Episode 63 Transcript: The game-changer: fusion energy is closer than you think

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week on the show, there aren’t a lot of silver bullets to be had in the climate conversation the climate crisis is a massive systemic issue that will require many solutions, many policies, many trillions of dollars and individual actions and votes and transformations and adaptations.

But there is one thing, that sits out there, that’s as close to a true game-changer as you can imagine. And that thing is fusion energy, the process of re-creating on earth the same type of energy that powers the sun.

The hope is to create a nearly limitless source of energy that emits no carbon emissions with minimal radioactive waste that’s far safer than nuclear fission reactors and would provide consistent power unlike wind and solar.

And if you think about it, there aren’t a lot of problems that can’t be solved with limitless clean energy from cheaper more abundant power everywhere to water desalination to creating green hydrogen to carbon capture and removal to decarbonizing heavy industries like steel and cement production to space exploration and on and on. This is the kind of technology that really could change everything. It’s sci-fi level stuff, full stop.

Now, humans have been trying to crack this science for a century but the last 25 years have produced real progress and in just the last five years private companies have gotten billions of dollars to commercialize fusion. The company that’s gotten the most is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. It’s raised 2 billion dollars to build a compact, commercially viable fusion reactor called SPARC and a fusion power plant called ARC. C-F-S says it hopes to be delivering actual fusion power to the grid by the early 2030s.

At New York Climate Week, I hosted an event with Commonwealth Fusion Systems — C-F-S and sat down with C-E-O Bob Mumgaard to talk about the state of fusion and how we get it everywhere. Here’s our conversation:

((Recorded Voice-Over))

Humans are wired to keep moving,  keep inventing,  keep pushing what's possible.  Our potential is limitless,  but our energy isn't.  The gap is widening every day. The transition to fusion energy is the answer. It's urgent, it's inevitable, and it's our mission to deliver it.  Combining decades of research, top talent, and new technologies, we're designing and building commercially viable fusion power plants and driving the movement that's needed to build the energy industry of the future.

Because if we're going to change the trajectory of humanity, we must move now. Move fast, move smart, move together.  Not in incremental steps, but a giant leap.  To limitless energy and infinite potential.

Molly Wood:

So with no further ado, let me welcome Bob Mumgaard. Bob, uhm, okay. So I actually have to start and he knows this is going to happen by ripping the bandaid off and clearing up the one elephant in the room. You're going to hear us talk a lot about fusion energy. About clean Abundant baseload power you are not gonna hear us other than for the next 48 seconds say nuclear. Yeah  Tell us why?

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah.  Well, this is a van about its communication, right? and you know, one of the things I think is cool about CFS is we've been very very intentional and most of the things we do almost all of them and Including how we communicate and like communication isn't about like is it exactly textbook correct. Fusion is a nuclear process, but it's about what people think, right? Like what is the person in, um, you know, taken away. And the, the term nuclear is a loaded term. It's, it's, it means something to a lot of people and that could get in the way. And actually we realize that we could take an opportunity when you build a new industry to change that. Um, uh, we found a study that was, uh, MRI machines. Have you anyone ever been in MR MRI machine?  Right? Who has been in a NMR machine?  nuclear magnetic resonance. Oh, they're the same thing.

But the American Medical Association determined that the biggest health risk was the name  that people wouldn't use them and so they switched the name of the technology.  Um, and that now means that usage went way up. And so that was an example of like, well, let's be really intentional about how we communicate. Let's and so we call it fusion energy.

Molly Wood:

Does everyone else in the industry, has everybody else adopted that for the most part, do you think?

Bob Mumgaard:

Uh, some of the scientists and physicists..

Molly Wood:

I still see the occasional AP story, you know. 

Bob Mumgaard:

The scientists and physicists that, that aren't all necessarily great at communicating, um, no offense. Uh, uh,  I'm one of them. Uh, that, uh, you know, they, they took a little longer to, to get on board. And, and actually there's some interesting ones. In, in Japanese, uh, there's no, uh, you can't do it. Oh. Yeah. The word is actually.  Still working on how to do that in Japanese. 

Molly Wood:

Okay. Keep us posted. Um, so we are here to talk, of course, about CFS, but also Fusion as an industry, give us, uh, where does, where does CFS exist in this ecosystem right now?

