Nuclear fusion and the new energy arms race

BOB MUMGAARD: No one really knows exactly the right way to build a fusion industry. It’s easy to look at a lot of the problems that are in the world, and think that they are pretty hard and insurmountable. Then when you find people that have actually built big things, that have taken things from nothing to something, that’s super exciting. We live in a moment where you can do really hard things, because the tools are so good, and you have models like Tesla and SpaceX that have built game changing technologies out of stuff that people thought was science fiction.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the leading U.S. player in fusion energy. The science fiction that he’s working to bring to life is a safe, plentiful, renewable energy source that’s recently made big strides and maybe nearing a tipping point. It’s also an arena that President Trump’s business, Trump Media, is moving into via an unexpected merger. In today’s episode, Bob Mumgaard explains what makes fusion different from fission, its nuclear power cousin, and why fusion is on the cusp of moving from the lab to industrial scale. Fusion energy offers an extraordinary opportunity to remake economic models, enhance prosperity, and address climate change. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Bob Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, also known as CFS. Bob, thanks for being here. Great to have you.

MUMGAARD: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkThe fundamentals of fusion energy

SAFIAN: So, people have been talking about nuclear fusion energy for decades. It’s almost this mythic, improbable breakthrough resource. The scale of CFS raising over $3 billion indicates that maybe we’re moving from hope toward reality. Can you start us off though by explaining what fusion energy is, the difference between fusion and fission? Fission is what drives existing nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. Can you ground us in that?

MUMGAARD: Sure. So the first thing, fusion is the energy that powers the universe. It’s like 99.99% of all the energy in the universe starts as fusion. That’s because fusion is the process that’s inside the stars. So in that process, the lightest elements, the most common elements in the universe, they’re combined together to create heavier elements. But in the process, they lose a little bit of mass, and that mass is converted to energy through E=MC². So, it’s the opposite process of fission, splitting the atom. They sit on opposite ends of the periodic table. They sit on opposite ends of the spectrum of processes. In both cases though, they make a lot of energy without a lot of stuff going into the reaction. So, that makes them very, very interesting as a way to power things because you essentially can power things without ever consuming anything.

Which when you think about what the stars do, they are a hundred million times more efficient at converting their mass to energy than say if they were burning coal. The difference between fission and fusion splitting versus combining has a bunch of knock-on effects as well.

SAFIAN: So, there’s no nuclear waste that’s coming from fusion.

MUMGAARD: Fusion’s been seen as a really big deal to have your own star. We’ve known about the fundamental principles of it for about 100 years. In the lab, we’ve tinkered with it for about 50 years. Over the last decade or so, we’ve gotten much, much better at being able to create the right conditions for this reaction to take place, to create the conditions that are inside stars. That’s been a culmination of diligent science done in national labs and universities. Some compute has gotten much better, some novel materials, superconductors, et cetera. We’ve stepped up over time to the point now where we can start to see what it would look like to build a power plant that would actually make all this work.

SAFIAN: How much of this at this point is a scientific challenge of what we know versus a manufacturing one, like how you get from lab scale to industrial scale?

MUMGAARD: It sits in between. So, there are still things that we have not done, but there are fewer and fewer of them, and our insights into how they’ll work is better and better. You can think of that like drug discovery. There’s still stuff we don’t understand about how drugs work, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make good drugs. Then there’s other stuff that we’ve never had to do because it wasn’t ready for primetime yet.  That is the engineering and supply chain that we’re starting to do now. So, I’m a history and technology guy, and this is a technology that is at that inflection point where it’s got one foot firmly grounded in the scientific method and universities, and one foot out into the commercialization, industrialization, and it’s making that step. It’s doing it pretty quickly.

SAFIAN: CFS, you’re working on a prototype plant in Massachusetts that’s hopefully going to go online next year. You’ve got a deal for a commercial plant in Virginia, although the timeline for that is five plus years away. I mean, you don’t have any functioning plants yet, right?

MUMGAARD: The type of machine that we build to do fusion is something called Tokamak. It’s basically a bottle that uses magnets to make fusion go. The world’s built a bunch of them, 150 of them. So, those are pretty well established technology, and they’ve gotten better and better every time we’ve built one, faster than Moore’s Law in various periods. What we’re building is we’re building another one of those. This one, it’s expected to improve on the previous 150 using the same principles, some new technologies in a way that actually makes more power out from the fusion reaction than it took to reach the hot conditions. That’s a big moment, because that means you have the heart of a power plant.

