Twilio & Inertia Co-founder, Jeff Lawson: Is Nuclear Fusion The Holy Grail of Energy?

Thank you very much, Cam. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Well, that's a great question. You know, I had been interested in curious about fusion for a very long time. Starting with just I took a bunch of physics classes in college. And you know, the reason is obvious, right? The promise of fusion is that if you can have cheap energy that is made out of abundant resources on Earth that will never run out, that is both clean and safe. Right? This is the perfect, this is the holy grail of humanity's energy needs. And if you succeeded at bringing this to market, you could transform not just, you know, everyone thinks about electricity as the number one thing and bringing down rate at the meters, which you certainly can. And obviously put out, you know, zero emissions doing so. Um, you think about the use for AI data centers in today's age. Obviously, everybody is worried about the role that AI data centers are going to play in the grid and having enough energy for them and making sure that energy isn't dirty. But not only that, you can transform other industries, too. The heat generated by a fusion reaction is so high quality and so high temperature, you could use it to green the concrete industry, the steel industry, plastics, glass, all these industrial domains that run these blast furnaces that are emitting tons of carbon into the environment, you could instantly green all of these industries. Okay, so you know, what's preventing this? Well, it turns out that for 75 years, people have been wanting to make fusion work. It's just that the science hasn't cooperated. Humanity just doesn't know enough about the behavior of these plasmas at extreme temperatures to make it work. And at a high level for anyone who isn't familiar with fusion, fusion is the act of taking light atoms like hydrogen isotopes usually and under intense pressure and heat getting them to fuse into a helium atom. And just like fission where you take these big heavy elements and split them, when you fuse two light elements together, they also release a ton of energy. And so, this has been the promise. So, several years ago, about 40 years ago, there was a breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Lab here in California where I am. And this breakthrough was the first time that any experiment, any device, anywhere in the world actually succeeded in creating energy. It gave off more energy than it took the experiment to start. Because people have known how to create fusion reactions for 75 years. It just always takes more energy to get the little bit of fusion energy out and a ton of energy in. It just makes no economic sense for why you would ever do this. But this experiment at Lawrence Livermore was the first time that scientists ever got one of those experiments to give off more energy than it took to.