Bob Mumgaard:

Right. So, you know, Fusion, first Fusion is a process, right? Fusion is a, um, a process that is the same process as inside all the stars. That's a physical process. Uh, Fusion. Um, putting it on earth, capturing it, building an industry around it, that's like, uh, harnessing that process. Um, we've known about that process for just over a hundred years, um, really serious research on it for about 60, almost all entirely governments. And over that time they have built, you know, today there's about 4, 000 people employed by governments, uh, maybe more if you look at what China's done recently. And uh, we've been researching this at National Labs Universities. About 20 years ago, the first company was actually founded, TAE, in California.

But what we saw in the, about 2010s,  was that the right pieces were coming together for there to be an industry. And at the time, I was at MIT, and, uh, the question was, well, how is this gonna go? I'm a history technology person, and so we were like, well, it's gonna go like the other births of other industries. There'll be one company, and then a few, and then a supply chain, and then finance structure. And where we are on that journey is we now have like 50 some companies.

Some people say there's more like 80, um, uh, that are are involved in fusion in in serious ways. We have the participation of large multinationals in fusion. The governments have moved from a science based program mostly, um, to, uh, more industrialization program. And we have actual steel in the ground, uh, on projects that will be the first projects that are intended to be commercial relevant demonstrations, not just  Learning tools.

Molly Wood:

I feel like that  anybody in the room, raise your hand. If this is further than you thought you were going to hear. Okay. So we have a pretty, it seems like everybody here has sort of a baseline of where we are. It, it still may be useful if you wouldn't mind to give us sort of the fifth grade version, maybe seventh grade version of the technologies in play.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah.

Molly Wood:

By the way, if you have not already seen them, the matchbooks in the back are very punny.

Bob Mumgaard:

Uh, so there's the the physical process, that's the the fusion process. To get that, you need the right conditions. So you need that to be very, very hot, like 100 million degrees, doesn't matter Fahrenheit or Celsius, like 100 million degrees. Um, that needs a special machine to reach those conditions. You can't just like do that on the  on the street. So you build what looks like, you know, a sort of aerospacey machine. It's a machine that, uh, can can write create those conditions. And there's multiple topologies of that machine. You can do it, um, uh, in a tokamak, which is basically a big magnetic bottle.

You can do it in a a stellarator, which is like a tokamak thrown off a roof and like twisted. Um, you can do it in something that with big lasers that that compress over and over again. So there's multiple ways to build that machine. And they all have trade offs. Um, and how scientifically advanced they are, how proven they are, uh, what they might cost, uh, how big they'd have to be.

Um, and then that machine sits inside a plant. And that plant, uh, is a bunch of technologies that most of which like exist in some form, but it needs like 20 percent fusion fusionified.  Um, yeah, it's like, uh, we need a refrigerator, but it's gotta be a little bit colder. Yeah. Um, so LNG refrigerator is just colder.

Um, so there's a series of these technologies that go into a plant, that feed and care for the machine. And then at the end of it, you actually generate heat, and that's a steam cycle the way that you run a normal power plant. That looks so from a utility standpoint, it looks like a natural gas plant. But from a technical stack, it's a unique combination of, of technologies that haven't usually been put together that way, And then the machine itself is this highly engineered thing, involves magnets, in our case, new superconductors, and that's where a lot of the effort goes.

Molly Wood:

Right. And high temp superconducting tape, that's the zero resistance, that's the pun. I'm just, I'm just telling you the pun so you don't have to like look it up because I had to ask.  Um, how do you think about,  with all of these companies in play, with something like five billion dollars having been invested in Fusion just since 2021, How do you think about this ecosystem and what you've described as a race?

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah. So you, you've got all these companies, you've got capital, you've got governments that say they want fusion power on the grid in the early 2030s. That's now, um, uh, the U S stance, uh, the UK is in the mid thirties in Japan. Uh, also, so you've, you've got the right makeup, but you, we actually have to go out and build these machines like we have to show it works and we've got the test machines that have been done in, in labs. And now, um, we're seeing, you know, you'll see here with CFS, we're building a, this machine spark that is, you know, a, you know, full scale, uh, plants, but half scale tokamak, um, intended to make real fusion power. I won't turn to electricity.

We know how to do that. Um, but it will show the right conditions and that now, you know, has a supply chain behind it. So you start to see people engage that supply chain. Like we actually have, I think the first debt infusion was, you know, Uh, to one of our suppliers who put together a prospectus and said, we want to supply this industry, we need more mills, and went to their banker.

