Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Is nuclear fusion getting close?

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

The common trope about fusion is that it has always been – and will always be – a decade away. So is something different happening now? Recently, we’ve seen technical achievements in fusion, like near ignition at the National Ignition Facility in August, yielding “a record 1.3 MJ in fusion energy, releasing, for the first time, more energy than the fuel capsule absorbed.” Fusion startups have also enjoyed a recent barrage of mega-funding. First, General Fusion raised $130 million. Then Helion Energy raised $500 million with another $1.8 billion committed based on whether it hits milestones. And then Commonwealth Fusion Systems closed a $1.8 billion venture round. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, has also invested in Zap Energy). So what's happening here? To find out, Shayle talks to Dr. Scott Hsu, ARPA-E’s program director for fusion R&D.  Shayle asks: what role will fusion actually play in the future of our energy supply?  Scott and Shayle cover technical advancements that have enabled rapid improvements in the size and cost of fusion systems. They also discuss key milestones, scaling to cost-competitiveness, and technical pathways. They also examine the economics and physics that will determine how rampable a fusion system might be and targets for the cost of a megawatt hour.  They also discuss the tritium-breeding blanket Shayle is getting for Christmas. Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst. All right, so I suspect you're reticent to make bold predictions, but do you think there's a good chance that somebody will achieve scientific break-even over the next, let's say, this decade? If I were a betting person, I would say yes. I think somebody will achieve scientific break-even this decade and possibly more than one. So I invest in deep tech climate startups for a living. And usually when discussing the technical challenges of some new approach,

I find myself at some point saying, well, it's not nuclear fusion, except sometimes it is. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com.

I'm Shail Khan. I'm a partner at the venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. Just so you know, I'm a little under the weather, so apologies for a particularly nasal voice in this episode, but let's get into it nonetheless. So you may have noticed that there's something afoot in the world of nuclear fusion recently. First, getting less headlines, but perhaps meaning more, have been recent technical achievements. Here's one, quoting from a physics journal article in early December. Quote, in August, a fusion reaction at the National Ignition Facility yielded a record 1.3 megajoules in fusion energy, releasing for the first time more energy than the fuel capsule absorbed. End quote.

But what received more headlines has been the recent, barrage of mega funding for fusion startups. First, General Fusion raised $130 million, then Helion Energy raised $500 million with another $1.8 billion committed based on hitting technical milestones, and then the big one, a straight-up $1.8 billion venture round for Commonwealth Fusion. And between us, there are more coming. So what's happening here? The common trope about fusion is that it has always been and will always be just a decade or two away. So is something different now? I'm interested in two questions.

First, when might we actually see nuclear fusion delivering power at scale? And second, if it happens, what role might it actually play in the future of our energy supply? That second one, in my opinion, does not get enough attention. Just because we achieve fusion does not mean all other energy sources suddenly become superfluous. And conversely, just because we have cheap renewables in storage does not mean fusion would have no role in the more. market. Cards on the table, we at EIP, have already made one fusion investment in a company called ZAP Energy, and we may make more, but excited as I am about the prospects of the technology, big questions remain. So let's talk about it, with none other than Dr. Scott Sue, who is a program

director at ARPAE and leads their nuclear fusion program. In our process of learning about fusion and ultimately starting to invest in the space, we spoke to dozens of nuclear physicists, their surprisingly chatty. And Scott was easily the most cogent and insightful person that we spoke with. So I'm very excited to bring his expertise to you all. Scott, welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Very excited to have you and to talk about nuclear fusion. Let's start with the obvious first question. Can you help us define fusion? What is nuclear fusion? Yes, nuclear fusion is the joining of two lighter elements like hydrogen or different isotopes of hydrogen to form helium. And there are other reactions as well. Why do we care about it? What's the promise of nuclear fusion? The promise is that

it holds great potential for abundant clean energy and the very high power density. So that means there could be environmental sustainability from very large energy production. Okay, but we'll come back to all the details of this. But let's spend a little bit more time on this first. Why would this be abundant? Why would it be power? Like how power dense? Like what is it that, you know, why would nuclear fusion if it reaches the promised land? Why is it so transformative? Yeah. So it really represents a step change, I would say, in the way humanity can generate and use energy. Maybe, you know, a lot of people have compared it with, say, the discovery and harnessing

