The Exchanges

Q understanding is that there are various different versions of that. They did it at the, at the reactor level, but not, uh, not a plug break-even, or whatever other term you want to use. So like, or orient me, what, what did that Actually show, and then what's different about that from what we're going to have to show when we want to turn fusion power plants into something real?

A So what they did, and you're gonna have to forgive me if I, if I get some of the details wrong, I'm not a physicist, I'm an operator in the field, so disclaimer. Um, what they did was they stored about 300 megajoules of energy in a capacitor bank. They used a laser to drive about two of those megajoules into a target, and then they got five megajoules of energy out of the target. So really, really big achievement. They've since improved on an achievement, gone closer to eight megajoules out of the target. And so if you draw your, your proverbial box around that fusion target, then you got more energy out of the target than you drove into the target. But to your point, if you draw your box around the entire fusion machine, including the capacitor bank, you only got, you know, percent and a half or so of the energy stored in the system out of the, out of the machine. And obviously that's not a practical basis for a power plant. You need to get about five X more out of the machine than was stored in the system to have a practical basis for a power plant. And so, to your question about milestones, that is the next big milestone for this field. It's demonstrating something called net facility gain, which is getting more energy out of the entire machine than everything required to run the machine. We like to define it as all of the energy stored in the system. Um, and a number of com…

AI assessment note: “demonstrating something called net facility gain, which is getting more energy out of the entire machine”

Q you mean? Obviously, if we're talking about fission world, there's like a, such a broad spectrum. If people talk about modular, they could be talking about a microreactor that's a megawatt, or they could be talking about, like, versions of SMRs they call modular, uh, and that's literally in the name SMR, but it's still 300 megawatts plus. So, like, what's a, what's a pixel size for modularity for you?

A I just mean big things that themselves consist of many small things. So tabletop scale fusion doesn't work, but our goal is to build fusion power plants in the couple hundred megawatt range, so in the two to 300 megawatt range, that themselves consist of modular mass-manufacturable building blocks. Um, and so in our case, the, most of the capital cost and footprint sits in the driver. This is true for a lot of different fusion approaches. For us, that driver consists of a 156 identical modules. Each of those modules produces more than a terawatt of peak power and sits in about the footprint of a shipping container and is made from oil, plastic, metal, and water. So we bring two things that make a big difference, right? The first is an established scientific foundation based on decades of work at the national laboratories and the breakthroughs that I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, but also a path to a modular, maintainable, deployable system that can scale more readily as a power source.

AI assessment note: “156 identical modules. Each of those modules produces more than a terawatt”

Q power plant design. Um, and so as a result, the folks Like yourselves and others who are saying, okay, we're going to get net facility gain in the next few years are generally not doing the same thing that INL did for that system. Why is that system not practical? And like, what is, what is the fundamental, what needs to be true to imagine that a design is practical?

A There are a lot of things that are important to consider here. So part one of practical might be what needs to be true to get more energy out of the entire fusion machine than was stored in the system. So what needs to be true to get in that facility gain? The second half of that question, which is equally important, I would argue, is what needs to be true to have a fusion power system that can scale, as in be maintainable, deployable, and affordable, such that it's a competitive source of power, right? Energy is a commodity market. At the end of the day, this whole thing is a race to the bottom on cost. So to start with the first, there are two things to consider. The first for lots of different fusion approaches is do you build on an established path to ignition and high gain, right? Is there experimental evidence that says the physics of what you're doing is going to work? Um, and then the second piece is, is your system efficient enough to do that in such a way that you get more energy out of the whole machine than, than was stored in the system? And so for example, The national ignition facility at Livermore was not designed to be a power system. It was designed for a different mission, and so it wasn't designed to get more fusion energy out of the whole system than was required to drive it. It has a relatively inefficient driver technology. What we do at Pacific Fusion is…

AI assessment note: “The national ignition facility at Livermore was not designed to be a power system.”

Q is believed that the path to one point oh one, uh, is way, way, way harder than the path from one to five. Is that your general view on it? Like, you get over this mountain that is net facility gain, and then after that you've just got, like, some version of engineering tweaks to make to get to five, or is that the wrong way to think about it?

A Yeah, I think we have to be careful, right? Nothing in fusion is ever easy, and I think trivializing the work required to make those improvements is not a good idea, but one way to think about, one way to think about what's often described as the ignition cliff is that to get your fusion fuel to generate more energy than is driven into the fuel, you have to get it to start self-propagating burn. And once you do that, it's easier to add a little more energy and get a lot more energy out. So there's lots of published literature on this. You can see different curves of the ignition cliff where you have for a very significant amount of current, for instance, in the case of a pulse system, you add a little more current, you don't get much more energy out, a little more current, you don't get much more energy out, a little more current, you don't get much more energy out. Then you hit this ignition cliff and suddenly a little bit more energy onto the target starts getting you way more energy out of the target. Um, so that, that is why, right, there's a lot of There's been a lot of focus in the field on finding that ignition cliff, and now on building systems that can drive targets up that ignition cliff, and obviously design all the supporting systems to be able to work in those kinds of yield regimes.

