Insider's Guide to Energy
The Energy Industry is uniquely evolving as traders are under increasing pressure to manage costs, cash, limits, and risks. The Insider’s Guide to Energy Podcast addresses current and emerging challenges business executives face daily through stories shared from peers and industry experts while covering topics such as innovation, disruptive technologies, and emerging trends.
Insider's Guide to Energy
196 - The Future of Fusion Energy: Insights from Focused Energy CEO Scott Mercer
In this episode of the Insiders Guide to Energy podcast, Scott Mercer, CEO of Focused Energy Inc., provides a comprehensive overview of the future of fusion energy and its potential to revolutionize global power generation. With the rising demand for energy driven by technologies like AI, Mercer explains how fusion could decouple energy production from resource consumption, offering a cleaner, more efficient solution. He delves into the technological innovations behind laser fusion, which mimics how the universe itself generates energy, and highlights the global race to commercialize this groundbreaking power source.
Mercer outlines the core differences between laser-based and magnet-based fusion approaches, explaining how Focused Energy is working on scalable laser fusion plants, modeled after successful experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). He discusses the company's ambitious goal to commercialize fusion by the 2030s, turning this scientific milestone into a real-world solution for global energy transition. By utilizing advanced laser systems and high-energy targets, Mercer envisions fusion energy plants generating gigawatts of power to meet the world’s growing needs.
Listeners will gain insight into the challenges and opportunities of commercializing fusion energy, including supply chain development, engineering hurdles, and the broader impact on the global energy market. With an emphasis on long-term sustainability and decarbonization, Mercer makes the case for why fusion is critical for achieving a cleaner, more reliable energy future. Whether you're an energy enthusiast or industry expert, this episode offers a fascinating look at the cutting-edge technology that could reshape the world's energy landscape.
We were pleased to host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-mercer-7ab2929/
Visit our website: https://insidersguidetoenergy.com/
Transcript
00:00:01 Scott Mercer
If fire was humanity's introduction to mastering energy, fusion is its culmination. Our increasing demand for energy, which continues to grow with technologies like AI, has outpaced the capabilities of our global energy system. We cannot grow progress and decarbonize without a new path. We need new power source fusion energy.
00:00:20 Scott Mercer
Has the capability to be one of the most valuable technology sets in history.
00:00:25 Scott Mercer
Said simply, fusion is our opportunity to decouple energy production from resource consumption.
00:00:31 Scott Mercer
The prospect has sparked a global race to commercialize fusion, and the winner will garner massive international power. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility proved fusion is possible. Now it's our job to successfully scale it to commercialization.
00:00:48 Chris Sass
Your trusted source for information on the energy transition. This is the Insider’s Guide to Energy podcast.
00:01:00 Chris Sass
Welcome to another edition of the Insider’s Guide to Energy. I'm your host Chris Sass with me as the Co host, Jeff McAulay. And this week we are talking fusion. We have Scott Mercer with us. Scott, welcome to the podcast.
00:01:11 Scott Mercer
Thank you, Chris. Appreciate.it
00:01:14 Chris Sass
Well, I've tipped our hand a little bit to our audience. We're gonna talk about fusion. What fusion company? Are you a part of? And what's your role?
00:01:22 Scott Mercer
Yeah. So I am the CEO of focused energy.
00:01:26 Chris Sass
OK. So you're CEO of focused energy?
00:01:28 Chris Sass
3.
00:01:29 Chris Sass
What exactly is focused energy?
00:01:32 Scott Mercer
So focused energy is a laser fusion company that is working on bringing forward kind of a.
00:01:41 Scott Mercer
Large scale fusion power plants based on really a similar architectural configuration to the system that has seen energy gain, which is the the system at NIF in Livermore, CA.
00:01:55 Chris Sass
Now, what is the impact? We've done quite a bit of fusion content. We really enjoy talking about fusion. It's it's always a little bit of an easier topic because it seems rather futuristic and farther away whether someone says 10 years or 30 years depends on who you're talking to, what's the impact and why is fusion so important for energy transition? I mean, you and I were having a conversation earlier today and we're talking about.
00:02:18 Chris Sass
Having all kinds of energy available, what's the importance of fusion?
00:02:23 Scott Mercer
You know, from my standpoint, fusion is really the culmination of all of these efforts. I mean, fusion is really functionally how the universe itself creates energy.
00:02:36 Scott Mercer
And so when I think about Fusion, I think about that as the culmination of humanity's energy journey.
00:02:42 Scott Mercer
Like it is our ability to move from using resource consumption to create energy to using sort of fusion adjacent things like wind or solar to create energy to kind of getting energy directly in the same way that the universe creates.
00:02:59 Scott Mercer
So the fact that we are getting close to that, that we've seen that in experiments like at nif's is pretty exciting.
