 Okay, let me thank you all for coming. My name is Steve Kahn. I'm the Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences here at Berkeley. And I asked Maria and some of our staff to organize this event because to be honest, we were getting lots of questions from alumni and from donors and others. You know, what's going on with all this fusion stuff? And so there seems to be a fair amount of interest on the public as a whole. I think most of you have noticed or probably noticed the press coverage that came around December and January over the achievements at Livermore that we'll talk about in a few minutes. We've assembled for this process expert panel of various individuals. We'll introduce them in a minute. To cover fusion in a very broad sense, starting with what is it? How does it work? Why is it attractive? Why is it hard? And what's been achieved recently? And what is the path toward the future? I think as probably many of you know, fusion is a process where two light nuclei combine together to produce a heavier nucleus, releasing a significant amount of energy in the process. This is the process, the physics process that powers the stars. It's also the physics behind the hydrogen bomb. But the real challenge, and it's been a challenge for many years, has been how to harness nuclear fusion, so-called controlled nuclear fusion in a way that we can convert it into a more usable form of energy without exploding the laboratory. And so that's been one of the issues. There are sort of two general approaches to controlled nuclear fusion. One is called magnetic fusion, which uses magnetic fields to try to constrain plasmas and heat them up to temperatures where the nuclei will fuse. And the other is generally called inertial confinement fusion where we essentially put a lot of energy into a unit containing hydrogen, a deuterium, tritium, various combinations, and then get that to implode and therefore heat up to high temperatures and cause fusion. The press attention that came in December was due to an accomplishment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which we'll hear about. That was in the inertial confinement fusion regime. And it was the first time when the amount of fusion energy released was larger than the amount of energy that was deposited on the pellet containing the deuterium and tritium. So that was a breakthrough, if you like in the field and has given significant interest and hope that we're on the path to develop this into something that could be usable. There've also been great strides in magnetic fusion and we have someone on the panel who will talk about that today. And a lot of investment from venture capitals and startups in attempting to harness both types of fusion to eventually lead to an important source of energy for the economy as a whole. So of course fusion's exciting because it produces clean energy. That could be a game changer, as you know, for helping to solve some of the climate problems, but also enabling us to move away from fossil fuels and toward a source of energy generation that would be self-sustaining for many years. It's possible that this is a long way off. There has been work on fusion for many, many years already. The joke is to say, you know, how far off is it? And it's always 10 years off. And so perhaps the more recent achievements have changed that story and that's what I think you'll hear about a little bit. But it is tremendously exciting. And of course significant advances in technology can occur relatively suddenly. There have been tremendous surprises along the way in many areas of science. And this is one of them that's perhaps on the brink. So with that introduction, I will introduce our moderator for the panel, Roger Falcone, who's sitting near the front. Roger was for many years a professor of physics at Berkeley. Here at Berkeley, he was a former chair of the department. He was also the director of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Roger's research over the years has been involved with the physics of extreme conditions of pressure and temperature and how that operates on various different levels. And since he turned emeritus a year or so ago, he's been actively involved in looking into fusion as an advisor to various committees for the government and elsewhere. So let me turn it over to Roger and you can go ahead and introduce the panel. Thanks, Steve. When I first became a professor at Berkeley, Steve and I, Steve just became a professor at the same time and we had a joint laboratory where we studied plasma physics. So it all comes around in a circle here. Let's see, we have a very distinguished panel. I'm going to briefly introduce them. You have copies of a little more extensive statements on their background, but I'll introduce the panel and then I have an initial question for each of them. Our plan is to essentially have presentations, questions by me for a total of about an hour and then we'll go to the audience for questions. Depending on the enthusiasm of the audience, we might extend that a bit too. So first on my far right is Dan Cason. He's a professor of physics and astronomy. He is also associated with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and he's our theorist here tonight. Studies the basic science of processes, nuclear processes in the universe and of course is very familiar with fusion and other processes, violent things that happen in the universe. The right to my right here is Carl Van Biber. He's a professor of nuclear engineering, chair of the department right now. Studies all sorts of interesting things in particle astrophysics, basic and applied sciences. He has served as associate dean in the College of Engineering, so like many great and dedicated faculty here at Berkeley, he manages to jump back and forth between administrative work and then being a professor and doing research and we admire that. Kim Boudille is here. Second from the right, Kim is the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Part of the UC system, she sets the vision for the laboratory, she's a terrific leader out there and happened to be director at just the right time when this breakthrough happens. I think we can credit Kim with a lot of that. Of course, Kim and I know each other from student days. She was a University of California PhD at UC Davis. And finally, right here is Rick Needham. Second from my right, he's the chief commercial officer from Commonwealth Fusion Systems and it's really terrific that you could be here with us today. He has a lot of experience in the energy sector, worked at Google and helped direct some of the new activities there and now is connected with Commonwealth Fusion Systems. You've probably read a lot about that. It's working together with MIT and we're really pleased that he was able to be here. It turns out he spends a lot of time on the West Coast which is lucky for us that he could be here and we're particularly interested in his, some of his views on the economics of this whole endeavor of making fusion power. So let's see, just to start off, I just have a kind of an opening question which the panel will take a few minutes to discuss. Maybe some have movies to show and they'll take five minutes. They may or may not choose to answer my question but that's okay, that's their prerogative. So Dan, what nuclear processes happen in the universe and how does that relate at all to helping us power the planet? That's sort of a provocative question but are we gonna show the movie or are you gonna call for it when it's appropriate? He's sure, that would be great. Okay, yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'll give a little introduction of the basics of fusion and the relevance it has in our universe, as it was said, it powers most of what we see in the sky and the basic idea is that in typical burning, you're sort of creating bonds or breaking bonds of atoms and a similar process of nuclear burning is happening with the nucleus which is sort of a million times smaller so the energy scales are about a million times greater and so you can have a very concentrated energy source that's converting up to a thousandths of the mass of the material into energy and the universe are basically two ways to do it. You can take heavy nuclei and split them apart to lighter nuclei and fission or you can take lighter elements and fuse them together into heavier elements and the latter that we'll talk about here it requires really extreme conditions because you need very high temperatures to get the particles moving fast enough to actually come together and fuse and so in the universe we have a wonderful example of this in the sun and the sun is a wonderfully stable nuclear reactor is a core of about 10 million degrees and the strong pressure in that environment is held together by the gravity of this massive body in this wonderful stable reactor system where if the fusion starts burning a little too hot the pressure will sort of puff up the star and quench it or if it's too slow the gravity will pull it in and speed it back up so a ingenious kind of engineering system that unfortunately you can't reproduce on earth so we're gonna hear about more creative solutions that you can do in terrestrial experiments and sometimes there can be instabilities in that process so in more massive stars, stars like 10, 100 times the mass of the sun they can sort of exhaust their fuel very quickly and then lead to catastrophic collapse formation of black holes and neutron stars and release sort of the energy that the sun will burn over its entire lifetime in a few seconds and these are supernova explosions and other stellar explosions are what my students in postdocs study theoretically and with computer simulations run on supercomputers that try to capture these complex multi-physics environments that very similar to the ones that they're exploring in the