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Engineering the Future of Fusion · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. When did you get the fusion bug? When'd you
0:23
Speaker 1: fall in love with fusion?
0:24
Speaker 2: It probably goes back to middle school or before, you know,
0:28
Speaker 2: and when a lot of kids would go out and
0:30
Speaker 2: play on the playground, I'd go to the library and
0:32
Speaker 2: read about particle accelerators and fusion reactors, and so, you.
0:36
Speaker 3: Know, I think I think the bug was that pretty early.
0:39
Speaker 1: This is Greg Pifer. He's the co founder and CEO
0:42
Speaker 1: of a company called Shine.
0:44
Speaker 2: And I watched shows like Star Trek and you know,
0:46
Speaker 2: certainly even like Star Trek the Next Generation where my
0:49
Speaker 2: moral compass was set. H.
0:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, So like, tell me the fusion dream. I mean,
0:54
Speaker 1: we'll get to like why. It's going to take a
0:56
Speaker 1: while and it's hard, but just like, why is fusion
0:59
Speaker 1: the dream?
1:00
Speaker 3: Yeah?
1:01
Speaker 2: So fusion essentially, it like to me, it represents a
1:03
Speaker 2: level up moment for humanity. When we can commercially unlock it,
1:06
Speaker 2: our species will be changed forever. And it's very similar.
1:09
Speaker 2: It's very akin to when we first started to access
1:11
Speaker 2: chemical energy through fire.
1:13
Speaker 1: So I thought you were going to say fossil fields.
1:14
Speaker 1: We're just saying that's bigger than fossil fuels. It's fire,
1:17
Speaker 1: it's it's biggest fire. Yeah, so it's not going to
1:19
Speaker 1: happen for a long time. But like, what does the
1:21
Speaker 1: world look like when we get to the fusion dream?
1:24
Speaker 2: Yes, so as technology continues to improve, energy becomes cheaper
1:27
Speaker 2: and cheaper.
1:28
Speaker 3: Fuel is no longer an issue.
1:29
Speaker 2: So fundamentally, today fuel is the issue that would prevent
1:33
Speaker 2: us from making energy super cheap. We just have to
1:35
Speaker 2: continue to work to extract fusionis I have that problem?
1:37
Speaker 2: So technology gets higher, the reactors get cheaper, and and
1:41
Speaker 2: fusion becomes super cheap. Now we can solve problems that
1:44
Speaker 2: we couldn't solve before. You know, we can we can
1:46
Speaker 2: desalinate water on a massive scale, like we can. You know,
1:50
Speaker 2: we can pull out minerals from the Earth very very carefully.
1:53
Speaker 2: We can go into space and colonize other planets. We
1:57
Speaker 2: can make anti matter, right and perhaps have an energy
1:59
Speaker 2: source that allows us to go to other stars like
2:03
Speaker 2: Star Trek.
2:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly right.
2:05
Speaker 2: So that's that's that's always the secret little motivation behind
2:07
Speaker 2: the scenes.
2:08
Speaker 3: I mean, also, I have a three year old daughter,
2:10
Speaker 3: right like, and I want to give her a world
2:12
Speaker 3: that's okay to live in.
2:20
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The
2:23
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
2:25
Speaker 1: make technological progress. People who are into technological progress and
2:29
Speaker 1: who dream big tend to be into fusion, a kind
2:33
Speaker 1: of nuclear power that could be safer and cheaper than fission,
2:37
Speaker 1: which is the way we get nuclear power now. By
2:40
Speaker 1: the way, as you probably know, fusion is fusing atomic
2:44
Speaker 1: nuclei together and fission is splitting them apart. People have
2:48
Speaker 1: been working on fusion power for decades, and reliable economic
2:53
Speaker 1: fusion power is still probably decades away, But in the
2:57
Speaker 1: past several years, billions of dollars have flowed into a
3:00
Speaker 1: handful of fusion startups that are using different technologies to
3:04
Speaker 1: try to make fusion power work. My guest today, Greg Pifer,
3:08
Speaker 1: is definitely on team fusion. He's been working on it
3:11
Speaker 1: for decades. But with his company Shine, he's taking a
3:16
Speaker 1: different approach. Rather than going straight to the dream of
3:19
Speaker 1: using fusion to create energy, Jine's taking baby steps, or
3:23
Speaker 1: at least mid sized steps. The company is using fusion
3:26
Speaker 1: to enter markets that are easier to compete in than
3:29
Speaker 1: the market for energy. As you'll hear, Shine has already
3:32
Speaker 1: used fusion to get into the business of scanning jet
3:35
Speaker 1: engine blades, and the company will soon be in the
3:38
Speaker 1: healthcare business as well. Later in the interview we'll talk
3:42
Speaker 1: about all of that and about how Greg hopes those
3:45
Speaker 1: businesses will eventually lead to that big fusion dream of cheap,
3:50
Speaker 1: abundant power. But to start, we talked about how Greg
3:54
Speaker 1: went from being a kid thinking about star Trek to
3:56
Speaker 1: a grown man starting a fusion company, and in particular
4:00
Speaker 1: about how that path led Greg to take really a
4:03
Speaker 1: very different approach than that taken by other people building
4:07
Speaker 1: fusion companies.
4:09
Speaker 2: I took a class actually in college that was taught
4:11
Speaker 2: by two very inspiring people, one of whom ran something
4:14
Speaker 2: called the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin,
4:17
Speaker 2: and another one named Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the Moon.
4:21
Speaker 2: And they were teaching a class about going into space
4:23
Speaker 2: and recovering resources, and recovering fusion fuel was one of
4:26
Speaker 2: the key resources they thought we could extract from from space,
4:29
Speaker 2: in particular the Moon. And so I got super excited
4:32
Speaker 2: about fusion because those fuels are if you burn them,
4:35
Speaker 2: you don't get nuclear waste.
4:36
Speaker 3: So the promise of nuclear energy without nuclear waste.
4:39
Speaker 2: And these people were doing it like on the front
4:41
Speaker 2: edge of it got me really excited.
4:43
Speaker 1: I actually went to the Moon to bring it back.
4:46
Speaker 2: Right, right, Like, these people have done hard things, so
4:49
Speaker 2: I'm going to go learn with them. Yeah, and so
4:51
Speaker 2: that got me into fusion. But you know, for me,
4:54
Speaker 2: it was a different experience. And if I had done
4:56
Speaker 2: a physics space program in fusion.
4:59
Speaker 1: Like more practical, more hands on, is that that?
5:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, this was an engineering program.
5:03
Speaker 2: And the Fusion Technology Institute, which I joined, its mission
5:06
Speaker 2: was to design viable fusion reactors. It was to say,
5:10
Speaker 2: let's assume the physics challenges are overcome, how would you
5:13
Speaker 2: build a real system?
5:15
Speaker 3: And that's where over the next few years, I just.
5:18
Speaker 2: Became a bit depressed, frankly, because even if you master
5:22
Speaker 2: the physics, it became really clear that the challenge of
5:27
Speaker 2: commercializing and making heat for five cents per kilo whatot hour,
5:31
Speaker 2: which is sort of the going rate for it, I
5:33
Speaker 2: couldn't see.
5:33
Speaker 3: A way to do that.
