Engineering the Future of Fusion

Pushkin. When did you get the fusion bug? When'd you fall in love with fusion?

It probably goes back to middle school or before, you know, and when a lot of kids would go out and play on the playground, I'd go to the library and read about particle accelerators and fusion reactors, and so, you.

Know, I think I think the bug was that pretty early.

This is Greg Pifer. He's the co founder and CEO of a company called Shine.

And I watched shows like Star Trek and you know, certainly even like Star Trek the Next Generation where my moral compass was set. H.

Yeah, So like, tell me the fusion dream. I mean, we'll get to like why. It's going to take a while and it's hard, but just like, why is fusion the dream?

Yeah?

So fusion essentially, it like to me, it represents a level up moment for humanity. When we can commercially unlock it, our species will be changed forever. And it's very similar. It's very akin to when we first started to access chemical energy through fire.

So I thought you were going to say fossil fields. We're just saying that's bigger than fossil fuels. It's fire, it's it's biggest fire. Yeah, so it's not going to happen for a long time. But like, what does the world look like when we get to the fusion dream?

Yes, so as technology continues to improve, energy becomes cheaper and cheaper.

Fuel is no longer an issue.

So fundamentally, today fuel is the issue that would prevent us from making energy super cheap. We just have to continue to work to extract fusionis I have that problem? So technology gets higher, the reactors get cheaper, and and fusion becomes super cheap. Now we can solve problems that we couldn't solve before. You know, we can we can desalinate water on a massive scale, like we can. You know, we can pull out minerals from the Earth very very carefully.

Yeah, exactly right.

So that's that's that's always the secret little motivation behind the scenes.

I mean, also, I have a three year old daughter, right like, and I want to give her a world that's okay to live in.

I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. People who are into technological progress and who dream big tend to be into fusion, a kind of nuclear power that could be safer and cheaper than fission, which is the way we get nuclear power now. By the way, as you probably know, fusion is fusing atomic

I took a class actually in college that was taught by two very inspiring people, one of whom ran something called the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, and another one named Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the Moon. And they were teaching a class about going into space and recovering resources, and recovering fusion fuel was one of the key resources they thought we could extract from from space,

So the promise of nuclear energy without nuclear waste.

And these people were doing it like on the front edge of it got me really excited.

I actually went to the Moon to bring it back.

Right, right, Like, these people have done hard things, so I'm going to go learn with them. Yeah, and so that got me into fusion. But you know, for me, it was a different experience. And if I had done a physics space program in fusion.

Like more practical, more hands on, is that that?

Yeah, this was an engineering program.

And the Fusion Technology Institute, which I joined, its mission was to design viable fusion reactors. It was to say, let's assume the physics challenges are overcome, how would you build a real system?

And that's where over the next few years, I just.

Became a bit depressed, frankly, because even if you master the physics, it became really clear that the challenge of commercializing and making heat for five cents per kilo whatot hour, which is sort of the going rate for it, I couldn't see.

A way to do that.

And it was because you're taking some of the most exotic materials ever developed by humans and putting them in the harshest environments ever created by humans, and they don't live very long, and they're super expensive to make, and so the idea that we could go straight to five cents per kilo whatt hour, at least when I was in school, seemed far fetched.

So that it's sort of a technoeconomic problem you're thinking of, not just the technical side, but if people are actually going to use it, it has to be price competitive.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so you get sad. You get sad because as your Star Trek dream doesn't seem like it's going to come true. And then, as I understand it, you go to a party and you have your big idea. Is that true?

That is the history.

It was a party at my house and we were thinking about well, I mean, most people weren't thinking about this, but I had been working on this problem earlier in the day, so it was already kind of in my head.

And it came down to our research. You know.

I had done work on a specific technology at the UW where we were trying to make small fusion devices, and the idea is that there were a number of applications you could use them for and they didn't work very well.

And one of the reasons we discovered they didn't work very.

Well was we were trying to collide these nuclei in the same space that we were trying to speed them up.

Okay, so you just shoot them really fast into each other as the.

Basic Yeah, but the problem is, like, if you're trying to make something go fast in a highly collisional space where it's running into stuff a lot, it can't really speed up. It's banging into stuff and losing energy all the time. And if you take away that the target material so that you can accelerate them, then it's not colliding very much and you don't get a lot of

Yeah?

I was.

I was at one point.

There were all kinds of people standing around with drinks, and I was sitting in one of our recliners my laptop, punching numbers into it, and I just actually built a really quick model to just see what the fusion rate would do if we did that in theory, and the numbers came out amazing, like actually it was like, you know, a thousand times higher than the output we were getting from our university experiment, and so, you know, like I

Go do this.

