Fusion energy: Wishing upon a star in a jar - Introducing 'Positive Charge' from GeekWire

Speaker A: I had to give them my id. I had to lock my phone in a lockbox, but it was just a level of security that I've never seen at, uh, uh, any facility before.

Speaker B: It's kind of wild. I mean, I don't think you look like an industrial spy, but I mean, I guess you've got to just be careful about this.

Speaker A: That's what would make me a perfect industrial spy.

Speaker B: Lisa that is true.

Speaker C: Hi everyone, it's GeekWire editor Todd Bishop coming to you a little early this week with a special episode. For the past couple of months, our GeekWire colleague Lisa Stifler, who covers topics including sustainability and the climate, has been teaming up with independent audio producer Laura Scott to develop a new GeekWire podcast called Positive Charge, exploring the innovations that could save the planet. Their first episodes came out this week and today we're going to be sharing one of them with you. It's a deep dive into the high stakes race to harness the power of the sun and make fusion energy real. I've been helping out a little bit with the podcast behind the scenes and I love the rapport that Lisa and Laura have developed. It's really fun to eavesdrop on their conversations in the office and as you'll hear on the show, beyond that, the topics that they've been digging into really open your mind to the massive potential of technology far beyond our screens and devices. And as you'll hear, Lisa has a real knack for explaining complex technologies and challenges in colorful and vivid terms. Also out this week is their debut episode on the Forever Chemicals contaminating water around the world and the companies that are figuring out how to destroy them. You can find both of those episodes and subscribe to Positive Charge wherever you get your podcasts. Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or@geekwire.com PositiveCharge My colleague John Cook and I will be back next week with our regular show. In the meantime, have a great Fourth of July. And here are Lisa and Laura with Positive Charge.

Speaker A: Welcome to Positive Charge, a new podcast

Speaker B: from GeekWire brought to you by Amazon Sustainability. I'm Lisa Stifler. I'm a former cell biologist turned journalist who covers beats, including sustainability and energy for GeekWire, the business and technology news site based in Seattle.

Speaker A: And I'm Laura Scott. I'm an independent audio producer and journalist with a lifelong interest in science and the environment. On this episode, Fusion Energy, we go inside the high stakes race to recreate the power of the sun. Touring two Seattle area startups racing towards fusion power.

Speaker B: One of them, Helion Energy has staked a claim that it will be the first to do it. 2028 is their audacious target for getting energy on the grid, and they're building a site called Orion in Central Washington.

Speaker A: After 70 years of trying, can anyone finally surpass break even getting more electricity out of fusion than you put into it? What is fusion?

Speaker B: What is fusion? Fusion is a really cool way to make energy. It's so exciting. It's just. It's a crazy area of innovation and technology. It's the holy grail of clean power. It's creating a star in a jar here on Earth. And the need for this power has never been greater. We're racing to build AI data centers all over the place. So I've heard fusion sounds weird, like people don't know what it is. It's like it's another form of nuclear energy. What is it? But you already know what it is.

Speaker A: Do I?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What is.

Speaker B: What is it, Lisa? We are trying to do what the sun does. The sun is the ultimate fusion machine. It's this churning ball of plasma. It's super hot. It's smashing together atoms. It makes them fuse, and then it radiates energy, and that is what sustains life on the planet Earth. So you already know it. You already know what fusion is. It's out there. It's glowing right now. And yet, despite decades of work by scientists, no one has been able to do this. They cannot tame these reactions and produce fusion energy in a useful way here on Earth. It's kind of bonkers, actually, to think that you could replicate the physics sufficiently well of what the sun does here on Earth to capture that similar energy source.

Speaker A: I know it seems like an impossible goal. Like, we don't have the gravitational pull here. We'd have to make that fusion reaction so, so, so hot for it to possibly give us more energy than we're putting into it.

Speaker B: Exactly. And they're trying, though. But they've been trying for about 70 years or more, and there's been real progress. I mean, they, the scientists keep advancing and making new discoveries that get them a little bit closer. They've got money like they've never had before. There's been about 10 billion doll, um, invested into these companies by investors.

Speaker A: Thanks, AI.

Speaker B: It is good for driving tech companies to invest in clean energy. Plus, there's support from governments. And so people are getting kind of excited. They're, they're setting goals. They're saying, like, yeah, actually, we're really going to do this. There are, like, three dozen companies that have said within the next 10 years they are going to commercialize fusion.