And that was, oh, fusion is going to happen, we'll do that. Um, and so all those pieces, uh, are starting to, to come together. It's still, it's still early days. Like this is not something that's going to happen, you know, suddenly, uh, you know, two years from now we're going to have fusion power plants all over the world.

But it is on the, the same trajectory that we saw with other energy technologies. Um, uh, and in some cases, uh, even faster. I think, um, it'd be an interesting question to some of the panelists who've been in Fusion for a while on, uh, how, how it's going compared to their expectations. My, my guess is it's significantly faster.

Molly Wood:

Yeah.  Is that, I mean, I want to put a finer point on the,  the, the sort of concept that it's not,  we're not at science risk necessarily. We're at scaling and scaling and, uh, you know, that's why we have a capital panel and a government panel coming up. But scaling requires the kind of ecosystem that you're talking about. It requires companies that do more than just what you do.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah, that's right. And so, and the whole ecosystem. So CFS, um, we're the largest of the fusion companies. So we're about a third of all the people and about a third of all the money in the ecosystem. So, uh, that makes us usually the, the first in the room and also like the first to hire a fusion specific lawyer, right? And figure out there's actually some things they have to figure out there. How do you do insurance for fusion? You got to like figure that out. Um, you've got to figure out how you regulate it, right? Who even gives you a permit for a fusion power plant? There's a lot of stuff that that you have to do and we we do a lot of that, but we we try to do it in a way that that builds an ecosystem so that maybe we don't always have to do it.

Um, and so whether that's like helping our supply chain get outside funding, or whether that's even like incubating and helping other like startup companies that, uh, can make components for us or selling our magnets to other fusion developers. You got to build this, this big ecosystem. You're not going to solve this, um, all with one company. And I think, you know, climate week's an interesting week because you have all the, all the pieces together, but the numbers are startling. They're, they're, they're amazing. Like, you know, we want to build thousands and thousands of power plants. And like, that sounds kind of crazy, except there are thousands and thousands of power plants. Like we already built like 60, 000 power plants in the world. And now we have to go and rebuild. Most of those power plants with something, what's that going to be? Well, let's build an ecosystem that that could be fusion. That could be an option.

Molly Wood:

What is it about that ecosystem, if anything, that really keeps you up at night?

Like, what's the thing, you know, we're going faster than expected now. What's the wall you really don't want to hit?

Bob Mumgaard:

Uh, the it's, it's talent. Um, you know, it's like, okay, we're in New York, I should say finance, but that's not, that's not it. It's actually talent.

Molly Wood:

Um, it's also finance.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah, financial talent, that, that fits.

Um, no, it, it's talent, and like, if you, um, needed to like double the industry at a rate that was limit that was talent limited, like, that's like a doubling every like seven years. That's like how long it takes to make a grad student, or like train someone in a whole new, whole new field. Um, that, there's no way that you affect climate with that strategy.

So that means the only way to do it is you have to like take people that are in adjacencies,  That have those skills that are useful in fusion, and you have to move them in. You have to come in from the side. You can't just grow it all up. And so we've done a, uh, a really deliberate plan of, you know, okay, like, who are the suppliers that know how to build large fabrications? Well, the oil and gas industry. Like, well, okay, let's take that supply base, that talent, and teach them how to make fusion parts. Uh, you know, who is really, really good at doing R and D and like fast manufacturing, the rocket industry, like fusion machines are kind of like rockets.

So like we have like remedial courses inside the company,  probably shouldn't call it remedial, you know, that are like how to get up to speed on on that because otherwise it will be talent limited.

And even like we even think about it and, you know, we could make like. Way like probably way more complex fusion machines that might even be lower cost, but  we wouldn't have the talent to actually deploy them at scale. And so, you know, you can't like go and build jet fighters if, if your pilots aren't jet fighter pilots, right? And, and so it really is the talent.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, the second part of my conversation with Bob Mumgaard about the competition, the geopolitics, and the money it’ll take to get it done.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. Here’s part 2 of my conversation with Bob Mumgaard of Commonwealth Fusion Systems from New York Climate Week.

Molly Wood:

Um, that's a good segue to competition since there are a lot of companies in the space. How do you think about you are the biggest? Uh, that isn't always a guarantee.  Um, but how do you think about the race first competitively and then we'll talk about geopolitically?