00:03:07 Jeff McAulay
Scott, I don't know much about fusion either, but the limited knowledge I have is that there are two main approaches, one with lasers and one with magnets. What are we trying to do and tell us about the laser based approach that you're working on?
00:03:23 Scott Mercer
Yeah. So, you know, Fusion is kind of a core physics principle. There are a lot of different ways to achieve.
00:03:30 Chris Sass
Cheap.
00:03:30 Scott Mercer
Vision.
00:03:31 Scott Mercer
There are really only two approaches that have been studied with significant investment and.
00:03:37 Scott Mercer
Depth over the.
00:03:38 Scott Mercer
Last half a century.
00:03:39 Scott Mercer
So you have laser fusion, which is what focus energies is working on, which was primarily funded by defense programs and has been done behind the fence.
00:03:51 Scott Mercer
Mostly by the US government and by governments really, as they work on weapons.
00:03:54 Scott Mercer
Programs.
00:03:55 Scott Mercer
And then you have magnetic fusion, which has been more and external facing scientific community program doesn't have as many applications from a military perspective, but is also a big energy focused program.
00:04:09 Scott Mercer
From a the sort of standpoint of.
00:04:13 Scott Mercer
Fusion moments NIF, which is the program that's going at Lawrence Livermore, achieved energy gain for the first time in Fusion back in 2020.
00:04:23 Scott Mercer
2.
00:04:24 Scott Mercer
Which means more energy out of the fusion experiment than was put in, and that that's been quite a landmark experiment.
00:04:31 Scott Mercer
For the community.
00:04:33 Scott Mercer
So from our standpoint, what we're looking at is how do you take that NIF event that gain event and that sort of sequence of growth of energy output from the fusion targets and start to really look at how you might do that from the lens of a energy generation program rather than a weapon simulation program?
00:04:54 Jeff McAulay
That's great. One more semi technical question. How do lasers force something together? Most people think about lasers as not interacting with matter. So what different kind of laser or different kind of matter is this that you're able to push things together?
00:05:10 Jeff McAulay
With lasers. So.
00:05:13 Scott Mercer
The easiest fuel to fuse at from the scientific community's perspective is a combination of isotopes of heavy hydrogen, so deuterium and tritium.
00:05:25 Scott Mercer
From a laser fusion perspective, what we're doing is we're building very small targets, essentially little pearls of deuterium tritium.
00:05:36 Scott Mercer
That are encased in a polymer shell.
00:05:39 Scott Mercer
And that are then hit with laser energy spherically from all sides to essentially blade off the surface of that shell and create a spherical inward facing rocket.
00:05:53 Scott Mercer
It propels the deuterium tritium towards the center of the target, a little 4mm target collapses to about the diameter of a human hair, and at that point you can spark a fusion reaction.
00:06:07 Jeff McAulay
Got it. So the lasers are kind of lighting the fuse and then this sort of very hot spherical flame is what pushes them together.
00:06:17 Scott Mercer
Yeah. I mean, the best way from my perspective to envision this is as a cleanly fueled, very scientifically sophisticated combustion engine, sort of like the the single cylinder of a car engine.
00:06:33 Scott Mercer
So you inject a small amount of fuel, in our case, one of these little tiny targets. You compress it not with Pistons but with laser energy. You spark it also with laser.
00:06:43 Scott Mercer
Energy and then that target releases a massive amount of energy, becomes the hottest point in the solar system at that moment in time.
00:06:51 Scott Mercer
That energy dissipates towards the walls of the chamber and is then picked up by as heat and as neutrons, and that heat is transferred into steam and eventually into electricity.
00:07:01 Chris Sass
So the difference here though is you don't need to maintain that state. You're continually creating a fusion state, but you're not trying to maintain a state and keep a stable state.
00:07:09
Correct.
00:07:12 Scott Mercer
And you know, I think that when I what I've seen from a perception challenge perspective is that there is from some members of the Community this idea or this, this thought that magnetic fusion seems simpler than laser fusion because the idea of injecting these little targets at 10 times a second, which is what we.
00:07:32 Scott Mercer
Inject them out sounds very challenging to people.
00:07:35 Scott Mercer
The difference is is that in magnetic fusion you have this steady state device that has to keep that deuterium tritium hovering for us that 10 times per section in second injection of those little targets is to the combustion engine analogy, sort of like a gasoline powered car at idle running at 600 RPM like as a mechanical device.
00:07:57 Scott Mercer
It's quite simple and from a laser perspective, lasers and the the physics of the experiments for US Act on very, very small minutia of a second.
00:08:08 Scott Mercer
So the device is mostly waiting for a new target to be injected from the lasers.
00:08:15 Chris Sass
Kind of energy does it a laser like that take to?
00:08:18 Chris Sass
To get the strength you need to the the the quality you need to start a fusion reaction.
