In short
Whether nuclear fusion is finally becoming practical and commercially deployable, and what that means for technology, regulation, timelines, safety, supply chains, and economics.
Guests and backgrounds
Ed Crooks hosts. Amy Myers-Jaffe is director of NYU’s Global Energy, Climate and Sustainability Lab. Andrew Holland founded and leads the Fusion Industry Association (FIA), after earlier work in public policy and think tanks. Bob Mumgard is CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS); trained in plasma physics at MIT and helped spin out CFS.
Key claims
Fusion timelines are moving forward—FIA survey respondents expect grid fusion in the early 2030s. The private sector is accelerating progress versus ITER-style long schedules. Fusion is “decoupled from geopolitics” and is safer than fission due to no chain reaction and easy-to-stop reactions. Regulation should follow particle-accelerator-style rules (US: 10 CFR Part 30), enabling faster approvals.
Notable examples
NIF’s 2022 controlled experiment exceeding input energy; CFS “Spark” (Massachusetts, ~80% complete, turning on next year) and “ARC” (Virginia, ~400 MW, early 2030s, Dominion/Google/ENGIE buyers). FIA supply-chain trade show; CFS uses REBCO superconducting tape at large scale.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to Fusion Energy
0:00 to 1:04
Learn about the shift in perspectives on fusion energy and its significance.
“That bad joke of this always moving to the right, always getting, you know, further and further away is not happening.”
Career Paths in Fusion Energy
1:30 to 2:09
Discover the backgrounds of the guests and their journeys into fusion energy.
“My Fourth of July was outstanding and looking forward to talking about fusion, my new passion.”
The Growth of the Fusion Industry
2:09 to 4:00
Explore the evolution and current state of the fusion energy sector.
“Yeah, thanks very much indeed for joining us.”
Challenging the 30-Year Joke
4:00 to 5:48
Discuss the changing perceptions around the timeline for fusion energy commercialization.
“And you, Bob, then you really have spent your entire career in fusion, haven't you?”
Understanding Fusion Power
5:48 to 7:31
Learn about the fundamental principles and technologies behind fusion energy.
“We see that right now with AI, large language models, but we've seen that in the past with biotechnology.”
Recent Milestones in Fusion
7:31 to 10:13
Get insights into recent achievements in fusion research and their significance.
“As Amy was saying, we've just put out a press release for our new industry report.”
The Role of the Private Sector
10:13 to 12:20
Understand how private companies are changing the landscape of fusion energy.
“And that's what companies like Commonwealth and like all the rest, we have 45 members in the FIA, all the rest of them are all working in a different way.”
Commonwealth Fusion Systems Overview
12:20 to 14:01
Dive into the journey and technology of Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
“And and two of the scientists that were or several of the scientists that were involved in those experiments now have private sector laser companies, Inertia.com and Longview.”
Understanding Tokamaks and Fusion Technology
14:01 to 17:07
Learn about the tokamak, its function, and its significance in fusion technology.
“And also, I'm interested in hitting a bit more detail about your technology.”
Comparing Fusion Power Designs
17:08 to 19:38
Explore the differences in fusion power designs and their potential market implications.
“Some of them, like, are related to each other.”
Show all 26 chapters
Fusion's Role in Energy Production
19:39 to 23:28
Discuss how fusion power can integrate into the grid and its operational capabilities.
“If you're trying to fit into the competitive American electricity market, you probably want to look a lot like a natural gas power plant, which is what most of our power is provided.”
Safety and Waste in Fusion vs. Fission
23:29 to 28:00
Understand the safety advantages of fusion power over fission and its waste output.
“I mean, we all kind of understand how you can take a natural gas peaking plant and turn it up and down.”
Regulatory Advantages of Fusion Power
28:00 to 29:16
Learn how state-level regulation can expedite the development of fusion power compared to fission.
“States, the regulatory regime will be done by the states and not by the federal government, not by the NRC.”
Understanding Fusion Reaction Safety
29:16 to 31:08
Discover the safety mechanisms in fusion reactions and their implications for public safety.
“I mean, Bob at CFS already has a license for their Spark and is working on that in Virginia for ARC.”
Understanding Fusion Reaction Safety
32:30 to 33:04
Discover the safety mechanisms in fusion reactions and their implications for public safety.
“Energy should support all of that, not become one more thing to manage.”
Advancements in Fusion Power Projects
33:12 to 36:15
Explore the current projects Spark and Arc, and their significance in fusion energy.
“Right, so fusion power has all these advantages in theory on paper, if it can be made to work.”
Future Timelines for Fusion Power Development
36:15 to 38:27
Examine the expected timelines for the development and deployment of fusion power plants.
“ENI, a large European energy company, will buy the power.”
Supply Chain Dynamics in Fusion Energy
38:27 to 42:00
Learn about the emerging supply chain for fusion energy and its potential growth.
“So the next step is to talk about the supply chain.”
The Growing Fusion Supply Chain Market
42:00 to 43:51
Learn about the increasing investments in fusion supply chains and the excitement surrounding it.
“And so the developers sent their buyers to this, their supply chain people.”
Rebco Tape and Supply Chain Dynamics
43:51 to 45:48
Explore the specifics of Rebco tape and how supply chains are evolving in fusion energy.
“If you buy things, people will turn up to sell them.”
Manufacturing and Policy in Fusion Power
45:48 to 47:58
Understand the importance of manufacturing policies and their impact on the fusion industry.
“And so, again, for the listeners, you know, you can get Revco tape from China, but there's a company in the United States.”
Government Role and Incentives for Fusion
47:58 to 54:03
Learn how government policies and incentives can shape the future of fusion power.
“There is nothing that says that this is the way it's going to go.”
The Landscape of Fusion Companies
54:03 to 56:01
Discover the competitive landscape of fusion companies and their progress towards commercialization.
“And you look at what's happening in advanced nuclear, where they have the ARDP program.”
The Current State of Fusion Companies
56:01 to 57:55
An overview of the number of fusion companies, their progress, and expectations for success.
“So there is 56 fusion companies we've identified in the world.”
Future Prospects of Fusion Power
57:55 to 1:01:15
A discussion on the potential long-term impact and dominance of fusion power in the energy landscape.
“So as you say, a lot of change expected in the next five to 10 years, certainly a very, very exciting time.”
Manufacturing and Energy Decoupling
1:01:15 to 1:04:25
Exploration of fusion energy manufacturing scalability and its potential to change energy geopolitics.
“that looks like science fiction and we're gonna run that experiment and it's happening like right now.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00That bad joke of this always moving to the right, always getting, you know, further and further away is not happening. We have moved five years and gotten five years closer to fusion energy. So you push a button, you fire up a star, it sits inside your bottle, it makes heat, you turn it off, it shuts off. That's what a token mic does. This is the thing that decouples energy from geopolitics. This is the thing that means that no dictator can say, I'm using my energy as a weapon.