labs now and so it's really in these processes stellar fusion and explosive fusion in stars and supernova explosions that the heavy elements of the universe all the stuff around us was formed so there's sort of an origin story involved in all of this and so if you want you can show the movie of one such example This is actually kind of an artist rendition of the type of simulations we do and it involves two neutron stars you can think of a neutron star sort of a nucleus the size of the mass of the sun dense as a nucleus and here are two neutron stars orbiting around emitting gravitational waves and eventually coalescing and colliding in an extremely energetic and hot kind of explosion and emitting debris out into the universe and it's under those sort of explosive conditions that you have all these nuclear processes happening you have fusion of elements into heavier elements all the way up to fusing to uranium and plutonium and then those elements fissioning back down and so those kind of events we think are producing the heavy elements like gold and platinum and uranium in the universe and so we're studying a whole range of phenomena like that to try to understand how this all plays out on the astrophysical scale and translates to earth perhaps yeah produces all the elements here on earth okay thank you so Carl you're up next so my lead in for you is do we actually need nuclear power either fission or fusion or both it's taken a long time to try to perfect these systems and we know there's some problems so will nuclear power in general grow to be a larger fraction of our energy use? thank you so I think my thinking on that question I think there's no question that we need nuclear power in one form or the other at least one should work to get us out of the paradigm of sort of a carbon-based energy system for a world which is growing and many economies emerging that have dramatically growing energy needs and I think we're all very familiar with the problems of you know associated with carbonizing the atmosphere and the need to sort of decarbonize the atmosphere the it is simply so attractive to tap into uh... sources of of nuclear energy whether they be fission or fusion simply because the scales associated with it are so vastly greater by factors of millions than chemical energy the uh... and it's amazing to me you know as a physicist not an engineer uh... thinking about the history of the father of nuclear physics lord Rutherford, Ernest Lord Rutherford died in 1937 in 1933 said anyone is talking about getting energy out of the uh... of the nucleus is talking moonshine and uh... literally five years later december of 1938 was the discovery by Hanan Strassman a fission uh... 1942 the first sustained nuclear reaction by Enrico Fermi at chicago uh... 1945 after a massive government program and uh... a world war, real cataclysm was uh... sort of uh... uh... a sort of weaponizable nuclear weapons that could be transported and used uh... and then by 1951 we had energy on the grid uh... fission is uh... like falling off a log it really went that fast fusion uh... in principle is very attractive uh... but it's been since the 1946 patent uh... UK patent of uh... Thompson and Blackett it's been seventy something years we're just now getting breakthrough in one case it's really an issue of of perfecting the engineering engineering discipline the other is uh... i think there are still some questions a lot of questions that the netherworld between physics and engineering that need to be solved fusion is a much harder thing uh... several qualifications that it needs to have you have it has to be scalable to very large uh... be able to produce many many uh... you know gigawatts uh... of power and in each region uh... scalable uh... it has to be have a good cost model i mean our current fleet of reactors we have to be very proud of is about a hundred in the u.s uh... their uh... availability uh... that which is measured very closely is in the ninety percent they're on all the time they provide base power when uh... there's no wind or solar there so they're very essential for providing that base power uh... they have to be uh... safe uh... we're against all possibilities of uh... various uh... uh... accidents uh... and they also have to be uh... proliferation resistant you don't want them uh... uh... the uh... the the byproducts or the main fuel being misused to diverted for uh... production of nuclear weapons uh... but it really is come comes down to engineering discipline and as a physicist i very very high regard for engineering in fact i would say pivotal moments my own life you know having been born in new london connecticut to to date myself a little bit when i was about yay hi my father took me down to the thames river and we saw the novelist go out to see on the sea trials it was the world's first nuclear submarine and i was too young to understand that but i understood that the world had changed and then many years later decades later having spent twenty five years at livermore was watching from the gestation of the national mission facility coming from a concept to construction project nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and nine and then uh... seeing it turn on and then this wonderful thing that happened on my birthday thank you so december december fifth uh... the uh... every time i walk through there it's simply awesome so we need it it can be made to work the new generation of fission reactors uh... the small modular molten salt cool reactors uh... are going to provide much much better economic model safety and uh... proliferation resistance from the old fleet of uh... like water reactors and fusion uh... i'm pulling for i hope it works thank you carl uh... next up is ken uh... so ken my provocative question is what was the breakthrough at livermore and why is it important how does it relate to fusion energy and what's next all in five minutes so before i start i'm gonna address your point about how it was all down to me so when i became director and i said uh... had a plan at a thirty sixty hundred a plan for the lab so thirty days figure out what's going on sixty days do some stuff hundred days i had only one item on the list and i thought well ignition and if we'll put that out of the second item so on just about day one hundred we had our first indication we were going to get close we got a one point three five megajoule shot so not quite ignition but point seven they said the only thing between us and ignition was an unreasonable expectation alright so i'm gonna show a brief movie just orient you to what happened uh... at livermore as has been said this is a very very very long journey to this accomplishment uh... started sixty years ago with the idea that we wanted to be able to create the conditions to study fusion in a laboratory so uh... you know modern human thermonuclear weapons had shown that was possible to create fusion on earth uh... but not in a not in a form where you could really get in there and study the detailed physics or control it and use it for other purposes and so uh... some very bold big thinkers had some great ideas that have uh... finally come to fruition so we can and here's the movie here's a movie so this them there we go this is the target chamber for the national ignition facility uh... which appeared in the movie star trek into darkness as the warp core of the starship enterprise pretty cool so niff is the world's largest most energetic laser to put that into context the facility itself is the size of three-foot ball fields and cross-section and ten stories tall at its its greatest extent that uh... those folks are holding the targets we put in the chamber the typical target is about a centimeter so we're gonna generate all this laser energy and concentrated into a very small volume and that's the trick for creating the conditions that enable you to create fusion laboratory so there's a hundred ninety two laser beams at the niff they get uh... transported into a little gold can the the laser beams hit the walls of the can and turn into x-rays which paid a little tiny capsule about two millimeters in diameter made out of diamond outer surface of the capsule blows off that causes the inner surface to move in and compressed deuterium and tritium which are in the center and if you can do that fast enough uh... and symmetrically enough and hold it together long enough you can get to the point where the fusion reactions start to beat out the loss mechanisms so fusion plasmas want to blow apart and the trick here is to create the conditions around the fusion plasma uh... that hold it together long enough for that process to begin to bootstrap and takeover so i mentioned the one point three five megajoule shot that was august eight twenty twenty one uh... it had been uh... a decade of operation in niff we've done uh... several hundred uh... attempts at these big ignition shots you know we can do uh... these very high energy shots about once uh... every few days uh... a true shot that produces high fusion yields we can do about once a week so it's a very slow iteration process these targets are artisanal works of art it takes about seven months from start to finish to create a fully uh... complete target and those little capsules made of diamond have to be you know perfectly smooth completely without imperfections uh... on a scale that's almost unimaginable so there are you know hand built and polished and assembled uh... to extreme precision because any deviation from that kind of precision uh... gives you ways to turn the fusion reactions off in the target so the boyd by that one point three five megajoule shot the team began iterating on the design of the experiment and we have a few levers how you deliver the laser energy how much laser energy you can put into the target and then the specifics of the uh... components of the target and