00:08:24 Scott Mercer
So these are very high energy lasers we are using essentially large bundles of KJ lasers. So about 1000 to 1500 of them depending.
00:08:37 Scott Mercer
On the the facility.
00:08:39 Scott Mercer
That are bundled together into a spherical target chamber. So think about a 10m wide ball with spherically arranged ports on each side so that you can hit that little tiny target with laser energy in a perfectly symmetrical way from all all edges.
00:09:00 Chris Sass
And when this is commercialized, if I'm doing GW production or larger scale energy production.
00:09:06 Chris Sass
How big are these arrays are lasers that we need?
00:09:09 Chris Sass
To do.
00:09:09 Scott Mercer
That so the for that scale, you know, we think.
00:09:13 Scott Mercer
About right now.
00:09:15 Scott Mercer
Our our facility scale is right now conditioned on the thermal management of the energy that comes out of the target. So that target when it's ignited is about 150 million degrees. It's very, very small.
00:09:34 Scott Mercer
So at the point that it reaches the walls of that 10m chamber, that energy dissipates to less than 1000° and is a much, much more manageable amount of heat for material science reasons.
00:09:48 Scott Mercer
And what we're looking at is really taking off the shelf lasers that we can build, not off the shelf at this point, but that we can manufacture on a manufacturing line at scale and combining them into these larger laser arrays so that we can get about a GW of power out of each individual fusion.
00:10:07 Scott Mercer
That reactor, and that's that's wall, that's wall.
00:10:10 Scott Mercer
Plug gain or engineering gain.
00:10:12 Scott Mercer
So it's about two gigawatts.
00:10:14 Scott Mercer
Of fusion energy output from those targets.
00:10:18 Jeff McAulay
Scott, tell us a little bit about the timeline of when you see this reaching various milestones and what are the biggest technical challenges between now and those milestones?
00:10:30 Scott Mercer
So I think that at this point there is sort of this breadth of approaches to fusion. There's about there's 45 companies in the space and growing probably higher than that now.
00:10:43 Scott Mercer
But everyone has a different pathway towards really a combined focus to get fusion programs up and running in the twenty 30s.
00:10:52 Scott Mercer
From our standpoint, this is a somewhat unique project in that focused energy is the closest system architecture to what's been worked on at NIF, which means that we are really following the only fusion program that has ever achieved energy gain. It's one of the biggest scientific milestones.
00:11:13 Scott Mercer
That one would need to prove in order to move towards fusion commercialization.
00:11:17 Scott Mercer
So when we think about the timeline for us, we have, we think about really a set of.
00:11:22 Scott Mercer
Engineering and supply chain problems rather than this binary question of if you use our approach, will it fuse? We know it. We know it will fuse. We know it will produce gain.
00:11:34 Scott Mercer
So I am now looking at building a integrated engineering facility to try to do these fusion target injection target ignition simulated sequences.
00:11:49 Scott Mercer
Over the next 4-5 years.
00:11:52 Scott Mercer
Towards the idea of that first pilot plant coming on in the mid twenty 30s and rapid commercial deployment thereafter, you know the focus for us and I think you'll hear this from a number of further along fusion companies is not necessarily on building that pilot plant, it's on really setting the ground to build that first generation of commercially viable reactors.
00:12:13 Chris Sass
What is the supply chain like today for for the materials? So you you mentioned kind of off the shelf lasers and I'm sure these high-powered lasers are just you know ready to be built at scale sarcastically describe the supply chain for your vision. So 2035 what needs to be in place for all this to be deployed where?
00:12:33 Chris Sass
We start seeing this deploy at scale.
00:12:36 Scott Mercer
So broadly from a supply chain perspective, we can think about.
00:12:42 Scott Mercer
Yeah. At its core, there are two core technologies that focus. Energy is working through. It is the the fusion fuel targets and we have a target tree lab in Darmstadt, Germany that builds these targets that interact with that laser beams, laser energy.
00:12:59 Scott Mercer
And then it is these high energy, high repetition rate lasers.
00:13:04 Scott Mercer
These lasers right now they exist. We've we've actually have one that is built with our IP that exists in Europe. Similar lasers exist in scientific programs worldwide, but you can think of them more as built like a satellite right now where these are built for generally a government client. They're built one at a time. They're very.
00:13:25 Scott Mercer
Folk, if you take NIF as an example, they built the entire supply chain just for that program. The laser glass manufacturing, the laser manufacturing themselves only built for that program, and down to the factories, and then shut down after that program was complete.
00:13:42 Scott Mercer
So what we really need to do from from a focused energy perspective, is to take a piece of highly technical equipment that's built like a satellite kind of one at a time, big budget and individually bespoke and move it to something that's built like a car, you know, on a supply chain, in a factory, repeatedly at high volume and that that becomes really the big supply chain.