of fire in the first place. That's really where the promise is. The abundance of the fuel can really remove, you know, consideration of energy from geopolitics. So there's a lot of very large ways that fusion will change the way that we approach energy as a civilization. I think that's the greatest promise. Can you give some examples? Yeah, so the fuel, like Deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen as an example,

that's one of the main fuels of almost any form of fusion that we can conceive of in the near term. It's available in seawater, right? One part in 6,000 approximately. And so it's accessible to pretty much any nation in the world. That's one example, right, in terms of what I mean by removing it from geopolitics. And you mentioned the energy density, which is obviously another major factor. Can you just give an order of magnitude? Like how energy dense are we talking about?

Yeah. So the example I like to look at is one train car of fusion fuel, and that's like a little over 100 tons. Imagine a train car of coal, for example. But if it was a train car of deuterium tritium fuel, that would provide enough energy for the U.S.'s electricity needs for an entire year. All right. So there's where we get in the real transformative stuff. So you've got a fuel that is super abundant, but you don't need that much of it to deliver kind of a ridiculous

amount of energy. Zero emissions. Can you talk about the waste benefit? I mean, this is obviously a big distinction between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Absolutely. there is some waste but it's short-lived waste radioactive waste and there's no fizzile fuel which is another concern but for sure

you also don't need geological storage of the waste okay and I think we'll talk a little bit later about the potential economics of it which is sort of an open question but just to reiterate okay if you get fusion via fusion reactors

what you're able to do is just deliver almost limitless amounts of power with pretty much no limitations to that besides where you deliver the power? That is the promise and the hope. Okay. And that has been the promise and the hope for a long time. People have been working on nuclear fusion for a very long time,

and it's been one of these things that I think, you know, we've heard about for decades. So let's do a brief history lesson. Can you kind of walk us through the history of nuclear fusion research and when there have been major milestones hit that leads us to where we are today? Absolutely. So really serious efforts to do controlled fusion

started perhaps very early in the 1950s. And in the first almost 20 years worth, people were trying very hard simply to make a stable plasma. And I should introduce what the word plasma means. A plasma is a collection of charged particles and basically when you heat up the hydrogen fuel, it necessarily becomes a plasma. When you heat it to high enough temperatures, millions of degrees or more, the fuel becomes a plasma. The electrons are stripped off of the atoms.

And so again, in the first 15, 20 years, people were struggling and working toward making the plasma stable and being able to heat it up to the millions of degrees and higher. It wasn't until about the late 1960s that people succeeded to about 10 million degrees of temperature, and that was in the now well-known Tokomac concept. That was kind of the first really major inflection point. And just contextualized that. So we heated to 10 million degrees. Where do we need to get to ultimately?

We need to get to 100 or 150 million degrees. So another order of magnitude still to go. That's right. But there's a couple other metrics, too, the density as well as how long you can hold the heat in. And we'll talk about this later, I'm sure, but the well-known triple product is a metric for fusion performance of a plasma. Okay, so in the 1960s, so 60 years ago, we reached 10 million degrees, heating up the plasma to 10 million degrees in a token mac reactor, which will come back to what that means. What's happened since then? Yeah, so once the 10 million degrees is a very important symbolic achievement because it means you've kind of passed that first major milestone of getting a stable plasma that can hold the heat in.

