This Week in Startups - Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ Bob Mumgaard on trying to solve climate change via nuclear fusion technology | E1171

Episode Date: February 6, 2021

Angel investor Jason Calacanis (Uber, Calm, Robinhood) interviews the world’s greatest founders, operators, investors and innovators. Get an insider’s look into venture capital, learn how to start and scale your own startup, and ride the cutting edge of technology in today's headlines and beyond.

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but I wanted to in 2021 open up the aperture a bit and talk about some bigger topics and how startup companies are trying to take on climate change, right? This is a big topic for us. And if you look at what happened during the pandemic, one of the most interesting things that happened was we learned what a world without a bunch of cars spewing carbon into a lot of cars spewing carbon into our atmosphere would look like. And lo and behold, people could see mountain ranges they previously couldn't see. You could see the stars that night. The air suddenly got better. And we have the possibility, we have the technology already to be fully on sustainable energy that does not cause global warming and does not cause pollution. One piece of that puzzle that we have

stopped using, and we'll get into it with our guest of why we stopped using nuclear energy, fusion, why we stopped pursuing these alternate energy solutions is a big question I have. And so today on the program, Bob Mumgard from Commonwealth Fusion Systems is here. Welcome to the program calling in from Boston. Yes, Bob? Yeah, glad to be here. Okay. Now, you've just recently raised $84 million.

and you're on track for a demonstration fusion reactor by 2025. Do I have that correct? Yeah, that's right. Okay. So explain to the audience what nuclear fusion technology is and what nuclear technology is and why you're pursuing this. Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, most people have, you know, a complete dependence on fusion. They just don't know it.

They depend on the sun. Like the way the sun is powered and 99% of the entire universe's energy gets made is through the fundamental process of fusion, where you take light elements, combine them together, and release just gobs of energy out of that process. And slowly actually build up all the elements that make us up. And that process, you know, we've known about it for about 100 years, actually, that that's how the stars worked, but we've never actually harnessed it on Earth. The process that we talked about nuclear power that we use on Earth is actually the exact opposite of that. It is taking heavy stuff and splitting it up to lighter stuff through a chain reaction. And that's what we get

about 20% of our energy from today. That's nuclear power. But there's been a big effort over the last about 50 years really to figure out how to build fusion power. Because if you were able to, if you're able to do it on Earth, you would have a really fundamentally new energy source, something that was very different than anything that we have so far. And just to be clear, when you are doing a fusion reaction, what is actually happening? And does this exist already in the world? Or are you doing this for the first time? Yeah. So essentially what we have to do to get a fusion system to work is you have to build basically a star in a bottle. It's like very sci-fi. It's like how you like, you know, look up in comic books or Spider-Man or, you know, old Keanu reuse movies. And in order to do that, you have to create a machine effectively that takes material.

materials, small amounts of fuel that is equally accessible to everyone, is everywhere. It's basically hydrogens. And combines them together at really, really hot temperatures, like hotter than the center of the sun, like 10 million, 100 million degrees. And in that process, unleashes a lot of energy by converting a tiny bit of mass to energy as the fuel turns into helium. And so we've been researching this for a long time. We understand how it works in stars.

And we've actually built a whole bunch of machines on Earth, about almost 200, of them funded by like governments at places like MIT, which is where CFS came from. And we've steadily gotten better and better and better at this, but we've never actually built a machine that will make more power out than it takes to run. So interesting science, but not something that we're going to power the world up with. And really what we're seeing now is a generation of startups, including CFS, but also national labs, who are getting close to going above that line and making a machine that can make more power than in.

And CFS is one of those companies that's attempting to do that. So for people who have no background in this technology like myself, the amount of energy it takes to heat the hydrogen is tens of millions of degrees. So you have to power that with some energy source, correct? Is that electricity? Is that kerosene? Is that nuclear reactor? How does one heat that hydrogen? and what you're saying to me is you're spending so much heating it up to create the fusion reaction

that you're actually losing energy. Yeah. That's historically what's happened. And it's actually like the way you heat it up is surprisingly mundane. Like we heat it up effectively using a microwave oven. It's just like you take about 3,000 microwave ovens, maybe a little more. And you gang them together and you microwave a grain of rice. you do that for a few seconds, and if you insulate it well enough,

if it's, if it's like perfectly insulated, it'll get really, really, really, really hot. And if it gets hot enough and it's insulated well enough, it'll actually start to fuse just like it would. And in fact, we do this in particle accelerators all the time. And if you can get it insulated well enough, you can actually make more power from that reaction than it took to heat it. And so you're really, you're building.

And when I say more power, like think about, think about it in terms of millions, factors of millions. So in these reactions, you get 200 million times more energy out per fuel in than, say, burning a hydrocarbon. So that means my entire life, like my entire out, my house, my whole thing, like is like fuel like this big for my entire life. And that's exactly why the stars are still here. Like if the stars were burning coal like we do today, like the stars would have burnt out after 5,000 years. Like, we never even have this. But because we're doing fusion, they're billions of years old. And when you said, like, this amount, you held up your hands to essentially the, what would be like a pint glass of

beer size. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Since you're from Boston, I'll use an analogy that you can like to. It's like a pint glass, right? That's the amount of fusion that would have to occur. And so let me ask a really stupid question. When this, this. The sun has always been amazing to me that it burns in what seems to be such a predictable way that we can have an existence on Earth for some millions of years. How is the sun stable? And it doesn't just go bov and burn out or explode in a colossal cataclysmic event. It's almost like it's so perfectly designed to send the exact,

amount of heat. Yeah. It's a good question. So actually, I'm a plasma physicist by training. So this is like going back to grad school here. And it's, it's a good question. So the way the stars actually work is there in equilibrium by their very nature that the gravity is pulling everything really, really close.