5:35
Speaker 2: And it was because you're taking some of the most
5:37
Speaker 2: exotic materials ever developed by humans and putting them in
5:40
Speaker 2: the harshest environments ever created by humans, and they don't
5:44
Speaker 2: live very long, and they're super expensive to make, and
5:48
Speaker 2: so the idea that we could go straight to five
5:51
Speaker 2: cents per kilo whatt hour, at least when I was
5:53
Speaker 2: in school, seemed far fetched.
5:56
Speaker 1: So that it's sort of a technoeconomic problem you're thinking of,
5:59
Speaker 1: not just the technical side, but if people are actually
6:02
Speaker 1: going to use it, it has to be price competitive.
6:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
6:06
Speaker 1: Okay, so you get sad. You get sad because as
6:09
Speaker 1: your Star Trek dream doesn't seem like it's going to
6:11
Speaker 1: come true. And then, as I understand it, you go
6:14
Speaker 1: to a party and you have your big idea. Is
6:16
Speaker 1: that true?
6:17
Speaker 3: That is the history.
6:18
Speaker 2: It was a party at my house and we were
6:20
Speaker 2: thinking about well, I mean, most people weren't thinking about this,
6:23
Speaker 2: but I had been working on this problem earlier in
6:25
Speaker 2: the day, so it was already kind of in my head.
6:28
Speaker 3: And it came down to our research. You know.
6:31
Speaker 2: I had done work on a specific technology at the
6:33
Speaker 2: UW where we were trying to make small fusion devices,
6:36
Speaker 2: and the idea is that there were a number of
6:38
Speaker 2: applications you could use them for and they didn't work
6:41
Speaker 2: very well.
6:42
Speaker 3: And one of the reasons we discovered they didn't work very.
6:45
Speaker 2: Well was we were trying to collide these nuclei in
6:49
Speaker 2: the same space that we were trying to speed them up.
6:52
Speaker 1: Okay, so you just shoot them really fast into each
6:54
Speaker 1: other as the.
6:54
Speaker 2: Basic Yeah, but the problem is, like, if you're trying
6:57
Speaker 2: to make something go fast in a highly collisional space
7:00
Speaker 2: where it's running into stuff a lot, it can't really
7:03
Speaker 2: speed up. It's banging into stuff and losing energy all
7:06
Speaker 2: the time. And if you take away that the target
7:09
Speaker 2: material so that you can accelerate them, then it's not
7:12
Speaker 2: colliding very much and you don't get a lot of
7:14
Speaker 2: fusion reactions. So you kind of had to operate in
7:16
Speaker 2: this worst of both worlds space, and you know, it
7:19
Speaker 2: was like the revelation was just like, well, why don't
7:21
Speaker 2: we accelerate in one place and collide in another place?
7:24
Speaker 3: Yeah?
7:24
Speaker 1: I was.
7:25
Speaker 3: I was at one point.
7:26
Speaker 2: There were all kinds of people standing around with drinks,
7:28
Speaker 2: and I was sitting in one of our recliners my laptop,
7:31
Speaker 2: punching numbers into it, and I just actually built a
7:35
Speaker 2: really quick model to just see what the fusion rate
7:37
Speaker 2: would do if we did that in theory, and the
7:40
Speaker 2: numbers came out amazing, like actually it was like, you know,
7:43
Speaker 2: a thousand times higher than the output we were getting
7:46
Speaker 2: from our university experiment, and so, you know, like I
7:49
Speaker 2: quickly disengaged from the party. I called my former advisor
7:52
Speaker 2: and I'm like, hey, you know if we did this
7:54
Speaker 2: like the math, and he was like, oh, okay, that's
7:56
Speaker 2: really cool, Like what do you want me to do?
7:58
Speaker 2: And I was like, I don't know yet. I got
8:00
Speaker 2: to figure this out, but I think I'm going to
8:02
Speaker 2: start a company to.
8:03
Speaker 3: Go do this.
8:04
Speaker 1: Were you sober, I probably had had.
8:08
Speaker 3: A couple drinks by then.
8:09
Speaker 2: Actually, so it's amazing that I got the math right,
8:11
Speaker 2: but I did, or maybe it helped.
8:13
Speaker 1: Maybe there's like a curve right, maybe there's an optimal
8:16
Speaker 1: number of efficts.
8:17
Speaker 2: There certainly is when it comes to bowling. So why
8:19
Speaker 2: not nuclear physics as well?
8:21
Speaker 1: Yes, so you have this idea. When you have this idea,
8:25
Speaker 1: do you think, oh, I've solved fusion energy.
8:29
Speaker 3: This physics revelation.
8:31
Speaker 2: It doesn't overcome the technoeconomic challenge of fusion energy that
8:35
Speaker 2: I already had. And so that was already like I
8:39
Speaker 2: had already moved past that, and I was trying to
8:41
Speaker 2: see if there were ways, like what I had put
8:43
Speaker 2: in the back of my head, where are there ways
8:46
Speaker 2: you can make use of fusion, you know that where
8:48
Speaker 2: you might get paid more for the reaction then you
8:51
Speaker 2: get paid for energy.
8:52
Speaker 1: So tell me about having this idea of like, oh,
8:55
Speaker 1: maybe there's a way to commercialize fusion to do something
8:58
Speaker 1: other than generate energy.
9:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, So two formative experiences.
9:03
Speaker 2: One, my advisor at the Fusion Technology Institute had identified
9:07
Speaker 2: a family, like, you know, a couple dozen probably applications
9:11
Speaker 2: where you could use fusion for non electric applications, and
9:14
Speaker 2: they hadn't really done the economic analysis on any of them,
9:17
Speaker 2: but they just said, here are some things you can
9:19
Speaker 2: do with fusion reactions, and those included things like making
9:23
Speaker 2: medical isotopes or detecting hidden material or you know, contraband material,
9:27
Speaker 2: detecting nuclear weapons, stuff like that.
9:29
Speaker 1: So, to be clear, those are things that people are
9:31
Speaker 1: already doing out in the world, right There is a
9:34
Speaker 1: market for those things. These are existing products. They're just
9:36
Speaker 1: not using fusion too exactly.
9:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, super definable markets, you know, and there are supply
9:43
Speaker 2: chain issues, and it's a good market to get into
9:46
Speaker 2: if you had an alternative way to make things.
9:47
Speaker 3: Okay, So that was interesting.
9:49
Speaker 2: And then the other formative experience for me, it was
9:52
Speaker 2: Actually we had started another company when I was in
9:54
Speaker 2: grad school that had nothing to do with any of this,
9:57
Speaker 2: but we were just recovering data from crashed hard drives.
9:59
Speaker 2: One of my roommates had a hard drive crash. We
10:02
Speaker 2: looked online. All the options sucked. It was like, pay
10:04
Speaker 2: us two thousand dollars and we'll try, but maybe we
10:06
Speaker 2: won't get your stuff back, and it's upfront payment. And
10:09
Speaker 2: so we decided that was a bad business till we
10:11
Speaker 2: started a business, and we said we told people, we said, look,
10:14
Speaker 2: we're just starting this company. We're new at it, but
10:16
Speaker 2: we'll charge you one hundred bucks if we get your
10:18
Speaker 2: data and nothing if we don't, and you know, we
10:20
Speaker 2: might break your stuff. So you'd be surprised how many
10:24
Speaker 2: people like that better than and then being able to
10:27
Speaker 2: pay two grand. And so what happened was we got
10:29
Speaker 2: really really good at it. As we practiced, the volume
10:33
Speaker 2: we could handle and the throughput we could handle, all
10:35
Speaker 2: of this scaled really really nicely. And so this was
10:38
Speaker 2: like just a formative idea for me that like, Okay,
10:41
Speaker 2: if we can get into a niche with fusion, and
10:43
Speaker 2: we can find an economic proposition that works, we can
10:46
Speaker 2: practice and if we practice, we'll get better at it.