1:04Hello and welcome to The Energy Gang, a discussion show from Wood Mackenzie about the fast-changing world of energy. I'm Ed Crooks. And on this show, we're going to be talking about what has for a long time, really, been seen as the future of energy, which is nuclear fusion. And we're going to be asking whether that future is now finally arriving. To do that, I'm joined by Amy Myers-Jaffe. Amy is the director of the Global Energy, Climate and Sustainability Lab at New York University. Hello, Amy. How are you? Hey, Ed. Great to be here. Having a fabulous summer. My Fourth of July was outstanding and looking forward to talking about fusion, my new passion.
1:39Yeah, exactly. Very, very exciting topic. And to talk about it, it's hard to think of anyone who could be better to discuss it with us than the two guests we've got on the show today. Andrew Holland is the founder and CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, which is the leading industry group for the sector. Hello, Andrew. Welcome to the show. Hi, Ed. Hi, Amy. As they say, long time listener, first time caller. Good to be with you and really excited to get into the whole span of everything going on in Fusion. Yeah, absolutely. And also, it's great to be joined by Bob Mumgard, who is the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is planning to be one of the first companies, perhaps actually the first company, with an operational fusion power plant anywhere in the world.
2:22Hello, Bob. Glad to be here. Super excited to get into it. Yeah, thanks very much indeed for joining us. So we're going to be talking about where the fusion industry is today and where it's going to be going very soon. We'll do that in just a moment. Just before we do that, something we always like to do on the show when we have new people on is talk a little bit about their careers in energy, how they first got interested in the field, how they got to the roles they now hold. So what about you, Andrew? What's your story? Did you always have a dream of making fusion power a reality? I can't say that I did.
2:54I actually came to Washington, D.C. here about 25 years ago to work in public policy. I worked on Capitol Hill for about five years, and then I worked in think tanks. I made my way to energy because I saw it as one of the roots of a lot of the problems that we face as a country, that we face as a world, energy security, environmental challenges, all of that. And then I came to fusion because fusion is the one that solves these problems. Fusion is the one that solves the problems of energy security, climate change, scientific leadership. And so I've been involved in writing and working on fusion since about 2013.
3:38We started the FIA in 2021 as the unified voice of the private fusion industry. And it's been a real fun way to ride the wave as this industry has really grown and become a really important new player in the energy space. And like I said, I got into it because it solves problems and it's poised to solve a lot of the real problems that we face. Absolutely. And you, Bob, then you really have spent your entire career in fusion, haven't you? Yeah, I came to fusion about 20 years ago. I'm a scientist by background and I came to MIT to study plasma physics, key part of the fusion process. And, you know, I'm also a history of technology person.
4:25So I studied that, and there's sort of patterns that emerge. And about 10 years ago, you could start to see that pattern emerge in fusion, where you could start to see the pieces fall into place of the jump from a science to a practical industry. It's still very early. And at MIT, we had a saying, like, what would it be like if we had serious people taking fusion seriously? What would happen? How would you build an industry, et cetera? And then about eight years ago, we spun the company out of MIT, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. And I led that spin out and been the CEO ever since. So to contextualize what you're saying, Bob, I mean, you just had a press release with the numbers, which are astounding, where we have 56 private sector fusion companies now.
5:13they've collected up investors of 14.24 billion dollars yeah 4.48 billion in the last 12 months I mean kind of incredible when you think about you know people always saying uh fusion is 10 years away or fusion is 30 years away depending on you know your viewpoint and the old joke of course you know fusion is 30 years in the future it always has been and it always will be which I know is a joke that everybody hates and it does seem like it's some distance from the truth now are we are we on the other side of that joke yeah well I I think so um and I think you know importantly you know technologies go from impossible to inevitable that's the evolution of how people think about technologies um and the more important they are the faster they do that And so it's hard to pick the timing, but the rate of change can actually really exceed people's expectations.
6:11We see that right now with AI, large language models, but we've seen that in the past with biotechnology. And basically every other major technology shift has gone from a time when people had jokes like that, that it was a backwater or something, to the time when it was actually a key piece of the economy. And so fusion is, I believe, very, very, very deeply that it's in that transition now. Right. And as you say, something which kind of seems science fictional. If you look back to so much science fiction of the past 50 years, probably 100 years, fusion power is the source of energy in a lot of those stories.
6:51it's now becoming a reality as you say and clear parallels with AI other sectors where again things that seemed wildly speculative for a long time are now becoming very concrete and real. So I think it'd be good actually then first of all just to kind of set the terms of the debate a little bit by talking about what fusion power actually is what the key technologies are. I And perhaps, Bob, you could talk specifically about what you're doing at Commonwealth. But do you want to just give us a bit of an overview of the landscape, Andrew, and how the technology stands at the moment? Yeah, absolutely.
7:32As Amy was saying, we've just put out a press release for our new industry report. So the timing is right to be talking about what the status of the fusion industry is. Fusion is at its base taking light atoms and putting them at extreme temperatures or pressures together to release energy and create new elements. The general way of doing it is two isotopes of hydrogen compressed to create helium and release a tremendous amount of energy. It's the energy source of the sun and the stars. So therefore, it is the predominant energy source of the universe, which means that this is the way that most energy is created and where energy ultimately comes from in our universe.
8:24So what we're trying to do is replicate that on Earth. I was just going to say building a star on Earth, then, is the image that sometimes people use when they're describing fusion power. That makes it sound pretty challenging. It is challenging, and there's a reason that we haven't done it yet. And so there are several predominant ways of doing it. At the one end, it is magnetically confined fusion, which is taking very large magnets to hold a plasma in place, get it up to high temperatures, and then have the atoms fuse, release the energy there. The other end is at higher densities to use lasers predominantly to crush a fusion target at extreme pressure.
9:11And that's actually the one that has happened already. The National Ignition Facility out at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California in 2022, for the first time ever, released more energy out than was put into it in a controlled reaction. Of course, we've been doing this with atomic weapons since the 1950s, but to do it in a controlled experiment was a really important place to show that this works. It's one of those sort of Wright Brothers, Kitty Hawk moments. And now what's happening is that we're moving from those national labs and universities to the marketplace. Companies are building their Kitty Hawk moment to show that they can do it in a commercially viable way.
10:02The NIF was never meant to be something that's a pilot plant. It was never meant to show that you could get more energy, total energy out of the experiment than energy put into it. And that's what companies like Commonwealth and like all the rest, we have 45 members in the FIA, all the rest of them are all working in a different way. There's multiple different technologies. This is one of the actually challenging things for us communicating about it, is that we have 45 members and really 45 different approaches to getting them. They're all competing with each other. The market's going to determine which is the one that gets there first, that gets there most economically.
10:44And so that kind of makes it a really exciting time. It's all to play for. And then the final thing I'd say on this, we were talking about timing. In our annual survey, we always ask the companies, when do you expect to see fusion energy commercialized, fusion energy on the grid? And a lot has changed in the five years since we started doing this survey in 2021. The numbers have grown very significantly. The numbers of companies have grown very significantly. The thing that hasn't changed is that the vast majority of companies, Those closest to it expect to see fusion energy on the grid in the 2030s or before, with the large majority of them saying they expect to see it in the early 2030s.