began a journey of trying to repeat that experiment and then begin to turn up the yield and so last december fifth uh... the team was able to uh... field a target we were able to turn the laser energy up just a little bit from we usually shoot about one point nine megajoules up to about two point oh five megajoules of laser energy and produce three point one five megajoules a fusion yield so the national academies gave us the decision definition of fusion ignition as target gain greater than one so that's target gain of one point five it takes three hundred and thirty megajoules to power the laser so this is not you know wall plug gain of one point five so there is a long way to go we can do one fusion ignition experiment a week uh... to go to an energy scheme you need to be able to do it ten times a second uh... now this facility was built to do national security work into study control nuclear fusion so it wasn't built to be efficient wasn't built to do energy research the laser itself is only point seven percent efficient so there's a huge amount of technological headroom with modern technologies to really begin to address many of these uh... concerns but it's the first time in history that a fusion experiment has produced more fusion energy than required uh... to initiate the experiment so pretty darn exciting uh... and for folks in a scientific community a real demonstration of the big payoff when you invest in these really enormous scientific undertakings so very exciting thank you kim uh... we just had this celebration of uh... ignition at livermore and i would went out to to see it and kim mentioned that it felt like an alumni gathering at a college uh... there were people from the classes from seventy years ago who were uh... who were there the original designers and it felt like that kind of gathering because people have been working on this for a while but it was all it was great to get together uh... our final uh... introduction is uh... by rick and my question to you is uh... the world many nations have agreed to spend tens of billions of dollars on a fusion reactor in kardash in france that's but i don't know if it's the largest project we've ever done globally uh... uh... to build a demonstration tokamak fusion facility uh... what it why is your approach at commonwealth different and why do you think you can get there before this massive international project uh... well thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me here uh... i'm going to talk about a version of fusion that's different than what kim talked about so i'll be talking about magnetic confinement versus inertial confinement and our our version of this is a tokamak which is the same architecture as the one that roger mentioned is being built in the south of france which is by the way i think the largest construction project in europe right now uh... twenty five billion expected to be much more than that uh... why do we think that we can do it faster the reason is because we're using uh... there's two elements to what we're doing but the reason we can be faster is we are using an innovation that either just name of the project did not have access to what is that it's a high-temperature superconducting magnet uh... that allows us to have a much much higher magnetic field than what the project in either is able to use and that's because it was designed many many years ago started construction two thousand seven uh... the best magnets they could use for low-temperature superconducting magnets which once you get up to certain man high enough magnetic fields they lose their ability to superconduct which means you can't run a lot of current through them without losses and so you're limited in the magnetic field that you can get high-temperature superconducting other than just the name higher temperature so it operates at slightly higher temperature but it's still pretty cold like tens of kelvin uh... the biggest deal is you can operate those at high magnetic fields very high magnetic fields and they stay superconducting so what does that mean that means we can take what has been classically viewed as the least risky approach diffusion energy which is tokamaks which is magnetic donut a hundred over hundred fifty of them have been built over the last fifty years their progress has been more than Moore's law in terms of how well they are performing until you get to a point where you had to build it big because you couldn't have a strong magnetic field and that took a lot of time and it took a lot of capital and that's what eater is a big machine in the south of france with a high temperature superconducting magnet we can build something that basically has the same architecture same physics but at one-fortieth of the size so it allows us to build a commercially relevant architecture fusion plant which is happening right now we're building one right now just outside boston we call it spark uh... and it will show net energy gain online by about twenty twenty five that net energy gain we're targeting is about ten not not just one or one point whatever it's actually ten which means it's going to be enough gain which means ten times amount of the heat comes out as we put in uh... that will be relevant for a commercial plant you can then attach a power producing plant to it and it would make electricity that's not what the intention of this first plant is the first plan is to show you get net energy gain once we've shown that with enough gain uh... we've been told and we certainly think that will be able to raise a lot of capital to go build the first fusion plant that produces electricity and puts it on the grid timeline for that is really twenty thirties we're right now looking at sites for that plant we're looking for off-takers for the power from that plant and we're looking for ways to fund that plant it takes a long time to build a power project especially a fusion one first of a kind so stepping back though i think we've we've talked about a little bit but maybe it you know i'll try make it as clear as i can well why is fusion so freaking awesome uh... it's because it is it is clean it is zero emissions energy abundant everywhere it is uh... safe it has no high-level radioactive waste it has no chain reaction has no chance of meltdown has no decay it has no transuranic materials has no chance of proliferation it's scalable people talk about small module reactors will build we're building a small modular fusion plant uh... we are manufacturing magnets today outside boston modules eighteen of them go into the plant and it's also secure it has no proliferation risk has no geopolitical risk it's not tied to any supply chain really uh... other than high-temperature superconductors it you can place all the fuel for the entire plant on it day one and not have to import anything anything so in essence you're creating it's just a new paradigm for how you think about energy you're creating energy your manufacturing energy the fuel cost is de minimis it just takes capital to build a plant and then you're making energy why because it's two hundred million times the energy per reaction and burning coal it's uh... it's just this is why it's in sci-fi this is why everyone loves it this is why it's so fantastic the problem is it's been really hard to achieve how to achieve star conditions on earth chemistry that you can do it so amazing uh... the question is no longer can you create fusion conditions on earth the question is can you do it in an economic way that provides power power anywhere everywhere at a reasonable cost and we uh... as we're building our first pilot plant the spark plant outside boston we're getting very good indications of what the cost to build because why because we have costs we have receipts we have thousands of vendors making tens of thousands of parts to go into a facility so we'll have a very good sense of what the capital cost of this plant will be there's another part of the cost which is the operating cost which we have some indications of but frankly you don't know until you build it uh... and part of the operating cost is the fuel which is obviously as i've mentioned really de minimis the fuel is basically deuterium a form of hydrogen that you can extract from seawater it's tritium well to see it very expensive and hard to find and it's has a half-life of twelve years it's just not not naturally occurring but you can see it with a little bit of tritium and then you can breathe your own tritium obviously some engineering work to prove that you can do that uh... and then we have lithium which is in a blanket that will surround the plant and will breathe the tritium all that stuff you can literally put on site day one and not have to import any fuel so we are focused commonwealth fusion systems is focused from the very beginning not on a particular architecture we've been focused on what is the most what is the fastest way to get to commercial fusion power and the fastest way in our view is use the least risky approach tocomax and use this innovation called high-temperature superconducting magnets that allows you to shrink it down and make it a commercially relevant architecture and plant that you can go build uh... we've raised over two billion we're now over five hundred people and we've got the most aggressive approach to producing electricity on the grid these were all great presentations great introductions i'm sure they um... seated a bunch of questions to i'm i'm gonna start off with maybe just couple questions um... so with any new technology like this the public has to be engaged uh... if they are convinced that this is not a good idea it seems to me things won't go forward in nuclear power we had Chernobyl we had yucca mountain we had three mile island each of those had their own problems of contaminating in an accident waste disposal high-cost operate and so on and and and switzerland