And it's basically building its own thick blanket to keep heat in. And at the core, it's getting hot enough and dense enough that fusion actually starts to happen. and that produces heat, which wants to make the whole thing expand. And so the sun actually, it's not perfectly stable. It actually has cycles where it expands and contracts ever, ever so slightly. And we can actually track those. And we do track those things like sun cycles and things.

We're not quite sure exactly how it all works yet. But those stars are all doing that. And they're running a fusion cycle inside their core. And eventually they do run out of fuel and then they explode. And that's a supernova. So we got to get out of the solar system before that happens. Luckily, you know, we have four billion years to do that. But, you know, four billion years is a long time, but really we got problems to solve like in the next 40 years on Earth.

That will tell us whether or not we even have that opportunity. How stable is what you're doing in creating this fusion reaction? In other words, we have from science fiction, from fantasy, from, you know, books and movies and our collective consciousness, when we say fusion power, that it is incredibly unstable and that if you, you, you know, you screw up, Bob, we all die. Is this? I mean, you're laughing, but if you screw up, do we all die? Does it leave a giant crater? No, no.

Using 3,000 microwaves to heat up this hydrogen. What happens if it goes wrong? Yeah, the way to think about it is, you know, people think of like things being really, really hot, right? Like, they think about like lava, like you've got, you know, lava, like melting through something. And then that's how, you know, you can depict things. and if you're, you know, Doc Ock or something.

But the reality is that the total amount of energy inside this plasma that's in a fusion system is only like the same amount of energy in like a pot of boiling water. It's actually not much energy. It's just very, very hot. It's like you have a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of mass. It's very, very hot. And so it's less like lava and more like a candle like in the wind. And literally you can blow it out.

So, I mean, the way that one of the problems in fusion is it constantly keeps going out. And so you have to really create. these conditions that are completely not on earth. They're in space, right? Like, stars are in space. You don't walk through the forest and find a star. So, like, you have to recreate that on earth, which means it's a fairly complicated machine

just to enable the life support for it to go. Okay, so when we get back from this quick break, I want you to describe for the audience what this machine, this fusion reactor, would look like and what is the hardware and the components of it in order to make this reaction occur with the right temperature, the right pressure, and the right heating in order to create that reaction. We get back on this weekend startups.

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I read about that, and I just thought this would be something amazing to get you on the pod and talk about it. Okay, so we understand what a fusion reaction is sort of. It's what occurs in the sun. It requires a massive amount of energy to turn hydrogen and create this reaction. I think we're in sync so far, right? Yep. Okay. Now, explain to me what this.

reactor is that does this and why it doesn't already exist. If we've done this, we know it exists and we've done various permutations on it, what is this physical device going to look like and how far are we away from having it? Yeah. So the way to think about what this thing is, is it basically like a magnetic bottle. So you use very strong magnets to bottle up the star. So, you know, people think it as like a sphere. It's actually, you know, the other thing, donuts, right? Like Homer Simpson, what can donuts not do?

Like, one thing donuts do very well is they can make magnetic bottles. And if you build a machine, which is an acronym and, you know, technical speak, called Tokomak, but it's by far the most research thing using a monetic bottle. Yeah, Tokomak, yeah. Thanks, Russian thing. But if you build one of these, and like you can build one of these in universities, and there's like 155 of these that have been built. It's a magnetic bottle that inside in the donut,

sort of the jelly of the donut, is the plasma. Very, very, very hot. And then it's very, very well insulated. It's compressed by the magnets. And we've done this over and over again, and we've gotten better and better at it. And if you actually look at the figure of merits that you need to do for fusion,

like how hot you get it or how well insulated it is, we've actually beat Moore's Law and almost all those figures of merit at places like Princeton and places like the National Labs in the Bay Area and places in France and people that do this for a living, entire departments at National Labs that do this. So we've gotten a long way. We've come just from nothing to something that's sitting right below where you would have a plasma that would make more fusion power than it takes to heat it. And we've been sort of stuck there for a little while. And we've been trying to figure out, okay, like, how do we get past that? And really, we only had two options.

And one of them was an option that was completely close to us until just recently. And that's really where CFS comes in. And so you have this donut-like reactor. It's a giant size. I'm looking at some images online of these. These have been in construction, and we've been working on these for how many decades? When did this work start? And what have we accomplished in these?

a Tokomak, T-O-K-A-M-A-K fusion reactors to date. Yeah, so we started them, you know, actually the Soviets started them. It was a big deal, like the Taunt era, right, Cold War and international exchanges of scientists and, you know, subterfuge and all of the spy stuff. And actually, by the 70s, we had made an international science effort to advance these. And we were able to do is to take them from, you know, cold, not insulated plasmas all the way up to the point where they can make just under more power than it takes to run. So they've gone, you know, from sort of like temperature of a flame to temperature of the sun in that amount of time.

And we've now developed all of the understanding of how to make these things work. And it's actually like an incredible feat that physicists and engineers around the world have done, all funded by taxpayers and the open science sort of spirit to be able to build these machines, predict how they work, and actually have them work according to the predictions, which is, you know, when you know you've got something really, really good. Like, we can't like make drugs work according to predictions, but we can actually make 100 million degree plasmas work according to predictions. So we've made 250 of these in the world.

and the challenge now is to have the energy that it takes to run one of these be less than the energy coming out of it. That's where we are after 40 or 50 years, 50 years of working on this. Is that right? Yeah, that's pretty, pretty accurate. And, you know, that's sort of like the point where it goes from being an interesting science experiment to like, oh, this could be useful. and sort of from the bench to something out in the market.

