The Frontier State of Compact Nuclear Fusion

Speaker A: Welcome to the latest episode of the Frontier State. Uh, this is the Frontier State dialogue with Robin, uh, Langtree, who is the CEO of Avalanche Energy. Robin, welcome to this podcast at Harvard. Thanks for coming. We'd uh, obviously introduce you briefly but uh, how are things going in fusion? And of course this is the frontier state of nuclear fusion today, so you'll be covering a lot of things. And uh, before I make your introduction, how are things going your side and how has it been the last couple of years?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, fantastic. Thank you so, so much for having me. I'm excited to be here on this. I think it's like the second podcast I've ever done. Uh, in terms of how things are going for us. It's, it's definitely crunch time. We're, we're grinding in the lab. We'll probably go do a tour of a fusion reactor at some point. Um, and yeah, like things are going well. We're making progress every day and working on trying to bring fusion to the world.

Speaker A: Great. Fantastic. So, just for our viewers and our readers, the Frontier State podcast and the Frontier State conversations, of course, uh, aims explore the intersection between venture capital, deep tech, such as nuclear fusion and technology policy and the way the interplay of these three, uh, determines, you know, some part of the future that we are all collectively and individually trying to build. Uh, Robin of course has a PhD in mechanical engineering. A fantastic story, you know, about a couple of decades of experience executing complex research and design projects at Boeing. And Jeff Bezos Blue Origin, which remains a very intriguing space company, and Avalanche Energy, which he co founded at, think about three or four years back, uh, is now VC backed fusion energy startup based in Seattle. And uh, Robin is of course going to spend some time today talking about why compact fusion, uh, is so different, what he's trying to build at Avalanche. And we'll also try to look at the marketscape and the landscape overall for what is now a ballooning industry, even if it's an albeit emerging industry of fusion energy companies. Um, of course, from carbon free microgrids to long haul trucking, maritime shipping, et cetera, et cetera, of course aviation, there's so many different applications that microreactors can power. Uh, of course microreactors and fusion seem for some much more of a pipe dream than that fusion itself seems like. Right. So there are a lot of those questions that we will, uh, try to float around, discuss and just have a casual conversation on. But over to you, Robin. Um, you know, please, please tell us how, how you made the transition from back in your academic days studying mechanical engineering to Blue Origin, which must be pretty kick ass, and finally to Avalanche, right? Just give the readers and the viewers.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, Fantastic. Yeah. So I did a PhD, um, in Germany, um, working on turbulence modeling. So my PhD was on predicting laminar to turbulent flow. And then we developed a really interesting model that ended up being in a lot of computational fluid dynamics code. So my background is in simulation, so using big computers to simulate stuff. Um, my entire career I've kind of used simulation as a sandbox to like explore different ideas. Um, after my PhD, I ended up moving to Seattle, Washington to work for the Boeing Company. Um, and we did a lot of cool stuff trying to make airplanes quieter and do that with simulation and then get into the wind tunnel test and see if our simulations match the wind tunnel. And then I heard about this little space company south of Seattle, uh, that nobody knew about at the time called Blue Origin. And this was sort of circa 2014, right before sort of the big reusable rocket space race happened, um, and managed to get a tour there. And I was like, oh my gosh, they are building rocket engines and rockets in this warehouse south of Seattle in a town called Kent, Washington in the Kent Valley. Um, and I was like 12 year old me was like, I've always wanted to work on reusable rockets. I never thought being, you know, growing up in Canada I would ever get the chance to do this. And I ended up getting an interview there. And in the interview they asked me like, what do you want to work on? I was like, I want to work on the secret thing that you haven't told anybody about, like what is the really cool project that isn't been announced. I want to work on that, whatever that is. And that turned out to be the new Glenn Orbital rocket, um, which was wild. So I ended up on that team when it was sort of like a 10 person architecture team meeting weekly in the basement of Blue Origin and then writing six page Amazon style memos to Mr. Bezos every week on the architecture of that rocket. So, you know, a couple months in, I basically became sort of the lead aerodynamicist for the booster. So figuring out how the hell you make a booster fly backwards, re enter it like Mach 5 and then target a ship at sea and land. And that ended up being like my job at Blue Origin for five or six years. Uh, and that was an amazing, amazing experience. I learned so much about how to be an amazing engineer and how to do some of these really, really hard problems. And one of the Things you realize with some of these super innovative companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX and Tesla is working on these crazy hard problems is addictive. Like, and having some success at it is addictive. Like once you get a taste of that and, and operating with people at that high of a level, it's like, this is what I want to do the rest of my career. This is like amazing. Um, so yeah, that's how I got started. Um, it became, you know, most people don't know about this, but the original version of New Glenn was to launch a space station with like 70 people. It was almost like a space party bus, um, that would go into orbit every week and then you go party with like 70 of your favorite friends and stuff, like very much like New shepherd on steroids. Um, and then it kind of got a little bit more real. It's like, yeah, you know, you probably want to like make some money doing this. Maybe we should launch satellites instead. Maybe go after some Air Force contracts. And so New Glenn as an architecture evolved from there. But the space party bus was definitely my favorite version of New Glenn.

Speaker A: Very interesting, very interesting. Thanks for the backdrop, of course. Let's spend a couple of minutes here on space itself before we come to Fusion, Avalanche and everything else. Uh, you know, I took this very cool course at ah, Harvard Business School. Uh, it was the HBS space course, Space Economics. And we had bunch of cases in HBS fashion on one was in Blue origin, another wasn't SpaceX. And of course there were so many on so many other space companies. I think there was a cultural, uh, distinction between what a Blue Origin was. Right. As you said, reporting to Mr. Bezos with the war chest that he had, which was virtually limitless, versus the iterative play that SpaceX made, which was around, uh, hey, we may not even survive till next year or till the next quarter if you don't get xyz government contract or some such commercialization strategy. Right. How do you think having spent, you know, significant time in one of these two, uh, those cultural distinctiveness, uh, that that kind of distinctiveness adds to the approaches that both of these companies made. How do you think the cultural play plays within, you know, an emerging industry like space again, considering it's so much more emerging back in the 2010s from the private sector lens and very much still is. So, you know, right now as well, in the 2000s.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think, um, definitely my perspective on this has evolved. Um, I know when I was at Blue Origin, I was very happy to be at Blue Origin because the rumor we kept hearing was that at that time, 2015, 2016, SpaceX was three or four launch failures away from bankruptcy. Right? And so I was very happy with two young children to be working at Blue Origin in something that I thought was like a lot more secure. Um, after working at a startup and kind of living sort of the other side of that coin, I can say for certainty that death by death, I mean the startup death is a very clarifying um, experience and really, really helps focus the mind on what matters and what doesn't matter. Um, and so I actually think if you want the highest performing um, uh, organization like uh, you know, being a year or two away from death is actually pretty great way to operate because it really focuses you on doing what matters and what you need to do to get, you know, in YC parlance default alive. Um, and so I think if you look at how that played out, right, um, SpaceX developed Starlink, which is a brilliant way for them to avoid death and become default alive and fund their, their vision of going to Mars. Right. Starlink is going to turn into a massive business. If they spin it off and they ipo, it's going to be huge. And that is essentially the piggyback to do all the things that probably don't make investment sense from a VC or private equity, which is like to build a city on Mars. Right. And so I think if um, SpaceX hadn't lived through that experience of near death, they probably wouldn't have come up with some of those really innovative ideas, um, and they'd be a very different company. So that's my take is I think a little bit of um, near death experience is probably healthy for an organization.

Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. That's actually well said, right? Considering uh, how early stage startups, particularly pre revenue startups, and particularly pre revenue early stage startups that perhaps have to survive for 10 years or more, uh, have to you know, be relevant, be not just relevant, but survive in a way that you end up being a beacon of high quality talent and also end up being taken seriously in year six or year seven when maybe the Runway becomes a little bit different or you know, governments and other public sector entities start questioning more around progress. Correct. Uh, so, so the SpaceX story is definitely a fascinating one and um, you know, the Blue Origin one obviously contrasts that approach altog together. Right. How do you think these experiences, these perspectives, uh, made you uh, tinker around in your mind space when thinking about fusion, when thinking about Avalanche, and what made you pivot towards you Know, building what is essentially one of the most ambitious energy startups within the fusion space itself.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, circa 2016, 2017, designing New Glenn, you know, writing memos to Jeff every other week. Like, I thought I was living my engineering dream. Like, that was one of the best times of my life, going into that wind tunnel and seeing the aerodynamics data come back from the wind tunnel and mostly matching the CFD and like, oh, my God, this thing might, this rocket might actually work. And it's super exciting to do this podcast now because New Glenn is literally on the stand in Florida about to fly in a month or two, which is wild to me. Um, I saw this picture of Jeff Bezos, like, looking up at this huge New Glenn rocket that was like, upended. And it's kind of wild to me because in my head, like, New Glenn is the size of about a tabletop because that's how big the wind tunnel model was that we built. Right. So in my head, like, you know, we designed it in CFD and simulation and stuff like that, and then we built the wind tunnel model. That's what I think of as New gl. But you look at, you know, five years later, after I left, um, that program, and now the rocket is actually built. Right. There was a ton of work that went in between when I, you know, finished the aerodynamics and they continued to work on it, uh, and they got that thing built and like, it's a, it's just amazing to see the scale of these things in terms of how I came to fusion. You know, around 2018, it became very obvious to me that this vision of millions of people living and working in space, like the Expanse, was like a big thing at the time that I was watching. Like, that vision was going to be hard, if not impossible to do with large chemical rockets. Even though we had billionaire founders funding these things and we needed nuclear and space, and at the time there's all these issues about fission and you needed presidential authority to even launch a fission reactor into space. And probably you would have protesters and stuff like that. So, like, it just seemed like fission was the wrong answer, at least for power in space, which meant it had to be fusion. And so I got very, very excited about space fusion. Kind of like went off the deep end and did like a self directed PhD. Read everything I could get my hands on from papers from like the 1935, 1930s era all the way to now. Started, uh, teaching myself plasma physics code. Actually wrote like a couple codes in Matlab and Python just to kind of like understand the physics better and then really started just exploring different ways of doing plasma confinement. Um, and that's ultimately how we settled on, you know, the thesis of avalanche energy, which is we're going to do small fusion so that it can be sort of mass produced like in an automotive manufacturing factory, and it could be something that could be launched into space. Right. You can't really launch Atokamak into space. Um, and we're gonna do it in a way that lets us follow this sort of SpaceX style, test, fail, fix, rapid iterative design. And that meant basically going down the road of electrostatic fusion, which is a very novel approach to fusion.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's very fascinating because I think that's actually leading up to a question. Right, because, and we've chatted about this slightly earlier, there is this penultimate version of fusion energy, which we'll come to maybe in a couple of questions later. But at what point within this journey of exploration, the self directed Ph.D. as you said, right. Looking at papers across 70, 80, 90 years of fusion research, at what point did you start seeing fusion differently from how the traditional industry viewed it? I understand you mentioned there was little reference of electrostatic fusion and you could explain it to more of the layperson audience in a while, but was there a specific moment of realization that led to Avalanche's distinctive approach beyond everything else that you already shared right around, let's say, popular media, the expanse, which by the way remains one of my favorite shows, but also so many other forces that were dominating that conversation. Was there something beyond this, uh, that made you characterize and catalyze rather in your mind that this is the way to go? Is there some breakthrough that you were expecting or so on and so forth?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think if I had come up in a more traditional way, like I'd done my PhD in Plasma Physics at MIT or you know, UW Madison or something like that, I don't think I could have developed the ideas that ultimately became the Orbitron. I think, I think coming at it from the perspective of I want something that's going to work in space, um, and I'm not beholden to sort of the existing, you know, defined approaches on how to do this. I think that was actually a benefit at the time. It didn't feel like it, it felt like, oh my God, this is so complicated. How are we ever going to make this work? But like, I think if it, but I think in retrospect it was an advantage. I think coming into it from a very first principles basis, like a Lot of us coming into Blue Origin, like nobody knew how to build reusable rockets. There was no degree that you could go to go do that. Right. So everything becomes a, uh, first principles reasoning basis. And so we were taught very well, you know, by our leads and just working in that environment of Blue Origin, how to think about new problems from a first principles basis. How do you go evaluate the different solutions, um, concisely roll them up into six pages of what are the core issues and the core decisions and the core arguments for and, and then argue those at a high level. And all of that turned out to be like excellent training for being an entrepreneur and talking to VCs and communicating with VCs. Right. Because my job is to take a very complicated thing, which is fusion, and the results that we're seeing in the lab, roll those up into something that can be understood by someone who does not have a degree in fusion, but maybe has a degree in finance and explain, you know, what are the challenges, what are we doing, how are we going to build a fusion reactor at a high level? So I think all of this, it didn't feel like it at the time, but all of this was actually like really great training to get us to where we were today. And I think being able to kind of like from first principles, write plasma physics codes and then explore different ways of confining plasmas, um, even if you're just doing a single particle like single ion, single electron, understanding how that physics works, um, was the enabler for, for the, the seeds that became avalanche energy.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Fantastic. I'm gonna talk about the viral tweet, uh, in a bit, uh, which, which is trending over the last 24 hours. Right. But before that, particularly also, again for the layperson audience, uh, it would be great if, you know, you could deep dive a little bit on the fundamentals of what fusion is and why avalanche is different, why some of the other players, maybe just the top three or four players are different and what the approaches have been, what is, what are these isotopes. Right. And uh, why is it that, uh, Andrew Cote, for instance, talking about how the DT fuel is the absolute worst choice for economic energy production. Right. So before we come to the technical side, let's start with something non technical, just to explain and lay the ground for. Or the non technical audiences.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I think it's helpful to think about fusion in the context of fission. Right. So most people, when they think about nuclear, they're thinking about fission. And so what is that? You're taking very Heavy elements like uranium. And you're firing neutrons at them and you're splitting them into smaller elements, right? Lower, lower things on the periodic table. And when you do that, that releases more neutrons than you put in. If it's a fissile material, there's only a few. Um, and so fission is like a chain reaction, right? You put in one neutron, you get three out, those three make three more, those in, right? You get this, like, chain reaction, this exponential going. That's why it's so easy to do fission, because it's literally putting the right materials together to make that neutron economy work. Um, but it also is dangerous because you can have a chain reaction that runs away. That is what a fission bomb is. Right? And so when you're talking about a fission reactor to make power, there's all these system safety systems that have to go around that to control that chain reaction, make sure it doesn't run away from you. Fusion is sort of the opposite of fission, right? You're taking very light elements, usually hydrogens, but not always, and shooting them at each other and doing it at such high energy that they stick. And when they stick, they release other particles, neutrons, charged particles, um, as energy. And if you do the right elements, um, you can actually make more energy out than took to bring those particles together and cause them to stick. So that's what fusion is. It is not a chain reaction. So the nice thing about this is that if you're, you know, most fusion reactions happen in a vacuum chamber. And so if your vacuum chamber gets too hot and melts, the air will rush in and that will kill your plasma and off you go. There's no fusion reaction anymore. So fusion is inherently safe from a meltdown standpoint. And that's why, what makes it very interesting as a power source for the future.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And, um, this, this is interesting, right, because you mentioned the expanse. You talk about chemical rockets and sort of, you know, not having, um, the potential to advance a species or our civilization. And again, we are into a different set of frameworks in science fiction or borrowing from science fiction writers, right? We can talk about Dyson Spher years on one end. We can talk about, uh, the cargo shape scale of civilizations, whether we will achieve type one or type two, uh, eventually. And I guess a lot of those have to do with energy being solved or unlocked as a limiting factor, which we'll again come, uh, to talk about later in this conversation. But specifically the chemical, um, rocket composition of the chemical rocket source. That's what you can Spend some time on while you explain why the current approaches to fusion from some competitors and perhaps those are the age old wisdom oriented approaches. Right. May not last in terms of actually achieving what fusion is trying to achieve. And you can again spend some time on what Q greater than one means within this entire context. Try to share some commentary on the whole conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, so maybe it's helpful to walk things back from the future. Right, so what's the penultimate version of fusion technology? Right. Uh, I believe, and many people believe the penultimate version of fusion is a neutronic. So it doesn't emit neutrons, it's small, it can be mass manufactured in any country. So every country can have energy security. And it uses direct energy extraction. So you know, instead of trying to boil water and then run it through a turbine and all this mumbo jumbo subsystems. And this is hard for me to say because I got a PhD in turbo machinery and like I love turbo machinery. But like, like that's. The penultimate version is a neutronic, probably proton boron 11 direct energy extraction, small, so it looks like automotive manufacturer. Right. That's I think the future of fusion. The penultimate version of fusion. And so when you walk that back to today, that was very much on our mind when we picked our concept for fusion, which is an orbitron. We wanted to pick something that would have legs to that penultimate version of fusion. Um, so that meant doing electrostatic, um, uh, ion confinement, magnetic electron. It meant working on some of the technologies that would enable direct energy extraction. So you know, we have um, some material scientists that are working on a chip kind of inspired by uh, radioisotope batteries that can directly convert the fusion charged particles to electricity, which is super exciting. Like that is one of the technologies you're going to want in the penultimate version of fusion. Um, but we have to live, you know, with the technology that we have today. And the reality is nobody has built a fusion machine that made enough power to actually just run itself. Right. That has not happened yet. And so that is very much where we are today. And that is very much where we and all of the other fusion companies are trying to go is we're trying to build fusion machines that can at least make enough energy to power themselves. Right? The self looking lollipop if you will. Uh, and then we can like perfect the technology into an energy producing thing and then march down that uh, tech tree if you will, if you're using like a civilization paradigm to the penultimate version of fusion, which I believe is PB11 Anatronic Direct Energy extraction, mass produced.

