For decades, many have called nuclear fusion the “holy grail” of energy sources. The undying hope is that fusion will someday provide very cheap, abundant, zero-carbon electricity to all – thereby both decisively addressing the climate crisis and powering economic growth across the globe. But despite decades of well-funded research and even recent technological breakthroughs, we still seem to be years away from a commercially viable fusion reactor. In this episode, Chad Reed speaks with Jim McNeil, Chief Marketing Officer of TAE Technologies, which just raised $250 million in venture financing to support the development of Copernicus – its next-generation hydrogen-boron fusion research reactor. Chad and Jim get into the weeds on the tradeoffs of competing fusion fuels, the longstanding challenge fusion must overcome to reach commercial viability, the role of fusion in our energy future, Star Trek versus Star Wars, and much more.
For decades, many have called nuclear fusion the “holy grail” of energy sources. The undying hope is that fusion will someday provide very cheap, abundant, zero-carbon electricity to all – thereby both decisively addressing the climate crisis and powering economic growth across the globe. But despite decades of well-funded research and even recent technological breakthroughs, we still seem to be years away from a commercially viable fusion reactor.
In this episode, Chad Reed speaks with Jim McNiel, Chief Marketing Officer of TAE Technologies, which just raised $250 million in venture financing to support the development of Copernicus – its next-generation hydrogen-boron fusion research reactor. Chad and Jim get into the weeds on the tradeoffs of competing fusion fuels, the longstanding challenge fusion must overcome to reach commercial viability, the role of fusion in our energy future, Star Trek versus Star Wars, and much more.
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Episode recorded: July 28, 2022
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: This is Climate Positive – a show featuring candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving our climate positive future. I’m Chad Reed
Hilary Langer: I’m Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I’m Gil Jenkins.
Jim McNiel: Oil is like one of the most energy-dense things on the planet. It's 5.8 billion BTUs for a barrel of oil. It's no mystery that why we used oil as we do. It's incredibly energy dense, but boron power is about a trillion times more dense than that.
Chad:For decades, many have called nuclear fusion the “holy grail” of energy sources. The undying hope is that fusion will some day provide very cheap, abundant, zero carbon electricity to all – thereby both decisively addressing the climate crisis and powering economic growth across the globe. But despite decades of well-funded research and even recent technological breakthoughs, we still seem to be years away from a commercially viable fusion reactor.
In this episode, I speak with Jim McNiel, Chief Marketing Officer of TAE Technologies, which just raised $250 million in venture financing to support the development of Copernicus – its next generation hydrogen-boron fusion research reactor. Chad and Jim get into the weeds on the tradeoffs of competing fusion fuels, the longstanding challenge fusion must overcome to reach commercial viability, the role of fusion in our energy future, Star Trek versus Star Wars, and much more.
Hilary: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions for over 30 years. To learn more about our climate positive journey, please visit HannonArmstrong.com.
Chad: Jim, thanks for joining us today.
Jim McNiel: It's a pleasure to be here.
Chad: Well, first, we'd like to learn a little bit more about your personal background. You grew up in Southern California, attended both the Wharton Business School and MIT Sloan. You've worked in software development, private equity venture capital, biotech, management consulting. Could you walk us through your personal and professional trajectory, and how you now find yourself the Chief Marketing Officer of a company focused on commercializing nuclear fusion?
Jim: I basically started my career as a devotee to the microcomputer. I was programming in basic assembly on VIC-20, and then the Commodore 64. I got a job early on out of school with a company that contracted with Lucasfilm on the first non-linear editing system. I found myself immersed in writing code for a 68,000 processed [unintelligible 00:00:54] and then eventually C code, doing machine controls. I was controlling video tape recorders, switch effect systems. We [inaudible 00:01:01] the world's first non-linear editing system.
It was great fun. It was during the time of Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back, and Wrath of Khan. I didn't realize I was working at such a wonderful fun company because I was in my early 20s, but it was great fun. Then I ended up on the manufacturing side of building PCs but I was on the software front. I became the Senior Director of Advanced Products at AST Research after working there for almost three years. Then my career found me pursuing networking.
I basically like to get in front of major trends as they're emerging. From the PC to networking, to local area networking, to wire networking. I wanted to be in the networking space, so I ended up helping to start a company in New York that invented client-server backup called Cheyenne Software. I was one of the founders there. We put drives on file servers, and we sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the software, and became a billion-dollar company in a couple of years, and sold that to CA.