11:31So that story, that bad joke of this always moving to the right, always getting, you know, further and further away is not happening. We have moved five years and gotten five years closer to fusion energy. So, Andrew, I really love your point and just want to add to that, because I think part of the joke, no offense to the scientists involved in that, is that we have this international cooperation structure called ITER, right? And they are not slated to get anywhere by the early 2030s. And so now you have the private sector, as you're saying, taking these different approaches. And you mentioned the Lawrence Livermore Lab success, which, of course, was sort of like a was not motivated to make a commercial fusion plant.
12:19It was another kind of project. And and two of the scientists that were or several of the scientists that were involved in those experiments now have private sector laser companies, Inertia.com and Longview. Yeah. And then you have people like Bob and others that are working on Tokamaks and other kinds of design. So it really is a very sort of competitive landscape, but with a lot of promise. So, oh, yeah, I think that I think that a lot of people think about ITER and therefore they're like, oh, yeah, they're never going to get there. That's right. This is what happens when you add competition.
12:56This is what happens when you add business into this, markets into this. When it's just a science program, you can spend years, decades optimizing things, trying to make it perfect. But when you've got actual money on the line, time is money. So that means you just got to go out and do it. You got to try things. You got to fail. You got to fail fast, learn from it, and move forward. I actually think one of the most important things that's changed in Fusion is applying this sort of Silicon Valley milestone venture capital mindset to this. Take the hardest thing, do it, reduce your risk, go out and raise more money and move forward.
13:40And I actually think that Bob and Commonwealth is one of the best examples of showing how that works and really kind of leading the rest of the industry into kind of following along that same sort of pathway. Yeah, absolutely. I was about to bring you in here, Bob, because it'd be great if you could talk a little bit about your story of Commonwealth, as you say, the way you were spun out of MIT. And also, I'm interested in hitting a bit more detail about your technology. I watched one of the videos, a couple of the videos on your website last night. A lot of discussion of the tokamak, as Amy just mentioned.
14:12I think it'd be really useful if you could explain what that is and how it works and what its significance is. But yeah, tell us your story. Yeah, and I echo previous comments on the change in the pace and the ecosystem. It's been fun to watch. So CFS, we're the largest of the private fusion companies. And we're actually about just over a thousand people. We're the largest by people fusion organization in the West. China's national programs, the one that's larger. And so, you know, at this stage, the single private company can be the size of the entire effort at like a national lab. And at CFS, eight years old, about$3 billion of capital raised.
14:54So when you put that in context, it's by far the largest capitalized company, largest people, largest capitalized. And we're building a - You had another raise about a year ago, right? Yeah, about a billion dollars. Just under a billion. Yeah, sure. It's actually, you know, CFS is one of the largest capitalized next generation energy companies, just period, right? Like completely private, shareholder base is very, very deep, very, very broad, name brand. And, you know, it's engineered from the beginning to do that. And that was because Fusion reached a point where the science was good enough, in some cases, not at all.
15:30There's distinctions here. But for some architectures, the science was good enough that you could really see what a power plant was going to look like. It didn't mean it was all done, but you could really see that you had predictive capabilities, large computers that could predict how these reactions would occur inside these machines. And also you had technologies that would make the machines easier to build, faster to build. Think about advanced materials and, in our case, advanced magnets. And so what we did is we took the tokamak, which is by far the most studied of all the fusion concepts.
16:01Its performance today is just right below what NIF is on the laser side. and Eater, mentioned earlier by Amy, that's a tokamak. But that science is very sound and it's predictive. And what a tokamak is then? It's one of these kind of donut-shaped things, right? It's a magnetic bottle. The way to think of it is it is a magnetic bottle that holds a star inside of it and it uses big magnets to do that. And so you push a button, you fire up a star, it sits inside your bottle, it makes heat, you turn it off, it shuts off. That's what a tokamak does. So, Bob, I have to ask this question because I do the reading and I'm like, I don't even understand what I'm reading.
16:41So apparently a tokamak is pulsing and a stellarator is non-pulsing. Can you explain to us as lay people what that means? Yeah, there's like a continuum of these things. And you can think of it as like, you know, there's lots of different types of cars. There's sedans and roadsters and trucks. And, you know, they all use the same basic internal combustion engine. They have wheels. Fugers kind of like that. They all use plasma physics. Some of them, like, are related to each other. Tokamaks and Stellarators are closely related. They have slightly different geometries. Tokamaks look like donuts.
17:17Stellarators look like Krulers, if you are into breakfast foods. and they have some slightly different attributes for how you run them. Do you have to shut them off every 15 minutes? Do you have to perfectly perfect exactly what you build the day one you build it? Types of things like this that are really product differentiation. But where we are right now in the field is less about product differentiation and simply about showing up with a product that actually works. And that's what Fusion is really racing towards right now is the first generation of power plants, the first generation of even pilot plants or even the step before a pilot plant where you can see a commercial architecture that is producing large amounts of fusion reactions, large amounts of heat, more than it takes to run, with a path to actually send electricity to a grid.
18:03That's where we are now. Bob, I have a question on that. So what you're describing, super interesting. And of course, you know, we know from other industries that some of this sort of trial and error winds up bringing really intensively innovative designs. For you and Andrew perspective, could it be that there'll be one design and then everybody is going to go to that design because that's the first one that worked? Or are there product differentiation where we might see multiple products to the market over time? Well, we'll see. We don't really know yet. It could look kind of like aerospace in some ways where like there's a preferred embodiment.
18:41You know, an Airbus kind of looks like a Boeing because the physics and the systems that you need to have airlines, et cetera, have a sort of win or take most. I really doubt it's win or take all. And I do think there's probably opportunity for product differentiation. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. There's multiple ways of getting there, multiple different approaches. And I think we're going to see a market that determines which ones are best for which places and which sort of things, you know, because we've got some companies that are looking at 50 megawatt electric versus others that are in the 400 to 500 megawatt kind of replacing a gas fired power plant up to the gigawatt and beyond replacing a large scale nuclear power plant.
19:32So there's different places that that's going to be important for, and there's different markets. If you're trying to pair directly with a data center, then maybe it's in the sub-100 megawatt size. If you're trying to fit into the competitive American electricity market, you probably want to look a lot like a natural gas power plant, which is what most of our power is provided. But if you're powering large Asian cities, maybe you want a multiple gigawatt scale thing. So different technologies probably lend themselves to different ways of producing electricity. And so we're going to see how this all plays out.