Speaker A: I was really excited to meet David Kurtley. He's the CEO and co founder of Helion.

Speaker D: There's now not just push it, it's not just us saying, hey, we gotta go solve climate change, here's a technology to do it. But the market is saying, man, we need every source of electricity that can come online and be low cost and reliable. And fusion should be a part of that too. Let's go invest in that. So it's enabled us to do what we've been able to do in the last two years of ramp up our timelines, go faster than we had originally planned. I mean, what I told the team early is if we're the first fusion comedy to get to 100 million degrees and that's all we do, um, it'll be a great achievement, but it won't be enough. If we're the first to build the world's first fusion power plant and that's all we do, the company will have failed. By, by my mind, um, our goal is deploying fusion at global scale all over and solving the real problem, solving climate change, solving the energy crisis, being able to power data centers.

Speaker A: So yeah, yeah, yeah, we could figure it out for 70 years. But I mean, Helion's goal is what, two years away?

Speaker E: Two.

Speaker B: Two years away. 2028. Yeah. So there are two startups in Washington state just north of Seattle. They're about four minutes apart from each other as the car drives. So we went to visit Helion Energy and Zap Energy.

Speaker A: You've been to both Helion and Zap before? It was my first time touring these two, uh, totally different fusion companies. What is your impression of Helion's Polaris? Because you've actually stood next to that machine.

Speaker B: I have, I've, uh, stood over it. So it's their seventh generation prototype. It's about 60ft long. It is in this room with these super thick walls to shield the radiation that's released. It's a vault really, that you go into where this device is and all through this room are these miles and miles and miles of black electrical cables that plug into Polaris and then stream out of the room to these rows and rows and stacks of capacitors. They extend a couple stories high and those are the electronics that provide the electricity. You kind of juice them up like a battery and then send a surge of energy right into Polaris so that fusion takes place to create the plasma and to do the fusion. So inside polaris inside this 60 foot long fusion device is this hourglass shaped interior. What they do is they create these really strong magnetic fields and they start squeezing the plasma inside of your hourglass. Then they can move that magnetic field so it keeps squeezing and it pushes. I think of them as like little jelly beans of plasma that have helium and hydrogen ions in it. And you push them and you push them and you push them and then they collide right in the middle of the hourglass. Uh, they go really fast. They don't just mosey towards each other and collide. They're going 1 million miles per hour. They jam together. And then they get even hotter. The magnets keep squeezing even more, and it heats it up to 200 million degrees Celsius. Well, they're not there yet, but that's where they need to get to. And that's more than 10 times hotter than the center of the sun. And then once they're in there, they fuse and then they release energy and the plasma expands and pushes against the magnetic field. Stay with me. And that creates a current. And then that current produces electricity. You can capture it as electricity just the way that the, the brakes work in an EV where you kind of, you push on it, it creates a current and electricity and that flows back into the battery for the ev. In this case, it captures that electricity and that flows back through all those miles of cables back to where the capacitors are. And then that would be energy that could go on the grid. Oh, and then they have to do it all over again. You just do it over and over and over and over. Yes, and do it and do it and do it.

Speaker A: We met with Manav M. Singh, who's the director of electrical engineering at Helion, and he said that they basically keep pulsing through Polaris with tests like a 9 to 5.

Speaker B: Yeah, they have to just keep perfecting this thing.

Speaker E: I think it's uncommon. Uh, that's kind of the summary is

Speaker C: the way I put it.

Speaker E: I don't think most people are doing fusion on a sort of normal work schedule like we are.

Speaker B: And that is how, in theory, they want to put energy on the grid someday.

Speaker A: This is so cool. I mean, it sounds like science fiction. I'm also, when I think about that magnetic force field, I just think about how when you hold two magnets the wrong way against each other, you just push and push and then they'll eventually freak out and not connect with each other.

Speaker B: Yeah. So that's it. The poor little plasmas right in the middle of that getting scrunched and getting hotter. And those, I mean, those atoms that are in there, they don't want to fuse. They repel each other. And so you've got to get them so hot and so energized and under so much pressure that they kind of fall apart and they just go whoop. And then they do finally fuse. I describe them as sad, but Manav said he likes to think of them as happy. These unhappy ions are finally like, oh, my God, fine, we'll fuse.