00:14:03 Scott Mercer
Question from a laser fusion.
00:14:06 Chris Sass
But with with so many versions of what Fusion's going to be like you, you're making a calculated bet based on your conversation like that you said, hey, our technologies are improving. Ish. You know, they're getting positive gain, energy gain out of it where others haven't shown that yet. So we feel like we have a hedge here that we're we're on the right direction, but you need the supply chain vendors to.
00:14:26 Chris Sass
To buy in and you need to be the leading indicator, right? So I look at Commonwealth Fusion and others that have raised, you know, a few billion bucks, but they'll admit clearly they need a lot more money to get to a commercial rollout. I mean, that's that's a small number in the whole scheme of things.
00:14:40 Chris Sass
How do you spark the supply chain in the direction of lasers or or in the the optics or whatever it is that you need as opposed to magnets or token or you know whatever technology others are betting on?
00:14:52 Scott Mercer
I mean they are different, but concurrent supply chains so we can see these different programs depending on what else might work or might see gain in fusion.
00:15:02 Scott Mercer
You could see a world in which several different, you know, macroeconomic fusion programs on.
00:15:09 Scott Mercer
Unfurl over the last 10 or next 10 or 20 years alongside each other, and frankly, from a an energy demand perspective, that's probably the best case scenario. We would love to see several different sort of high potential energy sources in the nuclear speeds that are all sufficiently.
00:15:29 Scott Mercer
Viable that you can build supply chains as quickly as possible to deploy this as quickly as possible because frankly the energy gap that we see as we look towards 2050 and beyond is quite profound.
00:15:42 Scott Mercer
So from my standpoint, the laser fusion supply chain is really something that's working in conjunction with the development of these laser diodes that allow for high repetition rate lasers and in conjunction with a lot of the laser based weapons work that's happening in the Defense Department that has really pushed the supply chains forward over the last five to 10 years.
00:16:24 Scott Mercer
It's it is a small percentage. I think that there is a a number of material science and energy harvesting kind of components. The idea of the tritium breeding etcetera that can be somewhat similar. But I think we're still somewhat early days in the development of some of those technology sets. And as you get a little bit more and more sophisticated.
00:16:45 Scott Mercer
They're probably adjacent more than they are shared.
00:16:49 Jeff McAulay
Right. So one of the things that's really interesting from the start that you differentiated is that magnetic confinement has evolved due to it being more public.
00:17:01 Jeff McAulay
And really, the laser based approach didn't.
00:17:05 Jeff McAulay
Progress as quickly because of its association with military applications. Vision technology has been limited due to potential for proliferation of nuclear weapons. Does proliferation of laser based fusion systems have some of the same risks?
00:17:25 Scott Mercer
Well, so from a fusion perspective, it's actually it's interesting because magnetic fusion arguably is not further along than laser fusion. It is only further along in public perception.
00:17:40 Scott Mercer
Laser fusion has achieved more of the sort of proof points that are needed to move towards commercialization and has fewer.
00:17:50 Scott Mercer
Scientific Show Stoppers on the go forward, then magnetic fusion still has to overcome.
00:17:56 Scott Mercer
So from our standpoint really it's getting across the the clear engineering pathway for laser fusion and showing that really from a technology perspective and really given that we've seen gain from an if standpoint, laser fusion is the furthest ahead.
00:18:12 Scott Mercer
Technology set in space.
00:18:16 Scott Mercer
As to kind of radioactivity and proliferation, some of these things that are, you know, problematic from fission perspective.
00:18:25 Scott Mercer
Laser fusion has very few of these, and the laser technology that we're using from a defense perspective is not really adjacent to what's happening in the weapons program. Aside from the fact that it uses similar components.
00:18:41 Scott Mercer
You couldn't turn a fusion laser into a weapon.
00:18:43 Scott Mercer
I guess is the way that I would say it.
00:18:45 Scott Mercer
UM, and really, from a radioactivity perspective, we use very, very small amounts of tritium.
00:18:54 Scott Mercer
Which is a short lived radioactive material, which means that our industry is regulated more like a medical facility that does X-rays than like a fission power plant might be. And that's been a big shift over the last couple of years as governments start to put regulation in place, preparing for the commercialization of fusion.
00:19:16 Chris Sass
You've taken us through a bit of the journey and the technology, but you're not a physicist by training. I don't believe. How did you end up becoming the CEO of a fusion company? Because I don't think your background, like I said, is physics.
00:19:22 Scott Mercer
Why not?
00:19:31 Scott Mercer
So yeah, from my standpoint, you know, my entire career has been focused on energy transition.
00:19:40 Scott Mercer
And from my standpoint, when I was in college, I really looked at this idea that across our working careers, we had the opportunity to build a truly generative energy system, to move from resource resource consumption.
00:19:55 Scott Mercer
As the core of our energy generation capacity to moving beyond that.
