A blueprint for scalable fusion power

For years, the prospect of commercial nuclear fusion felt a long way off. But recent breakthroughs—like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s historic 2022 net energy gain—have marked a new chapter in the quest for fusion. Proving the physics in a lab, however, is a lot different than building a power plant that can compete on the open grid. Massive hurdles remain across physics, financing, and scaling. In this episode, host Shayle Kann sits down with Carrie von Muench, COO of Pacific Fusion and a former venture capitalist. Carrie brings a unique, investor-minded perspective to this singular challenge. Shayle and Carrie dive into topics like: Net facility gain, and the difference between breaking even at a target level versus breaking even across a facility’s tech stack. The distinctions between steady-state and inertial fusion Why Pacific Fusion is focused on building modular reactors The company’s strategy of utilizing widely accessible commodities like oil, plastic, metal, and water instead of specialized materials that rely on shaky supply chains. Unpacking the “ignition cliff;”the point at which a nuclear reactor shifts from relying on outside inputs to producing energy itself Why Pacific Fusion emulated pharma's multi-tranche funding strategies to create milestones around capital deployments and de-risk its early execution Resources ⁠Catalyst⁠⁠: Is nuclear fusion getting close? Catalyst: The state and future of nuclear waste Catalyst: Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain Open Circuit: Inside Meta’s massive nuclear push Latitude Media: ARPA-E awards record $135 million to speed commercial fusion energy Latitude Media: General Fusion’s $1 billion deal and the return of the SPAC Latitude Media: Trump Media’s bizarre fusion play for TAE Technologies Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

• 0:07Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I lead the early-stage venture strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So let's check in on fusion. Last time we talked about it here was back in late 2021, I think, actually, with Scott Su, who was at that time at DOE focused on nuclear fusion. I would say the emergent picture back then was there were a bunch of companies pursuing multiple different approaches to fusion power with increasing capital availability to help them, hopefully, reach the promised land. None yet had hit the key, but importantly, not final, technical milestone of energy breakeven, or Q is greater than 1, or net facility gain, various terms to mean something pretty similar. Fast forward to today, and basically, all of

• 0:50Shayle Kann?

  that is still true. But some things have happened in the meantime. Probably most importantly, a DOE national lab did achieve a version of energy breakeven on, I think, what everybody universally agrees is a non-commercial viable reactor. But still, they did it. And in the private sector, some companies have continued to rake in even more capital. We've now seen over $15 billion in private capital flow into the space. And a few companies have actually started making moves toward what they claim will be commercial projects. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, submitted a real-life interconnection request. Two of the stalwart fusion companies that have been around a long time have announced plans to go public via merger,

• 1:31Shayle Kann?

  one of which is with a Trump media company. But more broadly, technical progress continues across the board, albeit not equally across the tents. On the outside, this is one of those categories that I think it's just hard to figure out where we actually are on the journey to commercially viable fusion power. So let's see if we can untangle it. For this one, I brought on Carrie Von Muench, who's the COO at Pacific Fusion, one of the better-funded companies in the space. Carrie's not a nuclear physicist herself. She's actually a former venture capital investor, like me, but she's deeply immersed in the space now. And, you know, I think it's interesting in that she made the jump from investor to operator and has a lot to say about why. That's coming up after the break.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Demand flexibility is now an essential part of the data center's speed to power playbook. But how do data centers actually curtail load? Gridbeyond is the end-to-end solution for flexible energy management. Gridbeyond's advanced DERS and VPP platform is tailored to what data centers care about most: maximizing reliability, intelligently meeting curtailment obligations, reducing costs, and managing all your distributed resources in one place. Ready to transform your distributed energy management? Get started at gridbeyond.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner behind the most influential companies in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped ambitious companies stand out, build market leadership,

• 3:08Speaker 00

  and become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antenna group.com.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  The power plant for the modern grid isn't a building. It's a network. Energy Hub's DERS platform connects batteries, EVs, thermostats, and commercial and industrial sites into virtual power plants that over 230 utilities dispatch as reliable grid capacity day in, day out. VPPs deploy in 60 to 100 days at 40% to 60% less cost than traditional infrastructure, and they perform like conventional generation from day one. Learn about the flexibility platform for the modern grid at energyhub.com.

• 3:57Shayle Kann?

  Carrie, welcome.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Thanks, glad to be here.

• 3:59Shayle Kann?