Then I found myself in venture capital. I went to work at Pequot Capital as a partner, and invested in software companies, which is how I happen to stumble into TAE. It was a normal, pipeline, due diligence opportunity to look at a very interesting and novel company.
Chad: In your free time, you also produce documentaries? Most recently Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.
Jim: Hardly a side hustle, yes.
Chad: [laughs] Tell us about that project.
Jim: Well, that project was also basically driven by a need. The need was to take a 30-year-old company, and reintroduce it to the world, or maybe I should say introduce it to the world in a way that most people would appreciate what their value proposition was. I was charged with the rebranding of a company called NetScout. NetScout was at the time one of the leading providers of network performance management and service assurance software. One of the most important companies that no one had ever heard of.
As I was rebranding the company, notionally, we thought it would be interesting to explain to people how the internet worked in what was behind the scenes, and how much we'd become to depend upon it. I thought would there be no better spokesperson to explore the promises and the perils of the internet more so than Werner Herzog. We reached out to Werner Herzog to do this, and he rejected it out of hand. Then I reached out again, and he rejected it.
The third time, I challenged him and I said, "You know, you say you're a explorer, a pioneer, an adventurer, and yet you know nothing about this internet frontier. I just think you're afraid to go." That got him over [unintelligible 00:03:50]. Werner is an absolutely wonderful guy. He's a very talented filmmaker. We created Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. We premiered this in Sundance, and we sold it to Magnolia, and Netflix, and Apple. It did quite well. It was NetScout presents. It took our annual impressions from about two and a half billion to 25 billion overnight.
Chad: Wow.
Jim: Yes.
Chad: Now, I do want to jump into nuclear fusion. Before we talk about the marketing aspects of it, which you're intimately involved with, I want to first set a baseline. For years, many have called fusion, the holy grail of energy sources. The hope is that it will someday provide cheap, if not free, abundant, zero-carbon electricity to all. I imagine many of our listeners are vaguely aware of what fusion is but don't really understand how it works, and how it can play a potentially prominent role in our energy supply. Can you help us out?
Jim: Yes. Well, first I'm going to check you on free. There are very few things in life that are free, right? We've raised a billion dollars to pursue fusion. Obviously, that's not free. It's taken the interest and the vision and the support of a lot of really clever individuals to do this. To your point, fusion is what makes everything on this planet possible, everything you know, everything you touch, everything you see, everything you eat comes from the power of our local star. That huge ball up in the sky, which is a million times the size of the planet earth is 74% hydrogen and 24% helium and other minerals mixed there.
What the star has been doing for four or four plus billion years, is fusing hydrogen together and producing helium. When you take two atoms and you have the right conditions and you merge them together and you create a new atom, the energy that is produced from that comes out in the form of heat and light. The energy that is produced is equal to the mass of those two atoms multiplied by the speed of light squared. That's a number with 16 zeros behind it. You know that equation, you've heard it before. That's the nature of our entire universe. It's our universe's natural power source is fusion.
Now what was discovered, not just by Einstein, but in the late '30s and the early '40s, was that you could do the opposite. You could split atoms, and when you split atoms, you create the same amount of energy, but it's a fission event, it's not a fusion event. You're dividing an atom into two new parts. When that happens, it can create a chain reaction, which can result in a bomb, or it can result in the capturing of heat and converting of that heat into steam and running a turbine, which is how fission power plants work.
The issue with fission power plants is, if they do get out of control and they continue to run, that chain reaction can cause a meltdown or can cause other damage, which is why some of the greatest engineers on earth have figured out how to harness that power and keep it safe the majority of the time. The other side effect of fission is that you're dealing with very radio-active materials because they're easier to divide because they're less stable. You end up using things like uranium and plutonium, and they have a very, very long life of radioactivity in thousands of years. There's a nuclear waste issue with that. There are ways of doing fusion where you don't create radioactive waste, and that's one of the things that TAE is very focused on.
Chad: Tell us a little about those differentiators, particularly with your technology, but in general, for fusion over fission and even other sources of energy production. What are the key differentiators and competitive advantages?