And once you do that, then it starts to become, you need to ramp it up, right? You need to heat it more, continue to improve the heat confinement. And so there was very rapid progress after that in terms of the density and the temperature and the confinement time. So from the 70s until the 90s, 20 years, that triple product metric increased by five orders of magnitude. And people like to compare that with Moore's law as an example, right? The rate of increase was similar to that of Moore's law. And that brought us to the cusp of what we call scientific break-even in the mid-90s of the Tokomac. So meaning that the fusion energy produced was about almost equal to the energy.

that you delivered to the fuel. Right. We'll come back to the energy break-even point because that's, I think, the sort of nearest term, most substantial milestone that a lot of folks are looking toward. But again, notably,

we're talking about the mid-90s now, right? So we were nearing energy break-even 30 years ago, 25 years ago. So what has happened since the mid-90s? Yeah, so what's happened since the mid-90s, well, a couple things. One is the science and the understanding, and the capabilities, the modeling, the diagnostic capabilities,

have continued to improve substantially. Now, that's less visible to the public, of course, right? You're not making a big, big, major milestone achievement. But that's what's been happening in the background. There's also been progress in other fusion concepts, like inertial fusion, which I'm sure we'll get to as well. But what happens, so most of the time from the 90s up to, say, 5, 10 years ago, ago, there was a lot of scientific advances, probably a little bit out of the public's eye,

right? But in the last five to ten years, the situation has started to shift again. A landscape is changing. And what has driven that shift? Yeah, a couple things. One is, well, one is, of course, the realization that we have better scientific understanding and tools and new ways of harnessing that understanding, but also outside developments in materials, in advanced manufacturing, in new superconductors, for example, these change the way that you might design a fusion device. So that's been one of the biggest new things that have happened within the past decade, is what took something, say, the size of Eder to reach the next major milestone in fusion, people think can be done now with much smaller sized systems

and much lower cost systems. You just alluded to my next question. You mentioned Eater. Can you describe Eater? I mean, the broader question is basically like over this 60 years of fusion research that we've been talking about, where has it been coming from? Are these governmental efforts,

intergovernmental efforts, private sector, who's doing all this work? Yeah, for most of the history, it was indeed government-sponsored efforts. academic labs, universities, and national labs, you know, government-sponsored labs,

had done the predominant amount of work. Can you describe ETER? Yeah, so Eater is a multinational effort. It's a very large Tokomac being built in the south of France. And it was the result of an agreement way back in the 80s, you know, between President Reagan and Gorbachev. And it's taken a long time. to get to the point where it is today.

First plasma on Eater is expected in hopefully within a few years, 2025-20206 time frame. But Eater was designed to be the very first experiment to reach high levels of plasma gain, meaning that the plasma would produce more fusion energy than the energy delivered to the fuel. You mentioned that there's a belief now that maybe we could do it for,

much smaller systems for much lower cost. Let's start with what Eater has cost, how much time, how much money has gone into it for it to be hopefully reaching First Plasma in a few years. Yeah, so I'll just caveat first by saying the total cost is a bit hard to keep track of because it's so many different countries contributing hardware, right, and different amounts of effort.

But some of the numbers you may see out there is that it cost at least 25 billion U.S. dollars. And it's taken, you know, the construction really started seriously perhaps about a decade ago. And it's nearing the point, as I just said, a first plasma. So this is where I feel like there's this interesting dichotomy and kind of from the outside looking in a fusion at the moment,

which is on one hand, I think a lot of folks reasonably have looked at stuff like the eater timeline and cost and said, okay, well, these things, This is going to take, it's already taken well over a decade and $25 billion, and we're still a few years away from hopefully getting first plasma there. And then at the same time, you see all these announcements that seem to be accelerating now, both funding for new fusion ventures but also technical progress and milestone announcements, and it sort of feels like we're building toward something that may actually be nearer term. How do you hold both of those things in your mind at the same time?

Is it just that like the technical progress has been so accelerated in the past, last five to ten years that we can't look at this history around fusion timelines and costs and so on, as we're considering what happens in the future, or is it just that we're getting overly excited at the moment? It could be some of all the above, okay? I'll explain a little further. I like to look at this a couple different ways. One is there's a spectrum of risk involved, right?

Eater is, first of all, recognize that Eater was designed with the knowledge and the technology know-how of about 20 years ago. And that's what we knew how to build and what we needed to do. And of course, like I said earlier, the scientific advances have been happening over the last 20 years and other technologies have exist now. That didn't exist 20 years ago. So that's one reason of the difference, right? if you were to redesign a device with the same goal of Eater, you would naturally come up with something very different. So I think that contributes already quite a bit to the difference in these things.