Speaker E: I like to think of them as happy ions, and I think our goal is that they make as many friends as possible in there.

Speaker B: I don't know, you're forcing them, um, to unite and they don't want to, but that's okay. He knows more. I'm not a physicist, so you got to go to Helion for the very first time in Everett, Washington. What did you think of the place?

Speaker A: When I pulled up, there was a very smiley security guard who also really meant business. Um, I tried to walk towards the front doors, and he was immediately like, hello, who are you? Come over here. What's going on? Um, and I nervously tell him I was there to tour. You weren't there yet. I showed up by myself first, and, uh, he allowed me into the building. And then I got passes. I had to give them my id. I had to lock my phone in a lockbox. I said, is it okay to bring in audio recording equipment? Luckily it was, but it was just a level of security that I've. I've never seen at, uh, uh, any facility before.

Speaker B: It's kind of wild. I mean, you don't. I don't think you look like an industrial spy, but, I mean, I guess you've got to just be careful about that.

Speaker A: That's what would make me a perfect industrial spy. Lisa.

Speaker B: That is true. That is true. Well, and I mean, and I know what they would say to explain why they do this. Like, they are. They are hyper private and secretive about their stuff. I mean, and that extends from letting people into their space, as well as what they share publicly about their research and about their progress. A lot of these companies write scientific articles, get them published, they speak at conferences, and Helion just doesn't do that. Um, and it's because back in 2015, they did their first paper, and then shortly thereafter, a Chinese website posted a graphic of a device that they felt looked a lot like what they were doing. And they're like, nah, nah.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: So then they.

Speaker A: So they have a reason to be a little bit paranoid about me.

Speaker F: Yeah.

Speaker B: About you in particular. Yeah, absolutely too. So that's, that's kind of their, that's their explanation. I mean, people get kind of critical because it's hard to know what they're doing and how much kind of progress they're really making. No one can really poke holes in it because they don't know what's happening except for their investors. In theory.

Speaker A: What if we gave them like $1 and then we got to know all of the secrets? So what's the threshold for being a Helion Invest?

Speaker B: Um, yeah. It's higher, you think?

Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah. So. And then once you got inside, what did you think? What did you see and think?

Speaker A: It's a very modern facility. They've got a lot of white cubicles, uh, and this big glass wall that actually, uh, once you get past the frosted portion, when you've forked over your ID and your phone, uh, looks straight out from their sort of office cubicle space into more of a warehouse industrial type facility. And to me, it looked like chaos. I don't know anything about what's going on in there. When we first walk in, there are these pallets full of these strange looking boxy machines with wires coming all out of them. I learned later these were capacitors. Helion has cute little neon signs labeling what each little department does, which I also thought was kind of charming. Uh, maybe like a little plasma nodded. They were all purple. Um, and, uh, that integration between the cubicle office space and the production floor feels, um, really seamless. Like their lunchroom, uh, with refrigerators and sinks is right next to guys in bandanas and long beards who are soldering wires together on all these capacitor machines. Um, there was a lot going on. It was very busy and, uh, it felt like we were in a full scale manufacturing facility.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, they really do cram a lot in there. And, and part of their thinking too is to keep kind of everything very centralized so that there can be a lot of conversation between different folks working on different challenges. You can iterate quickly, change what you're doing.

Speaker A: Yeah. Then they took us back to a different part of the warehouse and we went behind this huge plastic curtain like they make you walk through when you go into the dairy section at Costco. And that was when we met Tiny Merge.

Speaker E: All, uh, right, so we'll poke our head through here. This is where we're building the next smaller machine, Tiny Merge. Just like step in right here.

Speaker A: Tiny Merge is a fusion device that comes after their seventh generation machine, Polaris. But before they build Orion, their planned commercial facility in Malaga in central Washington.

Speaker E: It's tinier than most other machines and that's kind of the key aspect of what makes it nimble and easy to work with. As we thought about what needs to happen between Polaris and Orion, one of the important exercises was what are the really hard engineering and physics challenges that we must go get better at before we build this next machine? Otherwise we won't know about it until the full machine's built. Tiny merge kind of fell out of that exercise. Hey, there's these 10ish. Whatever number of things are that says, you know, we are uncertain about these. Will they go this way? Will the performance be good? Will we make this change and the performance will go lower? That machine's intent is to help us scale that forward and understand how our changes are improving machine performance.