  All right, so fusion is one of these categories where I feel like you see announcements here and there. I expect we will see increasing volume of announcements in the coming years, assuming things are going well. But it's sort of hard on the outside, I think, actually like figure out what various announcements mean and how important different milestones are and things like that. Can you walk me through how you think about like, what are the milestones that we really should be looking out for if we are trying to track the progress of fusion on its way toward being like commercially viable source of electricity?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  It's an important question, and I'm glad you asked. I'll start with what was recently proven because I think it really changed the field and it's important for folks to understand, right? In fusion, obviously, the running joke has been 30 years away and always will be. And it's important to understand what happened in the last couple of years to put this moment into context. And then we can talk about some of the milestones that are yet to come. But but I think the most important thing to start with is that a couple of breakthroughs in 2022 completely changed what's possible in the field. So first, researchers at Livermore National Laboratory up the road from where I'm sitting in the Bay Area right now demonstrated controlled ignition, which is a really, really big deal. They got more energy, quite a lot more energy out of a little fusion target than they drove into the target. And what that means is that we in the field now definitively know

• 5:19Speaker 03

  the conditions for ignition, and as a result, also high gain fusion. And the challenge has now become, how do you drive fuel to those conditions with a system that is a practical basis for a power plant? And that's a really, really different challenge than this question of, you know, where in the physical landscape can we get more energy out of a fusion machine than went in?

• 5:38Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about that milestone. So they demonstrated energy break even or Q greater than one, whatever you want to call it. But my understanding is that there are various different versions of that. They did it at the at the reactor level, but not a not a plug break even that or whatever other term you want to use. So like, or orient me, what did that actually show? And then what's different about that from what we're going to have to show when we want to turn fusion power plants into something real?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  So what they did, and you're going to have to forgive me if I if I get some of the details wrong, I'm not a physicist, I'm an operator in the field. So disclaimer, what they did was they stored about 300 megajoules of energy in a capacitor bank. They used a laser to drive about two of those megajoules into a target, and then they got five megajoules of energy out of the target. So really, really big achievement. They've since improved on that. Gotten closer to eight megajoules out of the target. And so if you draw your proverbial box around that fusion target, then you got more energy out of the target than you drove into the target. But to your point, if you draw your box around the entire fusion machine, including the capacitor bank, you only got, you know, percent and a half or so of the energy stored in the system out of the, out of the machine.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  And obviously, that's not a practical basis for a power plant. You need to get about 5X more out of the machine than was stored in the system to have a practical basis for a power plant. And so to your question about milestones, that is the next big milestone for this field. It's demonstrating something called net facility gain, which is getting more energy out of the entire machine than everything required to run the machine. We like to define it as all of the energy stored in the system. And a number of companies are saying they'll do that in the next couple of years. We're on track to do that by 2030.

• 7:19Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so net facility gain in your mind is like the next big thing. I guess the other thing that I'm wondering if you can help elucidate a little bit is, you, you hear this, okay, so the, the proof point that we've had of getting more energy out of the target than came into it is not a commercially viable or practical fusion power plant design. And so as a result, the folks like yourselves and others who are saying, okay, we're going to get net facility gain in the next few years, are generally not doing the same thing that INL did for that system. Why is that system not practical? And like, what is, what is the fundamental, what needs to be true to imagine that a design is practical?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  There are a lot of things that are important to consider here. So part one of practical might be what needs to be true to get more energy out of the entire fusion machine than was stored in the system. So what needs to be true to get net facility gain? The second half of that question, which is equally important, I would argue, is what needs to be true to have a fusion power system that can scale? As in be maintainable, deployable, and affordable, such that it's a competitive source of power, right? Energy is a commodity market. At the end of the day, this whole thing is a race to the bottom on cost. So to start with the first, there are two things to consider. The first for lots of different fusion approaches is do you build on an established path to ignition and high gain, right? Is there experimental evidence that says the physics of what you're doing

• 8:46Speaker 03

  is going to work? And then the second piece is, is your system efficient enough to do that in such a way that you get more energy out of the whole machine than was stored in the system? And so, for example, the National Ignition Facility at Livermore was not designed to be a power system. It was designed for a different mission. And so it wasn't designed to get more fusion energy out of the whole system than was required to drive it. It has a relatively inefficient driver technology. What we do at Pacific Fusion is similar from a physics perspective, right? We're driving that fusion fuel to very similar physics conditions. The fuel doesn't care how it gets to those conditions. But we have a much more efficient driver. So instead of using a capacitor bank to charge a laser and a laser to drive a target, we use a capacitor bank to make a large electrical current.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  That electric current squishes the target, and that's a whole lot more efficient because you don't have this lossy step of a laser in the middle.