00:20:03 Scott Mercer
I started out with the idea of building electric car charging in 2010. Essentially, how do you build electric car chargers?
00:20:11 Scott Mercer
15 years before you might see mass adoption in a way that could make money from day zero and act as a social psychology tool to signal people that EV's were here and that it might be interesting for them to consider the car.
00:20:25 Scott Mercer
Took that business from scratch to IPO in August of 2021, which was the same month that NIF reached ignition. And when I saw NIF reach ignition, I realized that commercial fusion might be on a similar trajectory where that might be the opportunity for the investment investment market to start to take.
00:20:45 Scott Mercer
Quite seriously.
00:20:47 Scott Mercer
So I started looking at this really first from a an investor lens. How would you build an investment portfolio of actual deployable operational fusion programs and was approached by the team here, which is a very, very strong scientific pedigree team to look at being an operator with the company.
00:21:07 Chris Sass
It doesn't. It take considerably longer.
00:21:10 Chris Sass
You talked about a four or five year cycle of building expensive equipment to go prove and vet this out. So it's it's a different economy of scale and and the the you would need really patient capital or you'd need federal dollars or something because you need tremendous amount of capital to do what you're talking about, don't you?
00:21:28 Scott Mercer
Well, one of the fun things about the space is that I can truly look people in the eye, whether there's investors or governments or people joining the company.
00:21:37 Scott Mercer
Say that this technology set can make one of the most valuable industries the world has ever seen.
00:21:44 Scott Mercer
And the companies that win here will be some of the most valuable companies in the history of the world. So yes, it is a different scale of capital, but it's also.
00:21:53 Scott Mercer
A different scale of return.
00:21:56 Scott Mercer
Companies that have the capacity to master technology.
00:21:59 Scott Mercer
Sets like this.
00:22:00 Scott Mercer
Do have a relatively uncharted upside, I would say.
00:22:06 Scott Mercer
That's kind of the big picture story in the small picture story, we are a fairly pragmatic company as it comes to supply chain technology capacity and we have this laboratory that's one of the best in the world for laser particle interaction experiments that supplies these little targets, not just for fusion experiments.
00:22:26 Scott Mercer
But for other laser particle interaction experiments worldwide, and we also have some high energy laser IP that the company has developed, that's been quite interesting to other laser programs scientifically or in the fusion.
00:22:41 Scott Mercer
So it is quite likely that focused energy will sell.
00:22:45 Scott Mercer
Components of our technology stack before we actually start to sell integrated fusion reactors and we've gotten significant demand on that side as well.
00:22:54 Jeff McAulay
Yeah. Scott, just on that, who are the customers for those lasers and love the parallel obviously of the the 15 year journey with something that can make money from Day 0?
00:22:55
Cool.
00:23:07 Scott Mercer
So maybe the most interesting application.
00:23:09 Scott Mercer
For the expertise of the company.
00:23:13 Scott Mercer
You know, focused energy really started out of Darmstadt, Germany, out of the university in Darmstadt. And was this targetry lab building, particle physics targets for laser experiments.
00:23:25 Scott Mercer
There were two core applications. One is fusion targets and the other is this imaging system where you can use lasers to shoot at particles. Essentially a leaf of water.
00:23:38 Scott Mercer
You shoot the laser beam through that leap of water and it shoots out very consistent beams of neutrons and heart X-rays. If you put a detector on the other side of a piece of infrastructure, you can get an image of not only what that piece of infrastructure looks like inside, but also a material asset of what it's precisely made out of.
00:23:59 Scott Mercer
It happens that one of the most interesting customers for that set is the the current fission industry.
00:24:05 Scott Mercer
And we took one of our first near term revenue contracts with RWE nuclear energy operator in Germany to take a contract to install one of these systems on site at a decommissioned fission power plant to help them assay all of the radioactive material that they have from their past vision regime as they prepare for the future.
00:24:36 Chris Sass
Yeah.
00:24:37 Scott Mercer
So just in the general history of the company, so focused energy was started in Germany by a well known professor at in Darsha, professor Marcus Roth and Thomas Horner.
00:24:51 Scott Mercer
The two founders of the company started the company based off this target Tree lab then went out and acquired the IP for a high energy laser company in Texas.
00:25:02 Scott Mercer
Then went to the scientific leadership team at the National Ignition Facility. The team that had led the ignition program showed them the White Paper for the company and essentially hired the majority of the leadership team from Niff. Once they had seen gain to come to focus, energy and work on energy production from laser.
00:25:22 Scott Mercer
You know.
00:25:23 Scott Mercer
I think that the idea of achieving scientific gain is a very exciting thing from a scientific community perspective. But if one has the opportunity to work on atomic weapons or to work on an energy source, that could change really the future of humanity. It's not necessarily a difficult choice for some people to come across.