I mean, that for the world, that was the eureka moment. It was a huge thing. Anyway, so after moving on from Twilio, I was curious just to learn more about fusion and see where this whole thing is going. And I managed to connect with the lead designer of the experiment, the person who actually created all the parameters that allowed it to come together and finally work. This woman, Dr. Annie Krikorian. And I was chatting with her about, you know, where all this is going. And I was expecting after this huge announcement, I mean, it really was a huge announcement. One, you know, like a true global. It should probably win the Nobel Prize. I was expecting to a few months later read, oh and then there was this spin-out and now there's a company or some startup that's going to commercialize this amazing technology and I never read about such a company. And I was really curious to understand why. So I was talking to Annie and she said, she said, yeah I don't really understand it either but I'm not a business person and so I don't know why no one is commercializing it but I've been told that people just think it's too expensive to commercialize this technology. So they're continuing to look at other ways that have never actually worked but people think maybe will work one day. And I was like, what that seems a bit odd like this eureka moment for society after 75 years they made it work and everyone's kind of ignoring it for commercial purposes. Well, why is that? And what I found were two reasons that people generally gave. They said you know first of all so the way the experiment works is they take this tiny little target of fuel. It's about that big about the size of a peppercorn. And they hit this tiny little thing full of deuterium and tritium which are just two isotopes of hydrogen. And they hit it with the world's largest laser from all sides. They hit it with all this laser light, megajoules of energy in this one pulse. And if you get it just right you compress this little sphere of fuel down to this tiny thing and inside you've created now huge temperatures and pressures that allow you to actually create that fusion then and then it creates all this energy. And so the story was the reason why you couldn't commercialize it was because oh well building a laser for a plant scale endeavor has to be a much bigger laser, a much more efficient laser and it's made out of diodes. And people said, oh these diodes are so expensive. In fact, to try to build a power plant out of this will cost you a hundred billion dollars because these laser diodes are so expensive and you need so many of them. And I kind of look at this and said, oh well that's a lot of money right a hundred billion dollars. What's the deal with these diodes? And I go look into it just to understand this better, and it turns out that this particular kind of laser diode that you would need is this tiny cottage industry. It's this, you know, there's only a few use cases for it. The total output of the global industry of this particular kind of diode is 0.1% of what you would need the industry to be for building a plant. Okay. So, I'd have to scale up this diode, this semiconductor fabrication industry by about a thousand X what it is today to go build a plant. And a lot of people are like, 'Well, see, that's the reason why you can't do it.' I was like, 'Well, actually, that's the whole name of the game, right? If it's too expensive and it's this tiny scale thing today, and we scale it up a thousand X, guess what? We all know what happens when you scale up semiconductor fabrication by orders of magnitude, the cost go like that, right? It's simple. Now, it's not simple. There's a lot of work to go do, but the economics of semiconductor scaling are well understood. So, I was like, 'Okay, well, that seems like a solvable problem on the grand scheme of things, you know, compared to solving basic science problems that have eluded humanity for 75 years. Scaling up a little corner of the semiconductor industry with well-known process like okay, that seems easy.' All right, what's the other problem? There's another problem people said. They said, 'You know, Jeff, these targets that they shoot, each one costs half a million dollars to make. And in order to create energy, you're shooting these targets 10 times a second. And each time you hit them, they explode and give off all this energy, so you need to replace it. And so, they're like, 'Jeff, you're going to blow up $5 million a second. How are the economics of this power plant ever going to work out?' And I said, you know, I was like, 'Well, yeah, that doesn't sound very good. I don't know I'm blowing up $5 million a second. Okay. What's the deal with these targets?' And start looking into it, and I'm like, 'Okay, there's only really four components to these targets. You can make these out of fairly cheap materials. It's not like the materials cost. Okay, like why are they so expensive? And I'm talking to Annie and I say, 'How many of these targets, you know, a year do you guys shoot?' And she says, 'Six.' I'm like, 'What? Six million? Six billion?' She's like, 'No, no. Six. We run this experiment about every other month. And each time, by the way, we're doing science. We're not just doing the same thing every time. We're trying to learn new things all the time. So, every time we make one of these targets, it's different. Slightly different specifications in order to learn and see if we can make the experiment work even better.' And I'm like, 'Oh, I know what these are called. Prototypes. You guys are prototyping in the lab. That's what you're doing, right? You're making a bunch of different variations, each a little different, to see if you can get it to work.' And I'm like, 'Okay, well, then what do you do when you have a prototype you like and you want to bring it to market?' Well, you go take it and go figure out how to make it in a factory. And when you do, you now amortize the cost of, the targets aren't that expensive to make. They're just expensive because you're amortizing big fixed costs over six units. So, now you got to amortize your costs over millions or billions of units and that's how the economies of scale kick in. And in fact, these things can be made quite cheaply. You just have to figure out like all the process steps to go take something that's done by hand today and automate it. And it turns out that there are a lot of people in the world, in fact, many of them right down the street from where we are in the Bay Area, that work at places like Apple, that every single year are figuring out how do I bring some product to market with some new specifications that no one's ever made before, and we got to figure out how to take some designer's whim and turn it into a billion units at a price point and a yield and everything else. So, I was like, this is another thing that is, you know, not easily solved.

Well, and that's what we set out to prove. What we set out to prove. So we started in inertia to go with the first step, prove that those two things that people thought were impediments to commercialization are in fact false.

Well, it's mostly about building up a supply chain and doing process development. For example, we've got to figure out how to scale up these diodes. We're partnering with the major laser diode vendors in the world and basically doing process development with them and say, 'Okay, well, you know, this part of the process here to make it is, you know, using a 3-inch wafer. Okay, what do we need to go take that up to a modern 6-inch wafer process. Or hey, this assembly step because, you know, you have to hold package them and process them after you make the semiconductors. Okay, well, that step is done manually today by a person in a lab because the demand is so low, there's no incentive to go automate it.' Okay, but if you look at scaled things that we make, it's all automated. The whole end-to-end process is completely automated. Okay, well, what do we need to do to go automate this process? And like build robotics in and automation and increase batch sizes and things like that. And so it's basically bringing the best practices that everything we've learned about fabricating semiconductors and consumer electronics in other disciplines and just bring them into this one.

Look, I'm not going to say they're wrong. I'm not smart enough to know if what they're doing is going to work or not. All I would say is that given the choice when it's time to go commercialize, given the choice between an approach where the physics is well understood and well known.

Yeah, that's the inertial confinement fusion. In fact, it's I think people often confuse the fact that because this one experiment worked, all that says is the very pretty specific conditions that they created there are now a well-understood regime. But, if you change things too much, now suddenly you've wandered back into the realm of unknown physics. And so, one of the things that Inertia focuses on is making sure that all the things we do in order to create this scale-up, we are always staying within the boundaries of what is this known physics regime. And it's a very specific one. You hit a certain kind of target with a certain kind of laser pulse. We know it works. That took 75 years to figure out. Okay, so one of the principles of our company is number one, start with understood physics. Number two, don't mess up the physics. And so, that's kind of how we think about the problem. And in fact, you know, our road map is actually pretty simple. You know, step one, start with known physics. Number two, go build the world's most powerful and most energetic laser. Number three, go build the world's first fuel fusion fuel target assembly line, like a factory. And then, after you figure those two things out, go build them into the first-of-a-kind power plants to actually bring all these technologies together and produce energy. And so, that's really our road map. It's quite simple.