• 9:37Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, that's maybe a good segue into talking about the different approaches that are out there right now. Can you just high level walk me through, obviously from a non-nuclear physicist's perspective, like, how do you think about the different categories of, you know, like, real attempts that we are seeing? As you said, there are multiple folks saying they're gonna or hoping to hit that facility gain this decade. So among that group, what are the different approaches that are being taken? And how do you think about the trade-offs between them?

• 10:04Speaker 03

  There are two leading ways to do fusion, and a bunch of different sort of subcategories within those ways to do fusion. The first is steady-state fusion. So tokamaks or stellarators, usually you've got relatively low pressures, relatively long confinement times. And the closest experimental result for steady-state fusion is from a tokamak from the 90s, a factor of a few from the scientific finish line. So you've got a scientific basis that is founded on many decades of work, and a number of folks out there trying to build the next generation of system to improve on that record from the 90s. The other way to do

• 10:42Shayle Kann?

  Which is like Commonwealth Fusion, for example.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:44Shayle Kann?

  Better known names in that space.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. Or Proxima in Europe is building a stellarator others, but but steady state is sort of one big bucket. The other big bucket of ways to do fusion is called inertial fusion. And it's sort of the other side of that spectrum. So instead of having relatively low pressures for long amounts of time, you have really high pressure for short amounts of time. It's pulsed like a combustion engine, you could think. And there are sort of two big ways to do inertial fusion. The first is laser driven inertial fusion, like they do at Livermore National Laboratory. And the second is pulser driven inertial fusion, like they do at Sandia National Laboratory. And inertial fusion entered the field more recently, originally for defense applications, and progressed so rapidly that it crossed the scientific finish line defined as, you know, scientific gain in 2022, which is a big deal. There

• 11:31Speaker 03

  are a number of private fusion companies building inertial systems. And then there are a number of other ways to do fusion that are factors of a thousand or more from the scientific finish line. So for the purpose of this conversation, I'll focus on those first two. Each of those ways to do fusion has different challenges associated with building an affordable, maintainable, deployable power system, right? There are different engineering challenges. There are different techno economic challenges. And if it's helpful, I'm happy to spend a moment on what it is that we do and why we think it makes so much sense. Because, right, that's where we're spending all our time.

• 12:04Shayle Kann?

  Sure. Yeah. Tell me about Pacific Fusion and like where you fit in that landscape and why, why your approach?

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we fit in the second category. So in inertial fusion, and we do what's called pulser driven inertial fusion, similar to what's done on the Z facility at Sandia National Laboratories today. And there are a couple of advantages to this approach. First, we get to build on the number one and number two highest performing approaches to fusion today, on laser driven inertial fusion and pulser driven inertial fusion at Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, respectively. But equally importantly, you know, for fusion to actually scale the power source, you have to build power systems that are buildable, maintainable, deployable, and can be delivered at a cost structure that makes sense. And the system we're designing is designed against those goals. So.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  First, on the buildability side, right? Buildability ultimately means modularity. If you want something to come down the cost curve fast, if you want to be able to quickly deploy large systems, we've learned that modular systems really outperform non-modular systems.

• 13:02Shayle Kann?

  Can I interrupt you on that one?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:05Shayle Kann?

  When you say modular, what do you mean? Obviously, if we're talking about fusion world, there's like such a broad spectrum. If people talk about modular, they could be talking about a micro reactor that's a megawatt, or they could be talking about like versions of SMRs they call modular, and that's literally in the name, SMR, but it's still 300 megawatts plus. So like, what's a pixel size for modularity for you?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  I just mean big things that themselves consist of many small things. So tabletop-scale fusion doesn't work, but our goal is to build fusion power plants in the couple hundred megawatt range, so in the 200 to 300 megawatt range, that themselves consist of modular mass manufacturable building blocks. And so in our case, the most of the capital cost and footprint sits in the driver. This is true for a lot of different fusion approaches. For us, that driver consists of 156 identical modules. Each of those modules produces more than a terawatt of peak power and sits in about the footprint of a shipping container and is made from oil, plastic, metal, and water. So we bring two things that make a big difference, right? The first is an established scientific foundation based on decades of work at the national

• 14:07Speaker 03

  laboratories and the breakthroughs that I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, but also a path to a modular, maintainable, deployable system that can scale more readily as a power source.

• 14:18Shayle Kann?

