Creating Stars in a Bottle: The Race to Commercialize Fusion Energy (Vinod Khosla & Bob Mumgaard)

While the world fights over chips, one company is building the power supply to run them all. In this episode of The Generalist, I'm joined by Bob Mumgaard, CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), and Vinod Khosla, legendary venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures. With over 800 employees and $2 billion in funding, CFS has accelerated the timeline for commercial fusion from being perpetually "30 years away" to potentially just a few years out. If CFS succeeds, it will unlock limitless clean energy for humanity, powering everything from AI to water desalination. In our conversation, we explore: • How fusion could transform everything from AI to water desalination and agriculture • The fundamental science behind fusion energy and how it differs from traditional nuclear fission • The breakthrough in magnet technology that changed the timeline for fusion • The strategic approach of partnering with existing power plant operators to rapidly scale fusion deployment • Why fusion is essential for powering AI and other energy-intensive innovations • CFS’s method for creating fusion using magnetic fields • The final hurdles to completing SPARC, the company’s demonstration reactor • The six-stage roadmap for fusion development, where CFS currently stands, and when they expect to begin delivering power to the grid • What clean energy could make possible for future technologies and industries • The geopolitical implications of a world with abundant clean energy • Much more — Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/creating-stars-in-a-bottle — Thank you to the partners who make this possible ⁠Brex⁠ https://www.brex.com/mario: The banking solution for startups. ⁠Generalist+⁠ https://thegeneralist.substack.com/: Essential intelligence for modern investors and technologists. — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:13) An overview of fusion energy, and why it’s so important (08:23) The connection between AI and fusion energy (10:20) How Bob became interested in fusion (13:06) The importance of entrepreneurs in bringing crazy ideas to life (14:55) The advancement in magnets that caused the leap in fusion technology (17:33) The extreme conditions required for fusion (19:46) What made Vinod interested in funding CFS (21:30) The alternatives that CFS looked at if the magnet hadn’t worked (25:18) Different methods for creating fusion (27:43) Bob’s entrepreneurial lens for fusion at scale (31:52) CFS’s strategy of partnering with existing power infrastructure (35:32) An overview of ARC and SPARC (40:03) Final hurdles to complete SPARC (42:29) The six-stage roadmap for fusion development (46:11) What clean energy unlocks (48:06) Entrepreneurial opportunities for supporting fusion power (50:43) Final meditations — Follow Vinod Khosla LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-khosla-65387416/⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-khosla-65387416/ X: ⁠https://x.com/vkhosla⁠ https://x.com/vkhosla — Follow Bob Mumgaard LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/mumgaard/⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mumgaard/ X: ⁠https://x.com/BobMumgaard⁠ https://x.com/BobMumgaard — Resources and episode mentions —Books— • Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Unweaving-Rainbow-Science-Delusion-Appetite/dp/0618056734⁠ https://www.amazon.com/Unweaving-Rainbow-Science-Delusion-Appetite/dp/0618056734 • The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company: ⁠https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Trinity-Robert-Important-Company/dp/0062226762⁠ https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Trinity-Robert-Important-Company/dp/0062226762 —People— • Elon Musk on X: ⁠https://x.com/elonmusk⁠ https://x.com/elonmusk —Other resources— • Commonwealth Fusion Systems: ⁠https://cfs.energy/⁠ https://cfs.energy/ • Sun Microsystems: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems⁠ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems • OpenAI: ⁠https://openai.com/⁠ https://openai.com/ • Moore’s Law: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law⁠ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law • The Hunt for Red October: ⁠https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099810/⁠ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099810/ • Magnetohydrodynamic drive: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive⁠ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive • ITER: ⁠https://www.iter.org/⁠ https://www.iter.org/ ... Resources continued at: https://www.generalist.com/p/creating-stars-in-a-bottle — Production and marketing by ⁠penname.co⁠ https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Fusion is a reaction, and it's the reaction, it's the most prominent reaction in the universe. So fusion is the power inside the stars. It's the reaction that basically could never run out of fuel. You'd have what is functionally limitless, clean energy.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Entrepreneurs make these things happen. Without entrepreneurs like Bob, this would go on forever, and we'd never be quite there.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  The technology has always been 30 years away. And now, you know, instead of 30 years, we talk in terms of, you know, is it 30 months? Which is super exciting to see.

• 0:34Mario Gabriele?

  Hey, I'm Mario, and this is the Generalist Podcast. You've probably heard the saying, "The future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." On this podcast, I sit down with the visionaries, builders, and investors who are already living in that future to give you a clearer window into what's coming next. Today, I'm speaking with Bob Mumgaard and Vinod Khosla about what might be the most transformative energy technology of our lifetime: nuclear fusion, also known as fusion energy. Bob is the CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, CFS, the world's leading fusion energy company.

• 1:15Mario Gabriele?

  Under his leadership, CFS has grown to 800 employees and raised more than $2 billion from climate-focused investors. Bob holds a PhD in applied plasma physics from MIT and has dedicated his career to bringing fusion from lab to market.

• 1:33Mario Gabriele?

