Nuclear Fusion

“China is installing this 582 ton magnet, superconducting magnet, at their nuclear fusion center, which at this point is going to be the most kind of advanced fusion system in the world.”

“We closed this down about a year and a half ago. We had a fusion project. We ran it. We did build something the size of a house. We did almost a thousand plasma shots. We convinced ourself it was not going to change the world. And we closed the project down”

“There are some very interesting initiatives to bring fusion energy about. It is expressly the type of science that we at Kantos do not invest in.”

“They're probably like the two areas where I feel the least comfortable trying to tell what's real from what's not real, because everybody's raised a ton of money, and it seems like serious people that are doing it, and they're smart people, and then you just c…”

“I suspect that we've already done sufficient damage to the climate. We're going to have to undo some damage too, even if we got to switch to fusion right away.”

“So if you think about AI, we think about nuclear fusion or, you know, a lot of different areas of research that have translated into really outsized returns for investors. They probably have originated from university or at some point touched the university in…”

“And so I think this is a very binary thing, that if we can actually hit unit economics that are competitive in fusion, It'll create the largest companies we've ever seen.”

“It may be safe, but like, I don't think local communities are necessarily going to buy into the idea that it is safe. It's going to take a while to get people to Sort of be comfortable in the US and other parts of the world.”

“I think my personal belief is that fission is going to go bigger, like hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts, and fusion is going to be really great from the kilowatts to a few megawatts.”

“Fusion is going to be really great for mobility and stuff. So like autonomous vehicles, fusion powered, like an Android dive XL or something like that. Like, I think that's going to be a really great application for fusion in defensive space.”

“Maybe post 2100, we'll find that we have scaled up nuclear fusion sufficiently, that we can have the free energy to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Till then, it's just very difficult to see How we can set up a scaled energy system that can actually pull ca…”

“Nuclear fusion is finally getting within the zone of commercial viability. In the next 10 or 15 years, it'll become commercially viable.”

“Hopefully something dramatic that can happen, happen in nuclear fusion. In the long run, that may be the cheapest source of electricity.”

“So there's some sets of technologies that we consistently overestimated, and those are the technologies that are always just around the corner, but somehow they haven't panned out to the extent that we predicted. And those are things like nuclear fusion or thi…”

“I definitely think that we over-index on counting on, quote, energy miracles, because, again, going back to what we were talking about before, it takes a long time to build this stuff. So we are not going to have significant contribution of, say, nuclear energ…”

“In twenty-thirty-five and twenty-forty, we're probably going to see some there in that range. We might see a first commercial reactor producing electrons onto the grid, but I think before that, it's all going to be, if we do well, it's going to be pilots and d…”

“We have predictive capability of these machines the same way that we have predictive capability of, like, how to build a plane, right?”

“Peculiarly, space-based solar power is the, Only really promising form of clean energy, potential form of clean energy technology that I would argue the world is not investing in significantly because every other energy source that you can think of, whether it…”

“Space-based solar power has all of the benefits of fusion, and some, because it can move power from one place to another place that is underneath the satellite essentially instantly over vast geographic regions without any loss, and even, you know, nuclear fus…”

“I believe demonstrating positive energy by 25, maybe 26, will be also 10 X faster.”

“AI and machine learning had so greatly accelerated progress in fusion that it was geometric now. It was a vertical curve. Because experiments used to take one to two years to run one experiment in a fusion reactor. Now they could run in high fidelity in the co…”

“And I think people feel as if they can break through on the engineering in the next 10 years, then that would have real impact, because then you have to site, build, plants. That takes a really long time. I'm sure there'd be a lot of pressure to do it faster. …”

“There are 33 private technology companies today that have raised about three to four billion dollars so far this year to pursue several other technologies besides what the National Ignition Facility is showing to try and build production-ready versions of nucl…”

“My estimate is that we will see production demonstration of fusion in the 20 thirties. So call it eight years from now plus, and then you'll see grid scale scale up in the 20 forties.”

“I continue to fundamentally believe that solar is going to be the bedrock of decarbonization. Put another way, if you ask me what single technology will do the most to mitigate climate change, short of some potential geoengineering or nuclear fusion future, my…”

“It's not inherently true that it's going to deliver the cheapest electricity. That is available on the market, even if it is fusion. It, that doesn't mean that it's cheap because you still have, you could have very expensive capital costs to build a fusion pla…”

“You know, I deeply respect all the work you've done in the space, but you sound like someone who hasn't visited the lab in a while, because that's not where it is, and I can't preempt any announcements coming from any of our companies, but I can assure you it'…”

“Yeah, so the example I like to look at is one train car of fusion fuel, and that's like a little over a hundred 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…”

“There is some waste, but it's short-lived waste, radioactive waste and there's no fissile fuel, which is another concern. But for sure, you also don't need geological storage of the waste.”

“My personal opinion is that wall plug gain It's kind of like the Kitty Hawk moment, right? Or the Wright brothers moment that people like to allude to. Because it really shows it, that this is re it's really an existence proof now, right? That not only can you…”

“So I would say going from .7 to one is is not a huge jump but going from one to 10, you, you're, or from, you know, one to a hundred in inertial fusion you're likely to encounter some new physics that, that haven't been studied yet, which makes it riskier.”

“In fact, the particular ARPA-E funded study showed that maybe 65% of the LCOE might be coming from capital cost.”

“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.”

“I can assure you it is much, much more near term than 30 years imminent, maybe now, who knows, but it's been fucking fascinating to see these accelerating curves”

“For 24 years now, actually 25 years, I've been waiting on the sidelines to invest in nuclear fusion because it was a science project... And we finally found one at MIT that turned it into a pure engineering exercise.”