Speaker A: Interesting, interesting. Let's, let's definitely spend another five or ten minutes on this part of the conversation. Right, so deuterium, tritium, obviously is maybe not the end game for fusion, in your opinion. Uh, how would you sort of conclude that with. We understand that at this point a lot of the startups are, you know, at development phases. Right. Personally, at your level as a startup founder, uh, building avalanche initially, but also now three, four years down in the journey, how would you conclude that the dte, um, fusion is not the end game for fusion? And what do you think when you say the penultimate version of fusion, what do you think can be an alternative to the penultimate fusion? Uh, the penultimate version. Are there other approaches other than electrostatic? And again, spend as much time here talking from the basics, walking us through, uh, the different technologies, if you can.

Speaker B: Yeah, so there's different fusion fuels, um, and there's sort of a progression of difficultness in terms of getting them to fuse in a net energy way. So, you know, the easiest fusion fuel to get net energy with is deuterium tritium. Tritium is radioactive. It's in very short supply. There's probably only 25kg of tritium in the world. Most of it is made, um, in Candu reactors in Canada or as part of the, the NNSA weapons program, um, in the U.S. uh, and Russia. Um, you know, there's deuterium, deuterium fusion, which is what most fusion companies, when they're doing fusion are talking about. Not very many. I don't know if any fusion companies, commercial companies, have actually gotten licensed and operated with tritium. I believe the answer is currently no, although some of them may be licensed for it. Uh, so most fusion companies are working with deuterium. Deuterium. We do that here in our lab. It's a little gray bottle that sits off the side of the machine. You shoot the deuterium ions in, they fuse, they make some neutrons. We can measure them. That's how we know much fusion we're doing. Uh, and then. But you can't. Deuterium, uh, deuterium is not really a pathway to net energy because, um, its cross section is so low. So it's just really hard to make a lot of fusion with deuterium. Deuterium. That's why you want to do deuterium tritium. There's an interesting middle fuel, which is deuterium helium 3. That is what Helion is planning to work with, that is slightly anutronic. So, like, there are side reactions from Deuterium. Deuterium in that reaction that make neutrons. Um, so you know, it doesn't eliminate your neutron flux, but it definitely brings the energy down and makes it more like you know, 5% of your fusion rate, not 100%. So that's an improvement. And then the penultimate version of uh, a neutron effusion is proton boron 11. So you take an isotope of boron. Uh, boron is a highly abundant element. It's used in tank armor. Um, and uh, 80% of natural boron is boron 11, 20% is boron 10. So you might need to do some enrichment there. But you basically are fusing protons, basically hydrogen and boron 11. And that releases three alpha particles, um, about three MeV energy, um, which is sort of perfect for directly converting those to, to, to electricity if you've got the right direct um, energy scheme. So you know, there's a spectrum of fusion fuels starting with dd, which is what everyone uses today, that gets progressively more difficult as you go. Uh, but the advantage is your neutron flux and the damage to your machine, both in terms of activating your machine, so making it radioactive and trashing your superconducting magnets. If you're a magnetic confinement scheme, the difficulty of solving that problem gets easier as you go to these or a neutronic fuel. So fuel.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And thanks for that quick primer as well. But you do also mention that the technical challenges of neutron damage um, to magnets and DD fusion or how sort of existing approaches have those limitations. You spend some time talking about some of those technical challenges. Which of these, if there are maybe multiple that come to your mind, do you think are achievable in the next few years? Uh, and uh, which of these do you think are fundamentally very difficult from an engineering standpoint or perhaps even from a scientific standpoint? Um, and I'll tell you where we are leading eventually, but we'll come to try to break down the 20 year timeline of why fusion is perpetually 20 years away. But let's start with these two technical challenges first.

Speaker B: Yeah, so let's start with deuterium tritium. Like almost every fusion company is going to operate from the get go with deuterium tritium and try and go for Q greater than one. Right? Because that is such a huge inflection point in milestone for any fusion company. Like that's anyone who says they're not going to do DT first is lie because everyone will do TD first. Everyone wants to get the Q1. Right.

Speaker A: Please, please also explain what is Q greater Than one. Um, and the engineering Q greater than one and so on.

Speaker B: Again, um, there's sort of two Q greater ones, right? There's, there's sometimes it's called Q science, um, and then there's Q engineering. So Q science is like if you draw a box around your plasma and, uh, it's debatable where to draw the box and what is really the right way to draw the box. Um, but if you draw a box around your plasma and you look at the energy that's coming into it, whether it's from lasers or from ions or whatever, um, and then you look at the fusion power coming out, if you can get more fusion power out than you put into your plasma, that is sort of the commonly accepted definition of Q science greater than one. And that's, that's what NIF did a couple years ago that generated so much excitement. Now they view, they drew a very, very tight box around the plasma, right? So if you open that box up just a little bit, it would not have been Q grid, but they drew a very tight box, uh, and hit q, I think, 1.7 or something, which was amazing. Uh, the really amazing thing about that is that it proves that the codes work, right? So the plasma physics codes that are the basis for how we're going to design these machines, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them. They can predict these plasmas, and then we can see those plasmas in the experiment. So that's what's amazing about the NIF experiment. Um, so you got your plasma, you draw your tight box around it. Now if you open up the box, and now you start including the power that went into your magnets, right? Or the power that went into your vacuum pumping and your cryo pumps, now the problem gets harder, right, because now you have more losses to account for. So you need to make more fusion power out to account for all those additional losses. And so if you draw the box really around the whole machine, that's kind of what we call wall plug or Q engineering, right? That's a machine that if it makes enough power that it can run itself, essentially hit Q engineering greater than one. Um, nobody has ever built a Q engineering greater than one fusion machine. That is what everybody is trying to get to along the way. There is the Q science machine. And those are all going to be very subjective in terms of how tightly you drew the box around your plasma and what you accounted for and what you didn't account for. Yeah.