  Vinod Khosla needs little introduction. He's one of the most visionary venture capitalists of our time, the founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, and the backer of transformative companies like OpenAI, DoorDash, Stripe, and of course, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. In my conversation with Bob and Vinod, we discussed the wild poetic science behind fusion energy, how CFS has accelerated the timeline for commercial fusion from being perennially 30 years out to potentially just a few years away, and what a world with abundant fusion energy might enable, from superintelligent AI to brand-new industries that we haven't even imagined yet. I can't tell you how much I learned from this conversation and how

• 2:18Mario Gabriele?

  excited it got me about fusion's potential. My hope is that you'll walk away with meaningful lessons about how energy innovation happens, why this technology matters in an AI-powered future, and how fusion might be the key that unlocks solutions to some of our most pressing challenges. This is a new podcast, so if you enjoy today's episode, I'd love to have you subscribe and join the journey. Now, here's my conversation with Bob Mungart and Vinod Khosla. This episode is brought to you by Brex. Fred Adler, the influential venture capitalist of the 1970s, was known for displaying decorative pillows in his office that featured a signature

• 3:01Mario Gabriele?

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• 3:44Mario Gabriele?

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• 4:13Mario Gabriele?

  Bob and Vinod, it is so great to have you here today. I am thrilled to talk about fusion energy, Commonwealth fusion systems, and why this has been the holy grail of energy for quite so long. A lot of people may have heard of nuclear energy and thought about what its impact might be for the future, but may not understand the real basics of what we're talking about here. So to begin, I was hoping to just have you, Bob, tell us a little bit about what fusion energy is and why it's so important. Because especially as we think about AI and climate change, it feels like something that anyone who wants to look towards the future has to have at least a sort of rudimentary understanding of.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an area that a lot of people see maybe in a science textbook and then sort of put in the back of their mind or comic book or something like that. And really, though, what fusion is, is fusion's a reaction. And it's the reaction, it's the most prominent reaction in the universe. So fusion is the power inside the stars. It's the reaction that builds up all the atoms. And what that does is it takes the lightest elements and combines them together. And in the process, the result is a little bit less mass than what went in. And E equals mc squared, you get a lot of energy from that. In fact, it's the opposite process of nuclear fission, which is what people today know as nuclear power,

• 5:40Speaker 00

  which nuclear power powers a large part of the world's energy needs. But in fusion, it's the other end of the Piroc table, building atoms up. And so the sort of reason you'd want to do this is because it's a reaction that basically could never run out of fuel. So the stars don't really run out of fuel. It takes them several billion years to do that. So if you made that work on Earth, you'd have a completely new type of energy source.

• 6:11Mario Gabriele?

  You'd have what is functionally limitless, clean energy. And the other thing that I thought was interesting in learning a little bit about this, and it's something I've been really excited to try and educate myself on, is just how different fusion and fission are, such that fission can unfortunately have incidences where it goes very wrong. And one of the things that I was learning about fusion is that like, I don't know if fragile is quite the right word, but it is. Yeah, something that you have to, you know, pay very, very close attention to such that, you know, a puff of air in the wrong place can can stop it from operating in the right way. You can probably explain that much better than I could.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  You've got the gist of it. So, you know, in traditional nuclear fission, it's a chain reaction. So you put in a large amount of uranium or plutonium, or things that you can use to make a chain reaction for nefarious purposes. Then you you sort of burn it very slowly over time. And the challenge is controlling that, which we can do. Then also, when you want to shut it off, it doesn't necessarily shut off on your timescale. It actually keeps going, and that's how you get a meltdown. And it's also why you have waste that lasts thousands of years. That doesn't mean it's not safe. It just means you have to design that in and you have to accept that in your society. With fusion, the challenge is that it's the most prevalent element. So it's not a fuel challenge.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  There's no chain reaction. Instead, it's how do you create the right conditions? It's sort of like brewing the right beer. If you don't get the right conditions, your beer is not going to work right. If you do, you can be magical, right? Well, fusion, those conditions are really extreme. They're they're never occur on Earth. You have to go to to big lengths to make them occur. You have to build machines to make them occur. It also means that if something's not quite right, it will stop. And as you mentioned, you can actually blow out a fusion machine with a single breath of air. But actually, a breath of air has more particles in it than all the fuel that at any given time is inside a fusion machine.

• 8:14Mario Gabriele?

  We're going to talk more about some of the, well, to my mind, poetic parts of this machine, including, you know, how a breath of air can, you know, stop it from working. But Vinod, you're someone who has reliably seen the future before the the rest of the world has. You know, you've done that throughout your career from from the very early days at at Sun through to the present moment. You're also very well known for being, you know, one of the first outside investors in OpenAI's for-profit arm. But what is less well known is that the same year that you made that investment in OpenAI, you also, you know, invested in in Commonwealth Fusion Systems, CFS. You know, there's now a very clear connection between those two technologies.

• 8:56Mario Gabriele?

  I'm curious if you could explain a little bit about that connection and if you saw it clearly at the time.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Well, I won't claim I had that much foresight. I think both are really, really important. Artificial intelligence is really important and energy is really, really important. I didn't quite connect how much energy AI would use. I didn't have that foresight, but we are fortunate we are here and we have a source of power to power that AI.

• 9:28Mario Gabriele?

  Given the energy intensity of AI, you know, that we've seen over the past few years, how has it changed how you think about, you know, Bob's work and CFS? Is this, you know, has this just become even more obvious why this is was is so critical? Are there other parts that have sort of come to light for you?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I would say we absolutely need AI and we absolutely need fusion and to independent of each other. I didn't connect the two in 2018 when I invested both, to be honest. I did think limitless energy was going to open up a lot of possibilities. And that was the important thing and we needed clean limitless energy because of climate change, but also because cheap limitless energy can do a lot of things for humanity.