10:49
Speaker 2: And if we get better at it, like our suppliers
10:51
Speaker 2: and our customers and everyone.
10:53
Speaker 3: Will grow with us.
10:53
Speaker 2: So we'll move this ecosystem forward. And I really like
10:56
Speaker 2: that because if you look at some of the most
10:58
Speaker 2: high tech deep tech industries around, they followed the same roadmap,
11:03
Speaker 2: you know, if you look at semiconductors and More's law.
11:06
Speaker 2: It was fueled by having products all along the way. Right,
11:09
Speaker 2: Like the first computers may have only had a few customers,
11:12
Speaker 2: they would pay a ton for them, yes, And by
11:14
Speaker 2: doing that, they got better and they brought the price down,
11:17
Speaker 2: and then there were new a new set of customers,
11:19
Speaker 2: right that could afford those computers.
11:20
Speaker 1: Now more recently, Tesla is the classic model of that.
11:24
Speaker 3: Right.
11:24
Speaker 1: They started with the Roadster, this super expensive, exactly electric
11:28
Speaker 1: car that was not for everybody, but enough people bought
11:33
Speaker 1: it that they could go from the whatever that was
11:34
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars car to the seventy
11:36
Speaker 1: thousand dollars car to the fifty thousand dollars car. Right, yeah, exactly.
11:39
Speaker 2: And I'd argue that the underlying technology for Tesla started
11:42
Speaker 2: even in other industries. So the ability to scale batteries
11:46
Speaker 2: even more cheaply, right, Like it's rechargeable batteries. So you
11:49
Speaker 2: started with toys and special services, and you move to laptops,
11:53
Speaker 2: and then you move to EV's and even once you
11:54
Speaker 2: get into evs, you do this where you build an
11:56
Speaker 2: expensive thing that few people buy.
11:59
Speaker 1: So you have the idea of applying this framework to fusion,
12:06
Speaker 1: which is quite different. Right, there are all these other people,
12:09
Speaker 1: people who are raising lots of money to go straight
12:12
Speaker 1: at making electricity basically right, make the energy. Yeah, Like
12:17
Speaker 1: why I don't know, Like why is anybody else doing
12:21
Speaker 1: it the way you're doing it?
12:23
Speaker 2: I think there's a there's it's a very exciting proposition
12:26
Speaker 2: to be able to go straight to energy. It's it's
12:28
Speaker 2: very inviting and it sounds very appealing and even if
12:31
Speaker 2: the odds are long, But I don't know how many
12:33
Speaker 2: of them have really spent time critically thinking about the
12:37
Speaker 2: engineering challenges. And that's where my education was just different,
12:41
Speaker 2: Like that's all we thought about. Like all we thought
12:43
Speaker 2: about were the engineering.
12:44
Speaker 3: Challenges and how to overcome them.
12:46
Speaker 2: Like these were university people that are super optimistic, right,
12:49
Speaker 2: like yeah, and we worked like we developed materials for
12:52
Speaker 2: first walls and things like that. But like everything we
12:55
Speaker 2: did till broke really fast and it was really expensive stuff.
13:01
Speaker 2: So you know, it's just that was different for a
13:04
Speaker 2: different experience for me, different formative experience for me than
13:07
Speaker 2: for a lot of people who are trying to go
13:09
Speaker 2: straight to the end.
13:10
Speaker 3: Now.
13:10
Speaker 2: I do think there are some innovative concepts out there,
13:14
Speaker 2: you know that if they work, and I say if
13:16
Speaker 2: because the physics is far from proven, but if they work,
13:19
Speaker 2: they could simplify a lot of the engineering challenges. But
13:22
Speaker 2: the main concepts we know that are likely to work
13:24
Speaker 2: will run into these challenges. They're very, very significant.
13:28
Speaker 1: Meaning that even if the physics work, actually building a
13:31
Speaker 1: thing at a reasonable cost is going to be super hard.
13:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's that's my view.
13:38
Speaker 1: So you actually did start a business and are selling things, right, yes,
13:43
Speaker 1: using fusions to do stuff that people will pay for.
13:45
Speaker 1: So let's talk about that. Let's talk about where the
13:47
Speaker 1: company is today, and then we can talk about where
13:49
Speaker 1: you're about to be, and then we can talk about
13:51
Speaker 1: where hopefully you'll be in some number of decades. What
13:54
Speaker 1: are you sell them today?
13:55
Speaker 3: We sell neutrons, and neutrons took.
13:58
Speaker 1: Me a little while when I started, and then I thought, well,
14:01
Speaker 1: you know, I buy electrons. I buy electrons every time
14:04
Speaker 1: I turn on a left switch. Right, I'm just to
14:06
Speaker 1: buying electrons. Tell me about the new neutron business, like,
14:09
Speaker 1: what does that mean?
14:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'll translate it. So we sell fusion.
14:13
Speaker 2: We just sell fusion to the highest bidders, and the
14:16
Speaker 2: highest bidders are not people who buy energy. And so
14:20
Speaker 2: it turns out the easiest fusion reaction to do is
14:22
Speaker 2: DT fusion, and DT fusion produces energy on the one hand,
14:26
Speaker 2: but it produces neutrons on the other, and when sold
14:31
Speaker 2: to certain customers, the neutrons are far more valuable than
14:34
Speaker 2: the energy.
14:35
Speaker 1: So, just to be clear, DT fusion is just two
14:38
Speaker 1: different isotopes of hydrogen, right, And they may tum helium
14:43
Speaker 1: and then they throw off some number of neutrons, which
14:47
Speaker 1: is just the neutral nuclear particle. And you're saying, there's
14:51
Speaker 1: people who actually have a use for neutrons, yes, okay.
14:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, it turns out and they'll pay a ton for
14:57
Speaker 2: it and so uh. And generally the historical neutron sources
15:02
Speaker 2: for these are very specialized fission reactors, so research reactors.
15:05
Speaker 1: Okay, so more traditional nuclear reactor.
15:08
Speaker 2: Because fission reactors throw off neutrons too, and as we've
15:11
Speaker 2: talked about already, fissions much easier than fusion from a
15:15
Speaker 2: science perspective. And so there's these old reactors that serve
15:18
Speaker 2: these industries. But the research reactor fleet that we built
15:22
Speaker 2: in the past is old.
15:24
Speaker 3: It's like sixty plus.
15:25
Speaker 2: Years old and essentially dying in general. So markets that
15:28
Speaker 2: have been served by these reactors are losing that capacity.
15:33
Speaker 2: On top of that, fusion based approaches are much cheaper
15:37
Speaker 2: than building new reactors, So as you look to replace
15:40
Speaker 2: the infrastructure, there's a massive edge for fusion there. And
15:44
Speaker 2: when we looked at the markets, you know, we did
15:46
Speaker 2: very quick. Like well, everyone else in fusion you probably
15:49
Speaker 2: talk to is chasing something called Q greater than one,
15:52
Speaker 2: and that's the ratio of energy out over energy in.