Speaker A: Before we get back to the technical challenges question, which was the point earlier this is fascinating for at least first time viewers or first time listeners or readers anytime, whether it's in 2015, whether it's in 2025, to read about Q Science and Q Engineering. A lot of the fundamental science students, a lot of people who feel like they've maybe had high school math and science or something more, have also been exposed to a fair degree of science fiction around perpetual energy machines, perpetual motion machines and so on. Correct. How do you explain, you know, eventual Q engineering greater than 1 to people like them? Because for a lot of them, and you and I both know, there are, I think, an overwhelming majority of the world who would not understand physics, let alone plasma physics and nuclear fusion. A, uh, lot of them will keep talking about how speculative it is because it seems like we are unlocking a different tier to our, uh, understanding of not just science, but of the universe in a way. Right. Because the fact that you're now generating energy more than you're inputting it. So just fundamentally as a statement, it's, it seems a little enthralling and a little unbelievable for a lot of the layperson audience. Right. How would you sort of go about explaining why this could potentially work? Specifically Q engineering greater than one?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, a lot of this comes from the fact that, you know, plasmas are hard, um, they often want to go unstable. And so, you know, we've made predictions in the past of, you know, if we just get to these plasma conditions, we'll have, you know, fusion, Q science greater than one, if not Q engineering greater than one. And then what happens along the way is there's some new instability we didn't know about. So it's just really hard to like climb that curve. Uh, I do think fusion is a little weird in that it, it's the only field I've ever worked in where there's this like, vein of negativity that it just can't be made to work. And I think some of that is born that like just, you know, we've just had a lot of like grinding for the past 80 years, but also like, we haven't really, if you look at the funding that has gone into fusion, there really has not been that much. Like there's this really famous chart, um, I think it was from the 80s or 90s was basically like, if we fund fusion this much, we'll have fusion in five years. If we fund it this much, we'll have it in 20. And if we fund it this much, we'll have it never because we'll just never make enough progress to ever have it. And then you look at what we actually did and we funded at Fusion Endeavor. So I do think like, you know, if this thing had been properly funded, um, and we had done it in a way where there was sort of a diversity of ideas and approaches, um, we would be a lot farther along. Like, if I think about what we're doing with the orbitron, like we are trying to get to the point where we could do Q science greater than 1 in the next couple years, like maybe even 20, 27, which would be amazing. All of the technologies that go into an orbitron existed 10, 20 years ago. I think the only thing that's maybe novel is the plasma physics codes and the fact that they're open source. And so we can just kind of like collaborate with that open source Workbex community. Um, that's a novel development. You know, GPUs being able to run, you know, a simulation of our orbitron on a single gpu. That's new, right? That did not occur five years ago. But the fundamental technologies we're working with, which is ion beams, high voltage, superconducting magnets, permanent magnets, all those things existed 20, 30 years ago. So we could have been doing this startup 30 years ago, um, if we wanted to. So I don't know if that answers the question, but I think that's an interesting aside that like, fusion is really weird and that we have sort of these negative nellies that are just like, this will never happen, this will never happen. It's like, well, no, you know, this technology, because of the promise, uh, has a lot of baggage with it as well. Um, and I think the novel thing is VCs stepping up in the past couple years and saying, no, this technology is worth pursuing, we're going to try and fund it, you know, privately. Um, because the path we were on with pure government funding was fusion never. Um, and, and the VC money and all these diversity approaches. There's something like 40 or 50 fusion startups all doing almost completely different approaches. That is the step up, um, that gets us to fusion sooner rather than later from fusion ever.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great response. And I think it also is a segue to the 20 year, uh, timeline. Uh, the biggest joke, or at least one of the oldest jokes in fusion is, uh, that fusion is perpetually 20 years away. Uh, how would you describe that within the context of, um, the technical challenges? I think we've tried to answer that question, uh, the last couple of times. Right. But how would you, you place the timeline. So what happens the next three, maybe four years? What happens the next three, four, five years? How do you achieve this in the next 20 years? And what achievement is defined as what version of achievement can be enacted upon in the next 20?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, with, with the Tokamax, um, if you talk to Bob Mumgaard at cfs, for them, that's a scaling law, right? They, you know, they just need to get to higher magnetic fields and suppress some plasma instabilities, I believe, and they should get there. Right? Um, that's where sort of like the scientific consensus is on Tokamax infusion, um, for what we're doing. Orbitrons, um, you know, it's very easy for us to make very high energy plasmas. I think we might have the record in terms of electron temperature that has been publicly disclosed at like, I think a APS DPP conference. Um, what's hard for us is plasma density, right? So we're trying to pack these positively charged ions together and confine them electrostatically. Electrostatics can only confine one particle, so you got to pick electrons or ions. So we picked ions because those are the heaviest particles and electrostatics is like the strongest confinement force. So like, that makes a lot of sense. And then we need to. But we still need electrons because we need a quasi neutral plasma to get to like appreciable plasma densities, right? So we use magnetic fields. They're weak magnetic fields, so they're not really strong enough to affect the ions. They're purely there to confine electrons, co. Confine them with the ions. That's, that's a fundamentally what an orbitron is that we're building. Um, and so the hard thing for us is really climbing up plasma density. We're already at the fusion energies that we kind of want to get to. Um, and so, you know, we're in the mid 10 to the nines right now. Um, if we can get to 10 to the 11, so sort of like 15x better. Um, it turns out, you know, that is an interesting pathway to q greater than one for us. So right now we're building 12 centimeter diameter plasma cores. Uh, and if we can get to 10 to the 11 plasma density and then grow the diameter to about a meter, meter and a half, um, we should be making a few hundred watts of fusion. And that few hundred watts is enough to overcome the inherent parasitic losses due to, for example, our high voltage feed through our ion sources, that kind of stuff. So to me, what q greater than one is what the path to q greater than one is it's not 20 years, right? Like, I have a mechanical engineer that last week was up till midnight working on the design for this big orbitron. Like, it's not 20 years away. It's coming. Uh, and so, you know, our job over the next couple years is to get to that plasma density, 10 to the 11 from where we are now, and then build these bigger orbitrons, go get licensed for tritium so that we can go do deuterium. Tritium. That's the easiest way to get to q greater than 1, and then go build that facility, go build that machine, and then go try and test it. So if I'm game planning this, right, like I'm a fusion CEO, uh, I hear things that maybe the general public doesn't hear about where people are at and where the plans are. I think 2027 is going to be a very interesting year for fusion. I believe that is the year where all the fusion is 30 years away and always will be. Uh, skeptics will be silenced. Like, that will not be a joke anymore after 2027. And so if I'm game planning it, right, you know, Bob Mumgaard at CFS is on the record saying in 2027, they're going to press a button and spark's going to turn on and it's going to make q greater than 1. And that's going to be amazing for fusion and the world. That's going to be awesome. Also, somewhere else, right, probably in Richland, Washington, um, there is going to be a little orbitron, maybe a meter in diameter, um, that has a little digital twin AI running it, um, turning the knobs, right, adjusting the cathode voltage, adjusting the magnetic fields, shooting in deuterium and tritium from the ion sources, mixing and matching them, and like, basically running this AI algorithm, trying to find the most optimal way to burn deuterium, tritium in an orbitron. And so there's, I think, a very much, a very interesting David and Goliath story being set, set up here with, you know, CFS Commodore, that's the big gorilla, you know, hundreds of scientists, amazing science program, amazing Tokamak building being built in Devons, Massachusetts. Um, that's going to basically, I think, you know, do q greater than 1 and, and, and really like, change the world. And then also there's this like, little fusion machine that we're building that is going to be ready around the same time. And we'll see like, you know, who, who does it first, um, even if we do second that will still be amazing because all of a sudden, you know, big power plant, tokamak fusion will be a thing and then small compact fusion will be a thing and that will be amazing development for the world. So I would predict now on the COVID of 2028 time or whatever, it's going to be something about fusion. Q greater than 1. Uh, and like real Q greater than 1. Like a real steady state plasma. That's Q greater than one.