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah. So wh while the the science is well understood, you know, we've we've now shown in California that you can make this reaction go, um, at a a national lab facility and and we have decades and decades of of science that is, you know, how do you simulate these systems and and how they've been validated. That's well in hand. We're at that engineering level, but we're not yet the stage where, like, we need to be out there competing over market share. Right? Like, fusion is gonna enter the market at zero market share. Like, the market is huge. We're not gonna need to, to, like, figure out, you know, one fusion company versus another fusion company against each other. Instead, it's how do you get Fusion into the conversation and into the market at all?

Molly Wood:

And in fact you wrote an open letter to the industry saying, in these early days we need to get on the same page about some really critical things.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah! It's like, you know, we founded, a founding member of uh, the Fusion Industry Association, which is like get everyone on the same page, so that that way, uh, as it develops, like we're using the same language, getting better. We're together on the things that are all, like, super pre competitive. There's some technology development. There's what the governments do. There's regulation that it makes a lot more sense to go together because, you know, if you're if you're the US government, you're not gonna bet on one fusion company.

We might be the greatest things in sidesplit. Red is a fusion company, but you can't bet it all on one company, but you can bet on a fusion industry. And so like going together, um, is is really important, and um. You know, that's, that's from a company standpoint. And it's cool too because you can see people with different strategies, both on the technical side but increasingly on, on other parts of their business that there's some, uh, you know, supply chain strategy, the picks and shovels.

That's, that's a, a really cool area right now. Um, uh, but we also see, you know, that like, well, is it gonna be private companies that bring this to, to market? Or is it going to be state led enterprise? And so like in some sense, the the race and the the competition is actually about economic systems. Um, that that's where the most of the headwinds we see are and particularly in China.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. Say more about that, about the the gen we'll talk about this a little more later too, but the general usefulness of command capitalism in a situation like this.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah. You know, your infusion, what you're doing is you're putting together complicated machines, um, uh, and marshalling a a whole new supply chain, you know, all at once, um, the command and control that China has is actually pretty good at that. Um, you're doing construction, pretty good at that. Um, but you're also at the absolute cutting edge of science and technology. And so that's where the, the innovation that the US has the advantage, advantage there. But like, it is the case that, you know, China's investing at a, a rate in fusion that, uh, you know, people in DC, I'll be down in DC at a, a Senate tomorrow. People are, are definitely taking note that like, well, how does, what does that mean if they get there first?

Molly Wood:

Right. What do you think it means? What are the stakes?

Bob Mumgaard:

Uh, well, I, you know, for us, we've never had China in our TAM. So as a company, you know, I just, we just never believed that we would sell power plants in China, like, um, in the next 30 years.

Want to, or you just, no, it's like, uh, we probably sell one. Yeah. And that would be it. Um, uh, and so I want to know a lot more about that over drinks. Like, yeah,  we, you know, have some people with some scar tissue, um, of, of, uh, bringing, uh, technology, uh, up, up into China. Um, and so the, the pie is big enough without that market, you know, from a, if you, what you care about is climate, uh, you've different, you have a different viewpoint because they're a big emitter, but what you care about is like making a really, really big company. Like the pie is so big that, uh, even if you take that, someone else eats that slice,  

Molly Wood:

Let's talk briefly about capital  or let's talk in depth about capital  because at the end of the day, this is an expensive proposition. It's going to take more money. And I wonder, like, as you try to quantify that,  what amount is needed and over what timeframe?

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah. Um,  so. You know, we've raised two billion to date. Uh,  and, uh, that Spark machine, that's where, uh, the majority of it is go is going, is gone. Um, uh, we still have plenty of Is everybody familiar with the Spark machine? Do we want to Yeah, Spark machine Recap. Prototype power plant, uh, 50 acre site, hour outside hour outside of Boston, um, about halfway through completion.

And its goal is, it's, uh, an integrated system minus the Steam system, Uh, and you'll push a button and you make a star in a bottle, and that'll make more power out than in at about 100 megawatts. So that's industrial scale fusion, controlled fusion, um, on earth. That's the first time, uh, in a commercially relevant way.

Molly Wood:

Do you have star in a bottle t shirts?

Bob Mumgaard:

Oh, we have all sorts of t shirts. That's a swag heavy company company. Um, I don't know if there's explicitly I want a star in a bottle. There's probably cheeky star in a bottle ones. Um, uh, but yeah. So that's that, you know, to do that, that's the lar we think that's the largest tough tech project in, in the United States that, uh, next generation technology that, you know, that's at a scale that, you know, there's no SMR that's at that point or any anything else. It's it's and then it sits next to a manufacturing facility that makes it. 