Jim: Yes, let's explain how fusion actually can happen then we can jump into the differences. The difference between being on the sun and being on earth is a lot. The sun is a million times the size of planet earth. It's 98.6% of all of the mass in our solar system. Just to give you an idea of how incredibly massive that star is. What comes with that mass, is a tremendous amount of gravity.
With all of that gravity, atoms don't like to merge. They're repellent. They have positive charges. They don't want to get together and multiply, very much unlike humans, we're very keen on multiplying, but atoms have a hard time about it. You need certain conditions to make it happen. If you have a lot of mass, a lot of gravity, that's one thing, but you also need heat.
Since we don't have the mass of the earth, we have to represent that and create gravity on earth. We do that with magnets. We also have to replicate space, so we create a vacuum. You create a vacuum vessel, you surround it with electro-magnets, you fill it with a gas, and you can think about different forms of matter. You have solids, you have liquids, you have gases, but we also have plasmas. The most identifiable plasma you can see is in the neon sign, but you also see it in solar flares and you see it in the nebula, in the telescopes. Plasmas are super heated gases, in the millions of degrees C. We have to replicate that plasma in a vessel. Then we have to heat that plasma up to a point where these atoms start to get along and fuse. Now, fuels fuse at different temperatures. Deuterium and tritium will fuse at about 100 million degrees C.
Deuterium is completely plentiful. There's more of it than you can possibly imagine because it's in all of our oceans. Tritium, is a bit tougher because tritium doesn't really exist naturally on earth. You have to breed it, and you breed it by bombarding a lithium blanket with deuterium atoms. Then you get tritium. Tritium has been produced in fusion reactors for the purposes of creating weapons and other research things such as medical isotopes and so forth.
There's about 50 kilograms of tritium in existence today on the planet. All the people that want to burn DT – deuterium and tritium – because it's a lower temperature fusion reaction are going to first have to find a source of tritium, then secondarily, they're going to have to figure out a way to take a portion of their deuterium and tritium reactions and breed nude tritium and capture that tritium and feed it back into the cycle. That is part of the challenge of running a DT reactor.
Chad: Just to level set. Deuterium and tritium are the typical feedstock that a lot of other fusion reactors will use to generate energy basically.
Jim: It's the majority of. TAE is unique in two very substantial ways. One is our architecture is completely unique and I'll talk about that. The second thing is our fuel source is not tritium and deuterium, it's PB-11 or boron. Our goal is to fuse hydrogen and boron. The challenge is you have to burn hotter. The benefit is it's aneutronic, you're not producing neutrons and you're not producing neutrons bombard the first wall of your reactor, and then cause them to start to decay.
Tritium has a half-life of 12 years. While that's much, much better than uranium and plutonium. It still does wreak havoc with the materials it comes into contact with. It radiates them, and then it begins this decay process. One of the big challenges of operating a DT fusion power plant is figuring out how to protect the power plant itself from the fusions taking place within the vessel. With boron, it's a lot different.
Boron, the biggest challenge we have is getting to a billion degrees. When you say these numbers, people really freak out because think about it. The core of the sun is 15 million C, so what are we talking about in terms of 100 million C, or a billion C? We're dealing at the atomic level. These are atoms, these are tiny, tiny, tiny little things. If any of these atoms, which are at this very high energy level, these very high heat levels could interact with anything outside of that plasma, they would immediately discharge their temperature and their energy.
See what would make fusion so incredibly difficult is also what makes it very safe. If for instance, a reactor operating in California were broken by an earthquake, it would just blow out like a candle. That would be it. Done. If you had an interruption in the power that was fueling the plasma, then it would just peter out, it would stop working. There's no risk of meltdown. There's no risk of a burnout. There's no risk of release of toxic gases or radiation or anything like that.
Chad: Actually, your reactor, which operates at a higher temperature, or the fuel which requires a higher temperature and that's why you reactor operates at that level is actually safer than one that operates at a lower temperature. Is that the implication?
Jim: That's a fact, yes. It's safer because of neutrons and radiation. We don't have-- For instance, if you look at ITER, the international energy experiment in France, the ITER confinement vessel, which is reinforced concrete is three and a half meters stick, and it's 60 meters tall and 60 meters in diameter. You have to put this huge dome over the tokamak reactor to shield the outside from radioactive material.