20:12We're going to see it's going to be a market based approach. I think that's also one of the real values of the way the private sector is doing it. You know, Eater is Latin for the way. It turns out there's not one way to do this. There is multiple different ways and they're competing with each other and it's going to drive all of them together faster and push that competition really supports the movement towards commercialization. So I have like a technical question because, you know, you're saying all this stuff, super interesting. You know, there's this whole question with data centers and volatile loads and weather and volatile loads and intermittent sources and integrating them into the grid.
20:59Where will fusion sit? Is fusion going to be 100 % 24-hour load and it can't be adjusted? How is that going to look when it's actually plugged in? Yeah. And just before you answer that question, I just wanted to check on a really super basic detail, which is the way that fusion reaction has actually turned into power. I mean, essentially, this is about releasing heat, boiling water, driving a turbine, right? As the old joke is about fission power, it's the world's most complicated way of boiling water. That's what a fusion plant would do as well. Is that right? That's what the vast majority, you know, if you look at fusion and you look at the landscape, you have areas that have been heavily studied that have lots of scientific consensus about them, that have companies that have raised billions of dollars and that have built actual hardware.
21:48And then you have a tail and there's a bunch of stuff that just PowerPoints. And there's a bunch of stuff that is frankly probably never going to work, violates the laws of physics. Unfortunately, that's what you get in your competition. It has some features, though, right? You can see a whole spectrum. But if you look at the part of the spectrum where the money is, and you look at the part of the spectrum where people are building things and where the governments are backing, what you get in that part of the spectrum is you get plants that are indeed using the easiest fusion fuels, that are following the science that has been done before, and that do boil water to run a steam turbine.
22:21And in general, those systems, there's architectural differences, but they all look like sort of a base central station, 50 to 500 to maybe a gigawatt, that wants to run 24 hours because fusion is all capital costs, not operating costs. So from an economic standpoint, you'd love to just throttle that sucker up and run it. But they all don't care about geography. They don't care about weather. And if you needed to ramp them up and down to match the grid, you totally could. They look like a gas plant without the gas. And that's the big advantage that fusion provides. It's energy that is decoupled from these other systems, weather, geography, what's under your feet.
23:06And also couples well to the existing grid because it looks like what the grid is already using, which is large scale steam turbine technology. And that is super exciting to utilities. It's super exciting to hyperscalers. It's super exciting to people that look at the full system model because it fills this hole of dispatchable, firm, build it anywhere, baseload-ish, clean, low fuel volatility energy. And Bob, can you just one last detail? I mean, we all kind of understand how you can take a natural gas peaking plant and turn it up and down. What about fusion? Like what's the science between having it produce more or less heat?
23:51Yeah, it's just like anything else where you basically put less fuel in and you can turn it down. You can turn it on or off very fast. So like the fusion reaction turns on or off in less than a second, independent of architecture. Like in some cases, many, many times less than a second. And so that means that like you can choose to light it up, run it, turn it off, light it up, run it down, run it up, turn it off. and that's because you know fusion you don't have a lot of fuel you have like less than a gram of fuel at any given time so like you're taking tiny tiny bits of bits of matter making lots of energy it's it's literally grams to gigawatts and and that's what the stars are doing and that's what you know happens when you have a star that you control yeah well that's that's kind of amazing it's it's good it's very vivid when you put it like that it's very uh impressive i feel very star trekky like that i have to say seems a little bit too good to be true that you could turn it on and off like that like a switch like in my house but really exciting if we wind up cracking that puzzle i mean people used to stare at the stars and think they were too good to be true like how is that up there still up there thousands of years later so on top of those advantages that you've been talking about bob in terms of fusion plants being locatable just about anywhere and the very small fuel requirement that they've got and so on.
25:13The other things people often cite in terms of comparisons between fusion power and fission power is superior safety, something which gets mentioned quite a bit, and also greatly reduced waste output. I mean, it's not that there's no waste from fusion, but a lot less than you get from fission. Is that fair? I mean, are those both advantages you'd want to claim? Yeah, and Andrew can talk about what the regulatory structure is that follows from these because it's important on the commercial side. But from the fundamental side, because the fusion reaction is something you can start and stop, that's related to the fact that it's so hard, it's easy to stop it.
25:49You don't have runaways, you don't have the ability to melt down. And because you're not using uranium or plutonium, the heavy isotopes, right, splitting the atom, that's what nuclear fission has, you don't have a chain reaction. You also don't have any of the transuranics, the very, very long nuclear waste from the reaction itself. And so those attributes make it a completely different hazard base than fission, which you'd expect. It's the opposite reaction combining versus... And this has big ramifications when it comes to how do you build a regulatory structure to manage those hazards. Yeah.
26:25And that follows on exactly from that. So the NRC, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has been working and looking at fusion for the last really seven, eight years. When they started this process, it was pretty clear that what they wanted to do was to regulate fusion in the same regime as nuclear fission, to make fusion just like a large light water reactor, gigawatt scale nuclear power plant. We started to look at that and said, that's not right. That's not the way that doesn't reflect the risk, that doesn't reflect the physics. And because fusion is so much safer, literally, it is very hard to start, very easy to stop.
27:16The opposite of nuclear fission, easy to start, hard to stop. It means that it needs to be regulated in a different way. And so it actually has a similar risk profile to particle accelerators. And so what that means in the United States and in similar legal regimes around the world is that there's already existing regulatory structures for this. So it's, you know, in the Code of Federal Regulations, it's 10 CFR Part 30 is where particle accelerators are regulated and now where fusion power plants are going to be regulated instead of 10 CFR Part 50, which is utilization facilities, nuclear power plants.
27:58And so since fusion is going to be put into this, it means that in the United States, the regulatory regime will be done by the states and not by the federal government, not by the NRC. And this is really important because it allows us to build quickly. It allows us to iterate as we're building. You don't have to have both a license to construct and a license to operate like our cousins in the nuclear fission world who are sitting and waiting for this license to construct. And then once they have that, they really can't change the system to get that license to operate. Fusion, you just have to have that final license to operate.
28:36And it is orders of magnitude cheaper. And so that's a really enabling thing that means that once we get over this big technological hurdle, Fusion's hard. Once we get over that big technological hurdle. There's nothing that's going to slow us from deploying it as wide or at scale as we need to. Fission, every single nuclear fission power plant is going to have to go through a detailed regulatory regime. And that's appropriate because if you get it wrong, things can go really bad. But for fusion, because the risk profile is so much less, it means that we'll be able to get these approvals pretty quick and move quickly.
Read the full transcript
29:20I mean, Bob at CFS already has a license for their Spark and is working on that in Virginia for ARC. Our multiple other companies, too, have licenses already to get going on this. So it's really an enabling thing that's going to be really important as we scale up. Okay. So I have to ask this because this is like a, I don't have enough science background and there are going to be a lot of listeners that are like me. So I'm using these either lasers to heat something or a magnetic chamber to hold the process in place in check. So what happens if a magnet fails or the chamber that holds the reaction fails?