• 10:19Mario Gabriele?

  There's a, there's a saying in, in the fusion space, from what I understand, Bob, that, you know, the technology has always been thirty, thirty years away. And I'm curious, you know, how you as a kid and as a young adult and, you know, eventually as an adult, decided to spend your life in a field that had that dimension to it, where it always felt just out of reach. Were you the, the kid reading the, the Dr. Octopus Spider-Man comics and, you know, seeing his, his fusion machines? Were you dreaming about this from a young age?

• 10:52Speaker 00

  So actually, I was not. There are people that are, you know, bona fide fusion aficionados that start really, really young, like, you know, third grade. I was not that. What I am is a history of technology person and, you know, studied how technologies go from laboratory to impact. And almost all those technologies have some element. It's like, oh, it's always a long way away and it will always will be. And that's true if you're a layperson. But if you actually study the history and you look, you can see these things advancing. You can see them advancing and them speeding up. Whether that's what large language models have recently done in AI. Or whether that's biotech, or whether that's, you know, the railroad. It's the same pattern.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  And Fusion, about 10 years ago, started to go through that pattern. That beginning of that pattern. I was in the field for reasons related to energy and all of a sudden Fusion became more and more relevant. As it got faster and faster. And really, the last five years, you know, it's drastically picked up. And now, you know, instead of 30 years, we talk in terms of, you know, is it 30 months? That sort of type of discussion, which is super exciting to see.

• 12:09Mario Gabriele?

  So if you hadn't seen sort of these dimensions changing in Fusion, you know, maybe you would be doing some other part of the the energy stack, it sounds like. Is that right?

• 12:18Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, that, you know, go where the smartest people are going, where the technologies are all overlapping. Where the science is is firm and Fusion fits that bill.

• 12:31Mario Gabriele?

  Is there, as you look sort of back and on the the history of Fusion, a a specific person from the field that you're like, you know, this person should be better known for their contributions, but has, you know, perhaps been forgotten or isn't as widely known as they should be?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Oh, I I don't know if I I'm in the position to be able to identify that. But I do think that, you know, the impact on the world that Fusion will have long term, like when we look back at it. You know, there will be more household household names that are right now sort of esoteric inside baseball.

• 13:06Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing. Vinod, you are someone who tends to take ideas from scientific research papers. I know that your first company, which was an alternative milk business that you were trying to get off the ground in India, came from studying the up-to-date research on that technology. Had you read a lot about nuclear fusion before meeting Bob in 2018, 2019?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Well, I vividly remember meeting Bob and standing on top with the fusion reactor where they were doing these shots and saying, "Boy, this has to exist." And Bob had a plan. But, you know, my view is, just to add to Bob's question, entrepreneurs make these things happen. Very much true, it happened in electric cars. The Department of Energy had a forecast for a number of electric cars in 2035 that I think Tesla exceeded in 2015 or 2016. While everybody else was sticking to traditional wisdom, Bob just, Elon Musk

• 14:15Speaker 01

  just did it and exceeded every forecast. And I think that's happened in fusion. On its own pace, without entrepreneurs like Bob, this would go on forever. And we'd never be quite there. But Bob took it on, and we had backup plans. I remember us making a plan, if we got a 20 Tesla magnet and didn't get to fusion, what would we do? We actually went through that discussion and made plans, the backup plans, if we spent all this money and we didn't get to it. So it takes an entrepreneur to do this, and that's why I was really excited to support Bob in doing this.

• 14:54Mario Gabriele?

  You talked there, Vinod, about the 20 Tesla magnet, which is a big part of Commonwealth Fusion's systems history. At the time that you guys had met, there were these changes in material science that was potentially setting the groundwork for that magnet. Bob, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what had changed that had made you excited to jump in the industry and what the state of play was when you met Vinod in 2018?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'd been in fusion for almost 10 years when I met Vinod and had watched as a confluence of different technologies and science results started to pile up. You had the ability to predict how these fusion plasmas, which are very complex, they're still things we don't entirely understand, you could predict them. So, machine learning, large-scale simulation, big compute was making inroads. And we were really, for the first time, seeing compute simulation make an impact on our understanding of those plasmas, those very hot plasmas. That was one area. You could also see other technologies that hadn't been applied to fusion before that

• 16:03Speaker 00

  were developed for fast chargers and for some materials, etc. But, in the fusion that I was working in, and that CFS still works in as a leader in, the predominant way to harness fusion is to use magnetic fields, to build a magnetic bottle. So, you basically take a tiny, tiny bit of fuel and you get it really, really hot and you keep it hot using a series of magnets. And it turns out, the performance of those fusion machines goes like the magnetic field to like the force power, super nonlinear. And any time you see something that is like very nonlinear, think like Moore's law, that's very nonlinear, right? Like, that says, "Go and crank it."

• 16:45Speaker 00

  And we'd cranked the magnets as far as they were ever gonna go. And then, there was a new material, a material science breakthrough, that opened the path to even higher field magnets, to double the magnetic field. And so, by about 2016, we really understood that that was going to be the thing that pushed fusion over the top. But you needed to go and take this new material and develop an entire technical stack on it of a new type of magnet. And so, in 2018, we set out to do that. And there was people that said that was gonna take 30 years. We said, "We think it'll take three." We did it, and just over three. And that was a big magnet in 2021 that showed that you could reach these very high magnetic fields, 20 tesla.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Magnet that lives in aircraft carrier level.