That's that's a pretty big project. Um,  and we think that, you know, we're we're gonna need more capital, right? And the big question will be, does the company need capital itself to grow?  But how much of the company's capital is gonna go into the projects? And so it's the first of a kind gap. Um, we're facing that gap and we have, I think we have a, a unique point of view on it because we, we are well capitalized and we are with a big project. and so we're, you know, thinking through like, okay, where's the capital gonna come in that project? If we had to do it all out of corporate equity, would we do it? Um, what's the role of the government? And I there'll be a panel I about that. But, uh, we we certainly look at it.

But we're also seeing that like, and this is something we learned, um, uh, from SpaceX where we have a lot of SpaceX people like we have like three of the first 20 SpaceX people and then like another 200 after that. And one of the key things there was like, the ability to actually go out and build stuff and be sufficiently well enough funded, that you could actually punch a new a problem like all the way through.

And, um, and we see that over and over again. I think in the I said earlier I'm a history technology person, and the technical moment that we live in right now is a technical moment where there is a collection of problems that if you put on order like 10 billion. It's not a maybe it's a billion, it's probably not 20 billion. But if you put an order that amount of money behind that problem at the right time, you will punch it through.  And like, internet from space, punch through, right? MRNA as a platform, like vaccines, punch through. Uh, the large language models, punch through. Like, there's a whole bunch of those problems. And like, if you put a billion in and you need a ten, you don't get it.

Right? And if you put a billion into 10, you might not get it either.  But if you pick the right place and you really punch it through, um, and you really do it at, at scale and with enough people, with enough, enough timeline, you can get it. We'll see how, uh, you know, Waymo does, but that's a classic another example. Um, and so we, we think it's on or it's, it's now, you know, on order that it's like, probably another four or 5 billion to  really punch it through all the way to something that is now completely replicable and now the world has fusion power plants.

Molly Wood:

But this is where,  this is where you have said, you know, no investors don't necessarily put need to put all of their eggs in one fusion basket. Shout out clay. Um,  But they do need to get behind some winners sooner than later. 

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah, I do, I do think, um, you know,  having an  infinite expansion horizontally and not actually getting the things done is always a risk in a new, new space like this. Um, at the same time, uh, I think these, these fields naturally roll up as well. Um, and, you know, that, that obviously will, will happen at some point in this field.

Molly Wood:

So then what are the key questions, like if you're going to pick that winner, either as an investor or even the media, right? What are the key questions that  people should be asking to determine what is real? Because there's  a lot.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah, well, you know,  I think one of the good things is that like the first question is less and less, what is fusion?  That's a good direction, right? The sort of fusion, uh, competency level of the average reader or journalist is higher. But, you know, this is a technical field. Like, it is a, everyone can say, I'm gonna go build a fusion power plant. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be startin a bottle. But the steps you have to check off to do that, um, you know, you have to, like, actually make the right conditions.  It has to be hot enough.

You have to eventually make actual fusion power out of it. You can't just have a light bulb. It's actually got to make power that you can measure and, uh, it's a non trivial thing to do. And right now, the only people that have done that are governments.  And then, uh, you eventually need to like hook that into a system where you, you sell power onto a grid, right? And you do that reliably every day. You know, we're still years, years away from that. Um, but there are these well established scientific. Um, signposts. So make a stable plasma, heat the plasma up to like 10 million degrees, not 100, but like 10. Get it dense enough and insulated well enough so that you're in the right neighborhood.

Then get it to the point where it has more power out from that plasma that took to heat it up. That's what Spark's doing. That's only been done at for a brief moment in a laser in California. And then put that in a plant that has excess electricity to sell.  Uh, that's what our power plant, the next thing we want to build and then get that to, you know, somewhere below 50 a megawatt hour. And, and if that's the path, and like we started that path 60 years ago and we're, uh, at the point now where we have a commercial case for it.