in germany are closing their fission power plants down uh... so without public support it's it seems like they could run into impediments and that also gets into the question of how the government should be involved here i mean we have billions of dollars of private capital funding this and yet the government wants to get involved either in regulation or funding its own research in this area so how do we get the public how do we get the government on board when in some sense it's a little bit like the wild wild west here we have a bunch of companies dozens of companies each with their own ideas uh... going forward uh... is that all that's needed or do we need public support do we need government support uh... anyone can jump in but uh... those with the microphone will speak first i'm not with the government so i'm happy to answer the question but uh... uh... it's a new form of power that you know it may sound crazy may it may sound hyperbolic but there will be a before and there will be an after like the steam engine if the fusion energy becomes economic and available we will live in a world of energy abundance is still the challenge of deploying it is still engineering challenge of building it so it's economic but there will be a before and after so should the government get involved in that i think so as a taxpayer i think so uh... and frankly the government probably hasn't been funding it as much as it probably should given this is literally something that could change the way we live change the world not just our own country but the way we live uh... that being said there are mechanisms of support we've been working with most of the national labs uh... trying to make sure we're advancing some of the science questions that still need to be addressed with respect to fusion that's materials it's operating uh... and height you know high-temperature physics and how materials operate in those environments uh... how to plasmas perform what are ways to control those plasmas there's a whole bunch of stuff that's going on but because of some of these innovations that happen like the high-temperature superconducting materials you can potentially make a leap forward uh... but the government involvement is also super critical in making sure that it's an understood energy source and we recognize this as well we will do our entire industry a disservice if we just decide we're going to build a plant somewhere not tell anyone about it and what it is why because first off people think oh fusion that's nuclear uh... it it it does operate from a nucleus uh... that is where the energy comes from but the safety profile is so so very different from fission i mean i i was a submarine officer my early days so i've been in new london i've seen the nautilus i ran nuclear fission plants underwater uh... but fusion is so different it doesn't have the same safety profile this is why we work very closely with other parts of the government the nuclear regulatory commission who just announced one month ago uh... that all five commissioners unanimously decided that they will regulate the u.s. will regulate fusion like they regulate particle accelerators or like medical fills facilities that have uh... you know nuclear materials or irradiated materials not like they regulate fission plants uh... where they the design of the plant and the operations of the plant are highly regulated for fusion plants is just gonna be based on the materials you have on site tritium and some irradiated materials why does that make sense it makes sense because that's what the safety profile is a fusion plant cannot undergo a rapid chain reaction that's uncontrollable cannot it just cannot melt down uh... it cannot release um... transurated material it has no proliferation risk they went through some of these but it doesn't have those those attributes and that's why uh... the government regulators took a very close look there's after two and a half years stakeholder engagement and deciding that this is the regulatory path that makes sense the the u k has also decided on that approach other countries are still deciding so it's an imperative that the government also works on this eight because it's it literally can change the world but also because it's a very important that communities are brought along uh... with understanding with what this technology really is its benefits but also how it fit with those communities and that's incredibly important something we've been involved in in boston where we're building our plant let me just pick up on something you let in with that question our roger about public perception and uh... public support uh... one of the things to me that is so incredibly encouraging uh... you know uh... being uh... the chair of a nuclear engineering department is that the current young generation of people growing up are just extraordinarily enthused nuclear energy whether it be fission or fusion uh... they do not share the prejudices of their of their parents and their grandparents uh... in fact uh... every year the number of people applying to our department who want to get a diffusion uh... basically is more than all the other sub disciplines combined and uh... it's it's it's really quite extraordinary something that that was sort of emblazoned in my mind i remember uh... someone telling me uh... several months ago uh... sent me an email that there was this remarkable young woman a high school student in sweden uh... by name of uh... jaan ansturt as a dutch last name but she's a swedish activist seventeen years old went to cop twenty seven you know the uh... uh... the committee on policies twenty seven was in charmer el shake in egypt where they talk about the implementation of the uh... you know the uh... the paris agreement and uh... set resolutions and and and a very formal document the the wording which is very important who had a very late hour changed the wording to actually include nuclear energy in uh... uh... in the in the in the joint resolution uh... so it wasn't simply renewables but it was uh... uh... it was renewables plus plus nuclear and uh... she became a press celebrity all around the world and what was interesting to cut my eye is they asked what she wanted to do in the future and she said i want to go to berkeley as a as a student so immediately and this is something about your department hasn't done we had her give by zoom a departmental colloquium on uh... you know the international policy having to do with nuclear power and uh... uh... you know the the the the whole thing of uh... of uh... how the uh... the whole agreements are are are going it was just marvelous and and uh... so to me that's very encouraging is the enthusiasm of young people so i just want to add one brief comment on public support so we wouldn't be having this conversation without decades of public support for fusion research this was a really big moonshot scale long-term challenge we've talked about the ignition result as the right brothers moment you know this is this would not have happened without that long-term view of the value of investments in science and the value of investments in the kinds of specialized facilities and capabilities we have uh... across the country and so you know what's unique about this moment is combining that uh... scientific might and capability with the risk-taking of the private sector to accelerate what we're doing right the public sector is slow-moving and risk averse uh... but has this huge scale and so if you can bring those two things together you know there could be fusion energy on the grid on that i've sure hope on the timescales uh... that you mentioned before but if not ten years you know twenty years would be awesome so i think it's important thanks uh... you mentioned the idea of the importance of research in this area you're collaborating with the national laboratories ken you've been doing research for many years in this area so i want to talk a little bit about publication of ideas here uh... it seems to me to be very complex uh... on the one hand we have proprietary ideas that business is worried about and i've talked a lot of fusion companies that are worried about uh... basically the threats the constant threat of their intellectual property being stolen as they're developing fusion this is this is for real uh... companies don't always publish their best results uh... for competitive reasons uh... on the other hand uh... research into fusion that goes on here on earth can benefit fundamental understanding and the kind of thing that you wonder about uh... worry about and and there's this constant interplay between the fundamental and the uh... proprietary part and then there's the national security risk that may be involved here these are uh... uh... there are issues associated with fusion that are obviously related to our nuclear stockpile uh... and and and so their national security issues just seems to me that it's a uh... real in some sense a mess but do we sort it all out uh... what is the role of scientific publication or any publication a revelation you want support but you can't tell people about it it's hard so does anyone want to weigh in on the the use of of uh... publishing results here and dan if you want to talk at first about uh... you know how this is benefiting fundamental understanding that'd be great yeah i would uh... echo what carl said about the enthusiasm of of young people and students that are coming in in physics and astronomy too and working on some of these uh... problems and uh... understanding the physics involved in nuclear actions and reactive flows and a lot of our students that are you know come in training in astrophysics wind up going to deliver more other industry companies they get excited about uh... the the commercial and and uh... benefits to energy in the world uh... and uh... and so yeah the you know a lot of the work we're