The other thing is, if you look at the private companies talking about very fast time scales, they're not designed to be a prolonged research endeavor, right? Eater is meant to provide a platform for us to really study high-gain burning plasmas, and we can get into what that means. Whereas the private companies are looking to check a milestone and move on very rapidly, right, and not do a lot of scientific discovery. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start.

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See what that looks like at Energyhub.com. Okay, so let's talk about some of the different approaches to fusion. You've alluded to this. You talked about the Tokomac, which was what we were building in the 60s, what we reached 10 million degrees at, 50 years ago or whatever it was. Let's try to explain in as close to Lehman's terms as we can, what is a Tokomac reactor, and then let's talk through some of the other approaches that have emerged since then.

So start with a Tokomac. Yeah, so the Tokomac is a donut-shaped or teroidal. shaped device with very strong magnetic fields, both in the long direction of the donut and the shorter direction around the donut. And the purpose of the magnetic field is to hold these charged particles in place so they don't go flying off and leave the device. So that's a basic idea of a Tokomac. It's a magnetic confinement fusion system. And what makes that difficult? Actually, sorry, what makes it attractive and what makes it difficult? Yeah, well, the most The most attractive thing is that it really does a spectacular job at holding the plasma in place and holding the heat in, right? And that is why it is the best performing device. What makes it challenging is that is the geometry partly. It's a toroid, right? And you have magnetic coils around the torroid. And so geometrically and topologically, it presents engineering challenges.

That's partly what drives the cost and the complexity of something like a tocomac. But a tocomac is, as we've alluded to, it's the most mature pathway. Is that right? Yes. And in terms of the sort of what is known publicly, where are we today? How close have we gotten to energy break even with the tocomac reactor? About, well, the record is held by the jet device in the UK, which has achieved about 70, But I think it's important to, again, clearly define that this is the fusion instantaneous fusion power has been about 70% of the heating power at that moment.

So it's not the total energy gain like what you're drawing from the wall. Yeah, this is one of the things. We'll come back to this because I think that we're going to start to see as, you know, hopefully over the next few years, some big milestones are achieved. these metrics that we're using are going to start to get a little bit confusing. They've already started to confuse me. So we'll come back to that. But okay, so that's Tokomac.

Let's talk about some other approaches. You mentioned, I think, inertial confinement before. Can you describe that one and how it's different? Yes. So inertial confinement is probably the furthest, you know, in the span of different fusion concepts. In inertial confinement, what you're trying to do is compressive,

very small amount of fusion fuel to a very small size at very high density. And you're not really trying to hold it there at all. You're just compressing it to high density and then it's going to disassemble on its own, right? And the goal is that just in the time that it takes to disassemble, you're able to get enough fusion burn to exceed the energy that you took to assemble that in the first place. And the most mature way to do that is using lasers to compress that fuel. So laser-driven inertial confinement fusion. And where are we in terms of the technical progress around inertial confinement? Yeah. In fact, probably the rate of progress has been a lot faster

inertial confinement fusion in the last few years. And many people probably have heard of the record shot on the National Ignition Facility just earlier this year. And surprising, well, not surprisingly, coincidentally, it also achieved about 70% compared to the laser energy. So it produced fusion energy about 70% of the laser energy.

The laser energy being the corollary to the heat energy in the case of the Tokomac? That's correct. Okay, so now we're in this horse race to get to energy break even. Tokomak has had a longer road and is much more mature, but inertial confinement sort of coming up fast, and at least in what's known publicly,

they're at sort of a similar place. What's the sort of trade-off with inertial confinement relative to Tokomac? What's more attractive about it? What's riskier? Yeah, that's a great question. It really does present different challenges. So on the physics side, which is in the future, itself, the way that you achieve a burning plasma and self-heating is quite different.