15:55
Speaker 2: And they want to show that they can make more
15:56
Speaker 2: energy than they can put into it. That's the fundamental
16:01
Speaker 2: fusion dream, right sure, but they don't even think, you know,
16:03
Speaker 2: most of them aren't really even seriously thinking about the economics.
16:06
Speaker 2: They're saying, first we need to get to net energy
16:09
Speaker 2: and then we'll worry about net economics. For me, you
16:14
Speaker 2: know that I couldn't see a way to scale fusion
16:15
Speaker 2: unless we were worried about net economics right away, and
16:19
Speaker 2: if we wanted to practice, we needed to have positive
16:21
Speaker 2: net economics right away. So we are our core metric
16:24
Speaker 2: was q economic. And so how do we get more
16:26
Speaker 2: dollars out than dollars in?
16:28
Speaker 1: Which is the classic business question? Yes, every business needs
16:32
Speaker 1: to answer to survive. How could our revenues be greater
16:35
Speaker 1: than our costs?
16:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's how we have seen deep tech scale,
16:38
Speaker 2: right Like that is the playbook by which it's scale.
16:40
Speaker 2: So we pursued that, and you know, we found actually customers.
16:45
Speaker 2: So you know, if you do a kill, what our effusion?
16:47
Speaker 2: If you produce a kill, what our fusion heat? And
16:50
Speaker 2: you can sell that for five cents. Let's say if
16:52
Speaker 2: you if you took the same neutrons generated by that
16:55
Speaker 2: killow what hour of fusion reactions? There are customers who
16:58
Speaker 2: would pay two hundred thousand dollars for it.
17:00
Speaker 3: Huh. And so that's a massive difference.
17:02
Speaker 1: And so are you in fact selling those neutrons for
17:05
Speaker 1: two hundred thousand dollars?
17:06
Speaker 3: Yeah?
17:06
Speaker 1: Now is that your business?
17:07
Speaker 3: We are?
17:08
Speaker 1: And who is buying them? And what are they doing
17:10
Speaker 1: with them.
17:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they're making airplanes safer. You know, they're making
17:14
Speaker 2: rockets more reliable.
17:16
Speaker 1: What is the link between buying neutrons from you and
17:19
Speaker 1: making airplanes safer?
17:20
Speaker 3: All right?
17:21
Speaker 2: So modern engines and jet aircraft operate to get very
17:24
Speaker 2: high efficiency and very high power.
17:26
Speaker 3: They operate in a really high temperature.
17:28
Speaker 2: In fact, they operate like twenty percent above the melting
17:30
Speaker 2: point of the blades in the engine.
17:33
Speaker 1: I'm glad I didn't know that.
17:35
Speaker 3: And now I'm going to tell you something that gets
17:36
Speaker 3: even more scary.
17:37
Speaker 2: So the way they manage that is they suck cold
17:40
Speaker 2: air in from the front of the engine and they
17:42
Speaker 2: pipe it through a series of cooling tubes in each fin,
17:44
Speaker 2: like embedded in each fin. And the manufacturing process is
17:48
Speaker 2: such that it's fairly common that one of these cooling
17:51
Speaker 2: tubes is blocked, okay, And if it's blocked, it will melt,
17:55
Speaker 2: it will imbalance the engine and possibly destroy it. And
17:59
Speaker 2: so we don't want that to happen truly, but with
18:02
Speaker 2: modern materials, and those are materials that X ray or ultrasound.
18:07
Speaker 3: Do not interact with heavily. So if you try to
18:09
Speaker 3: see inside these things with conventional techniques, you cannot see
18:12
Speaker 3: the defect.
18:13
Speaker 1: So just to be clear, you make this engine and
18:15
Speaker 1: then you want to look inside to make sure that
18:17
Speaker 1: these cooling tubes are not blocked so that it doesn't
18:20
Speaker 1: melt and the plane crashes. And so you think, well,
18:23
Speaker 1: we could use extra A or ultra sound too common technologies,
18:26
Speaker 1: but you're saying those don't work. But there's some way
18:28
Speaker 1: you can shoot neutrons at it and see inside of it.
18:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is so.
18:34
Speaker 2: So neutrons have you know, they have a characteristic of
18:38
Speaker 2: There are certain isotopes, so certain materials in nature that
18:43
Speaker 2: absorb neutrons like crazy, like okay, and you can put
18:47
Speaker 2: them where you want them to be. So, for example,
18:49
Speaker 2: with jet engine blades, we just push a liquid solution
18:53
Speaker 2: containing a material known as gadolinium into the blade and
18:57
Speaker 2: then we blow it out where there and if the
18:59
Speaker 2: channel's blocked, it doesn't blow out, so the gatoleinium sits
19:02
Speaker 2: in there and then we hit it with neutrons and
19:05
Speaker 2: any neutron that comes close to that gatoleinium gets absorbed,
19:09
Speaker 2: and then behind the blade you put a piece of
19:11
Speaker 2: film that's sensitive to neutrons. It's a little more complex
19:14
Speaker 2: than that and you can see it and you can
19:16
Speaker 2: see it.
19:17
Speaker 1: It's like an X ray, it's like a neutron. X
19:18
Speaker 1: rays you see.
19:19
Speaker 2: The inside of stuff, but neutrons can see things X
19:22
Speaker 2: ray can't, and it's actually very complementary. X ray is
19:26
Speaker 2: good at generally heavy materials. Neutrons are generally good at
19:29
Speaker 2: seeing light materials.
19:31
Speaker 1: And so are you in that business now?
19:34
Speaker 3: We are. Yeah.
19:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, We'll do tens of thousands of parts, you know,
19:38
Speaker 2: in a year, and we're replacing essentially age capacity. So
19:44
Speaker 2: the biggest imaging reactor in the United States shut down
19:47
Speaker 2: about two years ago, was run by GE And so
19:51
Speaker 2: there's this nice tailwin for share acquisition here. It's not
19:53
Speaker 2: just a way for us to make money in fusion,
19:55
Speaker 2: but a lot of the customers sort of just come
19:57
Speaker 2: to us proactively because they're very worried about the future
20:00
Speaker 2: of the supply chain.
20:01
Speaker 1: Uh huh. So they send you the blades. You have
20:04
Speaker 1: a facility, they send you the blades.
20:06
Speaker 3: They do, and we give them back pictures with the blades.
20:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so that's the business you're in. It seems
20:14
Speaker 1: like the next big step is getting into the medical
20:17
Speaker 1: isotope business.
20:18
Speaker 2: Right, You're building a yeah, yeah, okay, and just on
20:21
Speaker 2: the other thing, there are many others.
20:23
Speaker 3: So turbine blades are just one application.
20:25
Speaker 2: There's a lot of other parts and components that we validate,
20:27
Speaker 2: including radiation hardness testing and electronics, et cetera. But yeah,
20:31
Speaker 2: the next step, and it required a huge reduction in
20:34
Speaker 2: the cost per neutron. We had to get the cost
20:36
Speaker 2: per neutron down one thousandfold to make the next step work.
20:40
Speaker 1: So this is important right now. The whole arc you're
20:42
Speaker 1: trying to follow is like, let's do one thing where
20:46
Speaker 1: we can make a lot of money, and then let's
20:48
Speaker 1: do the next thing where they'll actually pay us less.