Speaker B: This was, this was such a surprise to me because Helion's narrative has always been we build a device, we test it, we figure out what works and what doesn't and then we make the next bigger device and we figure out what works and then we make the next bigger device. And this is a little device, as the name suggests. It kind of blew my mind.

Speaker A: Tiny merge.

Speaker B: Tiny merge. It's about eight feet long. So much, much smaller than the Polaris device. And it is just like a little baby version. What does it, what did it look like to you?

Speaker A: It kind of looked like a jet turbine. Um, it's got all kinds of circles smushed together on it. And then, um, it felt very sci fi, uh, alien esque because there's tons of wires coming out of it. I mean more wires than you could ever possibly imagine. And they're being wrapped around shelving in the larger room. And that was actually a huge part they were talking about. Cable management was one of the main things they were trying to test with this model sized version of a fusion device.

Speaker B: I really felt like it was sort of a, um, wizard of Oz moment, going behind the curtain. It's like, what is going to be back here?

Speaker A: What do you think it means though that they're going smaller instead of bigger?

Speaker B: It kind of highlighted that this is still a work in progress. I mean they have a 2028 deadline with Microsoft to get power on the grid and yet they're needing to scale down their research device to fine tune some components that haven't been sorted out. And so on one hand it's a really smart strategy because they can be much more nimble, they can do tests and do iterations more quickly, make adjustments faster, Apply those to Polaris, because that informs Orion, which is the facility that they're building right now. They've already broken ground in Malaga in Central Washington. And so they are really presenting this as a way to be smart and nimble and fast and effective. But it also means you've got some really big questions that you need to answer before you can take this next step to your commercial device that, let me remind you, is supposed to be operating in two years.

Speaker A: Yeah. Not just we've solved the problem in two years, but we've solved the problem, we've built the device and it is actually giving people energy.

Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the interesting things is that they're also building their assembly line for the next reactor after Orion. Like they are. They are going so hard and so confidently that this is going to work that they are creating the infrastructure for the plant that comes after Orion.

Speaker A: And this is a huge piece of Helion strategy. And what really differentiates them from all of the other fusion companies? I mean, you said they're about 50. Helion is building and scaling very, very quickly for technology that they have not mastered.

Speaker B: It's not been proven. It's a big swing. I know, it's. I mean, you go and it is kind of weirdly exciting, the audacity of it. It's like, yeah, let's do this. And then you're like, holy smokes, it's so audacious. And even Microsoft, you know, that's the planned customer for the Orion plant, it's hedging its bets. I spoke to Microsoft president Brad Smith earlier this year for a different story and asked about this project to see what his thoughts were. Because he was speaking a lot about how the company plans to pay for all the energy that it uses and not put that on to other rate payers where it's building its data centers. It's like, okay, but if you're building a data center in Central Washington that relies on Helion, relies on fusion energy, what do you do if that doesn't work out?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's technology that doesn't exist yet. Yes, it'd be great if it existed in two years, but it doesn't exist yet.

Speaker B: We just don't know. And so he literally said that no one would say that Fusion Energy in 2028 is a sure thing. So he said, quote, of course we have a backup, unquote. M. So yeah, he mean they're, they're in the partnership. But he is cautious too. This is risky. This is risky. We just. There is no certainty. And kind of to that point, ZAP is hedging its own bets, but they're

Speaker A: doing it in a completely different way. We'll tell you all about ZAP after this break.

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Speaker B: we arrive at Zap a few days later, just down the road. What did you think of zap?

Speaker A: Uh, no security, totally innocuous office, uh, building type space. Zapp's comms person came right out to let us in the door, just waved us in, badged us in. There's no front desk, there was no locking of the phones or wearing of badges. Um, that's a lie. We wore badges.

Speaker B: We wore badges.

Speaker A: Yeah, nevermind.

Speaker B: But they're pretty generic badges.

Speaker A: Yeah, kind of guessed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: They didn't have our names on them or anything.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. No ID was reviewed.

Speaker A: Yeah. And uh, they felt a little bit more standard issue. Corporate. Their device is smaller than Polaris, although not by much.

