Dennis Whyte

So this is where we have to be careful, though, you say commercial fusion.

You know, what does that mean?

Commercial fusion to me means that you actually have a known quantity about what it costs, what it costs to build, and what it costs to operate, and the reliability of putting energy on the grid.

That's commercial fusion.

So it turns out that that's not necessarily exactly the first fusion devices that put electricity on the grid because there's a learning curve to get better and better at it.

But that's probably, I would suspect, the biggest hurdle is to get to the first one.

Absolutely.

So actually, this is why I'm encouraged about fusion.

So fusion's still hard, let's let everyone be clear, because of the science underneath it of achieving the right conditions for the plasma basically is a yardstick that you have to put up against all of them.

What's encouraging that I see in this, and it's actually what happens when you sort of let loose the creativity of this, is maybe I'll go back to first principles.

So fusion is also fairly strange.

So if you think about building a coal, like burning wood and coal and gas is actually not that much different from each other.

Because they're kind of about the same physical conditions and you get the fuel and you light it and da-da-da.

Fusion is very, remember I told you that there's this condition of the temperature, which is kind of universal.

But if you take the density of the fuel between magnetic fusion and inertial fusion, they're different by about a factor of 10 billion.

So this, and the density of fuel really matters.

And actually, so does the, this means energy confinement time is also different by a factor of 10 billion as well too, because it's the product of those two.

So one's really dense and short lived and the other one's really long lived and actually under dense as well too.

So what that means is that the way to get the underlying physical state is so different among these different approaches.

What it lends itself to is, does this mean that eventual commercial products will actually fill different needs in the energy system?