We don't require that. The reason you stand away from our reactor, you have a reasonable distance is because of the magnetic fields, not any radiation issues. If you turn off a boron reactor, people can walk up and do maintenance on the machine with their bare hands and wearing hard hats. It's a very, very different kind of model. You talk about a billion degrees. CERN, the hadron super collider has reached temperatures in the trillions of degrees. Thousands of times hotter than what we're talking about.
Chad: Got it. It's definitely possible to reach those temperatures. In terms of the feedstock, the boron that you use instead of the deuterium or tritium, where are you getting that? Where does that come from?
Jim: Well, you just basically dig in the ground. It's on the surface of the planet. The two largest deposits are in the California Mojave desert in a place called Boron, big surprise and also in Turkey. It exists really all around the world, which is a really good question because currently today we mine about a million tons of boron a year. It costs about $700 a metric ton.
In contrast, if you want to go buy tritium today, it costs about $30,000 a gram. A normal, like 500 megawatt DT power plant would require about 2 kilograms of tritium to operate for a year, which at those costs would be about $60 million. Now, obviously, that's why they want to breed their own tritium so they don't have to pay $60 million in fuel costs, but in a boron reactor, you could deliver a year's supply of boron in a pickup truck.
That also brings up a really interesting point. You don't need rail going to the power plant to deliver coal. You don't need pipelines to deliver gas. You could drop off a year's supply fuel with a helicopter. Also because the power plants are not radioactive in nature you could put them anywhere, you could put them where the people are. The reason that's important is because currently, our model is to build large producing power plants in the hundreds of megawatts and gigawatt level.
When you do that-- For instance, if you have a hydroelectric dam, it makes perfect sense. You're going to run transmission wires from Hoover Dam into Las Vegas and you're going to spread power around. Those high tension wires, they take a lot of space, they take a lot of copper and they have a lot of loss in terms of the power that leaves the power plant and gets to its destination.
If you could take a power plant and let's say a 100 megawatt, 200, 500-megawatt plant and drop it in the middle of New York City or New Delhi, then you don't have wires everywhere. You have a much more efficient model and that's the future that we see. We don't want to build a six-story tokamak that has to run wires out to 100 miles away. We'd rather build a bunch of modular power plants that you can drop wherever you need them.
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Chad: You've sold me on boron over tritium and deuterium because it requires less feedstock and it's cheaper. There are locational benefits because it's safer. You can cite it at locations that are closer to where humans are and that obviously then allows you to have less infrastructure to connect it to the grid. You've sold me on that, but one of the major challenges that has plagued fusion, obviously since its inception, is the fact that you actually require more energy input for the reaction than the output energy that you get from it, this is what is called scientific break even.
Jim: That's a misnomer. If you required more energy in than you got out of it, then obviously it's a non-starter, it doesn't work. That doesn't make sense. I understand where you're coming from. You're going to talk about Q.
Chad: Yes.
Jim: Right? Which is the ratio of power in to power out. It makes sense that you need to get to a Q of 5 or 10 before this starts to really work, which is 5 times more power out than you put in. The reason this constantly comes up is that the amount of power that you need to get hydrogen up to the temperatures we're talking about is tremendous.
When we create a plasma in our current machine, Norman, we're dealing with hundreds of megawatts, 500 to 700 megawatts of power that is used to run the magnets and to heat the plasma and to basically activate the particle beams, the neutral beams that we're using to fuel and help confine and control the plasma.
You need temperature, you need density, and you need duration of plasma to be able to get to the temperatures we're talking about to start fusing energy, but it is a tipping point. When you get to that point where the atoms and the fuel in your plasma cloud start to fuse, then things move in the right direction because remember the amount of energy that you're going to generate from a very small amount of fuel is just tremendous. It's an insane amount of energy. Put it this way. A stick of wood is like 24 BTUs. A chunk of coal is like 175, right?
That's like our history of using energy, right? Then we discover oil and oil is like one of the most energy-dense things on the planet. It's 5.8 billion BTUs for a barrel of oil. It's no mystery that why we used oil as we do. It's incredibly energy dense, but boron power is about a trillion times more dense than that because it's not a chemical burn. It's a nuclear reaction. It's basically the way the universe was put together.
Chad: Right. Let's stay on Q though, for a sec, because last year, the US Department of Energy, they have a national ignition facility. It set a fusion record it was at the time where they got a Q of F. There's still not Q over one. Right? They're still not getting a Q that's greater than one. They're still getting less energy out of the reaction than they required putting into it.