Were you sober, I probably had had.

A couple drinks by then.

Actually, so it's amazing that I got the math right, but I did, or maybe it helped.

Maybe there's like a curve right, maybe there's an optimal number of efficts.

There certainly is when it comes to bowling. So why not nuclear physics as well?

Yes, so you have this idea. When you have this idea, do you think, oh, I've solved fusion energy.

This physics revelation.

It doesn't overcome the technoeconomic challenge of fusion energy that I already had. And so that was already like I had already moved past that, and I was trying to see if there were ways, like what I had put in the back of my head, where are there ways you can make use of fusion, you know that where you might get paid more for the reaction then you get paid for energy.

So tell me about having this idea of like, oh, maybe there's a way to commercialize fusion to do something other than generate energy.

Yeah, So two formative experiences.

One, my advisor at the Fusion Technology Institute had identified a family, like, you know, a couple dozen probably applications where you could use fusion for non electric applications, and they hadn't really done the economic analysis on any of them, but they just said, here are some things you can do with fusion reactions, and those included things like making medical isotopes or detecting hidden material or you know, contraband material, detecting nuclear weapons, stuff like that.

So, to be clear, those are things that people are already doing out in the world, right There is a market for those things. These are existing products. They're just not using fusion too exactly.

Yeah, super definable markets, you know, and there are supply chain issues, and it's a good market to get into if you had an alternative way to make things.

Okay, So that was interesting.

And then the other formative experience for me, it was Actually we had started another company when I was in grad school that had nothing to do with any of this, but we were just recovering data from crashed hard drives. One of my roommates had a hard drive crash. We looked online. All the options sucked. It was like, pay us two thousand dollars and we'll try, but maybe we

Will grow with us.

So we'll move this ecosystem forward. And I really like that because if you look at some of the most high tech deep tech industries around, they followed the same roadmap, you know, if you look at semiconductors and More's law.

Now more recently, Tesla is the classic model of that.

Right.

They started with the Roadster, this super expensive, exactly electric car that was not for everybody, but enough people bought it that they could go from the whatever that was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars car to the seventy thousand dollars car to the fifty thousand dollars car. Right, yeah, exactly.

And I'd argue that the underlying technology for Tesla started even in other industries. So the ability to scale batteries even more cheaply, right, Like it's rechargeable batteries. So you started with toys and special services, and you move to laptops, and then you move to EV's and even once you get into evs, you do this where you build an expensive thing that few people buy.

So you have the idea of applying this framework to fusion, which is quite different. Right, there are all these other people, people who are raising lots of money to go straight at making electricity basically right, make the energy. Yeah, Like why I don't know, Like why is anybody else doing it the way you're doing it?

I think there's a there's it's a very exciting proposition to be able to go straight to energy. It's it's very inviting and it sounds very appealing and even if the odds are long, But I don't know how many of them have really spent time critically thinking about the engineering challenges. And that's where my education was just different, Like that's all we thought about. Like all we thought about were the engineering.

Challenges and how to overcome them.

Like these were university people that are super optimistic, right, like yeah, and we worked like we developed materials for first walls and things like that. But like everything we did till broke really fast and it was really expensive stuff. So you know, it's just that was different for a different experience for me, different formative experience for me than for a lot of people who are trying to go straight to the end.

Now.

I do think there are some innovative concepts out there, you know that if they work, and I say if because the physics is far from proven, but if they work, they could simplify a lot of the engineering challenges. But the main concepts we know that are likely to work will run into these challenges. They're very, very significant.

Meaning that even if the physics work, actually building a thing at a reasonable cost is going to be super hard.

Yeah, I think that's that's my view.

So you actually did start a business and are selling things, right, yes, using fusions to do stuff that people will pay for. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about where the company is today, and then we can talk about where you're about to be, and then we can talk about where hopefully you'll be in some number of decades. What are you sell them today?

We sell neutrons, and neutrons took.

Me a little while when I started, and then I thought, well, you know, I buy electrons. I buy electrons every time I turn on a left switch. Right, I'm just to buying electrons. Tell me about the new neutron business, like, what does that mean?

Yeah, and I'll translate it. So we sell fusion.

We just sell fusion to the highest bidders, and the highest bidders are not people who buy energy. And so it turns out the easiest fusion reaction to do is DT fusion, and DT fusion produces energy on the one hand, but it produces neutrons on the other, and when sold to certain customers, the neutrons are far more valuable than the energy.