• 17:33Mario Gabriele?

  And because of that higher magnetic field, you said, you know, the magnetic field is important to sort of create the heat necessary. Is it fair, you know, am I correct in saying that more powerful magnet allowed more heat to be created in, in, uh, in the reactor?

• 17:50Speaker 00

  The way to think about fusion is you've got to get to these extreme conditions that are very hot. So like a hundred million degrees. We're talking like hotter than the center of the sun. So when Vinod, uh, yeah, when Vinod was talking about standing on top of a machine at MIT, that machine actually could get to those, those temperatures. It was the time the hottest thing in the solar system.

• 18:08Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I heard you say that on a, on a different, um, speech and I, I literally chuckled out loud and turned to my, and my wife was like, well, what are you laughing about? I was like, I just heard the craziest thing. Um, you know, that's part of the poetry of these machines. Anyway, sorry.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Very, very hot. Um, but it's not enough to just make it hot. Like, you know, if you like, you know, have a big furnace in your house, you can make your furnace hot or make your house hot. But if you have all the doors and windows open, it won't stay hot. And so you need to also insulate it very well. And so that way, when you put the heat in it, it stays hot. Otherwise you'll never make more power than it takes to heat it up. And so getting that, that insulation, that's what the magnetic field does. It bottles up and it makes, makes the, makes the field very well insulated. If you think about like your coffee thermos, you know, your coffee thermos keeps your coffee warm most of the day, all day. If you've got a good one. Um, if that could insulate things as well as

• 19:04Speaker 00

  a fusion power plant insulates it, you know, it would still be warm like years later. That's what we're talking about. Like really, really insulating it. And, um, and with these magnets, you could see that you could, you could increase the effectiveness, um, by an order of magnitude, which anytime you see anything that you get a factor of 10, like, you know, you gotta go try it.

• 19:28Mario Gabriele?

  Do you ever think, Bob, that you're working on the less ambitious problem that really you should be applying this technology to keeping our coffees hot?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  It's a complicated way to keep a coffee hot, but you know, I wouldn't want to drink 100 million degree coffee either, so.

• 19:44Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, that's fair enough. Vinod, you've you mentioned that, you know, this progress really happens because of exceptional people who refuse to accept what the status quo is, refuse to accept the projections made by, you know, top-down governmental bodies. What was it about Bob when you met him and, you know, the team that he was pulling together that made you think like, you know, this is someone who can break these norms and and push us forward on a much faster timeline?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  I'd say a couple of things. First, this approach to energy was too important to not try. And I have a set of things I think we should try. And I'd rather say, try and fail, but don't fail to try. And I think when we started, we didn't know for sure what would get in the way. We had alternative plans for a 20 Tesla magnet. We made those plans and found off-ramps, but we're hoping never to use them. So it was just a great team attempting a large project. Look, without taking risk, you're not going to do something

• 20:58Speaker 01

  exceptional. Most people are afraid to risk, they fail to try, instead of trying and failing. And I think that was the key here. Bob was willing to give it a try. He had a very solid side effect thesis behind it. So it wasn't just try without a thesis. And we assembled the right team. Bob had a great team. So it was all worth giving it a try. From my point of view, it was too important to not try.

• 21:29Mario Gabriele?

  Do you remember what some of those alternatives were that you had laid out had the had the magnet not worked as you'd you'd hoped?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were alternatives, and Bob can talk about it more than I can. But there were off-ramps we could use, very high Tesla magnets for windmills, for nuclear medicine, MRI machines potentially. Bob, go ahead and talk about it.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there was a bunch and like, you know, even something like the Caterpillar Drive from Punt for October, right? Like, high field management can be used for lots of applications. But I think the important part was, now, how do you manage the risk of a big endeavor at the intersection of science and technology that, you know, you don't just take no risk, but you don't take risks that you're going to learn something that someone already knew. You need to like, find the novel ways you were going to fail and try to identify those in advance, sort of primordum of what that's going to look like. And then manage the risks, retire the risks, put the biggest risks earliest, go

• 22:37Speaker 00

  build the experiments that are going to teach you about that fast. And so, while we built the 20 Tesla magnet, and it was an important day that we turned it on, it works, and now we build them like every day. Up until that point, like, we built a lot of stuff that we, you know, really pushed the limits and broke. And you can't be afraid of that, because that's how you actually advance the cutting edge. You know, a really good experiment has like a 50% chance of failure. That's very determinate. So, that was the strategy that we brought to that. And that was different than what we'd done under government funding, for instance, where you couldn't really do that. Entrepreneurs do this all the time,

• 23:20Speaker 00

  but typically not in such hardware-intensive, physical sciences. So, that was novel, and luckily, we had the node, and we could actually push forward in that strategy.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  I remember watching with excitement over hours and hours as the needle crept up to 20 Tesla.

• 23:40Mario Gabriele?

  This was in watching the sort of the debut of the magnet?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:44Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Which we livestreamed for the first time we turned it on, which shows you our risk tolerance.

• 23:50Mario Gabriele?

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• 24:34Mario Gabriele?

  database of emerging startups poised for significant growth. And finally, complete access to our archive of meticulously crafted case studies. All of this comes wrapped in the distinctive storytelling and incisive analysis that readers have come to expect from the Generalist. We've designed Generalist Plus to level up your capabilities as an investor and operator through knowledge that matters, delivered with precision and depth. So join a community of strategic thinkers who are gaining an edge in understanding markets, technology, and business fundamentals by visiting thegeneralist.substack.com. That's thegeneralist.substack.com.