Speaker A: Interesting. That's very interesting. How do you think some of the other players put themselves in this timeline too, right? Let's say going into2030s and uh, even accounting for a lot of speculative bottlenecks, um, that may be difficult to anticipate today. How do you think, let's say a Pacific Fusion would go about it? Or how do you think maybe a couple of other competitors would, if you have a couple of cents to share, uh, but also understand the industry landscape itself. Right, for, for people who don't know much, who can't understand, let's say, the physics put out even by someone like the Andrea Courte we spoke about earlier, uh, how would you go around classifying the industry probably 10 years from now, uh, if or if not certain milestones are reached? And we can also talk about, um, you know, the investment side a bit later, but primarily just the milestones around technical challenges, technical milestones overall.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I can say like from the outset, like I'm very biased against the target approaches to fusion. Like where you shoot lasers and blow up a target. Like I think that probably will do q greater than 1. In fact, NIF kind of showed that. Um, but I think that's going to be very hard to turn into like a commercial power plant that has any kind of like reliability or is cost competitive with vision or anything else. So like, I'm very skeptical of those approaches. Um, and that's just my personal fusion bias. I think what will win are the steady state machines or the machines that do pulse, but in such a way that there's no sort of like target that you have to like put into the chamber every time. So pulse, I would consider like zap, helion. Those are pulse approaches, but I think those are viable approaches that could be cost competitive with fission. So you know, if I'm gonna like horse race it, you know, I definitely think we're going to be in a, uh, at a point where we could start be doing q greater than 1, testing with deuterium, tritium. Um, zap is a very interesting one. They're kind of going for q greater than 1 via analysis. So they're doing a lot of shots with deuterium and getting very experienced with that. They're not operating with tritium at all. Um, but they're going to basically show that if we had been running with tritium, we would be q greater than 1. So that's an interesting approach that de risks all the cost and complexity of dealing with tritium. It's not really doing it like it's not actually q greater than 1. So I don't know how strongly that will play when they eventually do it. Um, so I would hope that they would have plans to be operating with tritium at some point in 2027 and be in the race as well. Helion is sort of the dark horse, right? They don't publish a lot, um, of. But if you look at them just externally, you know, they look and sound like a company that is on their way to doing it. They're signing power purchasing agreements and all that kind of stuff. So that's what I would expect if you were close to, close to doing it. So I think Helion is in the mix. Um, I think. Who else? I think Tokamak Energy is interesting. Although I don't know if they have the funding to really build a Q greater than one fusion machine right now. I do think I saw something recently where they're partnering with Japan. Uh, but that's more of like a mid-2030s type thing. Um, I think the other one that people shouldn't sleep on is Rialta. So I actually believe of the steady state fusion approaches, the mirrors are going to be the thing that wins. And I would consider what we're building in Orbitron, also a variant of the mirror. Uh, so Rialta is building a magnetic mirror. CFS actually built the magnets for them. The nice thing about mirrors is you kind of have the design freedom to separate the magnets from the plasma. So you can move the plasma as far as you want away from the magnets and fit a really big thick blanket in there, which you can't really do for a stellarator or a, uh, tokamak that wraps around itself. So, you know, if I'm, if I'm horse trading this, I think, uh, you know, I'm not aware of any stellarators that are going to be online for 2027, so I don't think they're in the race. Uh, but Realta has a mirror. It's in Wisconsin. I saw it last summer. It's awesome. It's doing first plasmas and shots and everything. And I'm like a big fan of what they're doing. Um, so I think it's going to be CFS, Realta, uh, us, ah, Zap and Helion in 2027 that are all trying to make shots at Q greater than one if I'm horse trading it.