20:52
Speaker 1: So we have to figure out how to do it
20:53
Speaker 1: a thousand times cheaper for it to be profitable.
20:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they'll buy a lot more neutrons, and so
20:59
Speaker 2: the market opportunity is actually, you know, let's call it
21:02
Speaker 2: ten to twenty times larger than the test opportunity in total.
21:06
Speaker 3: And so even though they're paying you less, they're buying
21:08
Speaker 3: so many more utrons that you know, you make more money.
21:14
Speaker 1: We'll be back in just a minute. The next step
21:29
Speaker 1: for Shine for Gregg's company is to start using neutrons
21:33
Speaker 1: to create medical isotopes. Medical isotopes, as it turns out,
21:37
Speaker 1: are widely used in medical imaging. To get into that business,
21:42
Speaker 1: Shine is building what's basically a factory that's going to
21:46
Speaker 1: use fusion to create medical isotopes. They call the factory Chrysalis.
21:51
Speaker 1: And Greg and I were talking on video and at
21:54
Speaker 1: this point in the conversation he mentioned that you could
21:56
Speaker 1: actually see Chrysalis out the window behind him.
21:59
Speaker 3: And this is Chrysalis behind me, by the way.
22:01
Speaker 1: Okay, so, and it's not a picture for people who
22:04
Speaker 1: are listening. It's like out there, there's a bunch of
22:07
Speaker 1: grass and there's a bill thing. Just it looks like
22:10
Speaker 1: a rectangle, a cement rectangle over your shoulder.
22:13
Speaker 2: That's over half a billion dollars of invested capital, is
22:15
Speaker 2: what it.
22:15
Speaker 1: Over cement rectangle. So tell me about what's going on
22:21
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah.
22:22
Speaker 3: So, essentially, we needed to get the cost per neutron down.
22:25
Speaker 3: We did. We demonstrated that back in twenty nineteen.
22:28
Speaker 2: And what we knew we could do then is if
22:30
Speaker 2: we got it that cheap, instead of using neutrons just
22:32
Speaker 2: to examine material.
22:33
Speaker 3: We can use it to change material.
22:35
Speaker 2: Okay, in a sense that nuclear engineers call it transmutation,
22:38
Speaker 2: but like the common population would think of it as alchemy,
22:41
Speaker 2: you can use neutrons to turn low value materials into
22:45
Speaker 2: I'm going to call them hyper valuable materials and I'll
22:47
Speaker 2: tell you why in just a second. So at small scale,
22:51
Speaker 2: the most interesting markets for these are in medicine, producing
22:54
Speaker 2: isotopes used for medicine.
22:56
Speaker 1: Which turns out to be wildly common, right, like medical
23:00
Speaker 1: isotopes I learned, you know researching for this show are
23:05
Speaker 1: like what tens of thousands of people a day in
23:08
Speaker 1: the US are tested with medical.
23:11
Speaker 2: Fifty million per year around the world. Yeah, yeah, so
23:14
Speaker 2: they're super common. And again, just like in the testing
23:17
Speaker 2: business where we're replacing fission reactors, that's how isotopes have
23:22
Speaker 2: been made in the past.
23:23
Speaker 3: So old research.
23:25
Speaker 2: Reactors around sixty years old, and you know they're dying, right,
23:29
Speaker 2: like the infrastructure is going away, and so it's the
23:31
Speaker 2: same tail when we just needed to get fusion a
23:33
Speaker 2: lot cheaper to do it.
23:34
Speaker 1: And is it right that in a kind of crude way,
23:37
Speaker 1: the use is analogous in many cases that that medical
23:40
Speaker 1: isotopes are used for scanning, but you're scanning people instead
23:44
Speaker 1: of jet airplane blades.
23:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, the mechanism is a little bit different, so, but
23:48
Speaker 2: it's the same idea, right, like so, and it fits
23:51
Speaker 2: our whole theme of illumination around the company, right In
23:53
Speaker 2: one case, we're illuminating defects here, we're illuminating disease.
23:56
Speaker 3: Eventually will be illuminating the planet, right with good.
23:59
Speaker 1: That's good metaphor.
24:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but you know, so what you do is
24:04
Speaker 2: you've got enough neutrends now that you can turn. You
24:06
Speaker 2: can change materials, so you can take things that are
24:08
Speaker 2: really stable, like uranium. You buy it for six dollars
24:11
Speaker 2: a gram, turn it into an imaging isotope molybdenum ninety nine,
24:14
Speaker 2: which is worth like one hundred and fifty million dollars
24:16
Speaker 2: a gram presuly.
24:17
Speaker 1: People buy it in very very very small pounce.
24:20
Speaker 2: Yeah they do, but you know it's a dose for
24:23
Speaker 2: a patient is like one tenth of one microgram, right, Yeah.
24:25
Speaker 1: I mean if it's one hundred and fifty million a
24:27
Speaker 1: gram and you're making it in a five hundred million
24:29
Speaker 1: dollar building, you don't have to make much of it
24:31
Speaker 1: exactly to deeve your cost of capital.
24:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, And Krystalist will produce a few grams per year
24:36
Speaker 2: that's it.
24:37
Speaker 1: Wow, that's extraordinary. So it's like like a few grams
24:40
Speaker 1: is like a little cup, not even just like a
24:43
Speaker 1: sugar spoonful sugar package.
24:44
Speaker 3: You dump in your coffee.
24:45
Speaker 1: That's a few grams, but that's millions of doses.
24:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so one gram is ten million doses is
24:51
Speaker 2: essentially that I think about it.
24:52
Speaker 1: That is wild. Can we just just have that be
24:55
Speaker 1: wild for one moment? Okay?
24:56
Speaker 3: Go on?
24:57
Speaker 2: So you know, for in the US, for example, most
24:59
Speaker 2: of the testing is to look at blood flow in
25:01
Speaker 2: the heart. If you're having chest pain, doctors will give
25:03
Speaker 2: you this test to see if your arteries are blocked
25:06
Speaker 2: or where the muscle is receiving blood and where it's not,
25:10
Speaker 2: and but also for staging cancer. And there's probably another
25:12
Speaker 2: two dozen tests all that use this on a skin.
25:15
Speaker 1: So that's what you're going to be making. Like, tell
25:18
Speaker 1: me about the tell me about the business end of chrysalis,
25:22
Speaker 1: of that facility over your should, Like what's it look
25:24
Speaker 1: like in there where you're actually doing the fusion.
25:27
Speaker 2: So there's a bunch of machines. So there'll be six
25:30
Speaker 2: fusion machines in Chrysalis. They're built and they're you know,
25:33
Speaker 2: they're being installed and they are surrounded. So there's a
25:38
Speaker 2: there's a tube in which the particle beam comes down
25:40
Speaker 2: and it strikes tritium and makes fusion reactions, and the
25:43
Speaker 2: neutrons come out in all directions, and we've surrounded that
25:47
Speaker 2: to with The uranium target is uranium dissolved in water,
25:51
Speaker 2: and as the neutrons hit it, they cause it to
25:53
Speaker 2: split and we get isotopes that are useful for medicine,
25:57
Speaker 2: things like molibdidum ninety nine, iodine one thirty one, which
26:01
Speaker 2: is used to treat cancer, xenon one thirty three, which
26:03
Speaker 2: is used to image brain and heart.