So, just to be clear, DT fusion is just two different isotopes of hydrogen, right, And they may tum helium and then they throw off some number of neutrons, which is just the neutral nuclear particle. And you're saying, there's people who actually have a use for neutrons, yes, okay.

Yeah, it turns out and they'll pay a ton for it and so uh. And generally the historical neutron sources for these are very specialized fission reactors, so research reactors.

Okay, so more traditional nuclear reactor.

Because fission reactors throw off neutrons too, and as we've talked about already, fissions much easier than fusion from a science perspective. And so there's these old reactors that serve these industries. But the research reactor fleet that we built in the past is old.

It's like sixty plus.

Years old and essentially dying in general. So markets that have been served by these reactors are losing that capacity. On top of that, fusion based approaches are much cheaper than building new reactors, So as you look to replace the infrastructure, there's a massive edge for fusion there. And when we looked at the markets, you know, we did

Which is the classic business question? Yes, every business needs to answer to survive. How could our revenues be greater than our costs?

Yeah, and that's how we have seen deep tech scale, right Like that is the playbook by which it's scale. So we pursued that, and you know, we found actually customers. So you know, if you do a kill, what our effusion? If you produce a kill, what our fusion heat? And you can sell that for five cents. Let's say if you if you took the same neutrons generated by that killow what hour of fusion reactions? There are customers who would pay two hundred thousand dollars for it.

Huh. And so that's a massive difference.

And so are you in fact selling those neutrons for two hundred thousand dollars?

Yeah?

Now is that your business?

We are?

And who is buying them? And what are they doing with them.

Yeah, so they're making airplanes safer. You know, they're making rockets more reliable.

What is the link between buying neutrons from you and making airplanes safer?

All right?

So modern engines and jet aircraft operate to get very high efficiency and very high power.

They operate in a really high temperature.

In fact, they operate like twenty percent above the melting point of the blades in the engine.

I'm glad I didn't know that.

And now I'm going to tell you something that gets even more scary.

So the way they manage that is they suck cold air in from the front of the engine and they pipe it through a series of cooling tubes in each fin, like embedded in each fin. And the manufacturing process is such that it's fairly common that one of these cooling tubes is blocked, okay, And if it's blocked, it will melt, it will imbalance the engine and possibly destroy it. And so we don't want that to happen truly, but with modern materials, and those are materials that X ray or ultrasound.

Do not interact with heavily. So if you try to see inside these things with conventional techniques, you cannot see the defect.

So just to be clear, you make this engine and then you want to look inside to make sure that these cooling tubes are not blocked so that it doesn't melt and the plane crashes. And so you think, well, we could use extra A or ultra sound too common technologies, but you're saying those don't work. But there's some way you can shoot neutrons at it and see inside of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is so.

So neutrons have you know, they have a characteristic of There are certain isotopes, so certain materials in nature that absorb neutrons like crazy, like okay, and you can put

It's like an X ray, it's like a neutron. X rays you see.

The inside of stuff, but neutrons can see things X ray can't, and it's actually very complementary. X ray is good at generally heavy materials. Neutrons are generally good at seeing light materials.

And so are you in that business now?

We are. Yeah.

Yeah, We'll do tens of thousands of parts, you know, in a year, and we're replacing essentially age capacity. So the biggest imaging reactor in the United States shut down about two years ago, was run by GE And so there's this nice tailwin for share acquisition here. It's not just a way for us to make money in fusion, but a lot of the customers sort of just come to us proactively because they're very worried about the future of the supply chain.

Uh huh. So they send you the blades. You have a facility, they send you the blades.

They do, and we give them back pictures with the blades.

Yeah, okay, so that's the business you're in. It seems like the next big step is getting into the medical isotope business.

Right, You're building a yeah, yeah, okay, and just on the other thing, there are many others.

So turbine blades are just one application.

There's a lot of other parts and components that we validate, including radiation hardness testing and electronics, et cetera. But yeah, the next step, and it required a huge reduction in the cost per neutron. We had to get the cost per neutron down one thousandfold to make the next step work.

So this is important right now. The whole arc you're trying to follow is like, let's do one thing where we can make a lot of money, and then let's do the next thing where they'll actually pay us less. So we have to figure out how to do it a thousand times cheaper for it to be profitable.

Yeah, but they'll buy a lot more neutrons, and so the market opportunity is actually, you know, let's call it ten to twenty times larger than the test opportunity in total.

And so even though they're paying you less, they're buying so many more utrons that you know, you make more money.