  I guess that gets to the next question, and really, for me, the probably the biggest question that I have, which is, okay, I'm not smart enough to know how likely Pacific Fusion or anybody else is to achieve net facility gain in the next few years, but let's take it as a given that it happens. The more interesting question to me then is what happens after that? And what is the path from there to commercially viable power plant? And what should we be expecting out of the cost curve there? Because one presumes, as you would expect with any first-of-a-kind thing, like that facility you're going to hit net facility gain in is going to be expensive. It's just like going to be. But what I don't know is how I should be thinking about the steepness of the cost

• 15:03Shayle Kann?

  curve from there and the path from net facility gain to sufficient net facility gain to be viable as a source of electricity. So I guess, walk me through how you see the post-net facility gain path.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  That path is hugely dependent on the technology in question, so it looks pretty different depending on the type of fusion you're talking about. But I can certainly speak to what it looks like for pulser-driven inertial fusion and for Pacific fusion in particular. First, let's talk about capital cost and path to come down the cost curve from an overnight capital cost perspective. Then we can spend a little bit of time on maintainability, because that's equally important if you're thinking about a system that's going to provide reliable power. And then we can spend a minute on the end about your question about gain, because to your point, driving up fusion gain is also really important to have a practical basis for a power system. First, on the capital cost side, I'll speak to two parts. The first is, what is actually a cost driver, right? One way to think about this is what's the multiple on the bill of

• 16:03Speaker 03

  materials that you need to achieve for the overnight capital cost to make sense? And that is just dependent on what your fusion machine is actually made of. Our fusion machine, at least the fusion driver in which most of the capital cost sits, is relatively straightforward from a bill of materials perspective. These modules that I mentioned consist largely of capacitors and switches, in essence, oil, plastic, metal, and water. And so when you think about the multiple on the bill of materials that you need to achieve there, it's readily achievable with today's manufacturing technologies. The second thing that's important to note about modular systems, we talked about this earlier, is you can iterate way faster and come down the cost curve way faster when you're working with these modular building blocks. So the time and cost to go from generation one to generation two to generation three of the underlying technology gets much, much

• 16:48Speaker 03

  shorter when that technology itself consists of a bunch of identical units.

• 16:53Shayle Kann?

  I guess the thing I still want to wrap my head around a little bit is like, I get the concept of modular building blocks that form the components of part of a system. And that does seem key to me in understanding what a cost curve over time might look like. But I still don't have a picture in my head exactly of how, I guess, how big a driver of the overall System cost those modular building blocks might be, you know, like what we've seen interestingly in, let's just take other categories of power in solar for that matter, batteries even, right? You do have these modular building blocks. In the case of solar, it's cells or panels. In the case of batteries, it's also cells or modules.

• 17:36Shayle Kann?

  And you do get this really steep cost curve on those things over time as manufacturing scales up and so on. And then what ends up happening is that everything else ends up dominating the overall installed cost of the system. You get the modular building blocks ultimately to be pretty cheap, but they, the cost curve there is way steeper than it is on the rest of the balance of system and on all the soft costs that come along with it.

• 18:02Shayle Kann?

  And so I guess what I need to understand is your modular building blocks that are, whatever you said, oil, plastic, water, and something else, are those like 50% of the capital costs of, or the bomb? Or are they 10% of the bomb? Or you know what I mean? Like, how, how much are you going to be able to drive cost as a result of scale of those components?

• 18:26Speaker 03

  It's a really significant portion of the capital cost. Like, it's much, much more than 10%. I think there's a lot of, as you know, right, we live in a seller's market for balance of plan equipment right now, which is common to all energy technologies. Those numbers are moving and so it would be premature to give you a specific percentage. But it is a very significant cost driver, like not a small percent. It's a very large percent of the overall system, at least today. And it's the stuff that's common to the demonstration system that we're building by 2030, right? We're not buying a turbine to put on that thing, but we are building the whole pulse power driver in many ways as we would for a first power system. The other pieces of the system to think about, like if you think about the system in categories of major subsystems, you've got the driver, which we talked about. You've got these fusion targets, which are tiny little cans filled with fusion fuel,

• 19:11Speaker 03

  and they're really important for the fusion gain that you mentioned. You have what we consider the fusion chamber, so the area surrounding the target that has to breed tritium, capture the fusion energy output and heat exchange with your balance of plan equipment. Then you have all the balance of plan equipment that's common to lots of different energy technologies. You need to account for losses at different stages of the process, and you need to have an economical power plan. The interesting thing about inertial technologies and our technology in particular is that you can improve the performance and reduce the effective cost of existing facilities just by adding new improved fusion targets. So those fusion targets are going to continue to improve over time and as a result be able to improve the performance of an existing fleet without building new capital infrastructure,

• 19:55Speaker 03

  which also gives you a path to coming down the cost curve much more quickly than you otherwise could.

• 20:00Shayle Kann?