30:04What does that look like in particle movement? Yeah, it's really hot. It's like a star. We talk about it like that way. And you think like lava in a chamber, it's going to get out. and like it's not really what it is it's it's more like a candle in the wind and in fact if you move off the operating point the fusion reaction stops everything cools down and within within a fraction of a second it goes from the super hot plasma with one gram of hot plasma to one gram of gas and we literally in today's fusion machines we blow it out with something that's less than a breath of air. So it's more like a candle and less like a ball of lava.
30:42And so that means if you're, which, you know, mentally is sort of weird, but... No, no, that's a great analogy. I mean, I have a huge visualization now in my mind. Yeah. That's not Doc Ock. Like Doc Ock, you know, East River, Spider-Man, it's not that. And actually, we submitted to the NRC in this, We did a study looking at what is the worst possible outcome here. And in that study, we did, you know, using models from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, we did a study to say if the worst possible thing happens, all of the source fuel within the machine gets out, which physically actually can't happen because it's in a vacuum.
31:25So that means the air rushes in if there's a breach of vacuum. But anyway, say the worst possible thing happens. All of the radiation goes up the stack and goes out into the general public. Well, actually, what happens is that there is no threat to the general public. Anybody outside of the power plant is going to get a radiation dose that is less than the emergency hazard evacuation zone. So basically, this has no impact on the general public. Now, you have to do work to protect the workers on the plant from anything like that. That's really important. And getting this right and protecting people who work there is really important.
32:13So regulation is effective, important in that respect. But you can cite one of these anywhere because even if the worst thing happens, it's not going to affect people who live outside of there. You don't have to evacuate. Every business has priorities to protect, goals to reach, and decisions that need to hold up. Energy should support all of that, not become one more thing to manage. That's why Engie takes the time to understand your business before building energy solutions around it. Your operations, your goals, your pressures, your plans for what's next. Because while Engie knows energy, no one knows your business like you.
32:52And when that expertise comes together, energy becomes more than something that powers your business. It becomes part of what helps move it forward. Engie helps turn energy plans into outcomes with solutions built around real business needs. Learn more at engieresources.com. That's E-N-G-I-E, engieresources.com. Right, so fusion power has all these advantages in theory on paper, if it can be made to work. But as we've been saying, what's really interesting, what's exciting about the industry now, the reason why we're talking to you on the show today is that it's going to be moving out of the realm of the theoretical and into the practical.
33:31And there are going to be real plants starting up very soon. Bob, perhaps, I mean, could you talk a bit about what you're doing then? Specifically, the names Spark and Arc got mentioned in passing earlier on. Perhaps you could explain a bit about what those are and what the significance of those two projects is. Add to that that you have commercial partners. You've got a utility. Yeah, exactly. The whole structure is very interesting as well. It'd be great if you'd go into that too, yeah. Sure, yeah. Infusionland, Spark, and Arc are well understood. Outside, black box. Yeah, so what we're doing is we have a plant here in Massachusetts.
34:05I'm at our headquarters here. We have about a part of an army base. And we have about a billion dollar prototype plant. So it's a pilot plant. It's the largest advanced energy project in the United States. It's about 80 % complete. It's called Spark. And it builds the science that we've already done in national labs, universities, tokamaks, about 150 of those that have been done. So we understand that. It adds a couple new technologies, very high field magnets, things we manufactured. It puts it into a commercial supply chain that were very vertically integrated. And we've gone and constructed it.
34:39And we're starting to turn it on. And it's predicted by the scientific community to be about 10 times power from the fusion reaction out and in. We won't actually boil steam and make electricity, but had we had a boiler, it would actually be able to sell electricity. That plant, that's about half scale of a power plant. And that gives us a snapshot of what a power plant looks like. And so your comment, Ed, of like on paper, it's no longer just on paper. Like it's in steel in the ground and concrete. It's in factories around the world. It's in experimental facilities that are been built and operated by labs universities.
35:13And now it's moving into this phase of like a near commercial. Yeah, and just to check on that, and you're planning to turn that on, what, next year in 2028? Next year. Next year, right. Yeah, next year. It's starting to turn on now, like plants are running, parts of it are running. It's almost all installed and we're just It's a big Lego set, putting a big Lego set together. So that's Spark. And then there's ARC, which is the next step. Yeah. And so that's designed to give us the last pieces of data that we need so that we can freeze the design of the first generation of power plant. And that's called ARC.
35:44And that's something that we've been working on at the company and our academic and university partners for about over 10 years of all the little details and building the supply chain toward it. And, you know, Spark gets us a lot of the way there and gets us the last data when it operates. That first, the first one of those plants, that will be built in Virginia and just south of Richmond. It's a power station there that we're, it's called Fall Line Fusion Power Station. In partnership with Dominion, large utility, Google will buy the power. ENI, a large European energy company, will buy the power.
36:20And so we're at the phase now where we're putting together the permits, the construction plans for that facility. And as soon as Spark is running, we'll take the supply chain, the manufacturing capabilities, the team, the data, and we'll move it and start building in Virginia. And that, we think, is the first fusion power plant on the grid. and that plant, it will be 400 megawatts and it will demonstrate many of these attributes that we're talking about here. Turn it on, turn it off, ramp it up, ramp it down. How do you regulate it? What's the public acceptance? How do you have a supply chain for it?
37:01How do you make this into a template for power plants? Right. I mean, for instance, one of the things I noticed with that was that you've filed an application to join the queue to get interconnection to the grid, to the pgm grid in virginia for a 400 megawatt bond that does really make it seem very real i think you know these are things which obviously this is a queue which is full of gas fire plants and solar and wind and what have you this i think you're just saying i think this is right it is the first fusion plant ever to join one of these queues in the united states or anywhere in the world that's correct yeah yeah again to that point about moving from the theoretical to the real that does make it seem very real.
37:45It also points out something that this energy gang has talked about a lot, which is in energy, the paperwork can be the leading long pole in the schedule. Yeah, absolutely. And so what is your timetable for that then? When do you hope to have ARK through that interconnection process and actually generating power, supplying it to the grid? You have to do the interconnection, you have to build it, you have to commission it, you have to operate it. But that looks like the early 2030s. And that's been a timeline to the long joke, but it's a long way away. That's been a timeline that's been very consistent with CFS.
38:20So, you know, we've said we're going to do big magnets. We're going to do Spark. We're going to do ARK. Watch it at this pace. And for the most part, we've done a pretty good job of meeting that pace. Okay. So the next step is to talk about the supply chain. You know, everything's about critical minerals, blah, blah, blah. and some things have a worse supply chain than others. So because you need to have some kind of breeding of lithium-6 to do the technology that I believe is embedded in your design, your product design, Y12 Oak Ridge facility, they're saying the construction will be finished in 31, but they won't have the first operational fuel till 2034.