We'll be back in just a minute. The next step for Shine for Gregg's company is to start using neutrons to create medical isotopes. Medical isotopes, as it turns out, are widely used in medical imaging. To get into that business, Shine is building what's basically a factory that's going to use fusion to create medical isotopes. They call the factory Chrysalis.

And this is Chrysalis behind me, by the way.

Okay, so, and it's not a picture for people who are listening. It's like out there, there's a bunch of grass and there's a bill thing. Just it looks like a rectangle, a cement rectangle over your shoulder.

That's over half a billion dollars of invested capital, is what it.

Over cement rectangle. So tell me about what's going on in there. Yeah.

So, essentially, we needed to get the cost per neutron down. We did. We demonstrated that back in twenty nineteen.

And what we knew we could do then is if we got it that cheap, instead of using neutrons just to examine material.

We can use it to change material.

Okay, in a sense that nuclear engineers call it transmutation, but like the common population would think of it as alchemy, you can use neutrons to turn low value materials into I'm going to call them hyper valuable materials and I'll tell you why in just a second. So at small scale, the most interesting markets for these are in medicine, producing isotopes used for medicine.

Which turns out to be wildly common, right, like medical isotopes I learned, you know researching for this show are like what tens of thousands of people a day in the US are tested with medical.

Fifty million per year around the world. Yeah, yeah, so they're super common. And again, just like in the testing business where we're replacing fission reactors, that's how isotopes have been made in the past.

So old research.

Reactors around sixty years old, and you know they're dying, right, like the infrastructure is going away, and so it's the same tail when we just needed to get fusion a lot cheaper to do it.

And is it right that in a kind of crude way, the use is analogous in many cases that that medical isotopes are used for scanning, but you're scanning people instead of jet airplane blades.

Yeah, the mechanism is a little bit different, so, but it's the same idea, right, like so, and it fits our whole theme of illumination around the company, right In one case, we're illuminating defects here, we're illuminating disease.

Eventually will be illuminating the planet, right with good.

That's good metaphor.

Yeah, yeah, but you know, so what you do is you've got enough neutrends now that you can turn. You can change materials, so you can take things that are really stable, like uranium. You buy it for six dollars a gram, turn it into an imaging isotope molybdenum ninety nine, which is worth like one hundred and fifty million dollars a gram presuly.

People buy it in very very very small pounce.

Yeah they do, but you know it's a dose for a patient is like one tenth of one microgram, right, Yeah.

I mean if it's one hundred and fifty million a gram and you're making it in a five hundred million dollar building, you don't have to make much of it exactly to deeve your cost of capital.

Yeah, And Krystalist will produce a few grams per year that's it.

Wow, that's extraordinary. So it's like like a few grams is like a little cup, not even just like a sugar spoonful sugar package.

You dump in your coffee.

That's a few grams, but that's millions of doses.

Yeah, yeah, so one gram is ten million doses is essentially that I think about it.

That is wild. Can we just just have that be wild for one moment? Okay?

Go on?

So you know, for in the US, for example, most of the testing is to look at blood flow in the heart. If you're having chest pain, doctors will give you this test to see if your arteries are blocked or where the muscle is receiving blood and where it's not, and but also for staging cancer. And there's probably another two dozen tests all that use this on a skin.

So that's what you're going to be making. Like, tell me about the tell me about the business end of chrysalis, of that facility over your should, Like what's it look like in there where you're actually doing the fusion.

So there's a bunch of machines. So there'll be six fusion machines in Chrysalis. They're built and they're you know,

So you're actually using fusion to drive a fission reaction that make the thing that you want precisely. Yeah, it's like a nuclear turned ducan, yeah, versus.

Using fission to drive a fission reaction. And the difference is cost. If you were to look at building a new research reactor to do what Chrysalis does, you're probably at something like five to ten times the cost when it's all said and done. So fusion turns out to be much cheaper and much safer, and it produces about, you know, somewhere between one and five percent the radioactive waste of a reactor, so much much cleaner.

And is it right that there have actually been shortages of the isotope that you're going.

To be making all the time. Yeah, it goes, and it's been going on for fifteen years.

And so how close are you to opening what has to happen? There's a building behind you, but it's not on yet.

Right, the equipment is almost all entirely here in Jamesville. We need to install it, we need to commission it, and then we need to start pushing product out of it.

When are you going to get the first neutron? I won't say out the door, but you know when you're gonna get the When you're going to make the first neutron?

Well, the first neutrons are actually like being made in a smaller building to the side that we used to practice. But the first isotopes should be made in about eighteen months.