And it's still got a little ways to go. We got some more work to do. But it was interesting enough. And the potential payoff is so big to be able to build an energy source like this. Like, you know, that going back to the pint glass, right? If every glass of beer powered everyone for their entire life, like we wouldn't need that much beer. Sort of sad analogy. So you're aiming in 2025 to have one of these that reaches, is there a term for, you know,

net energy positive, just to say it in plain language? Yeah, break even. Break even, great. So we're almost at break even and you have to get us past break even. And then is, you know, just one notch above break even, the breakthrough? Or is there like you've got to get 10x past break even? So if you think about where we've come from, so we've gone from, you know, 13 orders of magnitude, you know, 13 zero is behind the decimal place, almost nothing, to just below break-even. And we've got to get above break-even and just a little bit beyond that.

And we now know enough that you can design machines up there. And so I'm sure you've, you've, on while we're doing here, seeing the Eater machine, the big huge machine in France that they're building. That's all the nations of the world basically saying, hey, let's go build the largest consumers. construction project in Europe to get above break even in a token mac. And the consensus is they can do it, but man, is it big and expensive? And that was really the only option we had when we decided to do that. And what we're doing at CFS is we found that there's from a technology related to the magnet, instead of a magnetic bottle, we found that you can make it much, much, much smaller,

like factors of like 50 smaller by putting in this new type of magnet. And that's what we're doing now. Got it. So the magnets could be the big unlock here. If we get the magnets right, then maybe it doesn't have to be as big or as costly. Is that what happens? Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like now you go from having to build something that's like the size of, you know, an office block to something that, you know, fits on a tennis court. And so this is like, you know, in sort of the tough, you think about like tough technology, like hardware-based technology. This is the type of breakthrough you look for, right? This is like something where you've got a good established science basis. Now, underpinned by universities, you've got a new technology that came in that suddenly changes the game, whether that's DNA and fast gene sequencing, right?

Like those types of things. And Fusion, in Fusion's case, we've gotten so far in the science, we have climate change bearing down on us, and we're sitting right below the point where it's useful. And all of a sudden this magnet comes up. you know, like, oh, let's put these things together and let's change the scale. And that's really what led to CFS two years ago. So the Eterfusion project, ITER, is this multi-disciplinary or multi-country project in France that's building a giant reactor. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. Funded by the EU and Japan and Russia and China and India, the United States, Korea. It's basically the industrialized world. and it's according to their website, it is 72% completion to first plasma. Plasma. What does that mean? So it's 72% completed to the point where they turn it on

and they make a plasma inside of it that shows the machine works, but they still got about 10 years to go beyond that before they start to make more power than it takes to run. Got it. If you succeed in making these magnets a magnitude better, 10x better, 100x better? What do you have to do? Twice as good, 50% better? Yeah. So in these machines, like we built so many of them and we understand them well enough to know that the performance goes like the magnetic field to the fourth power. So a huge lever on it, right? And so even a factor

of two, you're talking about, you know, a factor of 16 on the other side. So we're aiming for just a factor of two, which was granted a factor of two beyond what people had been working out for a long time, but a new material allowed us to do that. Got it. And they're spending $20 billion on the ETER project? More, yeah. Wow, that's incredible. And so if you succeed in your mission to make the magnets better, you could potentially upgrade the magnets in what they're doing,

where they could leverage your technology or you'll be building. I guess the question is, and you can answer this on the other side of our quick sponsor break, is how many of these, and at what scale, do we need to build them? Will there be one per country? Will there be one per state? Will there be one per city?

One per neighborhood? What is the footprint in 20 years of fusion reactors in America and around the world if you succeed when we get back on this week in startups? Hey, everybody. I want to take a minute to thank him broker for sponsoring this week in startups and supporting us all year long. What a great company. And it's very simple.

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Twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend startups. Bob Mumgard is here. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, CFS-Energy, CFS. that energy. So when we left and we were talking about, God, the Eter, is I'm pronouncing that correct?

Eter, I-T-E-R, that $20 billion project is going on. They're just getting, I guess, there's 70% of the way to having the plasma flowing, which means it works. You're working on the magnets to make all of these around the world better. So if you succeed with your magnets, I guess you become the source of magnets or you're making your own proprietary reactors?

Is that the business model here? What's the business model for you? And then how does it manifest in the real world when you and I are in our 60s or 70s? I'm not sure how old you are, but 20 years from now, 30 years from now, is there going to be one of these in everybody's backyard or in everybody's DeLorean or Tesla? Or is it going to be like one per country? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think, you know, to tackle the question of like, what does it mean to do it at scale,

which is, you know, really what we're talking about here? It's like, what do you have to do at scale for the energy system? I think, you know, there's some like crazy numbers if you think about it. It's the energy system is the largest market in the world. Like, you know, just oil and gas, publicly traded oil and gas companies, largest in the world, are only a tiny fraction of the entire energy market. And so to solve climate change, you know, we're talking about replacing trillions and trillions of dollars. of energy infrastructure with something,

something that doesn't emit where what we have today, we know we have to get rid of it. And so that's the level of market opportunity that all of the clean tech sides are going after. And what Fusion really allows you to do is you basically can build a machine that's big enough to power like a town.

It's not like a machine that's like powered an entire region or city. It's like the size of the way we power our stuff today. It's like, you go and you see a gas plant. It's like, oh, you put a fusion, machine there and you get rid of the pipeline and you get rid of the smokestack. And that machine, if you know how to build it, its fuels are equally accessible to everybody. So it's a machine that makes power from effectively nothing.

And so it's like a complete reimagining of the way we do energy. Like one way to think of it is up till now, we've done energy through like hunter gatherer style. Like we have like rooted around. Diging into the ground. You like dig or you like wait to trap the wind or the or the sun. Right. And what this is is like, okay, build it. If you got the blueprints, you've got the tools to build it, you can build it,

you can run it, and you get energy. And that's a really, you know, that's like why is fusion in all the sci-fi? Because that's profound. And what we're trying to do is to try to make that into something that then can be, you know, a product, right? It's not a giant international project. You know, good luck to them. That's great.