doing is is building fundamental tools and in innovating uh... you know codes and simulations and other uh... experimental techniques uh... that is done for in the in the open and published as part of the general scientific literature uh... and and then uh... to some extent gets uh... uh... integrated into some of the other applications and uh... you know we we're learning much uh... potentially about you know astrophysics and fundamental uh... physics from these experiments and was fantastic to have you know in the lab some sort of conditions that we only see you know thousands of light years away has been experiments where they've done uh... you know built uh... strong shocks that are similar to what you see when a supernova moving a few percent of the speed of light runs into gas around there and uh... they've actually seen particles getting accelerated in these complex shock regions uh... which is the process we think you know cosmic rays are produced in the universe cosmic rays that are showering down upon us so we're learning a lot about uh... different uh... shock physics and nuclear reactions uh... and there's uh... you know a lot of uh... uh... potential interaction there in an engagement of students and postdocs yet you guys uh... don't publish everything uh... neither of you publish everything that you're doing here so we yeah but we we think the process of scientific uh... endeavor in the scientific method in publishing your results in being transparent about them are incredibly important because the whole fusion industry suffers and i know this because was looking at fusion when i was at google but then i was investor five years and one of largest private equity firms focused on energy and climate and when you look at the space there are many companies that don't publish their results and you don't know what did they really get to tell you here's what we got show me uh... show me how another expert has validated that's what you got uh... and without that you end up with companies that no one really knows what they've done so one of the reasons i think you know personally i think one of the reasons commonwealth fusion systems able to raise its large round one point eight billion series b was not just because they they made the most powerful magnet in the world great that is fantastic and can show a pathway to a small tokamak plant that's relevant but it's also the transparency that they had in doing so so they published the result they're published their their physics basis in papers in physics papers well before they started advancing the technology why because they want to be transparent they want to invite critique tell us what you think do you think this will work uh... if if you don't think it will work tell us why uh... we'd like to make those changes so we it will work and this is why one of you know articles in new york times like experts say this will work because they actually saw that the basis of the physics they weighed in and said this this should work uh... yet there's a bunch of engineering work to do for sure uh... but this should work and we we uh... when we talk to other investors to media to academic to to to people who are thinking about joining the fusion space ask these questions and ask them how are the you know what results can they share what peer reviewed papers that they published how do they compare to some of the critical conditions you need for fusion loss and criteria which is like hot enough long enough and compressed enough you know if you can achieve those three things you can achieve fusion that's what kim did like you got hot enough long enough uh... which is very hot for a very short period of time but it achieved fusion conditions and if a company can't say how they're doing on that in a peer-reviewed paper in a peer-reviewed way then move on to the next one and ask the next one how they're doing it but we think this transpires in transparency is incredibly important so of course we're doing this for national security so we have to think about both sides of this equation uh... and there's two ways to look at that one is uh... part of our national security objective is to show the world the capabilities of our scientists and engineers to demonstrate that kind of might technical might uh... and prowess and the way you do that is you participate in the scientific community just as you said we can tell everyone we're great and we often tell everyone we're great but it's better if we show everyone that we're great and so this kind of result really does that uh... although it was funny when we had the press conference to announce the result the first question from a reporter was you know you had this experiment on december fifth and it's now eight days later what have you been doing i was like what kind of conspiracy could i come up with here it's like well we were trying to make sure it was right and we did that you know we brought in an external panel of experts look at the data etc etc uh... but we do a lot of other things in our facility like laboratory astrophysics uh... to really build our skills and capabilities bring new people and new ideas to the facility and to ensure that we keep a very robust open scientific profile now there are other things we do that we don't publish we don't talk about uh... some are operational and engineering things you know we operate our laser at a level and energy fluence level that's well above what people uh... expected would be possible without damaging the laser and that's because we've learned over time how to manage damage in the laser optics we don't write a lot about how we do that that's uh... you know proprietary uh... approach to managing that system and it's not essential to the physics results that come out of those targets so you can think about separating the problem into different different components but i really do you think that open science is a critical part of uh... both success in the program but also the national security uh... image we're trying to project into the world i want to open it up for questions in a minute so you should think about seeing a lot of head nodding and shaking uh... so i there's some interest out there uh... but i may be just my final question is uh... my perception here is there is a lot more activity going on in the u s for uh... creating fusion power more companies here even though there are ones in australia and japan germany and the u k uh... there are uh... but the the bulk of the effort is in the u s is that something that is true do you see the international uh... nature of this business or is it something that the u s is focusing on more than other countries so there are companies around the world focused on fusion i i do think the bulk of them are in the u s and i'd say the bulk of the the funds raised have been uh... through companies in the u s uh... but there are several in canada there's many in the some in the u k germany japan china so there it's hard to imagine like a more game-changing kind of a thing for uh... a country to invest in uh... i would say we probably have an ecosystem that makes it easier to invest in things here in the u s uh... is one thing uh... but i think there's also been some you know significant advances here in the u s i'd say the u k actually was the first country to really uh... think about uh... a regulatory regime for fusion plants that made it easier and i say easier not because we want to be easy but appropriate with respect to safety uh... measures for uh... people communities the plant itself but they had the first path to you know licensing a fusion plant which will be finalized the next month or so and they have a you know fusion center uh... column was like three different companies trying to build pilot plants uh... but i do think the bulk of them are in the u s i don't know how long that will be i think there will be other companies that are formed i think germany just had a few form recently so we will see and like many technologies though it'll require global regulation whether it's a i vision power uh... other things uh... will look internationally for that kind of regulatory power so maybe we could have we have a microphone uh... this is being recorded uh... that i think this is where we say if you didn't like that and leave for something that's what they always say on computers uh... but anyway uh... please use the microphone because we want to hear your question and have that permanently recorded so maria can you pick hi first of all thank you very much for putting on this program with such high-qualified presenters it's really fantastic i have two questions uh... commercial type questions the first one is uh... is there an expectation on the cost per kilowatt compared to other traditional uh... sources you know either hydrocarbon or or fission sources including the amortization of the of the physical plant and well let's say the physical plant i don't know about the research uh... the other question is and this might be uh... focused towards you rick how do private investors uh... how do they stay interested when the internal rate of return horizon or the time value of money might be fairly stretched out and therefore you know having that kind of an impact on the ira sure yeah uh... okay uh... so economics good questions uh... an important one to ask so first off on the the capital costs uh... we think it like the few costs of fusion plant is really general things there's the capital costs and operating costs the capex and optics uh... with respect to the capex this is uh... a fusion plant like the one that we're building think of it as like a highly engineered aerospace type device that you're building uh... it has some some special materials uh... but it's not terribly dissimilar from the kinds of you know maybe the materials used in a spacecraft or something like that they're just they're