39:05You've got Hexium, which is a startup in Austin. I'm going to say something. I'm going to read it from a piece of paper because, you know, physics is not my strong suit. So atomic vapor laser isotope separation, avlis process to make the lithium-6, which is sort of a US DOE original funded experimental technology. so how are you seeing this so-called lithium-6 part of the supply chain uh is that an issue uh are you worried about it yeah i'm sorry and i've been following this uh issue less than amy has i'm afraid so you might need to take a step back for my purposes and probably for quite a few people in the audience as well so what are we talking about here lithium-6 this is what the crucial fuel for the fusion reaction, is it?
39:58There's a lot of misinformation. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. So in fusion, use lithium to close part of the fuel cycle. It doesn't have to be lithium-6. You can make fusion power plants without any lithium-6. However, like lots of things in fusion, there are areas where if you put a small amount of effort in, you can make it better. So this isn't a question of can you make it work or can you scale it? It's where can you start to make it even better? And so it turns out if you like goose it a little bit with lithium six, which is part 7 % of all the lithium, you can go get it. You have to separate it, but it's not that hard to separate.
40:33Just no one ever needed to do it. You can make it better. Likewise, like with materials, like we have materials today that you can put in a future power plant that can withstand the conditions. They won't last that long. They'll last long enough for the first generation of plants. But if we made better materials, then they'll last longer. And this is what you see at the beginning of an industry. You see, like, just get something that works. And then all these things that no one had any reason to work on, people go work on. And they make it even better. So you're starting to see these startups and other places do work, anticipating not just that, like, fusion is going to happen, but it's going to be a big enough industry to build a follow-on business doing a piece to make those be better.
41:16And that's super exciting. Yeah, let me jump in on that. So just last month, for the first time, the FIA hosted a trade show. This was a supply chain trade show. We hosted it out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And when we announced it, we kind of weren't sure if anybody would come. But it turns out we had 50 booths sold out over a month in advance. We had 250 attendees. Most of the attendees were people who work in the supply chain and wanted to sell things to the developers, to Commonwealth and to all of the other members of the FIA. And so the developers sent their buyers to this, their supply chain people.
42:05And it was really a lot of energy, a lot of excitement. And the reason they're doing this, we have a supply chain survey that we do every year. The reason they're doing this is because in 2026, fusion companies are going to spend at least$600 million on their supply chain. And so that's a market. And so the companies are coming in not because it's$600 million, but because it's going to grow a lot more in the years to come. And they see getting in early and being a supplier now, being able to show that they can do this reliably for one means that when in the next decade we're building tens and hundreds of these, they're going to scale up along with that.
42:51You know, you see it in all the other technology fields and such like that. You know, who's the one who actually, you know, what's the stock that did the best because of the introduction of the iPhone? Well, Apple did pretty well, but actually Corning did really well because they supplied the glass to the iPhone. So suppliers that can come in and find this new niche, this new market, lithium is one of them. It's not the only one. There's several fusion-specific things. But actually, what's really exciting is that there's lots of these large scale companies that are coming in that are doing things that are, you know, important for other industries, whether it's oil and gas or nuclear or, you know, just general power electronics.
43:36The defense industry. And the defense industry. So all of these coming in and they want to be a part of this market. They see it as a growth area. And it's just the supply chain is exciting. But also, like, this is how markets work. If you buy things, people will turn up to sell them. OK, let's talk about Rebco tape. Let's talk about low activation steel. I mean, Bob, do you have a supply chain ecosystem set up? We have a pretty good one. So we've built Spark. So Spark, to activate that supply chain, that was over a billion dollars into the supply chain. That included Rebco tape, a superconductor.
44:16We're the largest consumer of that in the world by a very, very large margin. And we've grown that niche thing by a factor of over 40. and the process dropped the price. Because each reactor requires, I think, tell me if I'm wrong, 10 ,000 km of tape, whereas previously we're only manufacturing 7 ,000 km across the globe, no? Yeah, yeah. And we've scaled it literally, just our own supply chain effort has scaled that one market by a factor of 40 in the last five years. And that's, you know, supply chains are interesting things because like when you show up with money, people will build businesses around it.
45:01And we've shown that over and over again in the things that we build. And the big parts are if you hit a limit of the world, like where you don't have enough stuff that you can dig out of the crust. Fusion doesn't ever really get to anything like that. Because even in a full-on fusion supply chain for like a full-on fusion economy, you're talking about an industry that is not the scale of, you know, like the auto industry. It's smaller than that. And so you're not talking about building an entirely, you know, new way to dig stuff up or process things or sell electricity. You're talking about an industry that looks kind of like what the GEs of the world today are, because that's what you're replacing.
45:47And you're replacing it with hardware that just doesn't consume fuel. And so, again, for the listeners, you know, you can get Revco tape from China, but there's a company in the United States. There's suppliers in Japan. so that the whole trade war you know do i need rare earth minerals from china thing doesn't really apply to fusion correct not not really and that's a key part about all the fusion technologies like in general it's the supply chain is about higher value add component level things it's not about like just how much stuff can i put through a system how much oil can i put through a How much, you know, rare earths can I put into lots and lots of cars?
46:31It's about a laser amplifier or superconducting tape or power capacitors. Like, these are things that are generally high value add, low material input. That makes it very exciting. Go ahead, Andrew, come in. Yeah. So because this is fundamentally a manufactured product instead of a mined product or a drilled product, it's a manufactured product. But that also means that policy is important for where that manufacturing happens. And, you know, the manufacturing can happen in the United States, can happen in Europe, can happen in Japan, can happen in China. And policy has an important role to play on attracting that manufacturing.
47:20So it's kind of all to play for right now in that world where people get things. It is a global marketplace right now. Companies are buying these things from all over the world. But governments in 2026, everybody wants to talk about manufacturing, wants to talk about, you know, reshoring things. So industrial policy, they're putting their thumb on the scale. And so that thumb on the scale will have an impact on where these things are made and where the components are made for it. So it's really important. A lot of the work I do here in Washington and the work FIA does in Brussels and London and Tokyo and elsewhere is saying, hey, guys, it's all to play for here.
48:08Where do you want to scale this up? How do you want to incentivize this? Because if it's not, there's a chance that this thing gets invented in the United States or in Germany, UK, Japan, but then ends up getting built in China, just like the solar power economy, just like these other sorts of things. It doesn't have to be. It's not written. There is nothing that says that this is the way it's going to go. But if we just sit back, and I'm generally a free market guy, you may have heard that, but it is, if you just sit back and let the markets work, the ones who don't respect the markets are going to be the ones that put their thumb on the scale at the heaviest amount.
48:53Right, because I'm going to ask about the economics of fusion power. I don't know, Bob, do you quote a number? Do you say if you're going to be supplying power to the grid? And as you say, the early 2030s, what the cost of that might be? Yeah, we don't quote a number, but we do know that it's competitive with the PGM costs. And the reason for that is pretty fundamental. It's your infusion, you're building something. The raw inputs to this are the vast majority of that is just steel. And you have to manufacture it, you have to put it together, you have to do a lot of value add. But we're at the very beginning of that on the first of a kinds.