This was very short-lived. It was only for, I think, four billionths of a second. Where are you in that process for your technology?
Jim: Well, first of all, let me say this. I would say that any fusion solution, whether it be DT or helium three or boron that gets to net energy out or a Q greater than one and figures out how to create a thermal cycle or a direct capture cycle where we can convert this energy directly into electrons is a huge boon to society, no matter who does it. Whether it's a national lab or it's one of our competitors. There is an absolute need for our planet to come up with a carbon-free, safe source of energy.
DT fusion is much safer than nuclear fission because of the nature of tritium. It has 12 years half-life versus thousands of years. It's a very big difference, right? All fusion is better than any form of fission, but having said that, fission works today, and fusion does not. If we look at what has to be done, 73% of carbon that goes into the atmosphere is coming from burning fossil fuels. 35% of it is from electricity generation and 38% or 39% of it is from transportation.
We need to create electric vehicles, and we need to wean ourselves off of gas and coal. We need to get there quickly. We think that our approach is much, much more efficient than a Tokamak approach. I'll tell you the main difference. If you look at Tokamak approach, which is the majority of the companies out there pursuing fusion, including ITER and JET, and Commonwealth and others, and Tokamak Energy, you're talking about a doughnut-shaped reactor that is surrounded by magnets. It's a hollow doughnut.
Instead of jelly, you fill it with plasma or hydrogen, and deuterium and tritium plasma in their case. There's also a core magnet that goes up through the center of the doughnut. If you think about ring toss, this doughnut's sitting on the pole, that pole is an array of super-powerful superconducting magnets. The magnets, as I said, are used to create a gravitational force, which suspends the plasma inside of this tube. It rotates readily around this core.
We think that that's very complicated and you need a tremendous amount of magnetic power to maintain that. We thought it would be much easier. That's not true. Norman Rostoker, who was a PhD's assist at UCI, who was the technology co-founder of our company, who spent his entire career pursuing fusion with the intent of creating a commercial power plant said, "What if you take this toroidal shape and you cut it right in the middle and you stretch it out, just bend it out until it's straight into a cylinder pinch the ends, right?"
Now, we have a cylinder. Again, in this case, horizontal cylinder – lay down a bottle of wine if you will, and then take magnets and surround that with magnets. You've got less magnets, you've got less area in the cylinder. You still have the ability to control this plasma through two means. One means is the magnetic force that's being controlled on these magnets, these rings. The other thing are the neutral beams that are feeding the plasma and spinning the plasma in the direction we want it to spin.
It's incredibly different architecture. We have built five reactors. Norman was designed to get to a demonstration temperature of about 30 million degrees and sustained plasma. We have developed AI and machine learning technologies that can respond in a nanosecond to variances in the plasma. We obviously monitor the plasma through multiple diagnostic tools, such as lasers and other sensors and probes. We look at how the plasma is behaving.
If the plasma starts to tilt out of the way we want it to, we can make adjustments with the magnets or with the beams. It's basically like spinning a very, very hot football using a light saber. The longer you can spin it, ironically, what happens is that the plasma tends to get more stable the more energetic it becomes because it starts to create its own gravity and it gets hotter. Now, we have been able to sustain plasma for up to 30 milliseconds, which in plasma physics is an eternity. It's a lifetime.
We could go further if we were able to store more energy to keep it going because right now, the way we keep it going is through our neutral beams. That's what's spinning this plasma. We need to have more energy to get to higher temperatures so we could sustain it for about two or three seconds. That's what we're doing with our next reactor, which is Copernicus. Copernicus is going to be built in Irvine. We've broken ground on the new facility. We expect to have this machine up and running in 2025.
Chad: Copernicus is also a research reactor though, right? It wouldn't be commercially operable.
Jim: Correct. Yes. Copernicus is a research reactor, which is going to demonstrate what you're talking about, which is this holy grail of a Q greater than one. We're going to do that using just hydrogen. Again, we tend to veer away from using tritium because we don't want to irradiate our machines. When you do that, you really can't use them much longer. That's what happened with JET on a couple of occasions.