Speaker B: Maybe about a third as big. So they just, they're just not pumping as much power into it.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And that's one of the things they kind of tout as one of their selling points is it's going to be more affordable to run and require less energy to do it. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how ZAP does it. Because most companies are using magnets to control their plasma. Because like plasma is this crazy fourth form of matter. It's sort of liquid, it's sort of gas, it's super hot, it's really energetic. How do you hold such a thing? And so they are using a physics phenomenon called the Z pinch. And this is a thing that happens when you shove a bunch of energy through a plasma and it creates a magnetic field that you can control. And so it kind of flows around the plasma, squeezing it tighter so it keeps getting hotter and, and more pressurized in Zaps fusion device. And it's about 12ft long, and the super skinny ribbon of plasma is about 2ft long. And so what they do is they put in a puff of a gas, hydrogen ions, like heavier hydrogen than normal hydrogen, and they puff it in there, and then they send all this current into it, and it creates their plasma. And so when it gets enough pressure and temperature to do fusion, it releases the. These particles called neutrons. And those are captured by a circulating liquid metal blanket that surrounds a plasma. And that is what captures the heat that is turned into energy ultimately. Then again, that starts all over again, too. They're pulsing and pulsing and pulsing and pulsing much faster than that. I can't even say it as fast as they have to do it. Exactly.

Speaker D: Now we're standing, um, on the ground floor of Century. There's actually a tank with a ton, a literal ton of liquefied bismuth under our feet.

Speaker A: We got our tour from Matthew Thompson. He's the senior vice president of fission technology at zap. And the material he's describing, bismuth, is a heavy, silvery metal that melts at a low enough temperature to be pumped around like a liquid. ZAP circulates it as a flowing curtain inside the chamber, capturing heat that's then turned into energy.

Speaker D: The system will circulate, uh, the liquid bismuth, uh, through the plasma chamber at about 20 gallons a minute. And that is more than enough to take out up to 100 kilowatts, uh, which is the top end of Sentry's, uh, design. Uh, we have so far operated Sentry up to about 35, 40 kilowatts of average power. Uh, that's, you know, 40 microwave ovens, roughly. Right. Or a significant fraction of your car engine.

Speaker B: They like the liquid metal because it can't be damaged the way a solid metal would be. Like fusion. It's flinging off stuff that can really damage the devices. And so by having the liquid metal, it's just, I mean, just what you think about. Water just absorbs. It's not. You can't poke holes in metal. It just absorbs things.

Speaker A: It absorbs impact, too. Like doing a cannonball into a pool.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. So the neutrons can cannonball into this liquid metal that shields it. And so that's kind of their, that's their solution for capturing the energy. So ZAP has three different fusion devices that they're working on simultaneously. Each one is used to kind of perfect a different component of the fusion process. And so over in another space they've got um, two other of the devices and it has more of the kind of chaos and energy with the cables sort of going everywhere. And it's like you feel like you could just trip and blow the whole place up. And there's kind of a more dynamic energy, I think in that, in that facility than the one that we went to. But they're both cool sciency spaces.

Speaker A: Yeah, I had that feeling too. It felt really cool to be in such an industrial space where they're testing, they're iterating, they're experimenting. But it's very hands on and it felt very handmade.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I mean they're really trying to perfect these things so they, they really need to build it in house to tweak it. It's like, nope, I need a little more of this, a little less of that to get it to be as optimal as possible as quickly as possible. You can't just, you know, outsource that really.

Speaker D: Between the three fuse series devices, one of them is running almost every day. So yes, we do pride ourselves here at zap. Uh, we're one of the few fusion companies that actually makes fusion on a daily basis. And this is one of the reasons why we are very bullish about our ability to accelerate, uh, towards break even,

Speaker B: which is that physics term for getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than you put into it.

Speaker D: And you will also note that these devices are quite small, which also means they're relatively inexpensive. So our rate of progress for unit dollar, uh, is one of the best out there.

Speaker B: But that also is a smart chance to segue into their kind of pivot. Cause we kind of, you hinted at it in the beginning, but um, this was more mind blowing than tiny merge. Like by a lot like this was.

Speaker A: I mean we got the news about this as we were driving to do a site tour for a completely different company for a completely different episode. And you could not wait until I got into the car to tell me about this.

Speaker B: Well, it was, this was the most shocking news. So they, so they've been at this for more than a decade, you know, pursuing fusion, but again, realistic about how fast and how far and what kind of promises they can make. And so realizing that they can't promise fusion on a specific timeline, they've said we're going to bring fission back into the mix here.