49:32And it's manufacturing type learning rates. And then you have this asset that you don't have to pay to continually feed every day. Yeah, okay, upkeep, maintenance people. But that's a really small cost, which means that the overall cost of electricity is really about the financing cost and the manufacturing processes. And those are both things that over time, historically in all industries have come down. So that's an interesting analogy to nuclear fission because, of course, those plants operate for 50 years and the return on them when you get past the initial build cost is quite high. So is fusion going to be the same thing?
50:14Are these plants, are they 50-year plants, 100-year plants, 10-year plants? How does that look? Probably more like 10 to 30-year plans to start, partly because they'll obsolete themselves. We're at the birth of something here. And that's what happened with fission. But over time, there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't be like today, the fission plants. But they have an important part to it, which is the fuel, much lower fuel costs, because you don't have the enrichment of uranium, or the government ties to that. And then also, the regulatory costs are much lower. And so there's reasons to believe that this could look like the economics of early fission, not the economics of recent fission.
50:56So, Andrew, when you talk about policy being important, then, in terms of where the deployment of fusion power happens, what does the industry really need then? What can governments do to make sure that they do actually attract that investment and get the growth in the industry that you say is possible? Yeah, we look at it from really two sides. One is the supply chain side and the other is the building side. And you see this in every new industry, new energy industry, new defense industry, every new major industry comes along. The government has a role in this. And let's be clear, fusion research has been government funded research for 50, 60 years all around the world.
51:39We're all standing on the shoulders of the science that has been done in that for a long time. And so governments are going to play a role in how this gets deployed and where. And so on the supply chain side, you know, when we're here in Washington or elsewhere, we're talking about tax credits, incentives to make sure that it is treated the same as any other emerging clean technology. So, for instance, under the Biden era IRA, any solar wind battery manufacturing that's done in the United States gets roughly a 30 percent tax credit. Fusion is not eligible for that. So, you know, supply chain companies that want to supply to American fusion companies.
52:26Well, if they're doing something that that is kind of similar, they're they're just going to gravitate towards doing the the existing clean energy. So we're asking for a level playing field there. So there's a bill in Congress on that that, you know, we think has a good chance of passing. And then on the other side, it's supporting the development of the pilot plants, the building of these proof of concept machines, and then especially the pilot plants. The first of a kind, the pilots are never going to be the best, right? This is the one where you show how it works and you show how you get it off the ground.
53:02And so we actually have a program that Department of Energy is running called the Milestone-Based Public-Private Partnership. It's built on actually how NASA supported SpaceX and the private space industry. It is milestone-based. So what that means is that when you hit a target that you've prearranged with the DOE, you get funding for that at about 50 percent cost share is what it's identified to be. The problem is, so this has been set up. There's eight American companies that are part of it. Commonwealth is one of them. And it's really important in incentivizing and growing it. The problem is, is that it's only, I think, 70 million has been allocated so far.
53:50A further 100 million or so has been appropriated, but not yet put out. And so this is actually split eight ways is not going to build you a pilot plan. It's not going to get you across the line. And you look at what's happening in advanced nuclear, where they have the ARDP program. Congress just put a further$3 billion into that in January. You look at other emerging technologies and, you know, it's in the billions of dollars scale. And so when we start thinking about how this moves forward, how to incentivize it, we need to get that going and activated. This is the way it works. Right. So something that I've heard people say in the industry, for instance, is that in terms of sort of technology readiness, new fusion plants are pretty well on a par with small modular reactors using nuclear fission.
54:47But I mean, probably a few of those projects are a bit more advanced, but certainly in terms of kind of getting to commerciality and getting to scale, those two industries are kind of on a par, you would say. And therefore, what should be treated in a similar way by policy. Yeah, exactly right. But just to make a little bit of a distinction, we're having a struggle with the halo fuel supply chain for SMRs. And what I'm hearing Bob say is that we don't need to have tritium breeding to get these early fusion plants off the ground. Is that correct? Yeah, they do it within themselves. And Andrew, I just want to get back to that point you were raising earlier about the wider industry landscape.
55:37We've obviously talked a lot about Commonwealth and what they're doing and getting this first plant online in whatever it is, five, six, seven, eight years. you're saying there are quite a few other companies. I can't remember exactly how many you said, but there are definitely a number of other companies that are on a pretty similar timescale looking to have their first plants operational. Is that right? So there is 56 fusion companies we've identified in the world. They are all moving at speed and very quickly. At this point, Commonwealth is the one that's going to be the first. There's a couple of others that are potentially going to give them a run for their money.
56:21But there is a first mover thing that's happening here. And I think they're kind of dragging a lot of the industry along with them. It's really been kind of they're almost breaking the trail. You know, when you're hiking in snow, it's hard to be the first one. And then those that follow on have a little bit of an easier way. And so I think that's kind of happening with the rest of the industry here, whether it's magnetic, laser, magneto inertial, various other ways. You know, fusion's hard. Let's not forget that. Fusion is hard. 56 companies. There's not going to be 56 commercial fusion companies in the world.
57:02A lot of them are going to fail, whether it's failing because of physics or failing because of business practices. And so there's going to be a lot of pivots, a lot of changes. Everything's going to change in the next five to 10 years in this industry as it really grows up, becomes commercial and that sort of stuff. So the answer is the industry is all aiming to get pilot plants on the grid in the 2030s. CFS is probably going to be the one that gets there first. Maybe the Chinese might be there in the 2030s, early 2030s as well. And there's a couple of American companies, a couple of German companies that are going to be giving them a run for their money in the early 2030s.
57:47when we start getting into the later 2030s, that's the timeframe when a lot of the others will be jumping on. Right. So as you say, a lot of change expected in the next five to 10 years, certainly a very, very exciting time. I want to end by thinking about the longer term perspective and where you think fusion power might ultimately get to, let's say, 25 years from now, 30 years from now as i say going back to the uh the the science fiction stories we've grown up on fusion powers everything in those kind of worlds yeah 100 they just run on exactly everything just runs like you so it's very very easy it can all be solved that way do you think we are actually going to get to that point is it ultimately going to be the case that if fusion works it is going to be the dominant source for power generation in the world.
58:44I think a bit about fission, where nuclear fission, again, probably when it first emerged in the 1960s, 1970s, people got very excited about it. People said, this is the thing that is going to dominate power generation forever. It actually got to, I think, a peak of about 17, 18 % of global power generation in the mid-90s has since actually dropped off quite a bit. Still very important, but it's probably now only about 9 or 10 % of global power. So question, what is the realistic future for fusion? Is it going to be a bit like that, where it'll be kind of part of the mix and will operate alongside fossil plants and solar and wind and whatever else?