  I don't want to jump ahead to it necessarily, but is it true to a first order that basically every additional point of gain that you can get translates to like pretty linearly higher, essentially what would be higher efficiency in another type of system, which is, which is lower LCOE? Like, should an equal amount of focus be placed on every additional point of gain as it is on every additional reduction of CapEx?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yes, with some footnotes. So one way to think about it is if you treat, imagine a system and you treat it as fixed, like a fixed capital cost of the system, the nameplate capacity of that system, so the amount of power that it produces is going to be determined in a pulsed inertial system like what we're building by the gain, so the amount of energy you get per shot and the rep rate, the number of fusion shots that you take per unit time. And so if you imagine building infrastructure, right, building fusion power systems, you can imagine building a fleet that starts with the ability to produce some amount of power per unit system at some nameplate capacity and then with improvements over time, so upgrades to the fusion chamber to accommodate a higher rep rate and upgrades to those fusion

• 21:13Speaker 03

  targets as we iterate on them on the demonstration system, that that same physical thing can produce more power and as a result have a lower effective LCOE.

• 21:21Shayle Kann?

  That makes sense. But so the target, the high level target initially, or you think what sort of like triggers, this is commercially viable, is something in that like 5X gain?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, approximately. Approximately, right? It depends on the ultimate efficiency of a lot of the supporting systems, but that's a good ballpark.

• 21:38Shayle Kann?

  And I've heard that like, generally, it is believed that the path to 1.01 is way, way, way harder than the path from 1 to 5. Is that your general view on it? Like, you get over this mountain that is net facility gain, and then after that, you've just got like, some version of engineering tweaks to make to get to 5? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we have to be careful, right? Nothing in fusion is ever easy. And I think trivializing the work required to make those improvements is not a good idea. But one way to think about, one way to think about what's often described as the ignition cliff, is that to get your fusion fuel to generate more energy than is driven into the fuel, you have to get it to start self-propagating burn. And once you do that, it's easier to add a little more energy and get a lot more energy out. So there's lots of published literature on this. You can see different curves of the ignition cliff, where you have for a very significant amount of current. For instance, in the case of a pulse system, you add a little more current, you don't get much more energy out, a little more current, you don't get much more energy out, a little more current, you don't get much more energy out.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Then you hit this ignition cliff, and suddenly, a little bit more energy onto the target starts getting you way more energy out of the target. So that is why, right, there's a lot of, there's been a lot of focus in the field on finding that ignition cliff, and now on building systems that can drive targets up that ignition cliff, and obviously, design all the supporting systems to be able to work in those kinds of yield regimes.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  For data centers, connecting to the grid quickly means two things: building distributed energy and having a plan for demand flexibility. GridBeyond helps with both. GridBeyond's Terms and VPP platform unlocks the potential of distributed assets and dispatches flexibility into the right market at the right time. And this is more than software. GridBeyond supports developers every step of the way. From modeling your highest ROI energy mix, to orchestrating the full set of assets around a data center. The track record speaks for itself. GridBeyond manages over 1,400 sites and more than 3.7 gigawatts of load across Europe, the US. And the US. Learn more at gridbeyond.com or click the link in the show notes.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  If you work in energy or climate, you already know the company's antenna group has helped build. For three decades, they've been the communications and marketing partner behind the industry's breakout companies, category creators and market leaders. Today, their team is working across the most consequential areas of the energy economy, from data centers and grid modernization to nuclear, geothermal, storage, critical materials, and next generation technologies. Antenna helps ambitious companies become the names everyone in the market knows, trusts, and wants to work with. They build reputation, elevate executives, drive demand, and turn momentum into market leadership. If your company is ready to lead its market, Antenna is ready to help you get there. Visit antenna group.com.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  When you harness the power of millions of DERs in a VPP and put artificial intelligence behind the dispatch, the outcomes exceed conventional generation. Energy Hub's DERMs platform has been trained on years of real dispatch data from over 2.6 million DERs, so utilities can plan with confidence. That means consistent load reduction across a four-hour event window, even during the widest, most uncertain peak periods. Utilities target, shape, and verify capacity down to the meter. Unlock flexible capacity that costs 40 to 60% less to deploy than traditional infrastructure in a fraction of the time it takes you to break ground on a peaker plant. Learn more at energyhub.com.

• 25:22Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so back to sort of the original question of like, what's the path post net facility gain? So like, walk me through for you guys, I guess, if assume you successfully achieve net facility gain on this demonstration facility by 2030 or so, like, what does it look like after that?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  After that, we go build power plants.

• 25:41Shayle Kann?

  We just still have to do a first of a kind that has the net gain of 5X and, right? There's like another version of a, I guess there is a first of a kind. The demonstration is a demo, the next is first of a kind. Is that the way to think about it?

