacity.
>> How do we 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 to factor a
gigafactory of these fusion generators
rolling off the line one a month, one a
week, one a day. And that that's the
kind of plans that I task my supply
chain team with, like of how do you do
this? How do we actually go build this?
how to 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. Uh I I see
what we uh 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 coal is there and and and the
market is there too. If you can get
electricity generators cheap enough,
then it's then it's worth doing.
>> Yeah. I mean, 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 describe clean and it's not
constrained to ge geographical 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 u on the AI side on all
the different things that we use compute
for, it's really really exciting.
>> So, yeah, I 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 and deploying them is is also
hard at this scale. Um, how do you go
and deploy power plants and deploy
generators at this scale and do it
quickly? Um, 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'll build a
site and put a hundred 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. Um, data centers are an
interesting application where very
immediately you need a lot of power in a
very small area. Um, 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 the
everything. Everything the innovation is
accelerated when you have to manufacture
at scale. It's actually fascinating to
watch. You see that in the in the space
industry as well. uh when uh do we
humans get to Cardartesev type one
civilization status and when do we get
to a card of type two? So the card of
scale cardv type one civilization is
when humans are either catching or
generating as much power as what's
incident on the earth from the sun. Uh
type two is the next big one where
you're catching as much energy from all
the way around the sun. Uh, so massive
amounts of 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 um what we know is that we
you know we're only a a fraction right
now of Carter type one and we got some
work to do. Um and and there's not a lot
of technologies that can get there just
from the point of view of the fuel.
>> Um but if as some research say that
there's a 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. Um
and what does that unlock? What does it
unlock to have um power 100 times the
output that we actually do here on Earth
right now? And and I think that's pretty
pretty transformational. Do we have
those huge AI data centers? Do we have
brains that can now think at rapid
speeds and now innovate? Um I think that
that that that's a pretty powerful
future.
>> Yeah. I could just imagine a giant AI
brain and rockets just constantly
uh shipping more and more humans out
into space into colonizing space and
we're expanding
[sighs and gasps]
out into the out into the universe. I
mean it's a I mean obviously there's a
lot to be concerned about. It's
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 uh
obvious ways and less than obvious ways.
It's I've been spending a lot of times
in a lot of time in nature and
>> you become distinctly aware that there's
something truly special about the
simplicity the balance that is uh
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 richer and richer ways. So
double-edged sword. I think a a lot
about how
what does vast amounts of lowcost
energy, lowc cost electricity enable and
how does that work with nature? Um, and
if you have power and 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 ft
building on the order of an acre for 50
megawatts. And 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 have uh be in places
where there's not a lot of water and 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 like we're going to grow
food because humans need to eat and and
and that's really critical. But it's
about 5t tall all over the earth. Why
can't you do it at 500 ft? Why can't you
build a building that where you're
actually growing in the building you're
growing plants um I spend a lot of time
thinking about growing plants ironically
um 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 you mentioned
actually going to space um you know how
do we go to space now? We take uh
methane fuels or or hydrogen fuels and
we burn them and we launch a rocket. Um,
there's 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
it can now use electricity as its as its
rocket fuel. And so there's 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 I think it opens
up things we don't really even think
about that just been theorized. Wow, if
I had a massive amounts of power in a
small place that is low cost. Um, this
is what it could do. But I 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 uh 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 uh 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 is 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
rocketa equation. And so um being able
to bring high energy density fuel is
really exciting. Um, and that's what
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 you get
hot water, you 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 that in fusion don't
make sense for space. And so that's
where some of this direct energy, this
this energy efficiency matters. It it
actually comes to some of the origin
story of the team that founded Helon.
Before spinning off Helon to focus only
on on fusion, we worked on a mix of
things. Advanced materials, rocket
propulsion, fusion,
fusion rockets, fusion materials, all of
those things. Um, and one thing that
people in in the in the aerospace field
know, especially if you're in deep
space, you you can't waste anything
that every watt of electricity you make,
you better use cuz it was expensive to
get it or the solar panel. Um, every
ounce of every jewel 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 your water and your air and all of
those things, you're efficient. Um, and
it's something we brought into thinking
about fusion, energy efficiency, is that
you want to if if my goal is to make the
product, what's the product? The product
is electricity. Don't waste any of it.
Recover every what you can by by
recovering electricity directly. Recover
every electricity from the fusion
process as efficiently as you can. Um,
and you end up with just like in space
systems that are smaller, are have
higher performance and can deliver more
whatever 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. Uh so
again continuing the pthead questions,
what uh 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, comes from stars. Um, and and we
we know that that's the process. And so
whether they're harnessing the star
itself, Carterv type 2, or are they
bringing fusion along cuz they want to
go somewhere and they're bringing it
with them to go visit. Um, I think that
that's that that's pretty um that's
pretty likely.
You bring up the Fermy paradox. How come
we don't see alien civilizations? Um,
even if it's infantestly small chance
that there is life on any one planet and
infantestly small that life uh grows
into intelligent life. There are however
almost infinite planets around infinite
stars in our galaxy that have been
around for vastly longer than we've been
around. But we don't see it. And I think
that's a question that many scientists
and 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.
>> Mhm.
like nuclear weapons but plus+
like new things that happen as you
develop super advanced systems that
close to 100% probability
um destroy ourselves, destroy any
intelligent being. The kind of
intelligent being that's ambitious
enough to keep innovating will
eventually destroy itself will be one
explanation. And that's scary and that
that should be a sobering that's at
least an inspiring sobering thought to
be careful with the stuff we create.
>> Um but I also just looking at humans. We
create dangerous stuff and then
>> figure out like sometimes almost like
last minute how to not destroy
ourselves.
>> We're good with deadlines. We're good
with deadlines
>> 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, so I have like 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?
>> Mhm.
>> 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 um I as I have gone
further and further in building fusion
systems that work um I've become more
optimistic around the firmy 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. Something happens that
filters out life. Um the dark forest is
another philosophy around sure it's out
there but everybody's hiding because
they want 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. Uh Matroyska brains
>> is that and that's Cartereesev 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. Um,
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
this 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 Matroka brain is uh 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 away
from that, a ways away from that, but
maybe AI and fusion together gets you
actually along that path sooner. And uh
I'm I'm excited by that outcome of the
Firmeny paradox. And then at that point,
those civilizations have a a star that
you can't find anymore because it's all
covered and are there thinking and
growing their intellects rather than
actually having to physically expand.
>> Yeah. uh exploring and expanding in the
realm of uh cognition and consciousness
versus in the realm of space and time as
we we uh 21st century colonizer humans
uh think like maybe 22nd century humans
will be uh thinking fundamentally
differently. Yeah, that's a beautiful
beautiful vision of the future. Uh
speaking of beauty, you've been doing a
lot of really interesting things in a
lot of interesting disciplines.
What to you is uh ridiculous question is
the most beautiful idea in physics and
um nuclear engineering
in uh nuclear fusion and power plants.
What what ideas
you just step back are and are in awe
of?
I'm continuously in awe that it works.
>> Yeah.
>> And I know I know that that sounds a
little silly to say. Um 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.
th those are things that
it's hard to imagine are accidental.
And um
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 uh I'm
just I'm I'm all 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
the you're uh the the group of brilliant
people that you're working with are
operating under is just um it stresses
me out, [laughter] but it excites me.
So, I'm uh 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 uh thank
you so much for talking today.
>> Thank you very much. It's been fun.
Thanks for listening to this
conversation with David Kurtley. To
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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 I hope to
see you next time.