In inertial confinement fusion, you're getting to this very high density, and you don't really have to hold it there, right? Like I mentioned earlier, you just want to hold it there. You just rely on the inertia of the fuel itself to burn enough before it disassembles. And that can be seen as an advantage. As long as you can get to that point, you don't need to worry about sustainable. staining it. So that's one advantage of inertial confinement fusion. The disadvantage, though, is perhaps less efficient. So even though they're both at the point of 70% of the input energy,

the efficiency of Tokomac heating is much higher than the efficiency of the laser. So you have a longer ways to go to get true wall plug gain, which is ultimately what you need. And there's other There's other differences too, of course. Sure. Okay, so token back inertial confinement. What else? Well, then, so both, well, there's kind of a hybrid of the two, magneto inertial, where you use a magnetic field and you use compression, both.

And what that does is it kind of relaxes the requirements from both ends, but it also adds some other complexities and challenges at the same time. Nothing comes for free infusion. Right. And then there's Z-pinch reactors? Yes, and there's E-Pinch, which can be kind of thought of maybe lumped together with the magneto-inertial fusion approach, as given that they're both pulsed and kind of somewhere in the middle in terms of the fuel density. What does it mean for them to be pulsed? It means that you have to compress it to high-density and let it come back apart.

You can't hold it there in steady state like you do for magnetic fusion approach. Okay, and magneto inertial fusion and ZPinch, what do we know about where they are relative to Tokomax and inertial confinement? Yeah, so the leading magneto inertial concept is a concept called Magliff at Sandia National Labs. And they've actually achieved very good performance as well, not at the kind of 70% of scientific break even, but they've certainly reached very robust fusion conditions, you know, many tens of millions of degrees and a good amount of fusion neutron yield. All right. Any other pathways that we should run through? Yeah. And then of course, each of the three, right, magnetic, confinement, magneto-inertial

and inertial, they all have a zoology of variance. Each of those has a bunch of variants. And with magnetic fusion, it's really a trade-off between the strength and the strength and and the geometric complexity of the magnetic field. So, you know, the less strength and the less complexity, of course, that is, those are engineering advantages, but then it's harder to hold the fuel in place. So that's the tradeoff you're making. On the inertial side, you're making some tradeoffs as well. Again, it's the degree of complexity in your driver, the laser, or the target, and, again,

the control of the fuel, right? It's the same thing, a magneto inertial. So in general, you're trading off some degree of complexity and how you assemble and hold the plasma versus the physics performance of the plasma. All right, so let's talk about, we've mentioned it a bunch of times, and I want to spend a few minutes on what scientific break-even means. Because that's, you know, sometimes people call it energy break-even,

sometimes people call it Q-Equels-1. This is the milestone that basically all these approaches, all these companies, everybody is trying to build toward, nobody's achieved it yet, unless I'm wrong. It's yet to be seen in the world, but is widely appreciated to represent a watershed moment for fusion. I want to talk about what it actually means,

the various shades of it, and then we'll talk a little bit about what has to come after that. But let's start with what is scientific break-even, actually. Yeah, so scientific break-even, you can define it as the energy produced by the fusion, divided by the energy you delivered to the fusion fuel. So maybe it's easier just to talk about an example, like a Tokomac. So you have your donut-shaped plasma fuel,

and you are applying some kind of heating, whether it's electromagnetic waves or a high-energy beam of neutral particles, neutral beam injection, they call it. And so it's the power of those heating systems. For example, you can be creating 10 megawatts of fusion power in an instant of time, but yet you're applying 15 megawatts of heating power. So that ratio is what we generally call scientific gain, right? And when they become equal, that's a scientific break-even.

In inertial fusion, it would be the laser energy that you're shining on your capsule. And you mentioned before the difference between scientific break even just on the heating element versus the plug, as you described it. So what is the difference there? Yeah. So in order to create, say, 15 megawatts of heating power, you're going to be drawing more than 15 megawatts from the wall, right? Because there's always efficiencies involved in your various electrical systems. Same with your laser. You don't get 100% efficiency.

And so there's further losses there, right? And you have to make up that efficiency loss through the energy gain in your plasma. So is the expectation then that if somebody, be it one of these government labs, one of these companies, whoever eater, if somebody successfully achieves scientific break-even over the next few years and makes a big announcement about it,

are they likely first to announce having achieved scientific break-even just from the heating or the laser? And then they'll have a whole other step to get to scientific break-even from the plug? Yes, yes, it's likely. It's very likely that this whole current steps. But it depends, right?