00:25:42 Chris Sass
I have a a very rudimentary question, or probably a silly question I asked in the chat to Jeff earlier in the interview.
00:25:50 Chris Sass
When you're talking about this, is there a? If we're gonna go deep space exploration, we probably need fusion energy. I would assume from stuff I've heard or seen. Is there a preference for a laser or magnet for space for the space program or do they lean one way or the other of what they're hoping gets developed, which would be easier for deep space travel?
00:26:09 Scott Mercer
You know, I think from a space travel perspective, you start to get a little bit more speculative and your system requirements change quite a bit.
00:26:18 Scott Mercer
So when I think about Fusion, and I think about kind of.
00:26:21 Scott Mercer
All of the different approaches that we might discover, all of the different sort of capabilities that we might master.
00:26:30 Scott Mercer
It becomes wider as you get kind of further afield.
00:26:33 Scott Mercer
But when you win it, wind it back to what we need to do today. That's when it really focuses on these larger scale base load replacement power plants where really from my perspective and it's a fairly aggressive perspective for the fusion community. But there's only one fuel source that makes sense, which is deuterium tritium, and they're really only two technology.
00:26:55 Scott Mercer
That's that makes sense as a simple bet, which is magnetic fusion or laser.
00:27:01 Scott Mercer
So there's lots of different programs going on, but those are really the bets that I think can be made from a commercialization perspective.
00:27:08 Chris Sass
So I agree with you that it's it's transformative to mankind to have fusion or I don't know if you said that in your words, but I I tend to think that when and if we get to fusion that that it would be I guess one of the the naysayer kind of near term things is we're competing for keeping global warming and greenhouse gases down. And there's only so much capital being placed.
00:27:27 Chris Sass
And so does it make sense to bet on a future technology, or should we be doubling down near term for the renewables we know can impact global change immediately and then make a little bit longer term bet on fusion. What what's your when you hear something like that? I mean, I've heard this many times. What what is your response?
00:27:47 Scott Mercer
So.
00:27:50 Scott Mercer
When we think about.
00:27:53 Scott Mercer
Kind of. The goal sets over the next 20 years. You know, a lot of people talk about 2050 as kind of the marker from a decarbonization perspective, from an energy perspective.
00:28:03 Scott Mercer
And the stories that we tell currently.
00:28:07 Scott Mercer
Don't add up very well.
00:28:10 Scott Mercer
In the as an example, the US EIA projects energy demand based on a base, a base case scenario, a high growth, high economic growth scenario, and a low economic growth scenario.
00:28:24 Scott Mercer
In the high economic growth scenario, the projection is that by 2050 we consume 19% more coal than we consume today. On a global perspective.
00:28:36 Scott Mercer
So when we talk about the larger kind of political will to decarbonize the larger political laws to decarbonize the drum beat decarbonize to net 0 versus the realities of what the energy projections are going for.
00:28:52
Forward.
00:28:53 Scott Mercer
You realize that that gap is very, very wide and it is much wider than the larger community is really willing to talk about in public to my view. So the answer is absolutely all of the above.
00:29:09 Scott Mercer
It is that we do have to push very hard on renewables. We will unfortunately have to make our peace with the fact that it will be incredibly difficult to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
00:29:21 Scott Mercer
And we have to make the push very hard to figure out novel technology sets that will allow that to happen. It is not a simple thing to do. It is nowhere near as simple as it is talked about from a political perspective.
00:29:35 Jeff McAulay
Yes, Scott, I tend to agree. We need everything possible. We haven't even talked about the energy requirements for carbon removal, which blow whatever energy needs out of the water with everything we can as fast as we can build it. I have a similar question, which is just.
00:29:54 Jeff McAulay
Commonwealth Fusion raised $202 billion. We've we've said that a couple of times. Are there enough investors with the 10 to 15 year time horizon that can put in the billions of dollars you need on top of the government sponsored collaborations?
00:30:09 Scott Mercer
Yeah. So when I think about the the program for us from here, you know I think that there is this.
00:30:16 Scott Mercer
This idea that you have to fund fusion with equity investors going forward for a very long time horizon, I think the general story that I hear from that people kind of think about at this point is this idea that you're going to take a bunch of scientists and engineers, they're going to go away for a decade. They're going to build a big shiny machine.
00:30:37 Scott Mercer
They're going to flip the switch and we're going to see if it turns on and changes the world or if it.
00:30:40 Scott Mercer
Makes a little fizzle noise and shuts itself back.
00:30:44 Scott Mercer
And really, from a laser fusion perspective in a post NIF world, that's not the case. So from our standpoint, what we need to go out and prove is not that the machine can actually see gain. It's really that you can build the supply chains and the engineering integration to do this repeatedly and at a commercially competent.
00:31:04 Scott Mercer
COE's levelized cost of energy.