Speaker A: Very interesting, very interesting. Just to you know, wrap up the first half of the interaction then we've covered so much ground, some different directions, some intersectional directions. Let's focus in the second half now on three primary things. Right? Let's talk a little bit about the industry dynamics in terms of um, how fusion compares with fission. Let's spend a little bit of time there around the new scale case which I will bring out shortly. Then let's also spend time on more big picture themes of superabundance and energy economics and something you've spoken of in the past and other fusion players have and it remains sort of one of the holy grails for the industry and the technology itself. Um, but also I think the third part which we'll try to cover in the second half of this interaction is the investment landscape and whether the government still have a continual role to play considering they did not play that greater role in the last few, last few decades even though they were the primary actor. Um, and considering there's so much VC funding right now with 40 plus Fusion startups, how does the investment landscape also look like. Right, and we can also talk about breakthroughs approach versus let's say others approaches. So let's start out with industry dynamics. How do you think the fission comparison plays out? And let me give you more context. Right, so the question here, and this is again another HBS case we covered at Harvard, which was on new scale, which was for those uh, among the viewers who don't know, was a small modular nuclear fission, um, startup. And the question is with small modular reactors, at least in the fission space, there was this question of diseconomies of scale that some of these startups existed or was started out because somehow as a civilization we forgot how to make big reactors. Right. Even though nuclear fission was such an established technology for so many decades. Do you think that's a risk, uh, maybe a huge risk for fusion, big fusion in the way other players, the tokamak designs play out? Or do you think that this economies of scale were unique to fission? Uh, what are the comparisons? Because the engineering remains the same in some sense, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think there's a really interesting analogy here. Like if you want to Mass produce something and get really good at it. It has to be small enough that you're actually mass producing it. Right. And so I think there's an interesting analogy here between blue origin, the SpaceX, right? Like SpaceX was building Merlin which is sort of four feet tall. It's the perfect size that all those components for that engine can be made in the supply chain in south, you know, South LA or whatever. Um, and they were able to turn out Merlins like one a week or something crazy like no one had ever built rockets that fast. And then you look at what we were building at Blue Origin, the BE4 like amazing rocket engine, awesome engineering. It was 12ft tall. And so there was only like three places in the whole country where we could get castings for the turbo pump. So every time like we tried to like, like do a design change or we lost one blew up on the test stand like eight or nine months later until your next casting and rocket came together, Rocket engine came together. Whereas SpaceX was like blowing these Merlins up on the Test stand and McGregor all the time. Didn't matter, there's another one coming. So they were able to have very low barriers to testing and trying ideas and move really quickly. And so I would say the problem with new scale is they didn't go small enough off. It wasn't actually a mass producible fission reactor was just make your economics poor. So to be mass producible for fission like you probably need to be in the single digit megawatts to maybe tens of megawatts, uh, range. And so you need to be smaller like a, like an oklo or a radiant or something like that to actually be small enough that you can mass produce them and run that test fail fix. Well you don't want to fail efficient but you run that like very iterative like process and get better at mass manufacturing them. Um, so I don't know, I think these like 100 megawatt, 500 megawatt SMRs are in this like graveyard where they're not really being mass produced but they also don't have the economics of a gigawatt plan. And so I think that's why they're struggling. I do think the megawatt class stuff like what oklo and radiant are doing is very interesting. Uh, from a fission standpoint. I think the challenge with vision is that um, you know there's this decision that happened uh, um, I guess six months ago or something that kind of divorced the regulation of fusion and vision. And I don't know if people are aware of this, but the NRC decided that they're going to regulate fusion reactors like particle accelerators. So functionally what that means is that a fusion reactor is very similar to like a cyclotron or something that you might have in a hospital or at uh, like a, a cancer radiation practice. And so you're really working with, if you're in an agreement state and in Washington state we are, you're working with the Washington State Department of Health to license your thing. So you know we, we design our fusion room machines, we um, design the shielding, we work with the Washington Department of Health on the uh, licensing and then like a month after we apply and they approve it, like a particle accelerator license shows up in the mail and I hang it on the fusion M machine and off we go. Right. That's a really great regulatory strategy for developing fusion with vision. I don't believe the NRC has ever actually approved one of these small advanced designs to the point where it's actually been constructed. So in that case you have a regulator that is ambivalent whether the industry succeeds or not and probably would rather just build giant gigawatt light radar reactors till the cows come home. So that is I think the challenge for fission. The um, really interesting thing that has happened in the past year is AI right? So this is the thing that I could not have predicted when I started avalanche energy in 2019, 2020 was that this thing would come on the scene that just devours huge amounts of energy and would create this insane market pull to build new generation capacity. And it's supercharging everything nuclear. Um, all the low hanging fruit is getting gobbled up like we're going to turn on Three Mile island where like X Energy is going to go build new fission plants at the Hanford site is wild, right? Like all of a sudden nuclear is completely flipped. Uh, and there's this very interesting dynamic developing between fusion which is at lower TRLs and really needs to like advance their TRL and get to actually building fusion power plants and net energy machines and fission which has this real regulatory burden that's super hard to solve. Super long time frames to get licensed, not compatible with most VC funding at all. Uh, and there's also a fuel problem that people don't really talk about. So most of the enriched uranium comes from Russia and there's a law that was passed that basically is going to ban that I think in 2027. And there is currently no domestic uranium enrichment in the US anymore. And so there's a whole bunch of companies that are trying to stand that up. So I think there's a very interesting race developing over the next 10 years between fusion on the tech readiness side and trying to get tech ready to scale and do it and fission. Can they solve the regulatory and fuel supply chain issues?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. You know, that's an interesting conversation because big tech has obviously bought on to the fission race. The nuclear race is, you know, we've also discussed and uh, this idea that, you know, nuclear fuel supply, uh, particularly from Russia, as you mentioned earlier in a chat that you're having, would what potentially end in 2027. Right. Which is another what's just a couple of years actually from now and how that can impact the fission dynamics. Uh, considering you have this, as you mentioned, AI, this huge race to have the most number of data centers or just this idea of having compute and that compute requires energy and therefore the energy is now being tried to be sourced from fusion and then fission runs out with a supply chain bottleneck. Right. Do you think this playing out in the medium term, if not the short term, considering, as you said, fusion is still in so many cases on the lower TRL bandwidth. Right. For those of our viewers, again, TRL would be very subjective for some components of fusion. So the technological readiness levels would be very different for certain components and would still be very premature for certain others.

Speaker B: So you get onto spectrum, right, like TRL for fusion, I would call it like three. Uh, get ready to try and demonstrate it and move to four or five. Uh, but you know, some of these advanced reactors, like I would also call them threes because they've never actually been built and demonstrated. So whereas, you know, light water fission is, you know, TRL 10. Like there's lots of things. So. So like, I wouldn't say like fission is TRL10 and off they go. Like there's still some TRLs to cross there too. Um, but I think there's more known, there's less science risk, uh, from going to 3 to 4 than there is with fusion, obviously. Uh, so, yeah, I mean it's going to be really interesting. I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a lot of deals done on the fission side. Um, and what I think Meta has an RFP out right now trying to get 4 gigawatts, uh, going by the mid-2030s. And I think what they're going to see is it's going to be very hard to hit that given the time frames of the NRC for licensing the fuel supply chain issues and stuff like that. And so I imagine what's going to happen is they're going to turn to fusion and there's going to. All of these uh, hyperscalers are probably going to have sort of an advanced technology fund, uh, where they're trying to figure out how are they going to get generation in the mid-2030s and beyond. Because I think vision will be tapped out. Like they will be, be so over, over subscribed they won't be able to meet it. And, and so what's the thing that could come on and you know, continue generation growth? It's probably not solar from China, it's probably not wind, it's probably fusion. And so I think that's going to be a really interesting dynamic that develops in a couple years as well.

Speaker A: Absolutely, that's, that's an interesting segue to also the funding landscape. Right. Because one part of it is the industry dynamics and we spend some time there. Uh, the funding landscape is very interesting. And I quote the Fusion Industry Association, I think in 2024 itself, like um, you know in July this year they said that the industry itself of nuclear fusion has attracted more than $7 billion of investment. And uh, of course uh, the governmental funding is now up to what, $426 million in the, in the, in 12 months or so. And this idea that the timelines remain on track for fuel in the 2000-30s again as an industry associ is a good uh, dose of optimism. Right. But then the funding story also says the same. It's not, it's not a mismatch at all. Like what are your comments on how funding has worked over the last few decades particularly uh, public funding driven narratives versus so much venture capital and other private investment sources today. And we can also spend time on how different funding um, mechanisms work. Right. With the case of Pacific Fusion which is milestone linked and so on. But give us some of your commentaries on just you know, the investment side.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think on the government side like there's been a lot of investment in the science and the, the foundation. So you know like all these like cross section databases that we're going to need um, to design a fusion power plant so that it's not highly activated. Like all that stuff is great. You know the, the plasma physics codes have come a long way and those were all funded by like the government and that's awesome. Um, the reason we are talking about fusion today is because of VC funding. Like let's not kid around, like the private Government funding that has gone into commercial fusion is pretty minuscule to date. I hope that changes. But let's be real, it hasn't yet. Um, and ah, so that's why we're talking about fusion today is VC funding. And so the Pacific deal is super interesting because it's a novel funding scheme. It's basically um, I'll try. So like you know, it was set up by a vc so there's certain structures that I imagine would go in place. I don't have, you know, direct knowledge of this, but this is how I imagine it was set up is that it's a milestone based funding algorithm where the milestones and the funding amounts have been pre agreed to with all of the investors that are in that $900 million deal. Um, how it differs, you know, normally when you raise money from VC you have this concept of pro rata, right? So investors have the right in future rounds to put more money in to make, keep their percentage ownership so they don't, don't get diluted. So the interesting thing about the Pacific deal is I think it has the concept of almost like anti pro rata. So it operates almost like an lp, uh, a VC fund. So you know, if they hit a milestone, board agrees, there's like a capital call to all the investors and so they all wire their checks in and they get to keep their ownership percentage, you know, that they agree to. But if they don't wire their checks in or they don't agree with the milestone, I think there's this anti pro rata uh, clause that like get, they get super diluted by the existing investors. And so there's a real strong carrot and stick thing going on here, uh, to try and keep the investors along the way, uh, which I'm sure the company likes because they're basically done fundraising right now. They just have to focus on hitting milestones. I think what they're doing is super interesting. It's a very interesting way to fund deep tech projects that need a lot of capital and need a lot of time. And so like I'm very excited about this scheme and to see how it works out. I also don't think it's a freebie. Like if I was, you know, the founder Will Reagan running that one, like it's kind of running on hard mode. Like you better hit your milestones, uh, you better be confident that those investors won't see some other approach that they like better or like, like if CFS does it and everyone decides CFS1 fusion, like you're in A very tough spot now, um, if those investors don't actually answer the capital calls, because what are you going to do? You can't like go raise a different round from new investors after doing this one. You've kind of like put all your eggs into this basket. So I, I mean, I think it's awesome what they're doing. Uh, I'm a big fan of alternative approaches to fusion and so I really hope they succeed. I think it's, I think it's uh, a very, it's operating on hard mode. Everything is like, yes, you've solved all your fundraising, but now you're 100 milestone based. You better have figured out what your milestones are and they better not change along the way. Uh, and you better hit them. So like, I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing how they do.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And you mentioned a great point, right, that the reason why we are talking today, or perhaps why a lot of people are talking about fusion, is because of the venture capitalists that have believed in um, you know, radical technologies that actually in the past were just driven by patient capital. Because the specifics, uh, of Pacific Fusion, I love the pun there, uh, are specific to that company. And General Catalyst has released an interesting note around why the $900 million Series A is tranched and um, is linked to the milestones that you spoke about. And while only they are privy to the specifics, it's also intriguing on the other side how there's General Catalyst where there's low carbon capital. A lot of the VCs that are bullish and optimistic about fusion have also bet on a hand of fusion companies rather than going all in on one approach or two approaches. A lower carbon capital, for instance, is obviously, you know, CFS remains a marquee investment. For instance, Stellar Raiders, Excimer, Zap Energy. So it's, it's obviously an entire portfolio. Right. Uh, and uh, that's an interesting trend that's bucking previous trends where a lot of the conversations around long term technologies with low TRLs were exclusively the domain of patient capital. And VC was already different class of pat capital, I would say. Correct. And that's changed in some ways or the other. Maybe it is because of, well, uh, undefinable amounts of total addressable markets. In this case, maybe fusion would be in trillions.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's very difficult to actually put an estimate on what happens to the market size, which then makes me come to superabundance, you know, um, but also linked to superabundance and venture capital is How Breakthrough and a couple of others approach this. Like what are your comments on how going all in on one side of the science spectrum yields results? Or do you agree or disagree with some of these methods? Because is there a propensity to miss out on the next SpaceX, uh, which may actually be a smaller startup today, but may actually be the right way to approach it. You know, what are your comments?