But it's something that's not quite like put in your basement, but it's something that you could put into the existing infrastructure as we turn over the infrastructure to clean energy. And what do you think the timetable is for that? If you were to, you know, bet your life savings on it because you've already bet your career, it seems, and your entire reputation on it. So we might as well ask this question, like, you're all in on this. What is your, if we were to pick an over under to a city, but one seat.

city. One city in the world is powered, you know, whatever, 100,000 people, a million people, something in that range. But let's pick a town. A hundred thousand people in a town are powered by a fusion reactor and fusion energy. Am I referring to properly fusion technology or is it called nuclear fusion technology? Fusion energy is the proper way you would say it. Why do people say nuclear fusion technology? That's a good question. It's a bit reduced. It's a bit redundant, right? Fusion is a nuclear reaction, but it's the opposite reaction of the one everyone's used to. So, you know, it's confusing to refer to it as nuclear often because, like, nuclear is synonymous with fission, with splitting the atom. It's like, you know, and we don't refer to,

you know, burning something as chemical combustion. So we call it fossil fuel energy, right? And it's fusion energy. So fusion energy, when will a town? If you had to pick an over under, we're going to make a bet, a betting line. What year is that? That a million populous city is powered by one of these? That, it's a, it's a really, really good question. And, you know, if you were to go back, even just five years ago and ask that question, the answer would unanimously be, ah, it's like after 2050. It's like, yeah, 2060, somewhere in there. 30, 40 years, got it. Three or four decades of work. Yeah. But what we see now, and one of the things that's driving money in the space and then causing the flywheel to accelerate infusion is that there are legitimate technology approaches

that could push that significantly earlier. Is it 2025? No. Is it 2030? Well, if we hit everything right, maybe. Is it 2035? There's some good chances on the table to do that. And so that's a big change in how people have thought about this technology and where you see

governments accelerating their investment, passing new legislation about it. it where you see your research getting more to be invested if we were to pick a number is it a trillion dollars a hundred billion dollars what would have to be invested to make that an almost certainty in nothing life is certain but is there a number where you said hey if we put a hundred billion billion or 250 billion or even a trillion dollars or 10 trillion dollars towards this it's going to happen yeah it's it's billions but not tens of billions so for as little as $10 billion, we could make this a certainty, which then leads me to wonder, why is every government, and we're in the middle of a stimulus package spending trillions of dollars, and people are

spending tens of billions of dollars on solar, why are we not just giving 10 teams in America a billion dollars each? Yeah, it's it. Well, you know, first, like, it's not. It's not, clear. Where are we doing that? To some extent, we are increasing investment. And in fact, they just right before the end of the year, they passed a fusion bill, first time and a long time that was part of the energy package that said, hey, let's put cost shares and competition from federal money going out to try to do basically what we did

with SpaceX and Orbital and building rockets. Let's try to do that in fusion because there's enough people. There's about 20 companies that are doing this. There's about $2 billion of private investment already. in the space. So let's put a little bit more on there and see where this can go in the short term. Like, who's got, who's got legs to take the next step where the next step in many cases is either, you know, aiming for just above, you know, breakthrough, like going beyond break even, like CFS or getting ready to do that for other companies. And so you're seeing that come in,

both from the private side and from the government side. And it's not clear that, you know, dumping $100 billion is a good idea in this space, right? There's only so many trials that you can do. There's not so much, so much you can do within reason on speed. But, you know, it's at the starting gate. Which is interesting because I don't know if you remember this during the Obama era. Solindra, Tesla, they all received, you know, a couple of billion dollars, a couple of hundred million dollars to see if, you know, we could actually get electric cars on the road. And Fisker and Solendra and.

famously all those things went bust, but Elon paid back all those learns early. And if they had been equity, can you imagine if even 1% or 10% of that money was equity versus a loan that would have paid off and the government would have made a profit on it? So our government, at the end of 2020,

I understand Trump, in the COVID relief, put in like $325 million in financing for fusion energy, something very modest. And they're matching those dollars. Is that the idea they're going to match the dollars? Yeah. So that's one idea. And that's the idea that was in the fusion bill is that it's actually a model just after,

you know, Elon's other play on SpaceX, which is, you know, hey, these companies are trying to do something really hard. If they do it, let's let's give them, you know, take the receipts and pay them back like half. So match on milestone-based reimbursement, which, you know, is very, very successful. You know, you look at the crew dragon. and dropping off people at the International Space Station, you're like, oh, that is a direct result of doing this. And even in that case, the taxes that have been paid on just building those rockets

actually paid back what the government spent to run that program. When we get back from this final break, I want to know what country has the best chance of becoming the leader in this space. if not America, France, China. Who has the intelligence in terms of people like yourself, colleges like MIT, whatever? I'm not sure where the fusion energy brain trust comes from. I want to know if we are educating enough brainpower because at the end of the day, what I know about startups is you're only as good as your team.

I want to know who's got the best funnel of intelligent team members in the world to make fusion happen and to save the goddamn planet when we come back on this week in startups. Do you ever wish that you got to invest in some of the best performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020? I bet you do. Well, our crowd investors did get a chance to invest in many of those amazing IPOs. With our crowd accredited investors can invest directly and easily in startups early before they IPO, before they get bought. In fact, our crowd investors have benefited from companies IPOing like,

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great deal memos. Just go to O-U-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in startups. My mind is blown. Forget about nuclear. Forget about solar, forget about wind for a second. Fusion is the long game. There is no other solution out there that comes close to this. Correct, Bob? That's what we think, yeah. I mean, is there anything when you go and debate, you know, energy, you know,

after having a couple of pints in Boston with a bunch of brainiacs from Harvard and MIT, whatever? Is there any other technology that somebody says, forget fusion, this is going to be the solution? Or is it? Not on it. Everybody universally agrees. is the holy ground. Yeah, it's, in the long game, everyone always gets there. It's like, yeah, you know, if you want to take the population of the earth and you want to put

them at the level of sustainable, the level of energy use, the level of their lifestyle that you can get in the West, and you want to do that sustainably, and you want to recycle everything and make the economy circular, and you don't want to ruin the planet. Like, that amount of energy is a lot. And there is, even if you like to think about, and I'm a big pro-solar person, big pro- wind. Even if you think about the long game on those, like eventually you've got a lot of solar and wind.