• 25:18Mario Gabriele?

  We've talked a little bit already about some of the sort of just mind bending parts of this technology, hottest thing in the solar system, the way that it interacts with a puff of air. You've said before, Bob, that it's not like a star in a bottle. It is a star in a bottle. And it really made me wonder how going through this process has potentially changed your concept of time. Because usually stars are formed over maybe tens of millions of years, and you are creating a machine to manifest them. I don't know how instantaneous it is, but much faster than that. And so, yeah, just curious how you think about that.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  I'm a scientist, so one of the great things about science is that the rules are the same everywhere. Right? And so how you get to that point might be different. But the way that physics works is the way it works all places, all times. And so, you know, for a star, in order to make that reaction happen and get those temperatures, it uses the physical force of gravity. Well, it takes moving a lot of material into the right spots. That's, that's at the time scale astronomical. And it's the scale of literally stars. You can't do that on Earth. That's not gonna work, right? But you have, because people are clever and science is advanced, you know that you can use magnetic

• 26:45Speaker 00

  fields, or you can use electric fields, or you can use the speed to your advantage. Those are all different ways that people do fusion. And even though it's the same physics that's happening inside those, um, those machines, uh, you get there at a different pace. And in fact, we had a machine at MIT that, that could recreate a plasma that's like the plasma that is the aurora borealis. And you could study it in the laboratory instead of in the telescope. That's the beauty of, of science. But then it's a different step to take that and actually say, okay, we understand it. We can predict it. So actually then harness it to make a product. And that's, that's where entrepreneurship really starts is, you know, there's no set

• 27:30Speaker 00

  hard, fast rules about how markets work at the level there is about how electric fields work. So you have to be able to bridge that. And it was, it's been fun to watch and shepherd, uh, you know, fusion along that journey.

• 27:42Mario Gabriele?

  One of the things that struck me about, you know, watching some of your, your previous talks and, and reading about CFS is how obvious it seemed that you were thinking about scale from day one. Like it wasn't enough to, to simply make this technology work. It's important to find a way to roll it out really widely, really quickly because of this dynamic that you call, you know, competing with a molecule. Um, and so, yeah, I would love to hear what that means to you. And, uh, yeah, what the plan is to sort of make that rollout happen at scale.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  You know, most people, you know, they don't, they don't understand energy beyond they flip a switch or that they fill up their gas tank, right? They don't understand the scale of it. When you sit down and you, you look at the numbers, clear eyed, you know, you realize that energy is one of the largest things that humans do. Right? One out of every 12 dollars or so goes to energy. You know, you've got. Tens of millions of people working in energy that just power plants, electrical power plants, that's, that's tens of thousands of power plants that exist today. The first power plant was at the, the turn of the century. We've built that entire system up. It's one of the, the most amazing things that humans have done is to continually get

• 29:00Speaker 00

  better and better at energy, whether that was using domestic animals, crops before that, later, you know, hydropower and mills to electricity and nuclear power, fossil fuels and what they enable for the world. And so we've, we've gone on this, this journey. It's the biggest thread that humans have done, really. And to think that like, we're not done. Just because we have what we have today, it doesn't mean it's the end. It doesn't mean that it's like, there's nothing better. The idea that, you know, digging up and burning molecules out of the ground is like the end all be all. No, no, that cannot be, right? I can't do the lowest cost way to do it. We have all these other technologies. There's all these other physical processes. The universe has already picked its solution, fusion.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Let's go grab that and, and put it on, on, on earth, put it within our grasp, the same way, you know, we domesticated animals. It's the same pattern over again, but now with, you know, all the technologies behind it.

• 29:57Mario Gabriele?

  But essential that we do it at a meaningful speed, given where we are with our climate. And I love what you said, you know, the universe has picked its solution. And, and so that's a, you know, obviously a big part of the drive here too.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yo, absolutely. And like, one of the cool things about fusion is about that speed. That if you think about all the other energy sources that we're used to today, almost all of them, they're all, you know, really like kind of hunter gatherer mode, right? Like we're going out and like, we're doing discovery of deposits and we're, we're mining them, we're capturing those resources, we're moving it around, we're trucking it, we're putting on ships, right? And we're, and we're burning it, throwing it into, to something and burning it. And that is a very consumptive means. And that means in order to scale, you just have to, you have to consume more, you have to find more, you have to move more. It's, it's quite a lot of work to do all that.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  And with fusion, you get a machine that you don't have consumption, the fuel's a rounding error. If you know how to build the machine, you get energy. That's energy as a technology. Like, that means it could scale really fast. Like, the world can learn how to build machines pretty fast. That's much easier to get faster at than, say, discovery of deposits or capturing large distributed things. And so the hope here is that with fusion energy, if it's designed with that in mind from the beginning, you could get into a cycle that looks more like the technologies that we use today and we're accustomed to. Our computers, our cars, our phones,

• 31:37Speaker 00

  things that were truly, once you knew it worked, you could learn how to build a lot of them. And that would be really good for climate and energy access, to have that happen. And really, like, the last area that's truly consumptive, which is energy.

