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The First Fusion Component Test Facility in the Country Is Being Designed in a San Diego Suburb · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the future applies for a building permit. NBC 7 San Diego reported today that General Atomics is designing a first-of-its-kind fusion test facility in Poway, California, under contract with the Department of Energy.
• 0:15
  [Guest] What they're testing is the blanket. It's a lithium-based structure lining a reactor's inside walls, and it does two jobs: breeds the fuel that keeps fusion going, and pulls heat out of the plasma.
• 0:27
  [Host] Fusion has been almost-here my entire life. Why is a lithium liner in a San Diego suburb different from the last forty announcements?
• 0:35
  [Guest] Because it isn't a physics claim. Nikolai Norausky, the engineer leading the design, told NBC that nobody has ever taken a blanket component and tested it at relevant heat in a background magnetic field.
• 0:48
  [Host] Define relevant heat.
• 0:49
  [Guest] The core runs about 150 million degrees, ten times hotter than the sun. Magnets hold the plasma off the walls, and the trick is letting just enough heat sneak out to the blanket.
• 1:01
  [Host] Wait. The famous milestone was getting more energy out than we put in. That didn't cover collecting it?
• 1:07
  [Guest] Norausky calls the blanket the business end of the reactor, where heat gets extracted and turned into something that makes electricity. Nobody has built one at full scale.
• 1:17
  [Host] Who's paying, and how long?
• 1:19
  [Guest] Design runs about a year. California gives General Atomics a twenty million dollar tax credit if the design is approved, and testing should begin in three to five years.
• 1:30
  [Host] Three to five years is quick for anything with the word fusion in it.
• 1:35
  [Guest] They're not starting from an empty lot. The chamber already exists at their Magnet Technologies Center in Poway, reusing hardware from an earlier superconducting magnet project. Norausky says a new facility elsewhere would take about ten years.
• 1:48
  [Host] Be honest with the people who live near that building. If I drive past it in five years, is my house running on fusion?
• 1:57
  [Guest] No. This tests a component. It isn't a power plant, and it doesn't feed a single home in San Diego.
• 2:04
  [Host] So we're funding the part nobody headlines.
• 2:06
  [Guest] Which is the honest way to read this field right now. Physics risk on fusion is close to zero, because the sun settles it. What's left is engineering risk, and that's schedules, materials and money.
• 2:19
  [Host] Engineering challenge is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Make the case it isn't a politer way of saying not yet.
• 2:27
  [Guest] There's a piece on unscarcity dot ai called Fusion Energy 2024 to 2030 that tracks this exact turn, where the physics stops being the question and the money moves to hardware. Helion's Polaris machine hit that same 150 million degrees on deuterium and tritium fuel and won Washington state's licenses to run a plant, per the American Nuclear Society.
• 2:49
  [Host] And if Poway slips? If this is thirty years, not five?
• 2:53
  [Guest] Then solar and storage keep getting cheaper and the lights still come on. Fusion raises the ceiling, it isn't holding up the floor.
• 3:01
  [Host] Sacramento is projecting forty thousand jobs and a hundred and twenty billion dollars. Real, or a brochure?
• 3:07
  [Guest] A state projection, attached to Senate Bill 80, the fusion initiative California passed. What exists today is General Atomics running D three D at Torrey Pines, the country's largest fusion testbed, and a design team up the road.
• 3:21
  [Host] So what do I tell my neighbor who thinks this is an expensive science fair?
• 3:26
  [Guest] That the argument in Patrick Deglon's book Unscarcity is that abundance isn't a utopia you wait for, it's engineering you schedule. A test rig with a date on it is what that looks like early.
• 3:39
  [Host] For more on fusion timelines and what happens when they slip, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.