00:31:07 Scott Mercer
Which means that when I think about my timelines, I think about working backwards from a commercial deployment of those first of the kind reactors starting in the late twenty 30s.
00:31:17 Scott Mercer
And that functionally means that I need to have my commercial Energy Partners signed up for fusion commitments by the end.
00:31:26 Scott Mercer
Of this decade.
00:31:28 Scott Mercer
So to go to investors and say, look what we want to do is build about $100 billion worth of pipeline diffusion reactors over the next 4 to.
00:31:36 Scott Mercer
5.
00:31:37 Scott Mercer
Years we want to de risk all of the engineering challenges left existent as quickly as possible, and we want to build the supply chain story behind that to make sure that we can actually meet those orders.
00:31:49 Scott Mercer
You have a very, very different business story.
00:31:52 Scott Mercer
And that's the business story that we're out in the market telling. So from an investor Time horizon, yes, it is 10 years till the pipe plant comes on, but it's more like 5 years until you have that visibility to that first $100 billion in orders to our.
00:32:06 Chris Sass
Now with all the the, the the challenges in the world right now with Middle East oil prices and Europe energy prices, gas has been crazy.
00:32:15 Chris Sass
Your your European American partnership, your your, transatlantic, and a lot of energy is politics. It's always politics and energy.
00:32:24 Chris Sass
How does that? I mean in in you know, in the beautiful world where everything where we get free energy and you know, we're just like the sun and we make everything go great. That sounds really good.
00:32:33 Chris Sass
But how does that work in reality? So you want to get $100 billion with the projects off the ground, but you're working in?
00:32:39 Chris Sass
Two different economic zones near North America and in Europe. How does that? Is that a, is that a headwind for you or is that a tailwind, what describe how?
00:32:47 Chris Sass
That helps or hurts you.
00:32:48 Scott Mercer
Yeah. So I think about when I think about the deployment of Fusion, I think about it from a global construct, right? The ownership of the IP, the ownership of the supply chains might be more localized. The deployment is.
00:32:59 Scott Mercer
And it's an opportunity for the countries that lead the development of these fusion technologies to be a global supplier of baseload energy going forward. We are taking the entire supply chain of the carbon economy and replacing it with the supply chain of the fusion economy, which is much more about technology development.
00:33:19 Scott Mercer
And science than it is about resource extraction. So the opportunity for countries to really build that development and supply chain ecosystem.
00:33:27 Scott Mercer
Is quite profound.
00:33:29 Scott Mercer
From from a focused energy perspective on the transatlantic bridge, you know we have very, very different talent sets and very, very different focal areas between Germany and the US in that Germany is quite focused on replacing their base.
00:33:48 Scott Mercer
The power capabilities, you know, they they turned off their entire fission ecosystem in the mid teens.
00:33:56 Scott Mercer
And they've suffered for, you know, given things that are happening with Russia, given things that are happening with energy prices in Europe, there is a lot of will in Germany towards a solution that would provide base load power. And there's a lot of push towards fusion.
00:34:10 Scott Mercer
And similarly in the US, you know the US, given the history of our physics expertise, has some of the best scientific minds and engineering minds.
00:34:19 Scott Mercer
To build laser fusion programs to really do the scientifically risking and to build the the laser development for that technology set that we're going to need as well. So I do think that while it's a bit of a challenge to be a transatlantic company, the advantages in very rarefied ecosystems.
00:34:39 Scott Mercer
Are pretty profound.
00:34:43 Jeff McAulay
Scott, we got to add just a couple energy nerd technical questions. Since you handed them, you can hopefully wrap these all together. You mentioned L Coe, so you have some target in mind, which is great starting there working backwards that implies you also highlighted base load. So this is not going to be ramping. You want to run it at super high capacity.
00:35:04 Jeff McAulay
Factor largely like traditional fission reactors today. Do you have a dominant size of plant and can you confirm sort of a capacity factor in LCA that you're looking for? Yes.
00:35:19 Scott Mercer
So architecturally, when we look at our system, our first generation systems are constrained by target chamber size. Like I I said prior a little bit, we really need the target chamber to be large enough to keep essentially the heat away from the walls so that the 150 million degree target at the center.
00:35:40 Scott Mercer
Is at a material science friendly temperature. By the time it hits the walls, but still hot enough to create enough energy to move through the system effectively.
00:35:49 Scott Mercer
What that means for us is that we're looking at building systems that provide about a GW of energy out from about two gigawatts of fusion energy at the target.
00:36:03 Scott Mercer
And when we think about building base load power, you know that's about the size that replaces a single core of a fission reactor. So if you were to look at fission architectures that might need to be replaced over the next 20 or 30 years, you could really map out each individual fission core for some of these larger base load power plants and say, OK, that might be.