• 31:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, the world looks very different when that is not a fuel-intensive process and a resource-intensive process and is just wildly available and unlocks so many new things. Before we sort of dig into that a little bit deeper, the way that Commonwealth CFS actually plans to roll this out, I thought was such a clever strategy, Vinod. I wonder, you've been a part of some incredible startup stories over the years. You've seen some of the best entrepreneurial strategists roll out extremely ambitious ideas. But this idea of partnering with existing power plant operators

• 32:36Mario Gabriele?

  to make CFS work and make this transition into a fusion world, I thought was really fascinating. I'd be curious how you have thought about it over the years.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  I would give you the general principle. In fusion...

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Lots of people have done lots of good work for many, many decades. But it takes an entrepreneur to just make it happen. Turn a thirty year ITAR timeline to three years. Imagine the impossible. So it's more like what Bob did here was imagine the possible and then try and make it happen. And not be afraid of failing if you did fail at it. I think that's what fusion was missing. That's what Bob did.

• 33:24Mario Gabriele?

  And as a small clarification, ITAR is a sort of initiative that's been taking place in Europe over many, many years to try and make fusion happen. And Commonwealth Fusion Systems is obviously operating much faster. But the question that I was interested to dig into is really how CFS operates in this joint structure where you partner with the stakeholders of the old energy world and rather than doing away with them entirely, actually finds a way to bring those people along.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So this is what entrepreneurs do. Imagine the possible, then try and make it happen. And the second part of make it happen is how can you scale it very quickly? If you're going to build 5,000 power plants in the US, it'll take a very long time doing it on your own. Repowering existing plants would make it much faster and make the politics of it much easier. All the incumbent power plant owners would want to be in this new world with less side effects and more benefits.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  In the past, environmentalists have just generally fought these older technologies instead of saying, how do we upgrade them, make them better? Nobody wants to take 5,000 power plants worth of assets and discard them. And what Bob did here is find a way to upgrade them. It's actually quite simple. It aligns your financial motivations also makes the technology roll out substantially faster than anybody imagined or even believes today. But I do think this is the right way to do it. Upgrade what people have so they don't have to write off their assets, change their economics,

• 35:23Speaker 01

  you know, and be losers. They can be winners instead of being losers by adapting this technology. So incentives get aligned.

• 35:31Mario Gabriele?

  Bob, can you tell us a little bit more about that specifically with, you know, what's actually happening in Virginia and the state of play on that front?

• 35:39Speaker 00

  So with Fusion, you're, you know, you're building a machine that's, that's a plant. You know, it's not something you're going to put in your, your car, your basement.

• 35:47Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, a power plant.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a power plant. And the world luckily knows how to do that, has a bunch of them and people operate them. And that's the backbone of, of the energy system. And so in Virginia, we're working with the, the utility Dominion, which is the major utility in that region. And we're taking a, an interconnect of a place where there was a coal plant. And that coal plant's gone, but the community is still there, knows energy. The connection to the grid is still there. Land is still there. And so next to it, we're actually putting a fusion power plant. We announced that in December. And so that means that, you know, we don't need to run new transmission lines. We don't need to find new places. We can even reuse some of the expertise and assets.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  And importantly, do that with people that their business is owning and operating power plants, which is what we need more and more of just to be cleaned. And so that's the ARC project and we're getting, getting ready to get deeper and deeper in that project. But importantly, you know, that is a project that was. Based on, uh, is based on Spark, which is the machine we're building now in Massachusetts. That it's very similar, it just doesn't sell power to the grid, but it's designed to, to show and how that works and be flexible enough to, to de-risk the remaining questions. And that's at an old military site. Um, but again, same story, a community that knows how to build things.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Um, and that, uh, you know, you go out and you retire the risk early of like, how do you convince people to have huge as a neighbor? Um, and, and so it's, it's that same pattern over and over again.

• 37:25Mario Gabriele?

  What I love about it is it feels like such a clever strategic jujitsu move where, you know, all the people who might've been, have their vested interests to really oppose these new forms of energy because their, you know, their livelihoods depend on it, the community depends on it. Suddenly have a chance to really participate in it and be a part of, you know, this, this new era in a, in a really exciting way. You also mentioned Spark there, just again, to, to help folks like wrap their head around how Spark fits into CFS exactly. You know, you know, what is the, the part that Spark plays? How essential is it?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the roadmap for CFS has been the same from the beginning, from all the way, this is 2016. I mean, first, first met the node and, and started to refine it. And the roadmap is, is pretty straightforward. Take the science, we already know, these machines called Tokamaks, magnetic bottles, that are pretty close to the right conditions, but not there yet. Add to them a new technology, a magnet that is much higher magnetic field, that allows you to re-optimize them to be more commercially deliverable. So smaller, faster, something a company could do as a product. Demonstrate that you can actually do that by building one. And so Spark is a demonstration machine that is most of the parts of the power plant

• 38:45Speaker 00

  at nearly the full scale, delivered in the same business model, vertically integrated with a set of suppliers. That's aim is to Show up at a plant, push a button and make a star that makes more power out than in, 10 times more power out than in at industrial scale, 100 megawatts.

• 39:04Mario Gabriele?