The magnetic confinement devices have higher efficiency, so you might imagine that a big breakthrough or a big advance, you might be able to cover a few steps at once. But if the efficiencies are very low, it'll probably take a couple of steps to get all the way to what I call wall plug gain, right? meaning that the fusion energy now truly exceeds all the power you drew from a wall plug. And do you think it's, is it right to believe that that moment, wall plug gain, let's say,

not scientific break even from just the heating or the laser, is that the seminal moment for nuclear fusion technology? Like, should we be thinking of it as being as important a moment as I think it is generally regarded to be? I think so. And people have varying opinions on this, but my personal opinion is that wall plug gain is kind of like the kiddiehawk moment, right, or the Wright Brothers moment that people like to allude to. Because it really shows it that it's really an existence proof now, right? That not only can you get energy gain, but it could be done in a practical way that creates net energy. And it's the net energy that becomes practically useful. In other words, if you had just over energy break-even, let's just say you wanted to build a gigawatt power plant, capacity power plant, you might put a gigawatt of power into it and get 1.1 gigawatts out.

And so actually your net energy from that power plant is a tenth of a gigawatt. Right? And so that gets me to, I guess, the next thing, which is so you hit your kitty hawk moment. You get to energy break-even. You've proven you can do fusion. you can get a net energy gain,

that does not then turn fusion into, it doesn't then swamp the electricity market globally because you have a fairly long way to go, I think, between just hitting that point and then, one, getting to ratios that actually make it attractive, but two, actually like engineering and building fusion power plants. So what does it look like to go from Q equals 1

to Q equals 10 or whatever it's going to need to be, to build economic fusion reactors? That is a great question. And you're indeed right. There's more work to be done. You have to get to higher gains, plasma gains, right? So you might need to get to plasma gains of 10 or 20 for magnetic confinement devices. Again, that's because magnetic devices have somewhat good efficiencies, heating efficiencies.

For inertial fusion, you might need to get to plasma gains of 100 because of the poorer efficiency of lasers. And frankly, it's not entirely known what that's going to look like going from gain of 1 to gain of 10 or 100, right? People, I think, have an idea from the theory and from modeling, but ultimately we have to do the experiments to prove it out. Do we have any sense of whether it'll be just on a relative basis, harder to go from 0.7 to 1 versus 1 to 10? Again, a good question and, you know, hate to get pinned down on questions like that. But it has to do with new physics you might encounter, right? So I would say going from 0.7 to 1 is not a huge jump. But going from 1 to 10, or from 1 to 100 in inertial fusion,

you're likely to encounter some new physics that haven't been studied yet, which makes it riskier. So presumably getting to Q equals whatever we need is not in and of itself going to be sufficient to build economic fusion reactors that work. What are some of the other technical challenges that will face beyond the energy gain in actually building these systems? Yeah, so there's three main areas, I would say. One is, of course, extending the duration of the operation, right? even if you get high cue for a split second, that's not very useful. So you have to extend that out to operating at high average power, right, for months at a time or longer.

So that's one challenge. And then two other challenges are what we call the first wall. The first wall sees this tremendous energy and particle flux coming from the fusion core. And so you need kind of an integrated way to deal with that heat exhaust. and also the materials properties that will allow for the handling that heat exhaust. And then the final thing is the fuel cycle. So especially with deuterium tritium fusion, you have to breed the tritium and you have to extract that tritium and put it back in the system.