That’s the one we’re building in Massachusetts right now. Then the next one after the one in Massachusetts is the one you mentioned in Virginia. That’s a commercial power plant, and that takes the same ideas as the one in Massachusetts, same basic components and size and everything like that. A little bit bigger, a little more industrial, but that’s designed to actually make and sell power.

Copy LinkThe role of AI and computation in advancing fusion

SAFIAN: You mentioned the impact of compute, and everyone is obsessed with AI these days. I know you recently partnered with Google DeepMind about how to use AI to speed up Fusion’s development. How does AI and compute play into accelerating the pace of what you’re trying to get done?

MUMGAARD: So, fusion has got, at the heart of it, a plasma. A plasma is this crazy state of matter. It’s very complicated. It wiggles and jiggles. It’s like what’s in the northern lights and the sun spots. There’s no way that you can brute force compute what that plasma will do. Over the last 30 years, what people have figured out is they can make some approximations. Compute can get faster. You can put more data in it. What machine learning has done is accelerate that faster and faster to the point that today we have predictive compute that can tell you what that plasma is likely to do with some error bars that are within what you need as an engineer, like 10%. If you were to be a scientist in this field, it’s unrecognizable, and that’s just getting faster.

SAFIAN: When you talk about this plasma that you’re not quite sure what it’s going to do. I mean, as you say that, and I have my associations with nuclear power, it makes me a little nervous like, “Oh, we don’t know what this is going to do.” Is that scary?

MUMGAARD: A couple things, really important in fusion. So one, there’s no chain reaction, so it’s not like this can get out of hand. Two, a single breath of air is enough to stop this super hot plasma from fusing. You literally blow it out like a candle. This thing is something that defaults to off. When I say we don’t quite know what it’s going to do, it’s like we don’t quite know how every type of protein is going to fold, and AI is helping us make it so that we can predict how they will fold. That doesn’t mean that we have rampant proteins everywhere doing crazy things. The fundamental process itself is not something that you could lose control of, or despite comic books and sci-fi movies, there’s not really a scenario like that.

SAFIAN: I ask this question because nuclear power fission has such a checkered history. I mean, it was also seen as a holy grail for energy at one point and then Three Mile Island, the disaster Chernobyl and concerns about nuclear waste. It made the brand of nuclear, pardon the pun, toxic, right? That’s blunted enthusiasm for more modern fission reactors, small nuclear reactors, SMRs. Is the nuclear brand a challenge for you as you’re trying to raise money for and raise enthusiasm around fusion?

MUMGAARD: We really treat fusion as a standalone thing on its own. It is its own process. It’s its own physics. It’s its own engineering. It doesn’t really have a crossover to fission. So, we’re very careful about how we talk about it. The word nuclear is synonymous with nuclear fission, and we’re not trying to rebrand nuclear. Instead, we’ll just be fusion on our own.

SAFIAN: You just dropped that word if you can. You don’t want to use the word nuclear. You don’t want to use the word reactor, all of those things.

MUMGAARD: We don’t go around talking about chemical reaction fire. It’s fire, right?

Copy LinkBreakthroughs that reignited fusion progress

SAFIAN: You’ve raised $3 billion, I would presume, because there’s progress that you’ve made recently that opens the aperture about where fusion can go. Can you explain what those changes are? What has shifted in the possibilities in the trajectory around fusion?

MUMGAARD: The first thing that shifted was in 2018, we realized that you could build an entirely new type of technology that was these very strong magnets, and much stronger than anyone could make before. So, we as a company developed those magnets. Once you had those magnets and improved them at scale, which we did in 2021, their application to fusion was transformative. That with very strong magnets, you can make existing, well-understood fusion machines drastically higher performing and smaller. It’s like we had computers before, and when you replace the vacuum tubes with the transistors, the same computer gets much more tractable. Same idea here. Much stronger magnets make these machines much simpler, much smaller, much higher performing. That was a generational discovery. Whole new tool, new landscape is available to us.

SAFIAN: When I see things like the Chinese government investing in fusion, at least six and a half billion dollars in the last couple of years, is that also predicated on like, “Oh, this magnet technology has opened the door for all of that?”

MUMGAARD: It is. The case that they see that this one innovation is a big deal. There’s a couple other things that also happened. We saw in 2022 that in the United States, a very large laser run by the Department of Energy at a national lab in Livermore, a laser called NIF showed that you could actually make more power out of a little teeny capsule in a little instant of time than it took to heat it up. That’s not to say the whole power plant worked, but the hard part, the fusion part could actually be the heart of a fusion power plant. So, that was the first time humans had ever done that, and that was a huge deal. That plus the magnet, plus the technology and the AI and new materials, there’s a swirl there, and out of there, you’re seeing over 50 startups. You’re seeing the Chinese program double down. You’re seeing the UK program double down.