Speaker A: Old school fission, the reactors that split atoms instead of fusing them. Kind of like the Simpsons where Homer worked old school fission, but with A new school twist.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And they say, I mean they, even though fusion companies have liked to draw a bright line between fission and fusion, they acknowledge they're both nuclear reactions and there is uh, there's plenty of carryover between the two. And they're arguing that their liquid metal containment system can be applied to the fission reactors because that's also how this newer generation, the Not Simpsons generation of reactors, they can use metal to cool down the reactors and control the reactions so they're safer. And so they're saying, well, we already know a lot about liquid metal in fusion. We're going to just apply some of that knowledge to fission because we know that fission works. We're doing it all the time. We've been doing it for decades around the world. There have been some hiccups for sure, beyond hiccups.

Speaker A: And I think people are very afraid of fission too. But the new technology that they're applying to it, the new methods of making fission even, even safer, uh, are very promising.

Speaker B: Yeah. And more palatable. The public, while there has been just like hard. No, the public is like well maybe this actually could work. And now, you know, reactors are being kept in service much longer than they, they had. I mean the, the general public consensus around fission has changed so much that it, it actually is viable to say, yeah, we're going to pursue fission like and it makes sense because we can promise fission on a certain date and that's going to create income that we can keep spending and investing back into the fusion in the hope that we get that as well someday too. It's a twofer. It's a nuclear twofer.

Speaker A: I like it.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean m. On one hand you look at it and it could be like, are they admitting not defeat but a higher level of uncertainty that maybe was appreciated previously. Or it's like this is brilliant because this will generate revenue and keep it going. And these two pathways can evolve simultaneously and everyone will be the better for it.

Speaker A: So we saw Helion and Zap, but they're not the only companies trying to solve fusion and they're not even the only companies in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker B: Right, Totally. So there are two others in this region. You have avalanche energy down in Seattle. It's called of a newcomer. They've got a whole different take on this. They're trying to make these small scale devices. They call them desktop. They're, they're pretty desktop desktop.

Speaker A: They're kind of Mac basically.

Speaker B: Well, okay, bigger than that but, but still a much smaller scope. You know, they kind of are Looking in part at applications for, like, space travel or different things where. Yeah, you need something smaller, more nimble.

Speaker A: Um, now I'm thinking of Project Hail Mary.

Speaker B: It could be. And then you, you have General Fusion. It's up in British Columbia. It's been around for a really long time. M been making progress like all the others, and it's looking to go public soon so that it can fund its endeavor. So they're trying to get to the finish line that way. And so, yeah, writ large, it's more than 50 companies around the globe that are working on this. And people kind of think that the most likely front runner is probably Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and that is in Massachusetts. It's got plans to build a facility in Virginia. It's raised nearly $3 billion, which is, yeah, something else again.

Speaker A: How much has Helion and Zap raised?

Speaker B: Ah, comparatively, Helion just raised some more money recently this summer, and so they're at about 1.5 billion and Zap is at 330 million.

Speaker A: Okay, so while Commonwealth is double what Helion has used.

Speaker B: Yeah, and Helion's way up there. Um, one other interesting development with Commonwealth Fusion is in June, it released a bunch of scientific publications that it says validate its approach, give it a stamp of approval that, yeah, your fusion technology could actually pull this off. Again, with helium being so private, it's harder to judge that. Um, and then you've got China, which is kind of a wild card in this. The Chinese government has invested several billions of dollars. Nobody knows exactly how much, but American entrepreneurs are anxious. That makes them really nervous. They're afraid that they're going to be able to take the tech that has been developed elsewhere and then make it happen, get it across the finish line, scale it up, run with this the way it has with solar, um, the way it has with batteries. So there are, some would say, EVs. Absolutely EVs. So who knows? We'll see.

Speaker A: What would fusion look like if it was able to enter our lives? Let's say Helion succeeds, and let's say Fusion is operating in Malaga by 2028. Uh, how much does it cost? What does it look like?