And sort of at a level, it's like, oh, man, that's, that is a lot. So Fusion always, everyone always gets there. Eventually, it's like, okay, like, you know, SimCity 2000, the final power plant you got was Fusion for a reason. It's like, that's where it goes. The question is, can you get there soon enough? And, like, who's going to get there first? So that leads me to what I've learned about building startups, which is, you

You're only as good as the talent that can join your team. And is that the same in your line of work, fusion energy? And if so, where do fusion energy scientists and entrepreneurs come from? Who is the number one source of those brainiacs? Yeah, it's a, you know, so it's an international effort, right? So there's people that are working on this all over the world. Basically, you know, you get to a certain level and countries start to invest in this. And so, like, you know, China's got a big effort pouring money in.

Europeans are building the largest fusion machine ever attempted. The UK is doubling down to get their industry on board with fusion. But really, the United States, you know, we have a really, really fundamental advantage, which is it's not just, you know, fusion brainiacs like people that know how stars work and plasma physicists, and we like those people a lot. But it's also people that know how to build companies and build ecosystems to take those scientific results and as quickly as possible, pull them out and put them into a package that can then be supercharged with finance and with manufacturing and going.

And I think the U.S. is clearly the leader so far. I think you're seeing it accelerate and you're seeing entities like CFS really, you know, take advantage of the people that came before and Clean Tech, right? You see more and more money coming into Clean Tech. You see more and more funds that are allocating significant parts of their portfolio to these types of technologies. You're seeing more venture capitalists, understanding what it takes to build bits, go from bits to atoms and how to transition that. And you're also seeing talent like coming out of the forges of like SpaceX. 30% of CFS is SpaceX alumni of some sort, right? You're coming out

of companies that have now done this a few times, either from the clean tech, you know, back before the recession, or from the must companies in aerospace or, you know, even medical devices and things. You're starting to see a confluence of all that happening in the United States. It's not just in fusion. It's in technologies that are across the energy spectrum. If I'm correct, scientists who understand the fusion reaction are but one component here. You need material science scientists and financiers and people who have figured out how to get raw science, material science, and actually result in a product as well. So it's not just about the science. scientist, Brainiac, it's also the person who knows out of packages. For you to get a customer,

your customer would be a state in the United States, correct? No, actually, you know, if you look at like who buys power plants or who buys power? Yeah, it's a surprise. Yeah, most people don't know where their power comes around. So you have everything from utilities, you know, traditional like con ed, you know, sort of sort of stodgy utilities. Which are quasi-government or the private companies that are governed. regulated? Yeah, they're government regulated and it really depends on where you are. Like if you're in the southeast United States, it's heavily government regulated. If you're where I am, it's actually a fairly open market. You have, you know, private infrastructure investors, big pension funds that own power plants

basically. And you also have people like Google and Amazon or Ford who buy power. And so when you see like Google say, okay, we want to go and be 100% clean energy. Like, they're out there, you know, writing, underwriting the financing and spending the money to get things built that are power plants. And then they write a contract to take the power. In fact, Google said not only do they want to be carbon neutral, they said they want to be carbon, they want to pay for all the carbon they've used in the history of Google, if I remember correctly and then they want to be a net what would it be that they're removing carbon from the atmosphere

like on a net basis like so they'd like to be net positive on that so in a way your customer is ultimately going to be those server farms with all of our data on them yeah a lot of people don't realize this but you know if you're surfing on your phone like the power your phone uses is it's not the power that's coming to from your charger overnight the power your phone uses is all those giant data centers and it's quite a bit of power and uh And it's not going to go down. And the same way, you know, you want to recycle, you know, our electronics and turn them into new products instead of dumping them across the ocean.

Like, you're going to need a lot of power to do all this. And this is now seen, you know, broadly as we're going to need lots and lots of electricity. We're going to need lots and lots of heat. And we're going to need to do all that without emissions. How far are you away from selling Google on buying 10 reactors from you? Yeah, it's still a little early for that, you know, like proof is in the pudding. Like, okay, we've been working on this a long time. We talked about, oh, we've been doing this.

for decades, but we think we're really close. Now, we're the type of people at MIT. It's like, okay, let's push it across the line. Let's show up somewhere where you can push a button, make a star in a bottle that makes more power than it takes to run, gets everything real hot to the point you got to shut it down, pour water on it and cool it off again, and then go again. At that point, that's the point that you start to say, okay, now let's start to find where we're going to build the first one and harness that heat and turn it into electricity

I think that a Google, Facebook, Amazon would love to make an early bet on you and say, hey, I'll give you $100 million for the first two or whatever. What do you think one of these reactors will cost, you know, the first, I mean, obviously, the first one's going to cost billions of dollars in terms of research up until now. And I think the United States, based on a note I have here, has put $50 billion into fusion already over 50 years or something. So the first one will cost theoretically 50 billion, but you're going to advertise that over, you know, 500 of these.

So what do you think they'll retail for, you know, to power some giant data center? I'm sure it depends is the answer. But ballpark, are these going to be worth a billion dollars each? And how does that compare it to building a nuclear reactor, which I think is really what you're up against, right? This is going to be compared to building a solar farm, a wind farm, a nuclear reactor, or one of those. Am I correct?