26:05
Speaker 1: So you're actually using fusion to drive a fission reaction
26:08
Speaker 1: that make the thing that you want precisely. Yeah, it's
26:11
Speaker 1: like a nuclear turned ducan, yeah, versus.
26:13
Speaker 2: Using fission to drive a fission reaction. And the difference
26:16
Speaker 2: is cost. If you were to look at building a
26:19
Speaker 2: new research reactor to do what Chrysalis does, you're probably
26:22
Speaker 2: at something like five to ten times the cost when
26:26
Speaker 2: it's all said and done. So fusion turns out to
26:28
Speaker 2: be much cheaper and much safer, and it produces about,
26:31
Speaker 2: you know, somewhere between one and five percent the radioactive
26:34
Speaker 2: waste of a reactor, so much much cleaner.
26:38
Speaker 1: And is it right that there have actually been shortages
26:41
Speaker 1: of the isotope that you're going.
26:43
Speaker 3: To be making all the time. Yeah, it goes, and
26:45
Speaker 3: it's been going on for fifteen years.
26:47
Speaker 1: And so how close are you to opening what has
26:51
Speaker 1: to happen? There's a building behind you, but it's not
26:53
Speaker 1: on yet.
26:54
Speaker 2: Right, the equipment is almost all entirely here in Jamesville.
26:57
Speaker 2: We need to install it, we need to commission it,
26:59
Speaker 2: and then we need to start pushing product out of it.
27:01
Speaker 1: When are you going to get the first neutron? I
27:04
Speaker 1: won't say out the door, but you know when you're
27:06
Speaker 1: gonna get the When you're going to make the first neutron?
27:07
Speaker 2: Well, the first neutrons are actually like being made in
27:10
Speaker 2: a smaller building to the side that we used to practice.
27:12
Speaker 2: But the first isotopes should be made in about eighteen months.
27:15
Speaker 1: Okay, so like end of next year, yeah, I think.
27:19
Speaker 3: And there's a big difference between first isotope produced and
27:21
Speaker 3: actually commercial readiness.
27:23
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and your whole thing is techno economics, right,
27:25
Speaker 1: the first isotope produced where the unit economics are profitable
27:28
Speaker 1: for you?
27:29
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, and I would say that's probably more
27:31
Speaker 2: likely two years. But this is a plant that no
27:33
Speaker 2: one's ever built before with technology that we have tested
27:36
Speaker 2: in the lab. But you know when you build a
27:37
Speaker 2: working machine that has thousands of moving parts and we've
27:41
Speaker 2: derisked all the.
27:42
Speaker 1: Home Yeah, I'm totally willing to believe that it won't work.
27:45
Speaker 2: Oh, it will work, But the things that are going
27:46
Speaker 2: to break and burn us are like you know well.
27:48
Speaker 1: Or that it won't be economical, right, like, nobody has
27:51
Speaker 1: ever done anything like what you are doing before.
27:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, it'll be economical.
27:55
Speaker 2: I think the question is for me is like I'm
27:58
Speaker 2: worried about things like valves. We have hundreds of valves
28:00
Speaker 2: in this plant, and they might have a very low
28:03
Speaker 2: failure rate, right Like, but if the failure rates one
28:05
Speaker 2: percent on hundreds of valves, you're going to have a
28:07
Speaker 2: lot of problems.
28:08
Speaker 1: You got always is going to have broken falst This
28:10
Speaker 1: is your engineering training.
28:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's exactly right. Like I've got an earlier models.
28:15
Speaker 1: And a Tesla, an old Tesla.
28:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, the motor runs fantastically. The car is still
28:20
Speaker 2: super fun to drive. It's got one hundred and seventy
28:22
Speaker 2: thousand miles on it. But I've replaced the door handles
28:25
Speaker 2: like it feels like a dozen times, and it's not
28:27
Speaker 2: fun when you suddenly can't.
28:28
Speaker 3: Get in your car and you've got to like use
28:30
Speaker 3: a credit card to which oh.
28:31
Speaker 1: Look, how fancy the door handles are. Just make regular
28:34
Speaker 1: door handles, man.
28:35
Speaker 3: And they went back to that. Actually they learned a
28:37
Speaker 3: lesson there. But that's what's going to hit us.
28:40
Speaker 2: So I think as we think about that thing, like
28:42
Speaker 2: really producing reliably, I tell people probably two years as
28:45
Speaker 2: sort of the soonest, and it could be three right
28:48
Speaker 2: like it, it could be somewhere in that range.
28:51
Speaker 1: That's the current staff. Yeah, I want to get to
28:53
Speaker 1: the big dream. How many steps between making medical isotopes
28:57
Speaker 1: and creating a cheap and abundant power for all of humanity?
29:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, and by the way, our steps are like pragmatic,
29:03
Speaker 3: not dogmatic.
29:04
Speaker 1: So it's nice.
29:05
Speaker 2: But they've held so like if there are new market
29:07
Speaker 2: applications that come up, definitely we'll look too.
29:10
Speaker 3: Include we won't.
29:10
Speaker 1: Hold you to it. I promise I won't hold you
29:12
Speaker 1: to your forward looking sayments. Yeah, but they have.
29:15
Speaker 3: Held for the last fifteen years.
29:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess is something I can say with confidence.
29:19
Speaker 2: So the next step is to do this transmutation, right,
29:23
Speaker 2: changing one material into another at a larger scale, and
29:26
Speaker 2: we can use that to solve one of the biggest
29:28
Speaker 2: problems with fission energy. So again you can see us
29:31
Speaker 2: starting to come into the fission world a little bit here.
29:34
Speaker 2: And one of the things that we should be doing
29:37
Speaker 2: as a nation is we should be recycling all of
29:39
Speaker 2: our nuclear waste.
29:40
Speaker 1: We have a lot of nuclear waste. For a while,
29:42
Speaker 1: we were going to bury it all in a mountain
29:43
Speaker 1: in Nevada, but people in Nevada didn't like that idea.
29:46
Speaker 1: So it's still just sort of sitting around everywhere, and
29:49
Speaker 1: it'll be sitting around for millions of years the right
29:52
Speaker 1: order of magnitude if we don't do something minute.
29:54
Speaker 3: I think that's right. And the problem with that is
29:56
Speaker 3: it's just loaded with value.
29:58
Speaker 1: Right, people worry about it. But also look look at
30:00
Speaker 1: all this energy that's just sitting there ready to be harvested.
30:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, so why not solve two problems at once. Right,
30:06
Speaker 3: it's not super safe wor it.
30:08
Speaker 2: I mean it's pretty safe for it is, but if
30:09
Speaker 2: somebody wanted to do something to it, they might be
30:11
Speaker 2: able to. Yeah, a lot of it's plutonium, which is
30:14
Speaker 2: stuff that if you worked and you processed it enough,
30:16
Speaker 2: you could turn into nuclear weapons. So we should be
30:19
Speaker 2: eliminating that hazard and at the same time we can
30:21
Speaker 2: solve a strategic fuel supply.
30:23
Speaker 3: Issue for us.
30:24
Speaker 2: Now that our relationship with rushes and not so good.