There's a lot of time involved in making the machine safe to operate again. We're going to demonstrate using accepted principles in the plasma physics arena that we can get to an energy of greater than one using just hydrogen. Then once we do that, all of the information we collect from Copernicus will inform the design of DaVinci, which is our first commercial prototype and that commercial prototype will be designed to actually put electrons to the grid.
Chad: Very humble names you choose as well for these reactors.
[laughs]
Jim: Well, they're rebels, they're people that buck the norm. What we're talking about, the old trope, which is, fusion's 30 years away and always will be. We've been at this since 1998. If we can prove net energy out in the next six years, then we've proven that fusion's 30 years away, right?
I think we're going to do it. We have a lot of confidence based on the data we've collected through the operation of Norman by using more powerful magnets and beams and more power that we can get to the temperature that we seek. Then once you can contain this plasma for long enough time, it's going to get up to the billion degrees we need to get it up to.
From the beginning, what set TAE apart and the reason I invested in the company back in 2000 is that the goal was always to build a commercial power plant. To build a power plant that is modular, that you can manufacture in volume, that you could put in shipping containers and ship around the world and stand them up and turn them on, it's a very, very different model than what you get with some of the large tokamaks that are currently being contemplated,
Chad: More distributed model. The commercial development, which I understand is a few years off, do you have a target price dollar per megawatt hour that can be achieved with fusion reactors?
Jim: Economics is what drives industry. It's what drives our whole world so if you can't create a power source that is competitive, then it's obviously not going to be adopted. We're seeing wind and solar get deployed because quite frankly, it's the lowest form of energy generation that exists today, which is great. The only problem with it is it's not dispatchable. To get to dispatchable energy that can compete with natural gas, let's say 5 cents a kilowatt, I think that's a reasonable goal.
We think we're going to be in the 5 to 7 cents kilowatt hour price range in the first generation machine. That generation machine is just thermal capture. Using the most advanced technology on the planet to generate energy, the most old-fashioned way possible by heating up water, and creating steam. What's more efficient in gen two will be the direct capture of photon energy within the reaction and converting that directly to electrons.
It may be a combination of the two which can bring this down well below 7 cents or a nickel per kilowatt. The original visionaries on fusion were contemplating energy that was too cheap to meter. The thing that's exciting about a fusion power plant is if you put it in almost any sovereign nation around the world, they're not going to have to go to war to get fuel. We mine a million tons a year. If we had 100,000 power plants in production, we would use 10% of that, of today's production to provide all the electricity that the world's going to need in 2050.
Chad: Germany and Europe wouldn't be dependent on Russian gas to heat their homes. Right?
Jim: What gets me excited about this is if you think about the mindset that we have as human beings, which is this mindset of scarcity. If I have it, you don't. I need to take it from you so I can have it. Energy is one of the things that people who have it take it for granted and people who don't have it will do just about anything they can to get it.
They'll burn dung, they'll burn wood, they'll cut down forests. They'll make charcoal out of old-growth trees. They'll do all kinds of things to get to the ability to cook their food, heat their houses, let alone generate electricity. We have 4.5 billion people on this planet living without access to reliable electricity. It's no coincidence that 4.5 billion people on the planet are living on less than $5 a day.
I live in the Northeast. I live in New York. If I didn't have electricity, I'd be spending all my summer chopping wood. I'd need like 40 cords of wood to get through the winter. I don't even think about that, but around the world, that's a reality. There are people that have to think about how they're going to heat their homes and how they're going to feed their families when energy becomes ubiquitous and it becomes super, super, super cheap to the point of it's almost not even worth charging for it from a national level, then everything can change.
You can have lights, you can have internet access, you can educate your kids, you can build a more informed workforce. To think about what it's going to take to convert the thousands of power plants that are in operation today rapidly to a clean energy alternative in the next 20 or 30 years, we're going to need a lot of people to do that and it's going to build a big economic opportunity.
Chad: Even today, several times more people are employed in the wind industry for instance, than in the coal industry so we're already creating those jobs in the renewable energy space today, but I do want to talk about how you see fusion fitting into the broader energy system with wind, solar, and storage. You mentioned how it could displace natural gas because it's flexible, it's rampable. How do you see it as part of the broader energy system, noting that we already do have some good technologies out there that are cheap, that are renewable, that are low carbon?