Yeah, and that's ultimately the beauty, the beautiful part about fusion, right, is that, or actually all of energy. The beautiful part about all of energy is you know the metrics. Like, you build a plant, you add up what it costs to build, you amoratize it about how much energy it uses. And that's a commodity, you know, comes out of a wire with electrons. And so the good thing about fusion is it's a machine that makes power without fuel and it makes a lot of power out of a relatively small machine. And so when you add it all up, it looks very, very competitive if you can get it down the scale that we're aiming to get it. You know, you're still, in these cases, you know, investing the better part of a billion dollars to build one of these. But that's something that people do all the time.

Like, you know, a solar farm, a good utility scale solar farm is a billion dollars. And so this is at the, in the channel that people are used to doing from a finance, from a procurement, from a building perspective. So they're not going to be shocked when they see your price tag. And the 10 cents or 7, 8 cents, 9 cents, a kilowatt hour, that nuclear cost. this will be similar or much cheaper. Aiming to be cheaper than that. Aiming to be below 5 cents a kilowatt hour. So if 5 cents a kilowatt hour happens for fusion,

and nuclear is currently like 10 cents, I think, and it's going down to 9 maybe or 8 is the target. And you do 5, what does that do to nuclear reactors and solar? And I guess solar and wind would be much more than nuclear? Depends on where you build them. It really depends on where you build them. But the really important thing here is that, you know, if you get into the right ballpark, like, A, we have to build all of the above. Like, you know, we talked about the trillions of trillions of dollars that have to be replaced in infrastructure for fossil fuels.

Like, it doesn't matter what fossil fuels cost. We're not going to let people build them, right? So we're going to build something. And we're going to build the thing that's most cost effective for the application that's there. So if you're, like, in the middle of a desert, like, yeah, it built solar farms. Right. But if you're, you know, outside of a major metropolitan area with a big industry or a data farm or things like that, you need to think about, you know, what's that look like? Is that a gas plant? Well, maybe that's not the right approach anymore. Maybe that's a fusion plant in the future. Maybe that's a nuclear plant. So coal, natural gas, they're done in our lifetime, 20, 30 years from now. The idea, we're, and right now, am I correct, that solar and wind and renewables are cheaper to build? And we've sort of crossed. that Rubicon now?

Yeah, we've crossed that Rubicon for many places in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. So nobody's building gas power plants and coal plants to, you know, generally speaking, nuclear is kind of frozen. People are scared of building nuclear, but we're going to have a couple more nuclear plants in the United States is the plan. Yeah, that's about right.

Yeah. So it'll be a three-horse race, if I, if I'm reading you correct, between fusion, nuclear and renewables. And all three of those can be part of the mix, correct? Yeah, absolutely. And you're already seeing, you know, people, people gear up for that and figure out what the future of the grid looks like. And it's a really exciting time to be in energy. You know, it's like, it's an exciting time to be in climate, super impactful. Like you want to do something of your life, like probably, you know, climate, sustainability energy is where you, it's an area where you can make a really big impact. And then on top of all that, you know, even within energy

itself, there's lots of really good ideas. Infusion is now in the mix in a way that it just wasn't five years ago. If you succeed in building this, one of the biggest offenders for our climate, and you know, this sounds crazy, and I think a lot of people don't know this, but there's a very small number of cargo ships on the planet, and they spew, from my understanding, a type of fuel that is incredibly dirty to get these containers from China to the EU and to America. And I don't know if there's 30 or 40 of them that are inconstant. I just had the CEO Flexport on who manages like all these, you know, the transit of all these shipping containers.

Is it on the roadmap to put a fusion reactor on a giant cargo ship and power it? Or is that too insane to put those on over the water? It's not necessarily like technically the, you know, something you would, uh, couldn't do. Like you could figure out if you built the ship big enough and stuff that safety wise, there's no reason you wouldn't do it. But, you know, we have other ways to solve those types of problems. Like, you know, if you use a fusion plant or a heat, you know, heat source effectively to, to make fuel, right?

Like if you make fuel, then you can close and make that, that, the whole system zero carbon. Right? Like, okay. Like that, that's, that's. a way to do it or make hydrogen even. In which case, you close the whole thing

for zero carbon and the smoke stack is water instead of particulates. And so there's a really good idea to then make hydrogen energy system. To then make hydrogen energy. Yeah, exactly.

Yep. Fascinating. And people are looking into doing that, you know, with renewables and with nuclear. And this is, I think, an underappreciated fact by a lot of people is,

okay, like we're going to electrify everything we can, right? Let's get EVs. like, you know, GM, they're going to stop making gasoline cars in 2035. EVs. Well, just because you have an EV, if you plug it in, where does your electricity come from? Okay, we've got to change all that to be zero carbon. Oh, but there's stuff like how to fly on planes, which we don't do right now,

but I assume we're going to get back to that. It's like, how do you make that zero carbon or how do you make steel zero carbon? All of that stuff, agriculture, you grow your crops. How do you do zero carbon agriculture? All of that is all right for innovation right now with effectively the largest market poll in history. Amazing. If you look at those container ships, you know, they're the size of like six football fields. And they produce, I just looked it out, the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars.

That is bonkers. You know, when people are looking at them, just to think, the amount of mileage of your gas power car is, insignificant to getting one of those container ships to flip over to something sustainable. So are you super positive that humanity is going to beat climate change with fusion? If we just get fusion right, climate change is a non-issue, correct? You know, I think that fusion is definitely, definitely has a chance to do that. But I'm actually super positive on fixing climate change overall. Like, and I'm part of the fusion as part of the mix.