30:27
Speaker 2: You know, they were the source of a lot of
30:28
Speaker 2: the uranium that we put into our fission reactors. But
30:31
Speaker 2: if we recycle all of our spent fuel, essentially we
30:33
Speaker 2: can become totally independent of any other nation for our
30:36
Speaker 2: own fission energy needs. And the great part is the
30:39
Speaker 2: more fission reactors we burn, the more recycled fuel we have.
30:43
Speaker 3: So it just scales with the number of plants.
30:46
Speaker 1: And so you have a sort of clear technological line
30:51
Speaker 1: to using your fusion reactors to do what to get
30:56
Speaker 1: energy out of spent fuel from fission plants? Like, what
30:59
Speaker 1: do you actually do there?
31:00
Speaker 2: We'll take spent fuel, will dissolve it into a liquid form,
31:04
Speaker 2: will separate out valuable materials that includes uranium and plutonium,
31:08
Speaker 2: which should go back into the reactor. So close loop
31:10
Speaker 2: close the fuel cycle with fission, will separate out other
31:14
Speaker 2: things precious metals, rare earth elements that have decayed enough
31:17
Speaker 2: to sell, and then you're left with this very small
31:20
Speaker 2: waste stream, like it's less than.
31:21
Speaker 3: Five percent of the original.
31:23
Speaker 2: Almost all of that has relatively short half lives decades
31:27
Speaker 2: or less, and a little bit of it has these
31:31
Speaker 2: really long problematic half lives million year plus isotopes. That's
31:36
Speaker 2: the only place fusion comes in. It solves that problem.
31:39
Speaker 2: So fusion neutrons can transmute. Just like we use them
31:42
Speaker 2: to turn low value into high value, we can use
31:44
Speaker 2: them to turn long half life into short half life.
31:48
Speaker 2: And one great example I like to use is id
31:51
Speaker 2: ON one twenty nine. Waste product from fission lives over
31:54
Speaker 2: ten million years, over ten million year half life.
31:57
Speaker 1: Which is bad. It's going to be radioactive forever forever.
32:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you hit it with a fusion neutron though
32:02
Speaker 2: it becomes id ON one twenty eight. Id ON one
32:04
Speaker 2: twenty eight has a twenty five minute half life, after
32:07
Speaker 2: which it becomes stable. You put it in salt, yeah,
32:10
Speaker 2: you could right, like you could eat it.
32:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
32:13
Speaker 2: So you do this process with fusion and you solve
32:16
Speaker 2: the problem with the long lived waste. So we want
32:20
Speaker 2: to do that two steps, and we know how because
32:22
Speaker 2: we're already doing both of those processes and chrysalis. So
32:25
Speaker 2: as we look to scaling to a waste recycling plant,
32:28
Speaker 2: we've already got essentially a prototype for it here, and
32:33
Speaker 2: you know we're going to build on that. It's the
32:34
Speaker 2: same part of the regulatory code that would license a
32:36
Speaker 2: recycling plant, same type of construction, everything.
32:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that one is obviously complicated on multiple dimensions, right,
32:44
Speaker 1: I mean you have to whatever the technical side is.
32:46
Speaker 1: It's the technical side, but presumably you're dealing with nuclear waste,
32:49
Speaker 1: there's going to be a whole like political regulatory side.
32:52
Speaker 1: That's what is that a decade? When you think about that,
32:55
Speaker 1: ten years, twenty, like, that's a long game already, right,
32:58
Speaker 1: But the political.
32:59
Speaker 2: Winds are changing, and I'm not talking about because of
33:01
Speaker 2: the current administration.
33:02
Speaker 1: No, the world is becoming more pro nuclear you know,
33:05
Speaker 1: basically non partisan way.
33:06
Speaker 2: But people are starting to learn that you shouldn't think
33:08
Speaker 2: an absolutely right like, are you more afraid of climate
33:11
Speaker 2: change or are you more afraid of the very very
33:13
Speaker 2: small risk posed by nuclear energy? Yes, And anyone who
33:16
Speaker 2: thinks about it from a mathematical perspective very quickly comes
33:19
Speaker 2: to Wow, climate change is going to hurt way more
33:20
Speaker 2: people than nuclear energy ever, will.
33:22
Speaker 1: Even particulate emissions from you know, certainly coal plants are
33:27
Speaker 1: wildly more dangerous than a.
33:28
Speaker 2: Physicially yeah, absolutely, And if you look at like coastal
33:31
Speaker 2: flooding and stuff like that, multiply that by like tens
33:34
Speaker 2: or hundreds of times in terms of impacted people.
33:36
Speaker 1: So okay, so you're saying the political still, it's going
33:40
Speaker 1: to be it's going to take a while, and it's
33:41
Speaker 1: going to be hard despite the political shifts you're talking about.
33:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, well see, you know, the US has had a
33:46
Speaker 2: long term policy band on recycling spent fuel, you know,
33:50
Speaker 2: but new executive orders that just came out are challenging that.
33:53
Speaker 2: So I'm trying to reinvigorate the nuclear industry. I mean,
33:56
Speaker 2: when you think you're going to do it twenty thirty two, okay,
34:00
Speaker 2: not ten years, but not too far off of ten
34:02
Speaker 2: years in a pilot plant, okay, because we want to
34:04
Speaker 2: prove the economics first.
34:06
Speaker 1: And then can we get to the big dream after
34:08
Speaker 1: that part? When do we get to free energy for
34:10
Speaker 1: all of humanity?
34:11
Speaker 3: Now?
34:11
Speaker 1: Are we ready?
34:12
Speaker 3: So?
34:12
Speaker 2: The cool thing is as you look at like these
34:15
Speaker 2: fusion systems that you use for recycling, to spend fuel.
34:17
Speaker 2: They look technologically very much like fusion power plants, but
34:21
Speaker 2: you're still getting paid at least twenty times as much
34:24
Speaker 2: per reaction and they don't need to operate ninety nine
34:26
Speaker 2: point nine nine percent of the time because you know,
34:29
Speaker 2: people freak out if a city loses power for good reason.
34:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you slow down.
34:33
Speaker 2: Recycling a material that has a ten million year half life,
34:36
Speaker 2: no big deal, right, Like you fix the machine, you
34:38
Speaker 2: get to learn, and you get to move forward.
34:40
Speaker 3: So, and we're going to have.
34:41
Speaker 2: To build dozens, if not hundreds of these fusion systems
34:44
Speaker 2: to solve the global problem with nuclear waste. So through
34:47
Speaker 2: economy of scale and through practice on a much more
34:50
Speaker 2: forgiving environment where you're getting paid more per neutron, we
34:53
Speaker 2: think we can get that next you know, that next
34:55
Speaker 2: factor of ten or so that you need to be
34:57
Speaker 2: cost competitive and drive and the fusion engine.
35:00
Speaker 1: So really, in your mind, the recycling nuclear waste is
35:05
Speaker 1: like a sort of a straight line. It just ramps
35:08
Speaker 1: right up to just generating energy.
35:10
Speaker 2: Yes, in my mind, and this is very hard for
35:12
Speaker 2: a lot of people to gress, but it really is
35:14
Speaker 2: exactly that. So I'm glad that you I'm glad that
35:16
Speaker 2: you put that together right away, because it is.
35:18
Speaker 1: That so the sort of fusion reaction you would be
35:22
Speaker 1: running in that context, it's the kind of thing that well,
35:26
Speaker 1: let's let's go back to Q. Let's go back to
35:28
Speaker 1: this idea of getting more energy out than you put in,
35:31
Speaker 1: right like in that setting, how does that happen that
35:34
Speaker 1: at some point in the future somebody has to do that?