It’s a completely different field than it was five, 10 years ago. Politically in the United States, fusion’s always been very bipartisan, and so there’s not really a divide there. It’s one of the most bipartisan science and energy topics. The Biden administration, the Obama administration, Trump 1.0, all have been pro-fusion and each one is up to their emphasis. The overall energy mix question is oftentimes false dichotomies. We need to power the existing world today, and we have tools to do that. Fossil fuels is one, and solar and wind are others. But at the same time, we have to invest in new technologies. Think about the battery or the EV industry, think about the solar industry today, but then think about what fossil fuels were.  The days of Rockefeller, right?

SAFIAN: I just love hearing scientists and technologists talk about their breakthroughs. In the case of fusion, I really want all the pieces to come together. So, what’s next in the problem set, and how patient or impatient do we need to be? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Bob Mumgaard of CFS talked about breakthroughs in fusion energy that have taken the technology from science fiction to near reality. Now, he talks about the business model and operational challenges in creating a new industry, and when we might start to see fusion inside new power plants. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkBuilding a business from scientific discovery

Your investors include some of the business world’s most accomplished leaders, Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff, Laurene Powell Jobs, Vinod Khosla. Have you received any memorable business advice from them?

MUMGAARD: Yes. Oftentimes conflicting, but that’s a good thing, because it means that no one really knows exactly the right way to build a fusion industry, and we’re figuring that out as we go. But, I think one of the important parts is it’s easy to look at a lot of the problems that are in the world, and think that they’re pretty hard and insurmountable. But when you find people that have actually built big things, that have taken things from nothing to something, that’s super exciting. We live in a moment where you can do really hard things because the tools are so good, and the software tools can be applied to moving atoms around. You have models like Tesla and SpaceX and Moderna, and that have built game-changing technologies out of stuff that people thought was science fiction.

SAFIAN: You hadn’t run a business before, right? You launched CFS out of MIT, out of an academic background. So when you get this advice, this business advice, and as you say, sometimes it’s conflicting. How do you decide what choice you’re going to make?

MUMGAARD: One of the advantages of being rooted in science and engineering is you can break problems down into a hypothesis that’s testable. We got to run the experiment. Whether you’re testing a hypothesis in a lab about a piece of chemistry or whether you’re testing about how a market will respond or how to build an organization and structure a team, you can break it down to those first principles, figure out what you know, what you don’t know, run an experiment about what you don’t know, and just continually get better at it.

Copy LinkBeing upfront about the biggest risks

SAFIAN: But you have to make choices about which experiments you run first, right? I mean, that is the human part of it. That’s the judgment part of it.

MUMGAARD: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the best pieces of advice is you really want to be upfront about what your biggest risks are, and move those risks all the way up front. Fail early on the hardest things first. So for us, that was the magnet. Once we knew we had that magnet, we knew that there’s a lot of other stuff that was way easier once you had the magnet. If you didn’t have the magnet, the road was going to be very difficult. So, that’s why we put that first.

SAFIAN: The environment of running a fusion business, your timelines are long and uncertain. Failure, as you talked about, it’s part of the game. It’s like constant, and the stakes are potentially enormous and existential. How do you manage all of that with your team, with yourself? You have to be patient and urgent at the same time.

MUMGAARD: The impatient and urgent at the same time – it’s not so hard to do when you break the problem into individual things. You’re like, “Look, this gets to this, gets to this, gets to this.” Milestones of like, “We got to learn this. Once we learn that, we get to learn that, and then we get to learn that. So, everyone goes laser focused on what needs to be done, not just this year, not just this quarter, but this day, this shift, this hour when you have something like fusion development, or when you’re building rockets, or when you’re building self-driving cars. That’s how you break these big problems that have big impact down into bite-sized chunks.

Copy LinkHow fusion could lead to global increase in prosperity

SAFIAN: So, for folks who are not as steeped in this world as you are, what’s your vision of what a fusion future for all of us looks like?

MUMGAARD: One of the most highly correlated things that we’ve ever seen in big statistics is that energy equals prosperity. Just, they’re directly related. Child mortality, free time, GDP, correlate with what is the energy use, and good things happen when we use more energy on prosperity. Of course, we’re hitting limits of that.

SAFIAN: Yes.

MUMGAARD: We’re hitting limits of how much energy we can use because of the side effects of energy, pollution, availability, consuming natural resources. Fusion takes those side effects, and makes them very, very, very, very different. It’s effectively uncapped. You could build a power plant in a factory, show up, put it on a piece of land that already had a power plant on it, and that power plant now makes the same energy, but doesn’t have a smoke stack, doesn’t have a pipeline, and that you could just do that over and over again, and get better and better and better at it. That is energy as a technology, not a resource. That’s super, super exciting to think about. Both practically of like, “How many power plants can you build? How fast? Where, da, da, da?”