• 25:55Speaker 03

  It's a good way to think about it. I think people tend to, if you talk to people and ask them, define a demo system, define a pilot system, define a first of a kind system. Everybody means something different. But what I can talk about is sort of what our demo system can do from a capability perspective and how we think about what will be new on a first power system and then what it looks like to scale from there. So the demo system is designed in many ways to demonstrate net facility gain and also importantly, to iterate on these fusion targets. So we have a lot of diagnostics on the demo system. We've designed it such that we can test prototype components of commercial systems on it, a commercial chamber on it, so take shorter runs at higher rep rates, for example. And as a result, it serves as a really important de-risking platform for a lot of the core

• 26:39Speaker 03

  technologies, including the targets and a platform upon which we can continue to iterate on targets that are relevant for commercial systems. On a power system, there's a really big difference between a power system and the demo system from a technical perspective. There are many, but one important one to understand is that the power system will be rep rated at about a hertz, so once a second, whereas the demo system will be rep rated at a shot a day. And when you think about a lot of the capital components like the pulser and preparing them to do hertz-like rep rates for 30 years, that's a pretty meaningful reliability engineering challenge. The good thing is that we can demonstrate that technology at a much smaller scale. So at this module level scale, iterate at a much smaller scale and then deploy those modules once they've been shown to meet production criteria into the first power system.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  One thing that's great about this modular design is that you can, to maintain the system, just swap out a module and put a new one in and go maintain that module. You can upgrade them in place as you make design changes that improve the performance of the fleet. Similarly, you can design a system such that the whole fusion chamber can be upgraded with how swapping out most of the capital infrastructure and you can experiment with different targets. And so really, the first of a kind power system is Designed, there'll be some commissioning phase where we're making a lot of those upgrades, likely over a first year or two, but it's designed to be rapidly upgradable to reach commercial performance for a customer, which is unusual. I think for most energy technologies, you know, you build it and then you have to build another one and you have to build another one. And it's in building those big capital projects that you come down the cost curve and

• 28:08Speaker 03

  improve performance. Our objective is to design these systems such that you can come down the cost curve and improve performance without necessarily needing to build new facilities.

• 28:17Shayle Kann?

  I don't know if you've, if you've made a public target or anything like that, but whether for Pacific Fusion or just generally, give a view on like what we should be anticipating as the asymptotic, how cheap can this get? Basically, what are we targeting here for either capital cost or level of cost of energy? Like, where should we think about fusion, you know, in 15 years in the context of the overall energy supply landscape?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  What we ask ourselves when founding this company is, is there a path ultimately to be cheaper than combined cycle natural gas? Because if there is, you have a really exciting business. And if there's not, you know, you can still build an interesting business, but it's not going to be as scalable as we'd like to see Fusion be. And obviously, that at the beginning ends up being a thought exercise, right? You use the best available data to make capital cost estimates, you figure out what you need to believe from an uptime perspective, from a yield perspective, and then you have a nice spreadsheet that tells you, we see a path to do this. And then you actually get into the work of building, and that tells you how quickly you can achieve or move toward those goals. So for me to tell you, you know, we're going to be at 150 bex a megawatt hour in 2038 would obviously be misleading at best. But I think the thing that's exciting is that if you

• 29:30Speaker 03

  look at the capital cost of the driver, if you look at the capital cost of balance of plant equipment, if you look at the Fusion game that you need to believe in, there's nothing preventing Fusion from being as cheap as anything else out there. And our objective is to move toward that goal as quickly and capital efficiently as we can.

• 29:48Shayle Kann?

  Not to spend much time comparing fusion to fission, but one of the reasons to even consider doing fusion over fission, obviously, there's the waste one, which is probably the biggest one. But beyond that, there's also a supply chain thing, right? Like, fission does suffer from, in certain areas, a pretty constrained supply chain. I think what people don't often talk about is what the equivalent of that is or isn't on the fusion side. So when you think about the supply chain, obviously, this is going to vary depending on which of the approaches we talk about. Some of the approaches require high-temperature superconducting magnets, which has its own pretty limited supply chain. But I'm curious what you think of as like the potential, let's say, we do scale up a fusion power generation market.

• 30:31Shayle Kann?