AI assessment note: “once you do that, it's easier to add a little more energy and get”

Q but is it true to a first order that, um, basically every additional point of, of gain that you can get translates to, like, Pretty linearly higher, essentially what would be higher efficiency in another type of system, which is, which is lower LCOE. Like, uh, should a, an equal amount of focus be placed on every additional point of gain as it is on every additional reduction of capex?

A Yes, with some footnotes. So one way to think about it is if you treat, imagine a system and you treat it as fixed, like a fixed capital cost of the system, the nameplate capacity of that system, so the amount of power that it produces, is going to be determined in a pulsed inertial system like what we're building by the gain, so the amount of energy you get per shot, and the rep rate, the number of fusion shots that you take per unit time. And so, if you imagine building infrastructure, right, building fusion power systems, you can imagine building a fleet that starts with the ability to produce some amount of power per unit system at some nameplate capacity, and then with improvements over time, so upgrades to the fusion chamber to accommodate a higher rep rate, and upgrades to those fusion targets as we iterate on them on the demonstration system, that that same physical thing can produce more power and as a result have a lower effective LCOE.

AI assessment note: “Yes, with some footnotes. So one way to think about it is”

Q We just still have to do a first of a kind that has the net gain of five X and right. There's like another version of a, I guess there is a first of a kind. The demonstration is a demo. The next is first of a kind. Is that the way to think about it?

A It's a good way to think about it. I think people tend to, if you talk to people and ask them, define a demo system, define a pilot system, define a first-of-a-kind system, everybody needs something different. Um, but what I can talk about is sort of what our demo system can do from a capability perspective and how we think about what will be new on a first power system and then what it looks like to scale from there. So the demo system is designed in many ways to demonstrate a facility gain and also importantly to iterate on these fusion targets. So we have a lot of diagnostics on the demo system. We've designed it such that we can test prototype components of commercial systems on it, a commercial chamber on it. So take shorter runs at higher rep rates, for example. And as a result, it serves as a really important de-risking platform for a lot of the core technologies, including the targets and a platform upon which we can continue to iterate on targets that are relevant for commercial systems. On a power system, there's a really big difference between a power system and the demo system from a technical perspective. There are many, but one important one to understand is that the power system will be rep rated at about a hertz, so once a second, whereas the demo system will be rep rated at a shot a day. And when you think about a lot of the capital components like the Pulsar a…

AI assessment note: “It's a good way to think about it.”

Q when you think about the, the supply chain, obviously this is going to vary depending on which of the approaches are We talk about some of the approaches require high temperature superconducting magnets, which has its own pretty limited supply chain. Um, but I'm curious what you think of as like the potential, let's say we do scale up a fusion power generation market, where might supply chain bottlenecks emerge?

A I think you said it well when you said it's really dependent on the technology. So something like high temperature superconductors are a relevant, a relevant piece of the puzzle for steady state approaches like tokamaks instillerators. They're not relevant for inertial approaches like what we do. Our objective in designing our systems and one of the reasons that we founded this company is because we see a path to avoid reliance on what I would call broadly speaking specialized materials. So as I mentioned, a lot of the system is built from oil, plastic, metal, and water. We'll have the same procurement work to deal with as any other energy system. We think about balance of plant and other such components, but there's nothing inherently rare or expensive, meaning that the bottleneck to scale up ends up being effectively a manufacturing bottleneck. So for a lot of these core components, you can procure them in small volumes today, maybe not quite at the performance and lifetime requirements you need, but there's not, there's, you know, a lot of the vendors, Do these in small volumes. As a result, the multiple on the bomb is relatively high, and so the challenge is in building capacity, both in the supplier base and internally, to deliver those components at the scales and at the performance requirements needed.

AI assessment note: “the bottleneck to scale up ends up being effectively a manufacturing bottleneck”

Q What about fuel? Talk to me about the fuel supply chain.

A Yeah, fusion fuel obviously is very different from fission fuel. There's no uranium, no plutonium, nothing that you can use to make a weapon. For fusion systems, the fuel is deuterium, so it's an isotope of hydrogen found commonly in seawater and tritium, um, and what that means in practice is that it's deuterium and lithium because every fusion approach out there needs to breed its own tritium to be economical, so make tritium from fusion events using deuterium and lithium. That stuff is readily available. Tritium is important to consider, though, because every fusion approach to be commercially viable needs a sustainable tritium economy. So that means you need your startup volume of tritium to be relatively small, and then you need your operating fusion power system to produce more tritium than it consumes, such that you can start additional systems and cold start your system when needed. And there are a number of people working on this in the field, it's a challenge, it's common to the whole field, but there are differences in, across different fusion approaches around the volume of tritium required to start up, And then how rapidly that tritium can be bred, or how efficiently that tritium can be bred with the system that exists.

AI assessment note: “every fusion approach out there needs to breed its own tritium to be economical”

Q made a public target or anything like that, but whether for Pacific fusioners generally, give a view on like what we should be anticipating as the asymptotic, how cheap can this get? Basically, what are we targeting here for either capital cost or level of cost of energy? Like, where should we think about fusion, you know, in, in 15 years in the context of the overall energy supply landscape?