35:37
Speaker 3: Yeah?
35:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I know that's not your primary goal,
35:40
Speaker 1: and it's a compelling case for why that's not your
35:42
Speaker 1: primary goal. But like, do you get to that just
35:44
Speaker 1: by incremental engineering tweaks? Are you ever gonna have to
35:48
Speaker 1: like have some you know, physics level technological insight or
35:52
Speaker 1: do you just think you can keep optimizing and optimizing
35:54
Speaker 1: what you're doing and you'll sort of eventually get to
35:57
Speaker 1: more energy out than you put in.
35:58
Speaker 2: Now we'll need we'll need we'll need physics optimization too.
36:01
Speaker 2: Like so, and even going from phase one to Phase two,
36:04
Speaker 2: it was it was new technology. Yeah, but the truth
36:06
Speaker 2: is through practice and building over time, it's a different
36:09
Speaker 2: path and you have a different technology evolution path than
36:12
Speaker 2: trying to go straight to the endgame. And so and
36:15
Speaker 2: it's pragmatic, right, You're always building systems that are doing
36:17
Speaker 2: work for customers, and so it's cost effective built into
36:21
Speaker 2: the model, and it's pragmatic built into the model, and
36:23
Speaker 2: that's just how you design new technology. But what I'll
36:26
Speaker 2: say is, we have our own technology that we like
36:28
Speaker 2: for scaling into phase three, recycling and ultimately energy. But
36:32
Speaker 2: I'm the only fusion company that will say this, I
36:35
Speaker 2: don't think it's more than ten percent likely to be successful,
36:38
Speaker 2: and I don't think any given technology probably is. And
36:42
Speaker 2: so what I do know, though, is we're going to
36:44
Speaker 2: have an amazing delivery engine that can manufacture fusion systems
36:47
Speaker 2: at scale, and whatever technology is successful, I know we
36:51
Speaker 2: will have a role to play in bringing this economically
36:54
Speaker 2: to the world.
36:54
Speaker 1: When you say you don't think it's more than ten
36:56
Speaker 1: percent likely to be successful, you mean the particular technology
36:59
Speaker 1: you are betting on using. Yeah, you think it's very
37:02
Speaker 1: unlikely that it will work to put out more energy
37:04
Speaker 1: than you put into it. It probably won't. It probably
37:06
Speaker 1: won't do that. And to be clear, cost effective effectively right, Yeah,
37:10
Speaker 1: for electricity, Yes, But you're saying you're learning all of
37:13
Speaker 1: these things about the engineering, about the nuts and bolts
37:15
Speaker 1: that will be relevant no matter whose technology works exactly.
37:19
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this. I feel like, if you
37:21
Speaker 1: think your technology probably won't work, you you must hope
37:24
Speaker 1: somebody else's will, right, Like, if somebody else does it
37:28
Speaker 1: before you do it, will you be happy? Will that
37:30
Speaker 1: be good in your mind?
37:32
Speaker 3: Yes, it would be fantastic.
37:34
Speaker 2: And it's kind of funny because you know it's becoming
37:37
Speaker 2: a competitive world in the fusion space, and like, I'm
37:40
Speaker 2: cheering for everybody I love. Really, i would love to
37:43
Speaker 2: see anyone be successful and moving forward. And look, we're
37:46
Speaker 2: going to have an awesome economic and manufacturing engine. We'd
37:49
Speaker 2: love to work with whatever technology prevails. At the end
37:52
Speaker 2: of the day, We're going to continue to adapt our
37:54
Speaker 2: strategy and invest in what looks like it's doing great,
37:56
Speaker 2: just so we can move fast. But this is a
37:58
Speaker 2: tool that I want to see in my lifetime come
38:00
Speaker 2: to humanity. And like that means looking across the page
38:04
Speaker 2: at everything, just like we looked at fusion holistically, right,
38:07
Speaker 2: not just the energy. We're not dogmatic to a single
38:10
Speaker 2: technical approach. We're going to learn a ton in the
38:12
Speaker 2: next ten years with all this funding going into all
38:15
Speaker 2: these different approaches, and I'm really really excited to see
38:18
Speaker 2: what comes out of it.
38:21
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
38:36
Speaker 1: Let's finish with the lightning round. What's one thing you
38:39
Speaker 1: would do if you had free, unlimited power?
38:42
Speaker 2: One thing I would do? Well, you know, all goes
38:45
Speaker 2: back to minority childhood and space and star trek, right, Like,
38:48
Speaker 2: I'd love to build a series of spacecraft that would
38:51
Speaker 2: go back and forth from the Earth to Mars and otherwise.
38:54
Speaker 2: I think, you know, if you've got a fusion engine
38:56
Speaker 2: that becomes very very fast and very very easy, you know,
38:59
Speaker 2: this nine month travel time is actually insanely problematic for humans.
39:04
Speaker 2: The radiation you get up in space is going to
39:06
Speaker 2: be very damaging over those timeframes. And so you know,
39:10
Speaker 2: we're even if we start to build a city on Mars,
39:12
Speaker 2: it's going to be very harmful for people just to
39:14
Speaker 2: get there and back.
39:15
Speaker 1: You think you'll go to space, well, you know, it's funny.
39:18
Speaker 2: I used to always want to be an astronaut, but
39:20
Speaker 2: the the reality of very tiny, closed in capsules is
39:24
Speaker 2: something that I'm not like super big fan of. So
39:26
Speaker 2: if we had starships or something a little more spacious,
39:29
Speaker 2: I'd love to, but not so much in today's way.
39:31
Speaker 1: Mean you need you need fusion power to build your
39:34
Speaker 1: Catillac Big cadillact space.
39:37
Speaker 3: Exactly right, exactly right.
39:38
Speaker 1: If you weren't working on fusion, what would you be
39:40
Speaker 1: working on?
39:41
Speaker 2: I'd probably also be working on the same thing. I
39:44
Speaker 2: do think like even with fission, there are ways to
39:47
Speaker 2: build uh spacecraft that can go to and from the
39:50
Speaker 2: different planets in the Solar System very cost effectively and
39:53
Speaker 2: fairly quickly.
39:54
Speaker 3: Fusion will be.
39:55
Speaker 1: Fast, but we can we can get that.
39:56
Speaker 3: We can get the time down to a couple of months,
39:58
Speaker 3: probably with fission.
39:59
Speaker 1: If you go anywhere in the Solar System, where would
40:01
Speaker 1: you go?
40:02
Speaker 3: You're in the Solar System?
40:03
Speaker 1: You want to do anywhere in the galaxy? I don't care,
40:04
Speaker 1: it's just a question.
40:06
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean, if you could go anywhere in
40:08
Speaker 2: the galaxy, it'd be great to go to some place
40:09
Speaker 2: where you could witness like a supernova happening from close
40:13
Speaker 2: range without being obliterated. The world's most spectacular fireworks show
40:16
Speaker 2: would be something to see.
40:24
Speaker 1: Greg Pifer is the co founder and CEO of Shine.
40:29
Speaker 1: Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. We
40:33
Speaker 1: are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
40:36
Speaker 1: show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who
40:40
Speaker 1: was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bruguheer.
40:45
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with
40:47
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Problem.