59:29Or do you think it really has the capability to displace everything else and become, as I say, essentially the predominant source of power generation that everybody uses in the world. Think big. Yeah, yeah. So I have a bit of a privilege, you know, because of what CFS is, you know, it's an energy company, tech company. I have a privilege of being in different rooms. And so the question on, answer to this type of question, there's like the Sarah Week level answer, which is like, energy's hard. it moves very slow you will build lots of plants and even in that scenario where like a fusion got to 20 of world energy it's an industry that is like the size of the renewable industry and if that industry in fusion if you have like a even somewhat dominant player you get like a ramco like so like that is a great outcome for the world that's a great outcome for fusion that's a great outcome for investors and companies that's like the sarah we crowd view there's another view which is fusion has attributes that we've never seen in our energy system before that are decoupled that is not energy as a natural resource but energy as a technology truly as a technology and anytime we've seen that change we've seen drastic changes in society around it and so there's an abundance point of view that if you could build fusion power plants at rate like a single car factory like one car factory can make fusion power plants at the rate that you would like replace global energy in like 10 years like if you could do it at that level you could get to a different place as a society and so that's the intriguing part about fusion is it has this outcome spectrum that has everything from okay we get another way to boil water to we get something that looks like science fiction and we're gonna run that experiment and it's happening like right now.
1:01:28And is it by analogy then could be more like, I mean, it's not going to be as easy to build and install as solar panels, which, you know, in the sort of straighter Hormuz context, you know, we've seen Pakistan and some other countries just run with solar panels in a way that no one in the fossil fuel industry predicted. I think we're going to see the same thing with electrified vehicles. I was talking to someone the other day about Uber has some scooter, business now in Nairobi and everybody's jumping on the back of other people's scooters and that's how they're getting around and it's all electrified.
1:02:05So is there some kind of a more of a barrier because you have to build a big centralized plant? But you talked about some of these 50 megawatt plants. So just try to understand the manufacturing scale up piece. Yeah, I think it's actually going to be, Bob said, an auto factory. I mean, think of it like an aircraft factory. The Boeing factory outside of Seattle is giant and it's huge. And those are some of the most complicated machines built in human history. And they crank them out one a day and it just cranks and cranks out and you see these things flying everywhere you go. And it is a massive, complex thing.
1:02:54And there is no reason that fusion can't be doing something like that. And that's where it gets into this change. And I'm asked this question some, and I'll often say it's like when fusion comes along, first you're going to feel like nothing's happened because it's a pure plug and play. You turn off a fossil fuel plant and you put a fusion plant in its place, and really nothing's going to feel like it's changed. And then you're going to look back at some point and say, wow, everything's changed. And the fundamental way that humans interact with energy, I think it cannot be overstated, especially in a time when we're talking about the Strait of Hormuz, especially in a time when we're talking about pipelines from Russia carrying natural gas.
1:03:40This is the thing that decouples energy from geopolitics. This is the thing that means that no dictator can say, I'm using my energy as a weapon. And that's honestly the reason why I got into this. That's the reason why I think it solved so many real problems. If we as a nation or as a company can just say, hey, you need energy, I'll sell it to you. And And I'm going to sell it to you because it's manufactured, not because I happen to be on a place where there's just a bunch of oil or a bunch of minerals in the ground. It's because I have a strong scientific manufacturing economy and I'll sell it to you.
1:04:25It just fundamentally changes how we look at energy, how we think about energy. And that's really exciting. Yeah. As you say, it is a really, really very exciting prospect. It's been fantastic talking to you both about it today. Unfortunately, we do have to leave it there. But thanks very much for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Andrew. Thank you. Thanks very much, Bob. Thank you. Many thanks for joining us. Look forward to hearing more about the fusion industry as it develops over, as we've been saying, this very, very exciting period we're now coming into. Many thanks, Amy. It's just been a great discussion.
1:04:57I've learned so much. So thanks, Bob. Thanks, Andrew, for helping us understand what could be a really revolutionary industry. Yeah, absolutely. Look forward to talking to you again, Amy, I'm sure, very soon. Many thanks to our producer, Molly Merwin. And above all, many thanks to all of you for listening. Please do leave a comment, leave a review, get in touch on social media. We really value your feedback. So please do keep that coming. And we'll be back very soon with all the latest news and views on the future of energy. Until then, goodbye.
1:05:34you
From the publisher
The old joke about nuclear fusion power is that commercial deployment is 30 years in the future: it always has been and it always will be. It may be time to retire that joke. Private fusion companies have now raised billions in capital, and pilot plants are moving from slide decks and plans into steel and concrete. The questions now are not so much around whether fusion power can ever work, and more about how soon it can reach the grid, and at what cost
Host Ed Crooks and regular contributor Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Global Energy, Climate, & Sustainability Lab at NYU are joined by two fusion industry leaders to discuss the rapid progress they are making. Andrew Holland is founder and chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association, and Bob Mumgaard is chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, one of the companies vying to have the first commercial fusion power plant in operation.
Andrew lays out the state of the sector. There are 56 private fusion companies globally, which between them have raised more than $14 billion in private capital. And there is a growing conviction inside the industry that commercial fusion could arrive in the early 2030s. Bob explains why Commonwealth believes SPARC, its demonstration project in Massachusetts, and ARC, its planned power plant in Virginia, can help make that timetable real.
Fusion has moved beyond the era when government science programs defined the pace of progress. Research backed by governments and universities has played a vital role in moving the technology forward, but Andrew argues that competition, venture capital and milestone-based development have changed the industry’s tempo. Crucially, the industry has not put all its eggs in one basket. Multiple companies are pursuing different technical paths, including both laser-based approaches and magnetic confinement systems, in a race to commerciality.
Bob offers the clearest lay explanation of what fusion power means in practice. Commonwealth Fusion Systems uses a tokamak, which is essentially a magnetic bottle that holds a star inside it. Fusion creates heat, which can be used to run a steam turbine. Unlike wind and solar, fusion does not depend on weather or geography. Unlike fossil fuels, it does not rely on continual fuel deliveries.
The episode also explores why fusion developers believe the technology could avoid some of the political and regulatory burdens that have constrained nuclear fission power. Because fusion reactions are hard to start and easy to stop, the risks are fundamentally different from those of a conventional fission reactor. Bob and Andrew argue that this changes everything from plant safety to siting to licensing, and could make fusion much faster to deploy if the technical hurdles are cleared.
They also discuss what it will take to build an industry, not just a few prototypes. Amy pushes on fuel cycles, lithium, superconducting tape and supply-chain readiness. Bob argues that these challenges are real but manageable, and Andrew points to the growing ecosystem of manufacturers now positioning themselves for a future fusion market. The wider point is that fusion is increasingly starting to look like a manufacturing and industrial-policy story, not just a laboratory science story.
That leads to the biggest question of all: if fusion works, how much could it matter? Bob sketches outcomes ranging from a valuable but still niche source of clean baseload power to a genuinely transformative technology. Andrew goes even further, arguing that fusion could decouple energy from geography and geopolitics in a way no fuel-based system ever has. If the industry’s ambitions are realized, within the next ten years fusion could emerge as a commercial energy source with real consequences for grids, markets and global power.
This episode of Energy Gang is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