I'm CEO of a fusion company. Like, we're going full speed as hard as we can. But I also don't think it's right to be, you know, fatalistic about this. That you have a lot of people that are like me and like our team who are trying all these different things. And like if with a little bit of creativity around finance, a little bit of support, like you're seeing seeing people do things that we didn't think were possible before. And, you know, I think that we just, you know, we are in this middle of this

pandemic and we started the show talking about, you know, getting rid of all the cars. Like, okay, we got rid of all the cars. Cities got clean, but we only reduced carbon by 10%. But still, it's 10%. Like, like, we only have to do that 10 times over, right? Yeah, yeah. It's not like inconsequential. And at the same time, you know, we managed to shorten the time to a vaccine through

science and through engineering and through finance, right? Right. And like, that is, that's the same type of thing that we need to do for, climate. And you're starting to see funds that are just pure climate funds. You're starting to see collectives of entrepreneurs that are doing it. Yeah, lower carbon fund, which is an investor in your company. I don't know when he came in. But so your company has raised quarter of a billion dollars to go after this. Correct? Yeah. Yeah, somewhere around there. You have a hundred people, 200 people working there?

I think right now it's about 130. You will not have a commercial product until 15 years from now? 10 years? 10 years. Well, we won't have the fusion commercial product until 10 years from now. Of course, we're always doing really interesting things, but we're really aiming at the fusion thing as the primary thing. Got it.

So you might have some revenue source between then and now. Maybe selling some parts to other people building stuff if I had to take the guess. Yeah, and like, you know, parts are useful for other things besides fusion. So things like that, yeah. And building one of these Tokomaks, is that what they call Tokamak? Close enough, yeah. No, you say it. I want to make sure I get it right so I can say it at a dinner party.

Tokomak. Tokomak. So is building a Tokomak like a huge carbon footprint or is it just like building a building? Yeah, it's effectively, it's funny. It's like we, you know, we're getting ready to build our net energy tokenac called Spark. And it's a building, you know, first and foremost, it's a shed. It's like a shed like any other shed. And it's full of equipment.

It's like kind of a weird mix of equipment, but none of it is crazy specialized in terms of it. It's like stuff you find in arc furnaces and things, which you can get. And then at the core of it is this fusion machine that is, you know, a machine that's made out of metal. It's machined out of steel.

And it's the same type of people that build rockets. And we've got a lot of people that build rockets on staff. And so it's following in that same mold. But of course, the energy payout and something like this is so big because the fuel that you're talking about is so inconsequential and the machine makes so much power. You know, it's like, you know, like it's a tennis court that's replacing miles of solar panels. It's bonkers. And now are you going to be putting these on rocket ships as well?

And is this how we get to Mars? I've heard Elon talk about fusion being a component of getting to Mars, but it's not required. But it would certainly be a boost, so to speak. Yeah, we don't typically look that far out. There's actually some fusion companies that that's one of the part of their business model. For us is like the fact that we've got to, you know, build 10,000 power plants, some matter what they are on Earth to solve climate change. The fact that fusion could be a part of those 10,000 power plants, that's enough for us.

If there was one thing that could be done in society that would advance your mission, what would it be? Is it educating more people? Is it getting you more resources? is it regulation? What do you need to be removed from your path that will accelerate this? Because I think we all want to see this accelerated. So when you wake up every morning, are there things you say, if we just didn't have this

regulation, or if we just had this much more money, if we just had this many more smart people, or we just had this raw material? Is there something there that would accelerate your process? Or is this just heads down? We've got to do the work and it's going to take time. Yeah, you know, it's head down, do the work. And then, you know, frankly, there's like death by a thousand cuts. Right. So it's like, oh, you know, like regulation is a little bit, slows you up a little bit here, slows you up a little bit there. And then really, you know, the big thing on a lot of this is, you know, a really vibrant ecosystem, right? If you can, if we can build and we're seeing it in the United States. And hopefully as we come out of the pandemic and we see investment in recovery, that, you know, these ecosystems are really smart people, interdisciplinary people attacking this problem with the finance behind them, whether that's from government,

loans or government grants or that's from, you know, special carveouts of long-term, you know, mutual funds and investment funds or venture capital that are willing to go into longer terms. Like, all of that is, is all part of this solution, you know, helps fusion. It also helps other things. And that's what we want to see more of. And I think you're starting to see that happen even just in the last year. I mean, like we closed a $85 million round, like when oil was going to. negative and one of our investors in that round was was equinor the big norwegian oil company.

And so you're seeing people turn to this and we like to see that accelerate. Interestingly, when you when you look at what you're doing, there is a device in financial markets of the early investors getting taken out by later stage investors. So I'm curious if you've thought about your decade one investors being the venture industrial complex. But decade two being the people who do SPACs or private equity or, you know, those large funds taking out the earlier investors. So if a venture firm has a 10-year horizon for a return, I wonder if you're on a 20-year timetable, if in year 10 the investors can turn over, right? So in our case, like we even predated this, our venture funds that are investors and us,

people like Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures or Steve Jervitson's future ventures. Like those funds are actually built to be 20-year funds. Like the idea of like a 10-year venture capital fund is sort of like a perversion of what venture capital started out as. Like we started out venture capital building chips, right? In Silicon Valley for a reason. Like building big machines that made other machines. Yeah, exactly.

And building machines that built other machines. And it sort of migrated into what we're going to do software. apps. And then apps. It's like, that's all great and everything. But, you know, there's still a whole lot out there that, you know, people experience their life, not just sort of in pandemic. It's sort of like only on a computer screen. But you think about the variety of stuff that underpins our society. And most of that stuff is atoms. And most of that stuff is at some point going from science into a product. And that takes time. It takes head down. It takes a coalition around them. of the entrepreneur of talent and of regulation and the government and of long-term investors

and all of that. And I think, you know, we've seen that engine in the United States really rev up over and over again and clean tech and infusion is doing it again. When your customers are looking at this and trying to figure out how to contextualize what's about to happen, it turns out like I'm trying to think of the second order. impact of what you're doing. So anytime this technology gets made, there's some things that happen that are either unintended,

you know, in a bad way or a great way. If you look at clean water and you look at clean water as a function of energy, right? Like if you just take desalienization, that's energy, right? Taking salt, it's just energy. You got to get the membrane, you got to use gravity, whatever it is to get the salt out. Then you look at food.