  No worries.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and but all that same science that's in Eater and machines that came in the past. And that is what we're doing right now and we're deep into that. We're, you know, can see the end of that project, which is super, super exciting. But, you know, it is the preeminent fusion facility in the world that's got, you know, national labs, universities and everyone, um, uh, you know, super, super excited and part of it. Then that is the template for the first power plants. And so that's ARC, the first one will be in Virginia. Um, but if you look at it, it looks the same, except it's bigger, makes more power because it's bigger. And it's simpler in some ways because it doesn't need to be as flexible.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  And, and it really then is, works as a pair between Spark and, and ARC and all the existing sciences come before. So really optimize that first generation of power plant so that it can be, and have a shot at commercial viability right out of the gate.

• 40:03Mario Gabriele?

  So push a button and get a star is, you know, another thing that's going to be now living in my head for, you know, that I'll be thinking about once a week for, for the next few years, I think about, I think. But you, you mentioned earlier, Bob, that the process behind CFS was really, you know, think of the biggest risks, tackle them one by one, methodically. Where things stand now, what are the biggest risks sort of standing between us and the push a button to get a star moment that, you know, the world can really benefit from?

• 40:36Speaker 00

  With Spark, you know, that is a machine that's not waiting on any R and D or breakthrough. The last major breakthrough for that was, was building this new class of magnets. And that was by design. Don't try to, to stack too much on top of it because if any one thing fails, then the whole thing fails. So manage that risk. So Spark at this stage, that's an execution project. So the type of things that keep me and, and the other leaders and all the way down, I'm sure in the organization up at night. Are, you know, pretty mundane stuff. It is like, how do you build, you know, hardware? How is the boat gonna dock on time with the parts on it? When you put the two skids together, will the pipes fit? When you fire it all up, did the people that wired it, they cross your wires?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  It's that type of work. It's that work in a novel, first of a kind context by a company that is built just for that purpose. But that's the type of work it is. So that, you know, is in some ways very, very hopeful because it means that between us and and Spark turning on and making more power than in is, it's a lot of work, but it's not a lot of like, you know, path dependence of, you know, figuring out things that, you know, you really have unknown unknowns. We don't really see a lot of those. That, that's super exciting. And, and that's been a feature of the, the plan from their beginning. And then, once we have Spark, you know, it will teach us some things that will be very important for the fusion industry.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  You know, it'll, it'll teach us, no one, no one has made a plasma on earth that, that really is at, you know, fusion conditions spitting out hundreds of megawatts of power. We gotta do that. That's like breaking the sound barrier in some ways where you've gotten close, you've seen it, you've done those simulations, and now you've got the, the machine to do it, so now go do it. Um, and, and that, that's what Spark will do for us, um, on the path to R.

• 42:29Mario Gabriele?

  You've talked before about sort of the, the six stages that different fusion energy companies should really be judged on and, and sort of, uh, the way that you should benchmark their progress. I'd be curious to hear, you know, maybe a, a summary of those for folks so that they can have it in their minds as they, you know, see and read about other projects and, and where you think CFS is sort of at the moment.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna start backwards. Okay, so like, the end result of all this is you build power plants that make economical power. What does that mean? A power plant that, you know, someone buys that makes five, six cents a kilowatt hour. That's market beating around the whole world. Okay, before you build that power plant, no one has done that. Arc is a, we'd like Arc to do that, but we don't know exactly what the economics will be. So before you do that, you make a power plant that can sell any power. So independent of price, just like put electrical power on the grid. That's milestone number five. No one has done that. That's net electric. And that's not just like you ran power through it. No, it is like you draw a fence around it and it explores electricity.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Self-sustained. No one's done that. That's Arc. Before you do that, the hard part about fusion is getting that plasma to those conditions so that it will actually make a bunch of fusion power. You know, if you don't make fusion power from the plasma, you're no way you're going to make enough to make up for everything that you lose in the plant. So that is, we call Q greater than one, long time goal. Only one organization has done that. And that's just more energy out than in, basically, right? That's you got a piece of plasma, maybe like a gram or less of plasma. And it's at fusion conditions at the right fuels and it is actually making power and like you got a power meter going in of that plasma and you got a power meter coming, power meter coming out of that plasma. And the second is more than the first.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  NIF did that in California two years ago and has since. Spark will do that at a much bigger scale. Those are the only two things under construction, that and either. But before you can really make a bunch of power from fusion, the plasma itself, you gotta get it to the right conditions. So that's milestone number three. And there's some technical pieces around those conditions, but it's basically hot, dense and insulated. Before you can even do that, you gotta get it hot. That's milestone number two. Like how hot is hot? I mean, 10 million degrees is pretty hot. Fusion is like 100 million, but like getting to 10 million, that's a big accomplishment. Actually, lots of people have done that. That's super exciting.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  And before you do that, you have to like be able to even make a plasma at all. Meaning, you know, you actually have a flash of light inside the machine. Fortunately, lots and lots of people have done that. And so where the the cutting edge right now is Spark, NIF. But there's other stuff in the pipeline that people are working on. And that's one of the, I think, exciting parts is you can see these milestones of, you know, plasma, hot enough, in the right fusion conditions, more power from the fusion reaction than to heat it, more electricity out, selling it, economic. You can see people go up that ladder. We're at the top of that ladder, we believe.

• 45:48Mario Gabriele?

  So 2025, 2026, CFS maybe goes from like number three to five. Does that feel about right?

• 45:56Speaker 00

  2026, 27, we'll go, we're sitting here right now at at number, number three, we'll go to number four. And early 30s go from four to five, and hopefully very quickly, five to six.