Molly Wood:

Right. So if you're evaluating, those are the questions. Um, who is, uh, who is funding fusion currently and who should be funding Fusion. I'm baiting you a little bit here because this is an interesting conversation. Uh. About where money is coming from these days.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah. So we have a, uh, uh, a pretty broad capital stack in, in CFS. Thank you for the one people that showed up. Um, uh, and that was very intentional, right? So we're not gonna get Fusion just with venture capitalists. It's a technology but you can't get to the point where you have plants with on, on VC dollars. Um, uh, so there's definitely.  Plays for them to play, but it's got to, it's got to grow up. We've got sovereigns. That's an interesting, uh, one. And like, there's some major geostrategic implications of Fusion. Um, there's, uh,  definitely, uh, we, we have some hedge funds, which is interesting. Like, you don't usually associate hedge funds with a long hold. But like, there are those out there that do that. And like, if you think arbitrage on information and like how the world might go. Um, and, uh. So that that's been interesting.

Um, we're we actually have more, uh, endowments. So if you think about, you know, educational institutions who need want access to clean energy in their portfolios and have long holds, um, can do that. That's that's, uh, been our case. And so we think it's it's gonna get bottlenecked though, without people figuring out and this I think is a topic that is happening, conversation around climate week more and more is that like, how do you get that transition from company building to a project pipeline and what that first project looks like, how that first project comes together.

If all it is, is infrastructure investors on a rinse and repeat commoditization of 12 percent returns.

Like, you're never gonna get that to go earlier without someone taking a real hard look and saying, Well, actually, there might be a hybrid model or there might where you have some of the the the TopCo or there might be other ways to package it into more of a pipeline. Um, but that's a problem that like all these early stage technologies that are are not yet in a in the project finance world, it's gonna face. And and Fusion is a great poster child for that because it's so flashy, it's it's big and there'll be a lot of benefit from building the first one.

Molly Wood:

Investors have historically, no one in this room I'm sure, tended to hit their own kind of wall when they encounter the reality of project finance after, like there are very helpful conversations happening about first of a kind financing and different capital stacks to get projects of this size, um, over the valley of death. But I wonder,  I wonder if at this exact moment. When there is this kind of increasing panic about energy availability related to AI,  if like something that might have slowed down a little bit for you is suddenly not going to.

Bob Mumgaard:

Yeah, we, so we have a, um,  uh, this document, 10 things we know to be true that we wrote 10 years ago. It's like how we think the world is organized. And, number two is in the future the, the markets will be energy and creativity.  And so there have been big debates now about what that creativity The only markets. The only markets. Like, that's, you know, if you read sci fi, that's where it gets to, right? It's like, well, what is that cre they've actually merged.  And if you look at the, the power use that is going to be required just from the chip, um, chip orders. Like, you look at NVIDIA's market cap. Like, where's that power going to come from? Like, those chips don't power themselves.

And, and so that's a big change and uh, I don't know. You know, how much of that is gonna be, you know, hype and overbuy versus how much of that is is gonna be real? Uh, interesting question but kind of immaterial. Like, it's all going up. And it's all going up at levels that are significantly beyond what, um, uh, most of the energy system has looked at recently. So, I think that's a really cool, uh, perturbation in this whole system that you have a buyer who's a class of buyers, who are techno optimists,  In a way that utilities and we're not in the first and clean tech 1. 0, who are bright enough to, to take risks that are outside their normal, um, normal space. And they have a product that is not as, uh, tightly tied to the cost of their energy. 

And like they have to make decisions about how they're going to power a data center. It's not going to get up and move. So like that is a, a, a very unique. Unique saying, um, uh, we didn't have that before, uh, and we'll, we'll see where that goes but you can just see this week, um, uh, with some of the announcements that have made where like people are, are, are scrounging like when you're starting to restart, you know, long shutter nuclear reactors, there's not that many, many of them. That's not a scalable solution. Yeah. Um, but that's a very clever, uh, thing to do that wouldn't have been done, um, by organizations that were. You know, at the table, uh, the last time we really had a big push on new technology and clean tech, right?

Molly Wood:

Might not be sovereigns, hedge funds and endowments for long. Yeah. Bob Mumgaard, everybody. Thank you so much for the time. Appreciate it.  Thank you.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Now, there are dozens of companies in the fusion space … other names you might know are Helion Energy,  Tokamak Energy, and T-A-E Energy, all with slightly different approaches to generating fusion. But the thing to note is that for a lot of years, fusion was considered a bit of a fantasy and the feeling at CFS and among its investors is that it kind of isn’t anymore.

Deployment will be hard and expensive and complex logistically and in terms of regulations …

but if the outcome is our kids growing up in an energy utopia instead of a climatedystopia, then this is without question, a swing worth taking..

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

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