But also just philosophically, if I’m not consuming something, if there’s not a finite supply, how much should I use? That’s a different mindset than to constantly be making a trade-off. In a world that has a fusion economy, you’re not talking about building a completely restructured globe, right? They’re talking about building an industry that’s at the scale of other existing industries, but happens to decouple energy as a technology for natural resources.

Copy LinkWhat it takes to scale fusion to the grid

SAFIAN: The cost of energy, I mean, we don’t really know what the cost of producing energy through this resource is yet, because you haven’t gotten it to a point of scale where you can measure that.

MUMGAARD: We have pretty good ideas actually. One of the reasons we built the SPARC facility in Massachusetts, which is 75% done and mostly procured, is so that we’d have the receipts so we know what it costs. That’s for the first one. So, this does not have learning rates in it.   Or, imagine the cost to go build one BMW, what that one BMW would cost you. It would be outrageous. So, we have that end, and that end looks still attractive. So, that’s super exciting because it should be better, significantly better. We already see it within one plant getting better. If you just add up the amount of stuff in a fusion power plant and the amount of steel and concrete, it’s not so much stuff, and it’s not so expensive.

SAFIAN: You don’t have to keep feeding it inputs. The inputs are negligible.

MUMGAARD: Yeah, that’s right. It’s like imagine building a natural gas power plant, but not paying for gas. People love that, right? How we get there and what the path looks like is there will be learnings on the way, and it’ll be dynamic, but the fundamentals here are sound. We know fusion works. We stare at the stars all night, and we sit under the sun during the day. Those are all fusion power plants. They’re just old ones that are really simple that can get by by being very, very big instead of being clever. Fortunately on earth, we can be clever.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for CFS & fusion

SAFIAN: So, what’s at stake for you right now in this moment for CFS and for the future of fusion?

MUMGAARD: As a company, we’re heads down execution doing the facility in Massachusetts and getting ready to build the first commercial plant in Virginia. We want to go as fast as possible, but that takes capital. It takes support. So, we’re lining all that up. We’re one of the largest tough tech companies at the edge of what people can do. The question is, how far can that edge move, and how fast? Corollary to that is the U.S. government is at a stage where they’re looking very, very intently at fusion, Congress and the White House, and they’re looking over at what is happening internationally. They got to make some decisions about like, “Are they going to really push the gas pedal?”

We’ve never had more attention on fusion politically than we have right now. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next six months or a year. We can look over and see what China’s doing when the next year the investments that they’ve made in large-scale construction projects will start to turn on. It’s really about, “Can we organize capital and supply chains, and close the remaining gaps as quickly as possible?”

SAFIAN: Given all this, when do you think fusion is actually going to be here? When are we going to see it and be able to use it?

MUMGAARD: Lots of it is already here. You can show up at a lab, and watch the fusion action happen. I think it’ll make more power than it takes to run in a commercially relevant way in ’27. I think we’ll be the first to do that. I think it’ll make power in the grid in the early 30s. Then the big question is like, “When will you have…” Give me a number of power plants. When will that happen besides the first one? It’s like, “When will there be a  second one?  A fifth one? A 10th one?” That’s really what’s at stake right now: It’s not a matter of if, but it’s when and how much.

SAFIAN: Because at some point, if it’s all working, it’s not going to be one or five or 10. It’s going to be hundreds of these things, thousands of them, right?

MUMGAARD: Well, there’s somewhere around 60,000 power plants globally today. So, most of those are fossil. Most of those are outdated. Most of those have to be replaced no matter what. Oh, and by the way, we have to build somewhere between two and 10X that for powering the world. So, what’s that technology going to be? Who’s going to show up with that? That’s what’s at stake.

SAFIAN: Well, Bob, this was great.

MUMGAARD: Thanks, Bob.

SAFIAN: Bob’s dreams for fusion are monumental, global, ubiquitous, transformational. Fusion would be a silver bullet for so many challenges unlocking the kind of abundance that’s become so en vogue to talk about. I sure hope Bob and his team and others who are working on this new tech get the elements to work right so reality can match the promise. It would, of course, be wildly disruptive if all the economic activity around fossil fuels disappeared. Who knows what the repercussions would be on geopolitics where resistance might emerge, but still, I just can’t help rooting for it. The human cleverness, as Bob calls it, inspires me, even if things don’t quite unfold as a dream come true. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.