engineered to be you have some specific characteristics uh... so you can get a handle on what that would cost uh... the one thing that it doesn't have that a fusion plant will not have at least so far in the u.s and u k is all the additional costs from licensing the design of that of that particular plant which by the way for fission plants can be on the order of five to ten years and five hundred million to a billion dollars just to get the design approved that's not to build a plant that's to get this design approved uh... and that's why fission has been difficult and why fission is the only power source to date where the cost has gone up and not down uh... so we won't have that cost but we're getting back to the just what we think the capital costs will be uh... we think it'll be quite reasonable compared to uh... and similar to fossil based plants and other plants uh... so in the thousands several thousands per kilowatt range so not uh... much less than fission plants today uh... with respect to what was the second question time horizon right and why would a private investor be interested in fusion given a long time horizon uh... we're talking about markets you know typically private investors get excited about markets in the billions that's a billion dollar market we're talking about a fifteen trillion dollar market for the capital equipment to make power generation if you're talking about getting to a net zero scenario that's fifty trillion fifty to sixty trillion these are markets that are measured but t's not b's and so therefore the payoff is enormous the risk is high but the payoff is enormous uh... i think private investors are getting a little bit more comfortable it's not the old joke of ten years i'm glad you said ten years is actually you said ten years actually the joke had been thirty years so i'm glad you said ten but people are getting a little bit more comfortable that we are on the cusp of seeing what could be potentially commercial fusion uh... these are long horizons but these investors and the investors we have for example recognize that there is a there is a time uh... not a short amount of time to developing and building large power plants and that will take time to prove out there's still a bunch of technology to prove out and engineering to do but the payoff at the end is potentially enormous and just imagine what's the valuation of a company that's producing fusion plants and able to deploy them all over the world so i think uh... you know one of the questions that was asked of carl was what's the value of fission or fusion you know there's been some recent studies done by whether it's princeton or mckinsey has done a report on this what's the value of firm base load or dispatchable zero carbon power and the short answer is it's very high uh... but the longer answer is like from the physics or sorry from the princeton study if you did not have firm base load power the cost of electricity to a user would roughly double uh... and it goes up over time because you're getting to you know higher and higher penetrations of zero carbon power and intermittent sources and if you did not have firm base power that goes way up firm base load power is incredibly valuable you know over the next several decades and certainly into you know the latter part of the century but is it still reasonable to evaluate things on the order of less than a dollar per kilowatt hour is that a a back of the envelope kind of calculation that people can do yeah it's uh... so there there's a measure of uh... analysis of people use for levelized cost of electricity and it's usually you know right now we're seeing it's in the range you know forty fifty dollars uh... a megawatt hour or four to five cents a kilowatt hour something in that range first off that that measure was originally designed to compare similar base load power plants it wasn't designed to compare intermittent sources with with dispatchable base load sources so it does not account for what does it take to firm that power what does it take to deliver that power all the time what does it take on the transmission system and the build-up additional build-out you would need from intermittent sources so it's it's kind of a it's a very imperfect comparison uh... but it is one that's useful just understand what is the capital cost spread that over all the energy that's being produced uh... and it's not just dollars per megawatt hour it's also the the power density of what it is that you're talking about uh... a fusion plant or a fusion plant is hundreds of times more energy dense from a land basis than solar or wind so if you talk about how much land will it take to proliferate renewables to a hundred percent it is it's not tenable uh... so you need a more power dense source of power anyway power dense and land dense source of power Carl did you want to add something to it or should we go on to another question okay or Kim okay thanks great presentations uh... sounds like fusion is absolutely great for the late late public also so the key of fusion is going to be like the holy grail for the coming future however i'm old enough to remember when uh... with uh... fission they're saying that it was gonna be so cheap that we would throw away the uh... meterings you would have to meter electricity i remember when uh... i think it was in isaac hour they had atoms for peace and proliferated now we have nuclear pants in north korea Iran pakistan india and that led to great things so being a bit of a skeptic uh... what are i mean what are some of the downsides may work how can a country or terrorists whatever really abuse these plants use them as weapons what about the potential uh... by-products not not the fusion themselves but all the stuff that required to make a fusion reactor run so uh... all i've heard is this is the greatest things in slice bread but what are some of the downsides and what are some of the really scary things that you've i'm pretty sure livermore looked at uh... as far as you know what these two can tell us uh... about the things that really can happen with the fusion reactor maybe we don't want to know about thank you all excellent questions and uh... i think being uh... cautiously optimistic but reasonably skeptical is a good posture i don't know i think that's good uh... i think by and large the upside dramatically outweighs the downsides for fusion things like passive safety right if you if you stop the reaction the fusion stops fundamentally different than your nuclear power no high-level radioactive waste uh... no radioactive waste not no need to manage radioactive environments in the plant so there are still safety considerations and i think having a credible transparent regulatory regime and a really good public education program and because this is the other nuclear power we don't want to end up going down the road that fission did in losing the trust of the public uh... it's very easy to get in a bad space when you're talking about things that emit radiation is just visceral public fear on that front uh... you know you do have to think through safeguards for any kind of technology that goes around the world either for sensitive technologies in the plant or other uses of the neutrons for example you're producing massive numbers of neutrons here you're not producing them with fissile material but you could do things with a lots of neutrons that we would not like so you would still want some kind of safeguards regime that went with that to deploy these plants so there are questions we should answer but by and large you know those are all manageable issues uh... of course i think they're all manageable for fission as well and i think you know in some sense we've lost the beat on the relative risk-reward balance with fission and that's a challenge here as well you know i thought the joke about fusion was that it was always fifty years away from whatever day you're asked so so i don't know we're making smart progress i'm really excited about the the efforts in the energy that's going into this field and all the private sector investment and momentum that's being generated and i'm cautiously optimistic that many of these will pay off history suggests they take longer they cost more and they're more complicated than we think when we start so you know i'll just use the facility we built right we built the world's largest most energetic laser the original projection was that it would cost a billion dollars and take five years it cost three and a half billion dollars and took ten years you know for this any scientists in the room the factor of pie is the normal thing you multiply your budget by turns out that was pretty good in this case uh... but we also had to invent seven of the core technologies that went into the laser as we were building it means it's just a remarkable story of overcoming those obstacles so i would say i hope we have fusion power on the grid in the next twenty years that would be a game changer for the planet uh... and for our economy maybe it's thirty years still a win i would still be all in on investing in that uh... but in the near term building credible education programs really talking about what the uh... safeguards regime needs to look like really being clear about what the safety issues are and how they're being managed in a plant is just essential and i would echo kim and saying a skeptical view is the right one to have always just because you need to ask the questions and we see people entering the fusion space that aren't skeptical and we wonder what it is that they're doing and what it is that they're funding uh... but on the safety side you know to be clear there there are issues with fusion which is we have some irradiated materials neutrons hit uh... our plasma-facing components and can they can get irradiated and therefore become radioactive uh... the design of the planet such that those