That the reason that they're not dispatchable wind and solar, or rampable in the way that we would like them to be is in part, because you can't store the energy that is produced during the periods of high resource to use when there are periods of low resource, but the battery technology is getting a lot cheaper as well. How does fusions fit into our broader energy future given our existing technology mix and the trajectory of it today?
Jim: Yes. Well, I think it's really important to be quite pragmatic about fusion. While fusion, I think is the holy grail that it is the perfect power for our planet, we're on a path to get there and we have to acknowledge that we're not there yet, so we have a path to perfect power if you will. The first thing we have to do is we have to really focus on efficiency. US power grid's about 40% efficient, it could be a lot better.
You talk about solar and wind not being dispatchable, to make it dispatchable, to make it a viable baseload power, we need to invest in all different types of storage, not just lithium-ion batteries because those are very expensive but hot rocks, molten salts – very different types of ways of storing the energy from wind and solar. Also, when you look at the physics of wind and solar, even if you can make a productive farm dispatchable through storage, it's still not going to scale enough to meet the demands of the planet, which is why we're still going to be burning natural gas and coal for years to come.
It's still why Germany's considering extending the life of a number of fission plants that they said they were going to turn off, for the reasons we mentioned before. They need energy. I think that we need to take a portfolio approach to the problems that we're trying to solve. We need to plan for fusion to be part of it, but we also need to make sure that we meet the demands of the planet today for electricity. I think fission plays a part.
I think that the new approaches to fission, more modular, scaled down, more portable, units that have a shorter half-life than what our traditional machines have had is a positive thing. I think that we also should accelerate investments in fusion so we can get there faster than 2030 or 2040. JFK said, "We're going to go to the moon in 1960," and we were there in '69. It took 400,000 Americans and about $250 billion in today's money to do it. Do you see that kind of effort going into fusion around the world? No.
Chad: That's what we're going to talk about is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER, which you mentioned a few times already, which is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering mega project, which is aimed at generating energy on earth in the same fusion processes the sun operates on. They're hoping to complete the first main reactor in about 2025. US, China, EU, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, all the big powers are behind it.
It has cost already about $20 billion. That's a very multinational public sector effort to create that man on the moon project that you mentioned previously. What are your thoughts on that project and how do public sector investment efforts like that fit into this broader ecosystem where you just raised $250 million for TAE to build your next research reactor, and those are commercial investors expecting a venture return on that. How do these two ecosystems coexist and support each other?
Jim: I would say one is an international effort to do substantial research and development in the areas of fusion, and I think there's a lot of value that comes out of that in terms of what we learned from their experiments, but it's also a very large bureaucratic undertaking that's been through a number of directors, and it's had a number of cost overruns and time overruns. If you take a look at pursuing fusion the way we do it, we're much more a technology company, a California Agile Technology company than we are a national laboratory.
If you compare the 400,000 people and the $25 billion ‘60s dollars that put a man on the moon to say SpaceX, which started in 2002 and put its first rocket in space in 2008, a considerably less money and now is actually landing rockets on barges autonomously. You get a lot more done when you have a very focused team of capable scientists and engineers. We have a very, very narrow mission and we have a very narrow architecture and idea. As I mentioned, we've got a field reverse configuration architecture. We've got boron as our fuel. We have not deviated from that in the 22 years that we've been in business, and we've made great progress towards that end. It's a very different mentality than a major international project.
Chad: Are there any other applications for your either particle beam accelerator or power management systems aside from electricity generation?
Jim: Well, yes. Let's talk about the path of perfect first. If you talk about efficiency, we view that the path of perfect is three major steps. Its efficiency, make the grid more efficient, support the electrification transition. Secondarily, it's prove that fusion works, which is what we're going to do with Copernicus in the next few years, and then thirdly, scale it out. Figure out a model, where we can deploy fusion energy around the globe equitably in very rapid order. On the efficiency front, the technology that we have developed in order to power a fusion reactor is quite substantial. Apparently, you can't call up Southern California Edison and say, "Hey, I need to draw down 750 megawatts in the next 50 milliseconds." [laughs]
They don't do that. It's not available. In fact, when you call them and tell them you plan on doing something like that, they say, "By the way, you're going to need to disconnect your building from the grid," which is what we've done. In the early days, we had a couple of seven-ton flywheels in the parking lot, that would spin up at 3000 RPMs. It's not like a jet turbine, we had to put it in a big enclosure, and the ground would rumble, and then we engage a clutch and you basically get on a bolt of lightning.