Well, I think you'll see is, you know, fusion is going to it is really the holy grail of humanity's energy needs, right? So, a lot of the consternation that we have about our energy being either too expensive, too dirty, or too unsafe, or non-renewable, those all go away. And so, I think what you'll see is a lot of the consternation around climate at least from the corner of the production, which is either based on burning petroleum in cars, now that we have EVs, whether it is how we get electricity to our home, whether it is how we are creating concrete, plastic, steel, all these things can now be clean industries with zero emissions. And between all of these things, you've now chipped away at the major sources of our climate problems. And so, not only does energy get cheaper, it also gets better in terms of every attribute you can possibly look at for where we get our energy. And even things that are impossible today become possible, like you can have desalinization everywhere you need clean drinking water, because suddenly the energy you need to power it is essentially cheap and clean. And so, you know, the other thing, by the way, is there's no unlike fission plants, we have proliferation risk and things like that. There's nothing in fusion that could allow you to create weapons, create national security problems, and even the inputs to it are so commodity that we will never run out of them. In fact, you could power your entire life's energy needs with a bathtub full of water and a single laptop battery worth of lithium. That's how efficient this process is. Can you imagine that?

Well, the thing that I agree with there is the best form of energy. In fact, you know, if you think about it, the most effective way of scaling up energy over the last 50 years, give or take, has been solar and batteries. And there's a particular reason why. It's because we can make them in factories. You know, unlike big fission plants or even geothermal projects or even wind projects or hydro, these are all big projects where each project is a bespoke implementation. And that's why they're slow, expensive, usually end up costing five times as much as the designers said it was going to cost at the beginning of the project. That's what makes them so hard. But, solar and batteries have the amazing property which is we make them in factories. And so, you can get better and better at them. There's a learning curve. And if each panel gets twice as efficient and effective and half the cost every five or 10 years, you can see these curves kick in. That is really powerful. Now, the thing about solar and battery is there's only so much of the earth's surface that we're going to devote to taking over with solar panels. You know, and if that wasn't the case, like if it wasn't the societal pushback on we don't want solar panels absolutely everywhere because they can be an eyesore or whatever, then I think you'd already see solar having taken over our grid. You just haven't seen it happen because there's enough pushback. And so, certainly there are great applications of solar in places where there is a lot of sunlight and not a lot of people. Like that's where you see it spring up. But, in places where there isn't as much sunlight or there is more population density. And it turns out electricity is hard to move. So, you really do need your power generating somewhat close to your population centers because it's lost. You lose energy across transmission. And I think that's why and I think that also the inputs to solar and batteries and batteries in particular, at least today's chemistries, you know, you do start to look at it and say, 'Wow, we actually start to run into the availability of the materials needed to make these batteries.' Now, we're not close to those limits today, but if you really try to deploy these resources at societal scale, you would start to say, 'Hey, look, we actually don't have the right amount of these elements at least available in any reasonable way to produce as much battery as we need.' Now, over a long enough horizon, sure, battery chemistries can evolve and change and become easier to produce. So, I think it's a combination. In fact, I think that 50 years from now there will be two sources of energy on the grid. There will be solar plus battery

And there will be fusion energy.

And there will be no need to produce anything else.

Because solar and battery will be an effective way but I think fusion will be cheaper, easier to deploy, and actually just much more available in terms of its inputs. And so, I think you will see those two forms win out.

I think there is a bit of that going on, yes. Frankly, I think you do see nation states where we're living in a world now where the war in Ukraine showed people that the global market for energy is not one we can take for granted because energy was cut off to a lot of Western Europe and people realized the precarious position they might be in. And so I think that's why you see a lot of geopolitical concerns driving this race towards new forms of energy. And in fact, you see the Chinese are investing a lot in fusion. Your government, the British government actually has just put a few billion pounds to work to develop fusion domestically for you. The Germans have been investing a lot because they have already committed to divesting themselves of fission plants. Kind of related around the time when their energy needs got more complicated by their supplier of gas which turns out was Russia. So, you know, you see a lot of geopolitical concerns here driving the need for every country to want to make sure that they are energy independent or they have a reasonable path to get there. And you just can't do that with natural resources that don't exist everywhere, not everywhere has coal, gas, had dinosaurs a few hundred million years ago. And so everyone's got to go figure out, okay, what is something that we can power our society with that we do have domestically. And it turns out water and a little bit of lithium, most people can get their hands on those things. And so fusion is a great natural resource. In fact, compared to fission which I agree is having a resurgence because of AI and everything else, but again, the inputs to it, you know, highly enriched uranium. That turns out that isn't everywhere. And even if it was everywhere, how to enrich it and whether the world wants you to enrich it is a whole other question. And that's why fusion is such a compelling technology for humanity.