There's something called a tritium breeding blanket. And so the blanket technology and all of the tritium processing has to be handled at a scale that we haven't done yet. So that's the final challenge. I think my mother-in-law got me a tritium breeding blanket for Christmas this year. So it's well-timed. Problem solved. So the other thing that has been interesting to me is to think about what is it ultimately

going to drive, assume we get to Q equals 10, 20, whatever it needs to be, we'll ultimately drive the economics of energy for nuclear fusion because it's not, you know, it's not just necessarily true that just because we have abundant feedstock and just because it's super energy dense that it's going to be the cheapest source of power, right? Like nuclear fission has struggled from this where, you know, we do have pretty cheap, abundant feedstock. But the capital cost of building these systems has turned out to be a lot higher than we expected, at least historically. And so the economics of operating these things has been challenged, not to mention their profile, which is baseload and not very flexible. So what do we know about kind of the economic

drivers of a nuclear fusion power plant at the end of the day? Yeah. Great question. And in fact, ARPA-E has funded some costing efforts in recent years, you know, based on earlier methodologies. And there's some commonalities with nuclear advanced reactors. It is dominated by capital cost. In fact, the particular RPA-E-funded study showed that maybe 65% of the LCOE might be coming from capital cost.

But it's the balance of plan. It's the buildings, it's the infrastructure, right? So even though you can optimize your fusion core and get to high gain, honestly, at the end of the day, those things are a smaller driver of the ultimate total cost. And so some of the lessons being learned from advanced reactor development, I think will apply to fusion. So reducing construction time, maybe some modular construction, reducing operation and maintenance costs. reducing operation and maintenance costs and things like that. Those in the end will have bigger drivers on the economics for fusion as well. What about the operating characteristics of a fusion power plant?

Could they be rampable? Could they be flexible generation? Or are they going to be more like fission 1.0, which is not super flexible? Maybe somewhere in between. So it won't be infinitely rampable because there's thermal mass involved. So assuming that you're doing deuterium tritium fusion where you're capturing most of the energy from the neutrons and generating heat, then that means you have a thermal mass of heat somewhere that you're then turning into electricity, right? So that heat is not going to be instantaneously rampable.

In fact, ARPA-E, we also did another study looking at markets. It might be best to do integrated thermal storage and then draw energy from the stored thermal energy, whether it's generating electricity or whether it's other co-gen applications. So do you have a heuristic in your mind of sort of where, in the long term, 2050 or whatever it is, where will fusion fit in the broader electricity mix? What are the obvious no-brainer applications for Fusion

and what are the places where like actually it might not make sense to use Fusion as your source of generation here? Yeah, that's a good question too. A couple of ways to answer that. I mean, firstly, if you look at it from a market penetration perspective, you're likely going to be dealing with fairly high penetration renewables markets in many places, right? Certainly in the first world countries.

And in that case, you know, Fusion might play a role of just reducing overall system costs. You know, it would play the role of hopefully what natural gas plants do today. That's one possibility. Of course, in other parts of the world where there's very large populations needing, you know, really, really large amounts of high-density power, you could imagine fusion filling the role of, you know, like today's light water reactors, you know, very big generating capacity and base load.

Right. I mean, to me, that was sort of most obvious place for fusion is like, how are you going to decarbonize the grid in Singapore or Japan, right? We have big populations, a lot of load, not a lot of land. So you either have to do something

offshore or you have to ship in fuels or you put maybe a single fusion reactor and that serves 80% of the load on the island. Yeah, that's right. In fact, we identified these types of places exactly. Singapore, Japan, you know, highest electricity prices of today as a good first market for fusion.

Speaking of electricity prices, I mean, you said ARPI has sort of gone down this path of looking at what the levelized cost of energy might be from fusion. You said 65% of it might be CAPEX, but order of magnitude, what are we talking about? What do we think it's going to, it might cost from a dollars per kilowatt-hour perspective? to deliver power from a fusion reactor. Yeah, that's a really hard question to answer. In fact, our study looked at it more from the perspective of what would it need to cost, you know, to be able to establish footholds in various markets.