That's pretty primitive technology, but it's kinetic energy converted into electrons. Today, what we've done and what we have developed is a series of supercapacitors, and microinverters, and power electronics that allow us to draw power out of the grid, and store it up in incredible, incredible volumes. As I said, up to like 750 megawatts, and then dispatch that into our reactor over the course of like 30 milliseconds. We are putting out really huge amounts of energy in a very short period of time.
In so doing, we created one of the most perfect sinusoidal waves, which is the feedstock for an electric motor, and that actually falls right into the EV powertrain category. We've also developed ways to charge and discharge different types of battery chemistries more efficiently than anyone else on the planet. We filed patents for something we call pulse charging, which enables us to charge standard EV batteries four times faster than what's currently possible.
If you take our power management technology, and you apply it in the electric vehicle space, we could charge faster, we can deliver a better sine wave to the motor, which makes that motor perform better about 30% to 70% better, so it goes stronger. We can increase the range of the battery by 20% or so and also increase the life of the battery because we treat the battery in a more kind way. We manage the impedance or the heat of the battery so that the battery actually lasts 10% to 15% longer.
Chad: I hope you're talking to Elon Musk then. [laughs]
Jim: Well, he's welcome to license our technology. We'd be happy to talk to him. He's got some activities in the supercapacitor arena because when you're doing regenerative braking on a vehicle, most of that energy gets lost in the form of heat because the battery can't collect that energy quickly enough. Unless, of course, you have our microinverter technology to pulse that stuff into the battery, you can collect more of it, or you have a capacitor that maybe you have a supercapacitor to collect that energy, and then distribute it back into the battery. That's something he's looking at, but we think we have a solution for that right now.
On the power management side, we can make the most expensive component in an electric vehicle much less expensive. We can give you a smaller motor, you can use a smaller battery, or you can get greater range or greater performance. It's up to the car manufacturer to decide how that's going to work, but if you can reduce the cost of the battery, which is a third of the cost of a new electric vehicle, that's going to make a big difference in terms of making those things more affordable.
We think that's really important. On the storage side of things, our numbers work out to a levelized cost of storage which is about 20% cheaper than what's currently available today. That is through the management of charge and discharge of existing battery chemistries.
Chad: Excellent. Well, Jim, we're almost done here but first, we have something called the hot seat so we asked for your immediate quick thoughts to the following statements. One thing I changed my mind on is?
Jim: I actually changed my mind on what's possible. As a child of the technology industry growing up with the PC and then watching the iPhone, my father was a programmer for TRW and NASA, helped put a man on the moon. He had a four-bit processor. Today we got 64-bit processors and quantum computers. I think if we can dream it, we can make it happen.
Chad: Good answer. The person I've learned the most from is?
Jim: My wife.
Chad: Even better answer. When I need to recharge, I?
Jim: Play the guitar. Read a book.
Chad: The most insightful book or article I've read recently is?
Jim: Book would be The Overstory.
Chad: Aside from Climate Positive, my favorite podcast is?
Jim: Well actually, I'm probably a Radiolab, Studio 360 kind of guy. I like Radiolab.
Chad: If I weren't the CMO of TAE Technologies, I would be?
Jim: The janitor for TAE Technologies.
Chad: Loyal to the end.
Jim: Yes. I've held a lot of jobs. I've been a CEO, I've been a chairman of a board. I've been a programmer. I've been a product manager. I've had a lot of jobs. I've never had a job, more fun than this one because every morning I get up thinking that we're going to make a difference. That we're going to do something that's going to impact not just this decade, but the world for centuries to come.
Chad: Star Trek or Star Wars?
Jim: Yes, I'm afraid I have to say Star Wars because I worked at Lucasfilm so I don't have a choice.
[laughs]
Chad: We talked about the Wrath of Khan though, too, so I didn't know.
Jim: Yes, well, you're right. I mean, Wrath of Khan was definitely the best Star Trek film ever.
Chad: Finally, to me climate positive means?
Jim: Climate positive means being a good passenger on planet Earth. It means being a responsible member of our diverse community of plants and animals and humans.
Chad: Well, Jim, thanks again for joining us today. This was a great and fascinating discussion. I really enjoyed it and appreciate your time--
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I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.