  Where might supply chain bottlenecks emerge?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  I think you said it well when you said it's really dependent on the technology. So something like high-temperature superconductors are a relevant, a relevant piece of the puzzle for steady-state approaches, like tokomax accelerators. They're not relevant for inertial approaches like what we do. Our objective in designing our systems, and one of the reasons that we founded this company is because we see a path to avoid reliance on what I would call, broadly speaking, specialized materials. So as I mentioned, a lot of the system is built from oil, plastic, metal, and water. We'll have the same procurement work to deal with as any other energy system. We think about balance of plant and other such components, but there's nothing inherently rare or expensive, meaning that the bottleneck to scale up ends up being effectively a manufacturing bottleneck.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  So for a lot of these core components, you can procure them in small volumes today, maybe not quite at the performance and lifetime requirements you need. But there's not, you know, a lot of the vendors do these in small volumes. As a result, the multiple on the bomb is relatively high. And so the challenge is in building capacity, both in the supplier base and internally, to deliver those components at the scales and not the performance requirements needed.

• 31:42Shayle Kann?

  What about fuel? Talk to me about the fuel supply chain.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, fusion fuel obviously is very different from fission fuel. There's no uranium, no plutonium, nothing that you can use to make a weapon. For fusion systems, the fuel is deuterium, so it's an isotope of hydrogen found commonly in seawater and tritium. And what that means in practice is that it's deuterium and lithium, because every fusion approach out there needs to breed its own tritium to be economical. So make tritium from fusion events using deuterium and lithium. That stuff is readily available. Tritium is important to consider, though, because every fusion approach to be commercially viable needs a sustainable tritium economy. So that means you need your startup volume of tritium to be relatively small, and then you need your operating fusion power system to produce more tritium than it consumes,

• 32:29Speaker 03

  such that you can start additional systems and cold start your system when needed. And there are a number of people working on this in the field. It's a challenge that's common to the whole field, but there are differences in across different fusion approaches around the volume of tritium required to start up, and then how rapidly that tritium can be bred, or how efficiently that tritium can be bred with the system that exists.

• 32:50Shayle Kann?

  All right, final question for you that I guess is sort of about fusion, but is really more about Pacific Fusion, which I find interesting. And you'll have a unique perspective on this as a former venture capital investor before you became an operator at Pacific Fusion, which is, you guys have financed the business in a pretty interesting way. They sort of came out of stealth with a, quote, "billion-dollar financing," but it's structured interestingly, and in a way that I've thought about a bunch, as to where something like this could apply elsewhere in other technology companies that want to, that have a big capital, intense journey ahead of them, which you certainly do and did, but want to de-risk that as much as they can from day one. So can you just talk about, a little bit about, like, how you have financed Pacific Fusion and what works and doesn't work about it?

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm glad you asked the question and I know you bring real appreciation for how big of a role financing risk can play in this excessive of young companies, especially hardware companies. I mean, we saw the story so many times in Clean Tech 1.0, where you have a company that doesn't have line of sight to the necessary capital to place procurements with four-year lead times, or get a building built, or actually make material progress against this big thing, meaning it's hard to make progress, meaning it's hard to raise, and you just get stuck in the cycle of death. And so for, for something like a fusion system, to be able to go fast, you need line of sight to the capital to go fast. Like, we're building large facilities. This is the kind of thing that works on a tabletop. The lead times associated with getting those things built are long.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  And when this company was founded, this is actually how I met the team. The team had come together and realized that based on the demonstration of ignition at Livermore, we knew the conditions for ignition at high gain, based on researchers at Sandia achieving the second-best fusion performance ever, and our CTO inventing technology that more than doubles the efficiency and power density of systems like Z, we had a practical path to deliver those same physical conditions with an affordable modular mass manufacturable system. Like, that means, put together, you have a big fusion project that's a massive engineering and execution effort, and has all the things that are hard about that, but not something that has a lot of binary scientific risk. And that lends itself very well to defining a clear set of milestones against which you can finance a business.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  And my old team, when I was on the venture capital side, had sort of solved for this in biotech a few times by saying, "Let's assemble the capital we need to do a big project, and then let's call that capital as milestones are achieved." And so we thought we'd borrow that for fusion. And we were super, super fortunate to find the right partners around the table. I mean, you know this, at the end of the day, it's all about who's around the table and how well you can align incentives and how you can work with them to make this successful. And Haymont of General Catalyst led our round. He had also seen this movie before in Clean Tech 1.0, and felt really strongly that if we were going to take a crack at this massively ambitious thing, we needed to be resourced to do it well. And so we worked together with him and our other investor directors, Eric Schmidt and Patrick Hallson, to design a set of milestones that made sense to everybody.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  And since then, we've been executing to plan. So, so far, it's worked really, really well, and it's really been possible because of the risk profile of what we do, and equally importantly, because of the vision and ambition of the investors we've got around the table.

• 35:59Shayle Kann?