will always stay uh... as low-level radioactive waste or lower uh... and so they would need to be stored somewhere but they have half lives that are not thousands of years but like tens of years uh... and then you also have to very carefully manage the tritium that you have on site which is also radioactive and can decay uh... but these are very very small quantities of tritium like we're talking uh... things that are in the grams level not in the tons level so uh... those are very important things that we need to make sure we manage but to be clear there's no it has all the safety precautions you have any industrial plant plus there is radiation there is there are neutrons so you need to be careful from a radiation perspective in the plant as well but these plants they don't explode they don't combust people have asked us what do you do to protect the environment from the plasma actually it's the reverse you need to protect the plasma from the environment because you look at this thing the wrong way and it just stops and what does it mean when it stops it just stops it's not a fission plant that has decay heat where you're running a fission plant a hundred percent you turn it off it's still producing energy at seven percent of its max power you turned it off it's still making decay heat this doesn't have that there's no chance that it could run away from you the worst thing that can happen is it just stops and maybe if it gets uncontrolled it may damage some equipment inside the plant there won't be any damage outside the plant but those those other things the irradiated materials in the tritium those are things we have to be very careful about make sure we're managing but to Kim's point the the biggest point here is education is going to be incredibly important because when people hear fusion they hear nuclear and they assume things about nuclear and this is not the case and so it's going to be incredibly important to work with government stakeholders media investors everyone so everyone recognizes what is what are the safety issues are we appropriately managing those and make sure people don't run off in a direction about something that's just not true about fusion plants great yes my question is really for Rick you seems to dismiss completely this huge European project twenty five billion fifty billions maybe is really your is it really what you say that they should stop it this is the worst taxpayer money or could they adjust the project while it's taking place to benefit from what you have discovered about my magnet I mean you completely ignore it correct yeah so I would either is incredibly important it's resulted in some advances in how we understand the plant even though it's not operating today it has resulted in some advances in the science been helping to build up the supply chain for fusion one of my biggest worries is what Kim referred to when she said they achieved ignition and five days later someone said what's next one of my big worries is we're gonna show net energy gain in our spark plant and people are gonna turn around and say where's the power plant like hello we just did something that's amazing uh... and we know we're gonna have to deliver a power plant we're we're working on that but it takes time uh... so either has been an important investment and there's a lot of uh... benefit that's come from that uh... and we actually have people on our team who've worked at either who have operated plants uh... not just either but jet uh... and uh... and other plants other tokamaks that have been built around the world this work on plants that are not yet there is incredibly valuable uh... it's been very very helpful for the science in advancing it I don't know I'm not a I'm not the person deciding on where where the government's putting its money there have been questions around that but it's a a question for the government to decide we do think at the very least there should be money that goes into the private approaches as well one of the challenges with either is it is like thirty five countries are involved in it and you can imagine a a large project run by a mini u n becomes very difficult to actually advance in a in a in a way that the private sector is uniquely able to advance which is build test learn build run it to failure learn from it and go build another thing uh... it's very difficult for what we talked about this little bit before we started about large government programs are very difficult uh... face a difficult challenge in running something to failure uh... and then learning from that and so that's what we're trying to do so uh... and the gentleman asked what's the big disadvantage of fusion i would say the big disadvantage of fusion energy is is not here today and that that's that's what we're trying to solve i have a question about the long-term impact of this new technology suppose one day we have fusion reactors all the world you know backyard and maybe in the basement of building now the uh... problem is that uh... in uh... convert the utilizing this energy produce you're quite often convert the energy into electricity and for use and the conversion process is not hundred percent because most of the energy you produce is in the form of heat and light so i was wondering what is the sort of a uh... waste product in terms of uh... not uh... heat pollution and how that would impact our environment over long term yes so the uh... you're right the fundamental thing that fusion produces is heat uh... it actually produces high energy neutrons that then will end and heat and those neutrons will impact things that create heat as well in essence what a fusion plant does it makes heat we will put then a plant on it that converts that heat into electricity in the same way that a natural gas plant or coal plant converts heat to electricity through a steam cycle there's other cycles that we're looking at as well in essence you're basically converting heat to electricity so what's the heat pollution it's the same that would come from any power plant you need cooling for that power plant we could do the cooling via air cooling which is less efficient but that doesn't require then water and uses of water to provide the cooling but it's also something that we've not necessarily pollution because the heat itself can be quite useful so we talk about electricity as a as an output of a fusion plant but you can imagine all the other hard to abate sectors when it comes to climate some of many of which will depend on clean heat not electricity so industrial processes manufacturing processes things like you can imagine like desalination requires electricity heat could be helpful hydrogen production electric you know zero carbon electricity useful heat can actually make that even more efficient you can imagine other things that would use heat district heating so you can use that heat for for useful purposes and knowing that that heat is not from a combustion of something but from from fusion good answer also there are at least one company that is working on not using heat but using directly the charge particles that are generated by fusion to directly convert that to a current to electricity we'll see if that works but I think there's a myriad of approaches here yeah I think the Kim you may weigh in on this but the the energy contained in the nuclear particles far exceeds the spectral emissions of a plasma like this and so most of the energy comes out in the form of high-energy nuclear particles and and quite honestly if it doesn't it's not fusion which could get us into a whole discussion of cold fusion but we're not going to go there today this equip this is a question for Kim so as you mentioned nif wasn't designed to be an operational reactor it was designed for a variety of purposes but partly to achieve ignition so my question is is literally what have you done since okay so where where is where is the lab going as you mentioned there's a whole slew of engineering issues and Carl alluded to these that go from just achieving that that breakthrough and towards something that's practical for ICF and I know I'm not asking you how to solve that problem but more like what is the lab's role versus private industry or other other elements thanks he was a great question so the role of the laboratory in inertial fusion enabling inertial fusion energy is that we have the only facility on the planet where you can do the physics of the energy producing source so our basic path forward is to try to reproduce the experiment we did in December but then increase the yield and the facility so we produce three megajoules of yield the facility is rated up to yields of about 150 megajoules so we have a lot of head room where we can work we burned a very tiny fraction of the fusion fuel in that target we have a lot of head room in that factor of 10 or so in in head room on that and then the goal is to begin to understand how we can simplify the targets that we use for this once you have a really robust igniting plasma then we can try to take some of the artisan character artisanal character out of the targets and make begin to make them more practical for using for science research for our national security applications and for fusion energy applications so the role of the lab I think is really to build that physics backbone and to work with partners to lower the barriers to getting these targets to ignite so we want them to be as simple as possible because it really is the cost of that target that's going to drive the cost of electricity at the end of this scheme we could build the component technologies that go into a power plant so the NIF laser is built on 1980s technology and lasers have come a long way over the arc of time and so it's a 0.7 percent efficient laser you could build a 10 or 20 percent efficient laser with modern technology but there are companies that could do that