00:36:24 Scott Mercer
Perfect one for one replacement for fusion.
00:36:29 Scott Mercer
And the other thing is we think about this from a grid capacity and one of the things that's most important to my view as kind of a infrastructure resilience nerd and building electric car charging, you want electric car charging stations to be 99.9% reliable because they're providing transportation fuel similarly.
00:36:48 Scott Mercer
With Fusion, this is providing base load power. It needs to be 99.9% reliable. It needs to be up and running all the.
00:36:55 Scott Mercer
And one of the the profound benefits of our approach is that by using these arrays of modular lasers, you can almost envision our system like a data center server rack where each of these laser beam lines is an individual server, and if a piece of hardware goes down, if a laser beam goes down.
00:37:15 Scott Mercer
You can pull that laser beam out without turning the facility off in hot operation.
00:37:20 Scott Mercer
So the idea of designing for serviceability and designing for resilience I think is incredibly important as we're looking at fusion schemes, not just to prove this.
00:37:29 Scott Mercer
Plants of can we see energy gain but the commercialization capability of developing a system that can be a full base load reliable integrated with this, it's the grid system.
00:37:46 Jeff McAulay
And and last one for sure, efficiency because you mentioned 2 gigawatts of fusion energy, that's the thermal energy gets you to one GW of electrical and that's largely driven by just the efficiency of boiling.
00:38:00 Jeff McAulay
Water. I hear that right.
00:38:03 Scott Mercer
Correct. So as you as you go from kind of heat transfer into steam into systems that look very similar to other base load energy configurations, it's about a 50%.
00:38:16 Scott Mercer
Loss.
00:38:17 Scott Mercer
I think as a a very like.
00:38:20 Scott Mercer
Rule of thumb.
00:38:22 Jeff McAulay
And just to complete that cycle, so you would have using that example 500 megawatts of energy in to start the lasers?
00:38:31 Jeff McAulay
Two gigawatts of energy out from the thermal reaction, and then one GW of electric energy out. So you would be what's what's the balance of energy into energy out at the end of the day in your target plan?
00:38:44 Scott Mercer
Yeah. So from our target projections, you know we have we have what I would consider our conservative projections for the pilot plant and for first Gen. and then we have what we think is likely feasible.
00:39:00 Scott Mercer
So when we think about energy gain from our standpoint, the target that we've set for the pilot plant is a gain of 25.
00:39:09 Scott Mercer
The the target gain that we're looking at for the the 1st generation commercial power plants is again north of 75 and that's based on growth in laser energies both laser and and target efficiency. But if you look at the lasers that are used to power NIF.
00:39:29 Scott Mercer
They use lamps, flash lamps, so they're analog systems.
00:39:34 Scott Mercer
They're about .5% energy efficient.
00:39:37 Scott Mercer
What we need to move to is a solid-state system, so using diodes rather than flash lamps. Those diodes exist today, they're they're out in market, they're in, they're in laser systems, they just are. It's a different program than using flash Labs. But if you look at laser systems, the lasers that we're looking at are between 10 and 15% energy efficient.
00:40:01 Scott Mercer
So it's quite a different efficiency parameter from a laser perspective than what's being done today. That's probably one of the biggest system shifts. That's one of the most clear.
00:40:12 Scott Mercer
Is that for NIF really having a gain of 2.4 and a scientific gain?
00:40:16 Scott Mercer
Of.
00:40:16 Scott Mercer
One, if you start to move from flash lamp lasers to diode lasers, you go from that .5% energy efficient to energy efficiency in.
00:40:26 Scott Mercer
The mid teens.
00:40:27 Jeff McAulay
Great. Well, Scott, I would clearly love to continue to ask you all sorts of nerdy and nuanced questions, but we're out of time and you've given us a tremendous tour of a different side of fusion and really appreciated the very commercial tactical working backwards from.
00:40:48 Jeff McAulay
Commercial operations and that's different than the language we've heard described fusion in previously. So really appreciate your perspective here as a non scientist, but like.
00:40:59 Jeff McAulay
Said 15 year journey of commercialization and this won't be your your first one. So Scott thank you so much for talking with us today.
00:41:09 Scott Mercer
Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it. So.
00:41:12 Scott Mercer
There he is.
00:41:14 Chris Sass
For our audience, we hope you've enjoyed this episode. We always love talking fusion. We're getting more and more episodes on Fusion, I think.
00:41:20 Chris Sass
We want to understand what the opportunities are and what's coming our way. If you want to find out more, check out focused energy. You know you wanna find out. We wanna find out. We're looking forward to having Scott. We hope to have you back in the future and and get some progress updates. Thank you again for being on the podcast for audience. Hope you enjoyed this content. Don't forget to subscribe. Follow us on our YouTube channel and we'll see you again next time.
00:41:41 Chris Sass
The insiders guide to energy bye for now.