Speaker B: If fusion succeeds, at some point in time, it will. All of the experts, even the people who just absolutely love fusion, aren't like, oh, yeah, we're gonna just like, knock down the dams and, like, put a blanket over the solar panels. Like, we will need all of the energy to meet the demands and especially at the cost of the other things are available. It's like, at what point Fusion could compete with solar. That's definitely not in my lifetime. And so you will need this as a compliment to other energy systems that are out there. So it would probably be deployed in more select scenarios. I mean, probably a data center who could pay big bucks for energy or would be like, yep, sign me up, I'm going to do this.

Speaker A: We wanted to get an outside perspective on what fusion would look like in the world in action. So we reached out and connected with Laura Burzak Hopkins. She is the deputy Chief research officer at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. And this is an institution that's been working in this space for 70 years. So she seemed like a pretty good person to check in with.

Speaker F: Um, so the promise of fusion is truly inspirational. It has this opportunity to provide robust energy, uh, to be delivered through a variety of means and mechanisms such that it can meet the need for, uh, the broad range. So be it, um, small, um, deployable or large city scale, there are fusion concepts that really span that breadth. And we know that fusion works really well. We can look up in the sky and we see the giant fusion reactor that is our sun.

Speaker A: Do you feel more hopeful?

Speaker B: I go back and forth when I go to, when I go to these sites, I do get excited. It's sort of intoxicating to think about, you know, harnessing fusion energy and what that could unlock to be able to have clean energy all over the planet wherever it's needed. And they are so passionate and so committed and have been at this for so many years and really see meaningful progress. They, I mean, they keep, again, they keep hitting the, these milestones of hotter temperatures and faster firing of their fusion capacitors. And it's like they keep notching really important milestones. Uh, but are they, will they add up to actually a commercial product? I don't know.

Speaker A: Is it about it being commercial or is it about it even being possible to do at scale? I guess they're kind of the same question.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the milestones, I think some of the real academic folks or the people in national laboratories would say it all helps. It's all building towards this knowledge base that could unlock fusion in the right hands. Maybe it has to change a little bit or whatever it might be, but it keeps adding to the understanding of how this can work, how you solve different problems and new strategies for getting more energy out than you put in.

Speaker A: That's the goal. Get more energy out than you put in.

Speaker B: That's all we want to do. So, so how close are we, how realistic is this? We asked Laura from the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

Speaker F: So my crystal ball is just as hazy as anyone else's. Uh, there are major, uh, scientific and technology hurdles ahead of us. Um, we know that there's a reason we don't have fusion on the grid. It's really hard. We don't know how to do that yet. Um, and that's okay. That's why there's so much investment and engagement in moving forward. And, and I do want to make sure to leave space for, uh, unique innovations that do leapfrog us ahead. Uh, we've seen, uh, definite examples of that across our history. Uh, we look back to World War II and the advent of radar. Uh, this was something that, um, of course the people working on it wouldn't say it came out of nowhere. It came out of decades of, uh, foundational work. Uh, but to the public it felt like it came out of nowhere. Our challenge is really, uh, controlling the plasma fuel in a way that we can heat it, we can optimize it, and we can harvest the energy from it. So we still have hurdles ahead of us. But the advent of new capabilities and new knowledge really brings us to this exciting cusp that, uh, we are on the verge of this next chapter for fusion research, fusion technology.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for listening to Positive Charge. In our next episode, we're going to do something very different from fusion. We're exploring end of life technologies that offer a carbon free alternative to cremation and a greener solution to burial. It gives people the opportunity to make their last gesture a sustainable one. Stay tuned for that in the weeks ahead.

Speaker A: And if you're still listening, you're either a super fan of fusion or a super fan of us. And either way, that's great. And you should subscribe to Positive Charge by Geekwire for more episodes.

Speaker C: That was positive charge from GeekWire. Topics of upcoming episodes range from the greenest thing you can do with your body after you die to solving Taylor Swift's jet fuel problem. If you liked the episode, follow Positive Charge wherever you get your podcasts or or find it at geekwire.com positivecharge thanks to Lisa and Laura and thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

Speaker G: Amazon is known for its speed and scale. That same approach now drives our sustainability efforts. Amazon has delivered 1.5 billion packages by electric delivery vehicles globally. We're also building the largest carbon free energy portfolio of any corporation globally. With over 700 car carbon free energy projects worldwide. Every package delivered and data center powered is an opportunity to make tomorrow better for our customers and the communities where we operate. Learn more at Sustainability about Amazon.

Speaker B: Com.