Speaker B: Yeah, so this is a very interesting um, topic, you know, when we talk about VC strategy. So there's, there's sort of two binds of thought. I'll call them consensus driven investing and contrarian driven investing. So you know what Breakthrough Energy and Bill Gates is running there is what I would call consensus driven investing. So they're kind of looking at like, okay, what are the different fusion approaches that have a long history of publishing, have uh, maybe built experiments, um, and put sort of points on the board in terms of fusion, triple product and queue. And then let's take a portfolio approach and make sure that we're invested in one or two of each one of these things. And I call that consensus driven, um, because like if you think about what happened with SpaceX, like they didn't spend 10 years publishing papers and got consensus from, you know, the aerospace community that a reusable Falcon 9 with landing legs was the way to do reasonable rocketry. Right? They just did it, it. And so it's a little, my, my critique of what Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy are doing is that it's a little bit like saying, well I'm only going to look at launch vehicles like SLS and Space Shuttle because those are blessed by you know, the government. And, and uh, and those have been like, those have scientific consensus or whatever. And so if you do that you're going to miss the SpaceXs that come out with a very different radical idea and do it. And so that's my critique of Breakthrough and what Bill Gates is doing. You know, I contrast that with, you know, Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, Praka and Lower Carbon. They have made some investments in um, the SpaceX's a fusion if I will, not just us, but other ones that are trying to do things differently with a concept that Maybe doesn't have 50 years of research but might actually be a better approach. And so, so um, I think at the end of the day we'll see what happens. I think Bill Gates and Breakthrough missed small compact fusion and Peter Thiel and Founders Fund did not. Uh, and it probably is going to come down to consensus versus contrarian investing strategies and I think there's a very interesting history, uh, note to see that someone will write someday on that.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And this is our central question on the state of the venture capital industry itself. Right? Um, whether you call it an industry, whether you call it a sector, this question of consensus based investing has been one of the biggest critiques of what a lot of VCs, if not almost all of them, end up being victimized to, which is that once upon a time there were a bunch of people with some money, they obviously institutionalized that capital and then was really searching for remarkable founders. But as the number of VCs have balloon like to something like, I don't know, 31 or 20 or 30,000 general partners today versus let's say a fraction of that 20 years back, you also see that the idea spotting, the founder spotting and just the industrial trend spotting becomes very clouded in terms of at least searching for, pun intended, the breakthrough innovation of the time. And I guess that then trickles down to even more difficult sectors like fusion.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Where a lot of people do not come from the relevant backgrounds and even if they do, it's so difficult to difficult to predict what's going to happen. So the question then becomes how do you market size? What is super abundance? And we can spend a little bit of time here. Now you've spoken about it earlier and a lot of people in general have spoken about what limitless energy could provide and fundamentally shift the way we understand energy economics. Right. So do you think that a lot of the VCs are missing the point in terms of what superabundance could be? Or maybe it's just a common denominator philosophical construct at this point that it doesn't really matter matter, uh, whether there could be a limitless energy future. We just want to stick to what may be peer reviewed stuff considering this is so deep science and engineering heavy as a business.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think if you're, you're picking horses here, you want to pick ones that have a pathway to this super abundance that we've talked about. Right. And what, what is super abundance? It basically to me means every country or every entity, like you know, like the EU for example, people, uh, has access to producing more than enough energy that their populace needs to live well. Right. And we are not in a super abundance era. We never have been. Right. Huge swaths of the earth's population still live far below what we consider modern living standards. And so we have a lot of work to do to uplift the whole planet. Um, into this era of superabundance. And I believe fusion is the way to do that if we do the right kinds of fusion. So I don't believe deuterium, tritium will get us to superabundance because of the challenges of, um, magnet life, tritium breeding, proliferation. Um, when you have a high neutron, uh, flux source like that, I believe it's the aneutronics, deuterium, helium 3 or Pb11 that will bring us superabundance in the future. And so we should be funding fusion concepts that have legs to. That is my opinion. Um, I also think we should be funding things that can be mass produced and look like automotive manufacturing. Right. Almost every country or entity, if you're, you know, putting the EU in a bucket, has a domestic automotive manufacturing industry. And I think in the future they're going to have a domestic fusion energy manufacturing industry. And so that is going to change the world in very interesting ways. I think the resource wars from, you know, the eight, nine, the 20th century are going to be a thing of the past. Um, and that's a good thing. Um, you know, we'll still be mining, we'll still be trading, all that kind of stuff. But I think sort of like economies being beholden to the price of oil and the massive swings and the wars that, that caused, I think fusion will end that, that, um, and I think that will be like, really amazing. And we're seeing it like, you know, even in the past couple years with the geopolitics with Ukraine and Russia and natural gas and like, like the world would be a much better place if we could move off, you know, oil wars, um, and, and get everybody into like energy security, um, and, and move past this.

Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Also just talking about the big picture, right? And how do you synthesize the big picture overall? Let's come back to Avalanche and let's also contextualize this within what may be possible in the super long term versus the short term that you just described, which could still be turbulent. Right. Considering the geopolitical situations worldwide. Now, uh, as the founder of Avalanche, as someone who would want to grow it out, what do you feel would be beneficial? Is it more geographies? Is it more policy support? What is it that you seek other than of course, technical progress, which I'm sure as a fusion startup you would be primarily focused on. Right. How do you see this playing out, um, in the journey of building your company? And also on the other hand, in the long term, considering so many startups end up consolidating shop, you know, shutting shop, merging in some cases to what the big gorillas, as you mentioned, end up doing with the kind of bank that they have behind them.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: How do you see this entire journey playing out, uh, in the next few years?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. So, like, my number one job as the founder of Avalanche is to, you know, get the company in a state where it has a shot at doing Q greater than one and also, um, get it default alive. So that means that it's generating enough revenue as a going concern that it can just kind of keep chugging along. Right. And so, you know, we're looking at doing that a number of ways. It turns out orbitrons, because they have a cathode that runs through the middle and it's very close to the plasma. If you're running with deuterium, tritium, they actually can make really high neutron fluxes. And so orbitrons are almost like really interesting test machines for developing the materials that you're going to want to put into a fusion power plant if you want it to last for 20 or 30 years. Um, so I think, you know, we're very focused on building what I would call fusion wind tunnels. Um, there's this concept of a fusion prototypical neutron source, um, in the doe, um, for testing fusion materials. And I think we're going to try and build a micro version of that, a micro fusion prototypical neutron source. And the vision is that it's basically a wind tunnel where you, as a fusion company or as a national lab can come test your advanced materials, which we're going to have to do as an industry. Um, you can come test your superconducting magnets to see how they're going to perform under these neutron fluxes. You can come test best tritium breeding subsystems and ideas for blankets. So I actually think that's probably what we're going to be doing earlier rather than later for, for some revenue, um, to help fund the rest of the company. Um, radioisotopes is another really interesting thing. So it turns out small fusion can make isotopes much cheaper than a big fission reactor. Most fission reactors are built, are designed for power. It's very hard to kind of like fit get isotope production into them unless they're custom made. And now you're talking about billions of dollars for a custom fission isotope producer. So I do think orbitrons are very interesting devices for manufacturing isotopes, medical and maybe even radioisotope batteries. So that's another thing we're looking at that's really Interesting for early revenue. Um, yeah, I think that's kind of where we're going. And so you know, if I walk three, four years into the future, you know, we've probably got a machine that's doing Q greater than 1 or has hit Q greater than 1. We probably have a bunch of other machines that you know, different companies and, and labs are testing their, their subsystems that kind of, and running that kind of like a wind tunnel. Um, and then we probably have another couple machines that are making some like interesting isotopes either for medical or for radioisotope battery. And that's like a very interesting, you know, revenue generating, probably cash flow positive business that um, is off scaling, trying to engineer the Q greater than one, the ah, Q engineering greater than one machines and then really get ready to kind of scale in the2030s. That's kind of where I think we're going to try and go in the next couple years.

Speaker A: Fantastic. That's very different from so many of the other players that are dependent on successive tranches of venture capital or private capital overall. Right, Yeah. I think the questions again back to you as we wrap up in the next five minutes or so. Um, how do you think support can be galvanized other than as I said, the technical side or the fact that you already have revenue sources potentially opening up in other ways before you reach q greater than 1 on the engineering side? So do you for instance would benefit from state level policy or some state level support whether it's in the U.S. as you said, it's different from the NRC, right. Which is the federal regulator for nuclear fission. But how would you be able to better go ahead with your strategic roadmap with state level support? Could be outside the US could be Europe, it could be South Asia, it could be East Asia. Are uh, those areas and geographies even the frontier states for you in some ways to advance the frontier state of fusion? Or do you feel like you uh, are hyper focused on what you're trying to do based out of Seattle and based out of the um, current ecosystem of support?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean with the funding we have right now we're hyper focused on Seattle. We're really Washington state. So we're going to have two sites. We have you know, our headquarters remain design office uh, in Seattle. We are opening up a site in Richton, Washington that is going to be licensed for tritium and that's where we're going to do all sort of our tritium fusion operations. So we're kind of hyper focused on that we only have funding really to go for Q greater than one. So this you know, micro fusion prototypical neutron source is sort of like a bonus thing that we're looking to try and get funded by either federal DOE, DoD for radiation effects testing plus some combination of maybe Washington state matching or as a public private partnership. So that's something we're definitely having a lot of very interesting conversations about is this fusion wind tunnel and that being like a center of excellence, um, for economic development where we're going to sort of like bootstrap or boot up this, you know, nuclear fusion industry, um, and, and all the knowledge that has to go with that. Um, so yeah, I think I would love to see some kind of like you know, fusion wind tunnel, you know, program in the doe, maybe with some Washington state matching. That would be amazing, um, in terms of partnerships. So like, like we are very open with working with other countries. Right? Like I'm having some fantastic conversations with Kyoto Fusioneering. I would love to work with them in Richland on testing some of their, you know, tritium blankets, um, and breeding blanket technology there. I would love to work with, you know, the Canadians, CNL as well. Um, I would love to work with some countries in Europe and Asia as well. So like I did my PhD in Germany. I would very much love to open, open a European office of Avalanche. And so I hope that people aren't thinking of us as just an American company because you know, I've traveled the world in my formative years. I would love, and I believe that this concept of superabundance means that we're going to have to develop fusion in all areas, not just going to be an American thing that's just as exported. Um, and so I'm very open to working with other uh, other companies and other countries.

Speaker A: Superb. As a last question before we end the recorded uh, conversation, uh, this question about how Luke Skywalker for instance, you mentioned it earlier, uh, is essentially a moisture, uh, farmer about how those kinds of things are inconceivable to people who don't read fiction, don't watch fiction. How do you think economic uh, models make sense when marginal costs approach zero for energy production? What kind of a super abundant future can we imagine, uh, with small scale uh, fusion which is still so much superior technologically.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the really cool thing about energy abundance um, is that it, it allows us to deal with um, difficult climates. Right. And so whether you believe in climate change or not, like there are places on the earth that are very hard for humans to Live. Live. And so if we have abundant energy, it's a lot easier for humans to live there. And so, you know, what I've talked about in the past is, like, Luke Skywalker was basically a moisture farmer. So, like, well, imagine if you know how he was, you know, how he's farming the moistures. He had, like, little fusion reactors in the desert. And so what if we could take whole areas of, like, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and with small fusion, you know, pull moisture out of the air or the soil and basically turn those areas into a garden on Earth? Like, that would be an amazing thing. Right? Um, so it's a really cool vision. I think humanity will get there. I am fundamentally an optimist at heart. We are going to do this. It's not going to be easy. It's going to take a lot of, you know, grit and, and, and suffering and hard work to get there, but we are going to get there. I believe humans are going to crack fusion, and I believe that, that, you know, this, this world of super abundance and climbing the cardes of scale is going to happen. But take it for granted, right? There's lots of periods where, you know, Adam's technology, like, kind of stagnated from the 70s to the 2000s. Right. Peter Thiel talks a lot about this, um, in his books. You know, like, instead of flying cars, we got 140 characters. Well, we made. The flying cars are coming. They just may be coming 20, 30 years later than everybody would have liked them, but they are coming.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. This is a fascinating conversation. And as you can perceive, we can keep going on and on about this. There's so many more areas that we touched upon, did not fully cover, but definitely loved interacting about. Uh, thank you so much for your time, Robin. This was a fascinating chat, uh, as we continue our exploration of technologies that try to make science fiction a reality. I think fusion remains the centerpiece of that. And I believe, and I'm firmly in support of Avalanche's vision and your vision driving the company. Thank you so much. Uh, we would love to, um, have more conversations in the future around this, but we wish you the very best.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Tusha. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you all.