  I think, so yeah, so I, the only other place where I've seen this is in biotech and pharma. And, and I'll tell you what I think is, is common about that and what you're doing. And, and the reason why I think there is a limited set of other kind of markets and technologies wherein it could apply, but I've struggled to like really execute this vision in, in a lot of other places, which is there is a set of clear milestones that you can define. They're largely technical milestones in your case, and they're clear. It's clear in that the hitting each milestone is a clear de-risking event. And, you know, you can define them ahead of time very well.

• 36:42Shayle Kann?

  A lot of businesses, if you tried to do that, even hard tech companies, if you tried to do that at day zero, you just get the milestones wrong, right? There's like so much pivoting that goes on along the way that if you tried to line up a billion dollars of capital that was like tranch tied to milestones, like you'd have a really hard time defining the milestones such that they would still work years later. Fusion is sort of unique in that you, you sort of know, like we're, we're leading toward net facility gain. There are milestones along the way to that facility gain. You probably set some other milestones along the way. So I really like it conceptually because it is a way to de-risk capital early on for something that will be capital intensive and is a big swing. But I've struggled to find other situations where the milestones are so well definable

• 37:28Shayle Kann?

  early on in the journey. And I'm curious what you think about that.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's a good way to think about it. I think the, there are two things that kind of have to be true for a structure like this to make sense. I think one of them is that you have to have very high conviction in how the market will value this big end thing, or not end thing, but like this big intermediate milestone that you're resourcing a business toward, that's certainly true in biotech. You know what certain endpoints are worth in the market. It's true in fusion, nobody questions that net facility gain is a massively valuable milestone for the whole business. And then you also have to kind of think that the market on the whole is not going to know how to value the intermediate milestones along the way. Because if it does, if you're living in a regime like software where you kind of know what a series A investor expects to see, a series B investor, et cetera, et cetera, then why do the tranche capital thing?

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Like just raise your initial round, go over there, that financing risk doesn't exist. And so when you think about a milestone, get a financing round, really the thing it is solving for is how do we? Maximize the probability and the speed at which we can reach this thing that's going to be massively valuable for everyone around the table. And how do we do that in such a way that investors aren't putting a ton of capital at risk without seeing execution against that plan? And so being able to define the milestones is important, but I also think that market dynamic matters because it's sort of the critical incentive structure that makes this whole thing make sense.

• 38:46Shayle Kann?

  It's a very good point. I mean implicitly within the structure is that those, you know, subsequent tranches are priced ahead of time, too. So you've like defined the pricing all the way through the end of whatever your, you know, full scope of that original deal is. And so as you said, you have to, it's a pretty high conviction that you can assess what the market value of any given milestone will be, or at least the final milestone, I suppose, which is the one that really matters in this context.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  The final, the interim pricing doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't really matter. It's just how much do investors own with all capital called? Like, that has to make sense. And then you have to deploy that capital in a way that everybody feels good about. And you have to bake into your structure some flexibility such that when you inevitably learn things along the way, everybody wants to come to the table and make sure that what you're doing still makes sense.

• 39:32Shayle Kann?

  That also, though, makes another good point, which is the reason that the interim financing steps don't really matter is because it's kind of binary. Right? Like, if it were not binary, and, you know, if you're, if this were a software company and, you know, you could, the milestones are like 10 million of ARR, 50 million of ARR, whatever, there's, there, you believe there's some intrinsic value to the company if you exited in the middle there. And so the ownership and the pricing along the way would also matter to investors. In the case of Fusion, I would argue there is very little intrinsic value in the company until there is a lot. Right? And it becomes pretty clear at that point.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you can look at other comps in the market and think about whether the market has said that that's true. I think you can see plenty of fusion companies that haven't reached net facility gain that have raised at high valuations.

• 40:25Shayle Kann?

  Sure.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Because I think the thing that's true is that you're not going to see an exit prior to that milestone.

• 40:30Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, maybe that's what I mean.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, I guess we've seen, yeah, but I think that, I think that investors are not expecting an exit prior to that milestone, which means it's all sort of in the noise.

• 40:40Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, well, enough about Pacific Fusion. Thank you for your time. This was, I really appreciate speaking to somebody else who's also not a nuclear physicist, but is deeper in it than I am, to help me understand a little bit about like what what we're really looking out for in the next few years, because it will be very interesting. As you said, Pacific Fusion is among a small group of companies that are saying, we're not that far from net facility gain. So we got to monitor this. So I appreciate your time. Good to see you.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Likewise.

• 41:10Shayle Kann?

  Carrie Von Muench is the founding COO of Pacific Fusion. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode was produced by Max Savage Levenson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey edits the video version of this show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.