I think the hope, of course, is that it can cost, say, less than $50 a megawatt hour, right? And we believe that if it can cost less than 50 a megawatt hour, it can access large markets globally, not just electricity. but perhaps hydrogen production or industrial heating of various applications All right

so I suspect you're reticent to make bold predictions but do you think there's a good chance that somebody will achieve scientific break-even over the next, let's say this decade? If I were a betting person I would say yes

I think somebody will achieve scientific break even this decade and possibly more than one. And in fact, I should also just mention that with the recent NIF result at the National Ignition Facility, I think it's quite possible that NIF will achieve scientific break-even in the near future. Can you, you alluded to that before, but we didn't actually talk about it. What was that finding? It made a little bit of news, but actually less news than I would have anticipated given how big a deal it was. But it came right in the middle of like a bunch of other fusion announcements, largely from private companies raising a lot of capital. So what happened at the

National Ignition Facility? Yeah. What happened was it got 1.3 megajoules of yield compared to 1.9 megajoules of laser energy. And I think maybe to everyone except for the team doing it, it kind of came out of nowhere. It was a dramatic improvement, right? I mean, usually these things happened a little incrementally. But this was, you know, if you look at a chart of the performance over the past year, this record shot in August just was like almost 10 times bigger than anything beforehand. So it was a really dramatic increase in performance. And it brought it to the cusp of what people call ignition, right? In inertial confinement fusion, you're trying to heat up a tiny little bit of fuel. and that tiny little bit of fuel generates enough fusion

to burn a surrounding layer of more fuel. And if you're able to burn up that surrounding layer of greater fuel, that's called ignition in inertial confinement fusion. So this nif shot basically got to the cusp of ignition. It started to burn that surrounding fuel, which is a big physics, you know, accomplishment. That's what feels like has been starting to happen,

is just these like announcements pop up from left and right, sometimes from somebody like NIFs, sometimes from one of the private companies, and they all feel like they're building toward maybe it's that moment, maybe it's scientific break-even in relatively short order. But then, of course, we have a lot of work ahead of us as we've talked about getting from scientific break-even

to, like, you know, energy gains that are actually attractive, and then from energy gains that are actually attractive to building a reactor at scale, but still an exciting moment. I guess the final question I have for you, I realized we didn't talk about is scale. So is there, what do we know about the sort of ideal scale

of these fusion reactors once they are built? Are these going to be multi-gigawatt, tens of gigawatts, hundreds of gigawatts? individually, are there some designs that are better suited to be distributed? What does that look like? Yes, to all the above. I think there are some economic constraints and there's physics constraints, right? And the different concepts certainly may have different natural physics constraints.

So some devices will be larger in generation capacity than others just due to the natural characteristics of the fusion core. But I would say on the whole, our understanding at this point is that the bigger is easier from a physics standpoint, but of course it's harder from an economic standpoint, right? Because as the capital cost gets big, there's more financial risk involved. And there's less private entities are less willing to fund very large capital cost power plants. So it remains to be seen. You know, kind of there's got to be a sweet spot in the economics and the physics.

All right. Well, I think we've covered all the highlights on the state of fusion. I guess final question for you is you've been looking at and working on nuclear fusion for quite a while now. Calibrate me in terms of your level of excitement today about the state of this technology and the state of this market. Relative to a year ago, five years ago, you know, what has changed and how big a deal is it? to you? It's a huge deal. I think this is something I personally hope to see in terms of the change that's occurring, in terms of the conversation around both the number of approaches that people are excited about, but also I think the recognition of need for something like

fusion. You know, there was a very famous quote attributed to a Russian fusion scientist that, you know, somebody asked, when will fusion be ready? And he said when society needs it. And I think finally society is deciding it needs something like fusion. And I think that has a lot to do with the attention of the excitement around fusion right now. But combine that with the scientific and technological advances. And I think we're at a moment right now where the need and the ambition and the capabilities are all coming together. They're converging to give us the opportunity to move forward aggressively.

All right, Scott, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you, Shale. Scott Sue is a program director at RPAE, leading its fusion R&D programs. Catalyst is hosted by me, Shale Khan. The show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. Find me, Canary, and PostScript, all on Twitter. Tag us if you want to provide feedback on this episode or want to suggest future topics. We always appreciate those suggestions.

You can find links for this episode's topic and guest in the show notes or go to canarymedia.com. Our producers are Daniel Waldorf and Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquan, composed our theme song, mixing and scoring by Eber Pinheiro. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.