Food is about water and about energy on the margins, right? There's some energy used, like you mentioned aquaculture, but really water is a big part of that. The sun, right? And so being able to have greenhouses, you know, that have light, in a world where energy becomes free or close to free, because that's really what this does, right? Energy is going to get close to free or a magnitude cheaper, half? Yeah, eventually it'll get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as you get better and better at building

it. But, you know, we always try to avoid from free. Like, you have to build stuff. Still breaks down. You got to fix it. But you're saying maybe half. Yeah, yeah, you could get cheap and more important. Like the externalities, even when they're priced in of carbon and pollution, you know, still don't make it more expensive than we're paying today.

Does this mean we could solve water and food security as well as part of energy? So, you know, the way that we describe it, like, you know, companies got sort of, you know, this collection of really, really fun, right? People have, you know, got 10 things we know to be true, right? Like, what do we absolutely know about? And one of them is that in the end, the only two markets are energy and gray matter. right like energy and creativity and you can basically with enough energy you can reduce things to that right that's like the equivalent of your server farm running all the uh the computers and AI right it's like okay energy and gray matter and so you know you start to run things out on oh yeah you could desalinate and

you could you can make enough water you could do vertical greenhouses near the point of consumption with LEDs inside to to take electricity and turn yeah you can see lots of things like literally whatever the most expensive crop is, could be made in vertical farms with energy right at like the source. And then you start thinking about like there are deserts in the world. And they could be, if you desalinized, and we just took some of the water out of the ocean, which there's plenty of. Of course, desalinizing, you can kill some wildlife and there's brine and these issues. But those are all surmountable. You could take swats of desert in Africa, in America, in the southwest, and over time, convert them into rainforests or forests.

And if I'm correct, and I'm no genius at this, forests are good for global warming. Trees absorb carbon, correct? Like, this is a good part of, if we had more trees, that'd be better. So. Yeah, you can see like, and this, you know, the more energy that we have that doesn't come with consequences for future

generations for the environment, the more we can do and think about these types of things, right? the, you know, we want to remove the constraint of sort of searching around and dealing with the downsides of producing large, large energy flows, whether that's going out and having to drill in the middle of the ocean or whether that's the carbon that's in the air. And like these energy sources, both renewables and fusion down the line, allow you to do this at a bigger and bigger scale. And we think that's not just the solution for climate change. You know, that's a truly sustainable solution long term. It's crazy when you think about we could be sitting here in 40 years

and this entire oil infrastructure that we've built from the cars to the pipelines to the rigs out in the middle of the ocean, they're all going to be deprecated. There'll be no use for them. There'll be like some vestige of like a world that we, our children's children will not even be able to understand like what was that? Yeah, well, think about the last... The ocean? Yeah, think about the last time

that you ever heard of anyone lighting up a whale oil lamp, right? Yeah. It was probably good that we stopped doing that. Wow. Just the number of people off Nantucket who lost their lives getting those whales, the number of whales who died

to make us, you know, be able to read past sunset. I mean, it really is incredible. light bulb powered by coal at the time was a really good idea. Well, maybe we should stop building the coal. We still need a light bulb, though. And, you know, it's sort of the evolution of progress in a sense to more and more benign ways to make our lives better. And really, you know, the crux of, you know, we look at it as the next battle for our generation is to do that with zero carbon energy. Hey, Bob, I just want to tell you, like, I appreciate.

you and thanks for doing this. Like, I don't mean to get cheesy and stuff like that, but you know, you get to, you know, our age, you have kids and you worry about the planet. You worry about the planet that, you know, they're going to inherit. And people like you and your team are busting your asses to save the goddamn planet. And I think that that's just tremendous. So thank you. And I'm sure you're toiling away and nobody's saying anything to you.

And there's no high fives. But, you know, we owe you a job. debt to do this. Like, this is important work. And you're hiring, correct? Oh, yeah, definitely hiring. And, you know, it's a, it's a really good time to look at, you know, those types of problems and say, like, hey, you know, what do I want to do after the pandemic? What I'm going to go work on? And we think energy is certainly a fulfilling way to do it. I may want to put a million in this. I may want to put a million or two in this. When's the next round coming around? I may need to get a, put, try to get my beak wet here, Bob. couple of million in this. It'd make me sleep well

at night knowing I'm not just investing in apps. Well, we're building the magnet now. So basically in June, we'll turn on the world's strongest magnet and that's twice what it was before. And at that point is really the go point to build the Spark Tokomac, the Net Energy Fusion Tokomak.

And we got a team ready to go. We got building permits coming and we're getting ready to do it. So it'll be sometimes... That's got to be an interesting one when you show up at the building and you follow yourself and you're like, hey, I just, here's my paperwork. I'm building a fusion reactor. And the person's like, okay, let me look that up. And there's no page that says, like, what you requirements are for a fusion? What happens when you submit a

future reactor to City Hall? Do they even know what to ask you? You typically talk to him first. Yeah. But do they understand? That's not a cold call. But they don't understand what you're building, right? Like, this is the first time anybody's ever come and said, can I build a fusion reactor here? The good news is we built so many of these before that you could come see them. So like, know, the token backs you've built before, right. So they're not scared to death. Yeah, yeah.

You can actually come crawl over it at MIT, which is where the previous record setter is that we evolved from. So, you know, we're not doing things that are completely, you know, outside of a comic book. There's some grounding in reality here. When can I get one as an arc reactor to put in my chest like Iron Man? I have unloaded fuel source. Don't answer that.

Yeah. We just need to get these server forms. and these ships, you know, and everything else off of it, factories, etc. All right, listen, brother, congratulations. If there's a chance to invest in this, man, let me wet my beak, because this would be a really great experience to be on the ride with you. Congratulations. And thank you.

We'll see you all next time on this week in startups.