• 46:09Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing. Vinod, as you think about the world, when you do get the push a button to make a star moment, what are sort of the second order, third order effects that you think about? You know, in a, in a world where energy is really, you know, essentially too cheap to meter, what are the businesses that suddenly get unlocked?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Well, it, you know, we've been surprised how much energy AI is taking, for one. But there's so many other things as the price of energy declines that are possible. Water is a big issue, but desalination is principally electricity. That's another huge one. Growing crops in the right conditions and indoors maybe, and not destroying the environment with low density crop production. I could go on and on, so much more is possible. And currently, there'll be things we haven't imagined, when energy is limitless and not

• 47:12Speaker 01

  gated by things with lots of side effects. Coal has lots of side effects. Natural gas has side effects, the geopolitical implications of energy. All those go well.

• 47:25Mario Gabriele?

  Interesting. Do you think there's an emergence of new geopolitics of energy with a fusion world? And in many ways, it feels like this is a very strategic asset in the same way that AI is becoming a strategic asset. How do you think about the US leading the way in this field?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Well, there will always be geopolitical aspects to any technology. But fundamentally, if every society can have all its energy at very inexpensive prices, I think the world is a better place and there's less conflict. You have a lot of conflict over resources, some of those, not all, will go away.

• 48:05Mario Gabriele?

  Okay, final question before I lead us into just the ending philosophical questions. As you look at the fusion energy landscape, I'm curious how both of you or where both of you maybe see opportunities for other entrepreneurs to build things. What are the sort of complements for CFS that need to exist or the different approaches that we want to see come to the fore? Maybe Bob, you can start us off with things that you hope new founders are going to chase after.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  So fusion has some attributes that are nice in the sense that you can reuse existing industry. Talk about the power plants and we have fabricators that make our stuff that is oil and gas fabricators. There's also a bunch of like fusion widgets that all fusion plants will need. There's simulation tools. There's sort of the picks and shovels of a fusion industry. And we're starting to see people go and attack those entrepreneurially, which I think shows the seriousness of the industry and now it's more nuanced. That comes after a period where everyone thought they had to build full stack fusion companies.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  And to go from that to like a more nuanced supply chain capability set is been very, very good. Same evolution happened, say, in commercial space.

• 49:24Mario Gabriele?

  Vinod, are there particular areas that you're excited to see innovation around within fusion energy?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Well, within fusion energy, almost every part will be innovated behind it. There's multiple scales of power plants that need to be built from 500 megawatts to 5 gigawatts to 50 watts, 50 kilowatts. So then you will see proliferation of these approaches. But I think the most exciting piece will be how electricity is used when it's near limitless. I think we'll see a lot more innovation on that side. A lot of the cost of delivering AI is, in fact, electricity. So that will become scalable at a very large level.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  I think we don't have the imagination yet to figure all this out, but downstream of fusion power generation, we'll see many more uses. Even how mining and minerals are done may actually change. And so I can't wait to see all the side effects, the positive side effects of real fusion energy being available.

• 50:42Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing. Well, I'd love to ask you both just two short sort of wrap-up questions. The first one is, if you had the power to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what book would you assign?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Richard Dawkins has a book, I don't even remember the full title called, but it's called Unweaving the Rainbow. It's all, I forget the subtitle, but that's the book I would assign. It's imagination to pursue a lot of things.

• 51:18Mario Gabriele?

  I love that. What about you, Bob?

• 51:20Speaker 00

  I, one of my favorites is the Intel Trinity, which is the history of Intel, which if you want to talk about it, a civilization-changing innovation and to trace that all the way back to the Fairchild and the founding of that company and then all the way through Grove and OKRs to what it is today. You know, obviously it's had some hard times, but you can't discredit the, the change that they ushered in. And here, you know, we are sitting on computers that, you know, were completely unimaginable without that technology.

• 51:59Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing. Full circle. The historian of technology picks a beautiful technology history book.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  By the way, the full title of that book is Unveiling the Rainbow, The Appetite for Science, Delusion, and Wonder.

• 52:15Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm. Amazing. Um, the final question would be, how do you think historians will describe our era in 50 years' time?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Our era right now, the historical context for it, like the closest analogy, I think, is like the 1890s to 1910s, where you had a mixture of a new world emerging, cars, planes, radio. At the same time, you still had people doing subsistence farming and the Civil War was not that far removed. But change was happening very quickly and technical technologies were advancing, some of which were marvelous, some of which were scary. I, I find that that feels like what we're in right now. Just now,

• 53:06Speaker 00

  we're taking all the things that have happened in software and compute, and they're moving back into the real world and into atoms, bits and atoms emerging. And that's super exciting.

• 53:20Mario Gabriele?

  Vinod, how does that sound to you? What would you say?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  That sounds great. I would add, my favorite is when art knows, imagine the possible and then try and make them happen. Whether they succeed or fail, that is where large progress happens.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  And even from the failures, people learn. But if a small percentage succeed, it changes the world. And this is about doing that. I can't think of a single change in the last 40 years I've been doing around technology and entrepreneurship that was driven by a large company and incumbent conventional wisdom. It doesn't matter what area you look at. And I'm sure there's some areas. Every large change were driven by somebody imagining the possible, trying to make it, make that happen without having any guarantee of success.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  And I think it's that risk-taking culture that matters.

• 54:24Mario Gabriele?

  Well, I've been very grateful to spend time with two people imagining what's possible just now. So, thank you, Bob and Vinod, for joining me and sharing so much about fusion energy.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:38Mario Gabriele?

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So, if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.