A What we ask ourselves when founding this company is, is there a path ultimately to be cheaper than combined cycle natural gas? Because if there is, you have a really exciting business, and if there's not, you know, you can still build an interesting business, but it's not going to be as scalable as we'd like to see fusion be. And obviously that at the beginning ends up being a thought exercise, right? You use the best available data to make capital cost estimates. You figure out what you need to believe from an uptime perspective, from a yield perspective, and then you have a nice spreadsheet that tells you we see a path to do this. And then you actually get into the work of building, and that tells you how quickly you can achieve or move toward those goals. So for me to tell you, you know, Ruby, a 150 bucks a megawatt hour in 2038 would obviously be Misleading at best, but I think the thing that's exciting is that if you look at the capital cost of the driver, if you look at the capital cost of balance of plan equipment, um, if you look at the fusion game that you need to believe in, there's nothing preventing fusion from being as cheap as anything else out there, and our objective is to move toward that goal as quickly and capital efficiently as we can.

AI assessment note: “is there a path ultimately to be cheaper than combined cycle natural gas?”

Q it, something like this could apply elsewhere. And other technology companies that want to do that have a big capital intense journey ahead of them, which you certainly do and did, um, but want to de-risk that as much as they can from day one. So can you just talk about a little bit about like how you have financed Pacific fusion and what works and doesn't work about it?

A Yeah, I'm glad you asked the question, and I know you bring real appreciation for how big of a role financing risk can play in this success of young companies, especially hardware companies. I mean, we saw the story so many times in Cleantech One Dot O, where you have a company that doesn't have line of sight to the necessary capital to place procurements before your lead times, or get a building built, or actually make material progress against this big thing, meaning it's hard to make progress, meaning it's hard to raise, and you just get stuck in the cycle of death. And so for, for something like a fusion system, to be able to go fast, you need line of sight to the capital to go fast. Like, we're building large facilities. This is the kind of thing that works on a tabletop. The lead times associated with getting those things built are long. And when this company was founded, this is actually how I met the team. The team had come together and realized that based on the demonstration of ignition at Livermore, we knew the conditions for ignition at high gain. Based on researchers at Sandia achieving the second best fusion performance ever. And our CTO inventing technology that more than doubles the efficiency and power density of systems like Z. We had a practical path to deliver those same physical conditions with an affordable, modular, mass-manufacturable system. Like, that …

AI assessment note: “defining a clear set of milestones against which you can finance a business”

Q of hard on the outside to, I think, actually, like, figure out what various announcements mean and how important different milestones are and things like that. Can you walk me through how you think about, like, what are the milestones that we really should be looking out for? If we are trying to track the progress of fusion on its way toward being like a commercially viable source of electricity.

A It's an important question, and I'm glad you asked. Um, I'll start with what was recently proven, because I think it really changed the field, and it's important for folks to understand, right? Infusion, obviously the running joke has been 30 years away and always will be, and it's important to understand what happened in the last couple years to put this moment into context, and then we can talk about some of the milestones that are yet to come. Um, but, but I think the most important thing to start with is that a couple of breakthroughs in twenty-twenty-two completely changed what's possible in the field. So first, researchers at Livermore National Laboratory, up the road from where I'm sitting in the Bay Area right now, demonstrated controlled ignition, which is a really, really big deal. They got more energy, quite a lot more energy out of a little fusion target, and they drove into the target. And what that means is that we in the field now definitively know the conditions for ignition, and as a result also high gain fusion. And the challenge has now become, how do you drive fuel to those conditions with a system that is a practical basis for a power plant? And that's a really, really different challenge than this question of, you know, where in the physical landscape can we get more energy out of a fusion machine than when in?

AI assessment note: “I'll start with what was recently proven... then we can talk about some of the milestones”

Q so I guess what I need to understand is your modular building blocks that are, whatever you said, oil, plastic, water, and something else, are those, like, Uh, 50% of the capital cost of, or the bomb, or are they 10% of the bomb, or, you know what I mean? Like, how, how much are you gonna be able to drive cost as a result of scale of those components?

A It's a really significant portion of the capital cost. Like, it's much, much more than 10%. I think there's a lot of, as you know, right, we live in a seller's market for balance of plant equipment right now, which is common to all energy technologies. Those numbers are moving, and so it would be premature to give you a specific percentage, but it is a very significant cost driver. Um, like, not a small percent. It's a very large percent of the overall system, at least today, and it's the stuff that's common to the demonstration system that we're building by twenty-thirty. Right? We're not buying a turbine to put on that thing, but we are building the whole pulse power driver in many ways as we would for a first power system. The other pieces of the system to think about, like if you think about the system in categories of major subsystems, you've got the driver, which we talked about. You've got these fusion targets, which are tiny little cans filled with fusion fuel, and they're really important for the fusion gain that you mentioned. You have what we consider the fusion chamber, um, so the area surrounding the target that has to Breed tritium, capture the fusion energy output and heat exchange with your balance of plant equipment, then you have all the balance of plant equipment that's common to lots of different energy technologies. You need to account for losses at differe…

AI assessment note: “it would be premature to give you a specific percentage, but it is a very significant cost driver”