as well and so you know I think there's a technology development aspect that will largely reside in the private sector we may help we may have ideas we built some high repetition rate solid state lasers that are more efficient based on diode pumping instead of flashlight pumping so we have some ideas that I think are salient but there are things that industry can take over from there I think some of the big challenges that both magnetic and inertial face in materials understanding materials that are more radiation resistant or how to manage radiation high radiation loads and different types of materials working on the blanket materials the actual details of how you're going to manage the tritium cycle in your reactor those are the kind of things that we can really be helpful with we have the infrastructure and the expertise to work on those kinds of problems and so we're working to create what I think of is sort of a new kind of ecosystem for this research if this is really important I want every company that's working in this area to advance as quickly as possible so I want them to all have access to the physics that's very important because they really if they don't have that they can't accelerate down the road and then the companies can differentiate in their approaches that's how they'll make money different technologies different commercial approaches but really an open ecosystem with many companies participating to build that physics backbone I think is our main contribution in this Kim I'll just add I know you are participating in this but the government is funding public private partnerships right now and I'm sure the lab will be contributing in a broad way to those and secondly the government is funding research hubs infusion energy that'll be located at universities private companies and national labs and I'm sure you'll participate in those too we are and we're we're trying to find opportunities to partner with magnetic fusion energy researchers because there are common challenges and we should really lean into those together there are a small number of inertial fusion energy companies and we have partnerships with all of them of course most of the capital that's been invested has gone to magnetic fusion but that was before we got ignition so I'm just saying maybe maybe next year there'll be more okay thanks oh Carl actually I just wanted to riff on that question and point it back to Kim one of the liabilities of being an administrator you don't get to keep up with the literature or the current but I'm at 38 days and counting down right now so I get to get back to doing science but you know in to give IFE a chance you know the you know to be able to do this 10 times a second you know like have a stick of dynamite going off as Kim said you really do need to be able to relax a lot of the artisan quality of these capsules some years ago a concept that was invented at Livermore and pursued by the Japanese which would dramatically relax those requirements was a concept there's a variant of it called a variant of hot spot ignition called fast ignition you know hot spot ignition you compress and you get ignition it's sort of like analogous to a diesel engine yeah the the concept of fast ignition is that you could compress the fuel to much less a degree and symmetry was much less requirement and then come with a very short pulse laser and zap it like a spark plug much like a gasoline engine and get the thing going and this could be much relaxed requirements initial experiments were not promising but I think the Japanese are still working on it what's the current state and I think Roger may know this too as a Roger probably knows certainly knows the literature better than I do but at least one of the companies we're working with has a fast ignition based scheme so what we haven't had is a really good facility to work on the target coupling for the fast fast pulse beam I mean you'd like to do those experiments that if we built a short pulse set of beam lines the arc to do the short pulse injection we're using those to do diagnostic techniques not to do that you probably need more energy so we just from my perspective we don't have have not had the correct experimental infrastructure to really do the test at scale to understand how this will work over time so I don't know if you want to comment on it I'll just say that it is evolving people are still working on it but there's a whole field of using these very powerful lasers to accelerate subatomic particles to accelerate protons and their ideas around producing protons for medical therapy or for particle physics and that field has been working in parallel and now is coming together where the ignition part comes from creating a high-power proton beam that might seed the ignition so it's interesting to see that that parallel development of a different field now is coming together with the fusion people but it it's not well funded right now yeah yeah yeah so and I don't know if this applies to I mean certainly applies to the topomac I don't know if it applies to the laser approach but are the materials that are made that are used to make the the magnet this high temperature superconducting are those in limited supply is there a concern about you know is it is it concentrated in one part of the world how how much of a constraint is that yeah so the high temperature superconducting material is like a rare earth brilliant carbon oxide it's it's kind of this very specific material there's other there's a bunch of materials that have exhibited high temperature superconducting attributes but the one we use does have it's it's only come into commercial production really in the last several years which is why it's a new thing and which is why eater hasn't used it and we are using it so it's only kind of just come out it's we are actually scaling up that industry ourselves as a buyer we have scaled that industry up pretty dramatically already just ourselves fusion is the killer app for high temperature superconducting materials and highest high temperature superconducting tape so it comes in a form of a tape actually I don't have it I have it in my bag usually it's just it's literally a thin tape it's a micron thick that you can put over 100 amps through so it's kind of just fascinating what it actually is and I'd say high temperature superconducting is one of these miracles that people up here in the panel may know more probably no more no more about it than I do but it is fascinating that something can be like zero resistance not low resistance like zero resistance which was such a thin amount of material that you send mega you know mega amps through so but to answer your question we are the materials themselves haven't been in high production yet and we are scaling it up right now as we speak so there's nothing a rare earth doesn't mean that it's rare in the earth it just means where it falls on the periodic table so it's not that it's rare it's just there hasn't been a lot of production of it but we face this actually in other parts of the plant like people tell us oh the the blanket that you're using we plan on using a fly blanket which has beryllium in it and people say oh beryllium that's that's very constrained there's not a lot of supply of that but if you actually go talk to the people that make beryllium they say oh well we've got by the way it's a plant in the U.S. or a place in the U.S. where the largest manufacturer beryllium gets it from and says oh well yeah we have one shift working on that we have a big vein the demand isn't high enough the demand shoots up we can add another shift of like eight people to go dig stuff up but no one's asked us to do that so we haven't done it so there's sometimes people get in their minds that things are constrained just because that's where the market is that's what the demand is but when you go actually talk to the people doing the thing you realize oh there actually aren't that many constraints on it you know we would hope to actually get to a constraint where we're selling you know thousands of of arc power plants um but then that's a that's a later challenge I was just gonna first of all there's no demand for beryllium because it's the most dangerous substance no demand um and traditional applications of beryllium like where you have to machine it there are problems aerosolized beryllium is very dangerous and causes berylliosis uh which is a very terrible disease so so there would be a huge supply if you had a you know a safe application that you could manage the industrial controls for on critical materials and minerals in a huge range of applications in this energy transition are dependent on materials that are come from other parts of the world that are in short supply or where supplies could be constrained and what this means for the US is many of these materials are domestically or sourceable and friendly countries it's just not been economically viable so if you put a demand signal into the system that's consistent and at scale I think many of those challenges can be overcome we just really have to change the economic calculus for companies to get into mining refining and and providing many of these component materials and ICF uses gold and diamonds and of course we know there's tons of that everywhere so well look I think we've we've answered a lot of questions and we've opened up maybe even more than we've answered so what we're going to do is please come upstairs to the sixth floor where we have a reception you can bug any of these people with any of your questions that were not answered I'm going to ask them about why isn't artificial intelligence solving this problem for all of us I don't get it I mean we're at an amazing time for all these technologies so that's my question to them but please bring your questions come and have some food have a drink thank you for coming tonight