Okay, so like end of next year, yeah, I think.

And there's a big difference between first isotope produced and actually commercial readiness.

Yeah. Well, and your whole thing is techno economics, right, the first isotope produced where the unit economics are profitable for you?

Yes, you know, and I would say that's probably more likely two years. But this is a plant that no one's ever built before with technology that we have tested in the lab. But you know when you build a working machine that has thousands of moving parts and we've derisked all the.

Home Yeah, I'm totally willing to believe that it won't work.

Oh, it will work, But the things that are going to break and burn us are like you know well.

Or that it won't be economical, right, like, nobody has ever done anything like what you are doing before.

Yeah, it'll be economical.

I think the question is for me is like I'm worried about things like valves. We have hundreds of valves in this plant, and they might have a very low failure rate, right Like, but if the failure rates one percent on hundreds of valves, you're going to have a lot of problems.

You got always is going to have broken falst This is your engineering training.

Yeah, it's exactly right. Like I've got an earlier models.

And a Tesla, an old Tesla.

Yeah, Yeah, the motor runs fantastically. The car is still super fun to drive. It's got one hundred and seventy thousand miles on it. But I've replaced the door handles like it feels like a dozen times, and it's not fun when you suddenly can't.

Get in your car and you've got to like use a credit card to which oh.

Look, how fancy the door handles are. Just make regular door handles, man.

And they went back to that. Actually they learned a lesson there. But that's what's going to hit us.

So I think as we think about that thing, like really producing reliably, I tell people probably two years as sort of the soonest, and it could be three right like it, it could be somewhere in that range.

That's the current staff. Yeah, I want to get to the big dream. How many steps between making medical isotopes and creating a cheap and abundant power for all of humanity?

Yeah, and by the way, our steps are like pragmatic, not dogmatic.

So it's nice.

But they've held so like if there are new market applications that come up, definitely we'll look too.

Include we won't.

Hold you to it. I promise I won't hold you to your forward looking sayments. Yeah, but they have.

Held for the last fifteen years.

Yeah, I guess is something I can say with confidence. So the next step is to do this transmutation, right, changing one material into another at a larger scale, and we can use that to solve one of the biggest problems with fission energy. So again you can see us starting to come into the fission world a little bit here. And one of the things that we should be doing as a nation is we should be recycling all of our nuclear waste.

We have a lot of nuclear waste. For a while, we were going to bury it all in a mountain in Nevada, but people in Nevada didn't like that idea. So it's still just sort of sitting around everywhere, and it'll be sitting around for millions of years the right order of magnitude if we don't do something minute.

I think that's right. And the problem with that is it's just loaded with value.

Right, people worry about it. But also look look at all this energy that's just sitting there ready to be harvested.

Yeah, so why not solve two problems at once. Right, it's not super safe wor it.

I mean it's pretty safe for it is, but if somebody wanted to do something to it, they might be able to. Yeah, a lot of it's plutonium, which is stuff that if you worked and you processed it enough, you could turn into nuclear weapons. So we should be eliminating that hazard and at the same time we can solve a strategic fuel supply.

Issue for us.

Now that our relationship with rushes and not so good. You know, they were the source of a lot of the uranium that we put into our fission reactors. But if we recycle all of our spent fuel, essentially we can become totally independent of any other nation for our own fission energy needs. And the great part is the more fission reactors we burn, the more recycled fuel we have.

So it just scales with the number of plants.

And so you have a sort of clear technological line to using your fusion reactors to do what to get energy out of spent fuel from fission plants? Like, what do you actually do there?

We'll take spent fuel, will dissolve it into a liquid form, will separate out valuable materials that includes uranium and plutonium, which should go back into the reactor. So close loop close the fuel cycle with fission, will separate out other things precious metals, rare earth elements that have decayed enough to sell, and then you're left with this very small waste stream, like it's less than.

Five percent of the original.

Almost all of that has relatively short half lives decades or less, and a little bit of it has these really long problematic half lives million year plus isotopes. That's the only place fusion comes in. It solves that problem. So fusion neutrons can transmute. Just like we use them to turn low value into high value, we can use them to turn long half life into short half life. And one great example I like to use is id

Which is bad. It's going to be radioactive forever forever.

Yeah, And you hit it with a fusion neutron though it becomes id ON one twenty eight. Id ON one twenty eight has a twenty five minute half life, after which it becomes stable. You put it in salt, yeah, you could right, like you could eat it.

Yeah.

So you do this process with fusion and you solve the problem with the long lived waste. So we want to do that two steps, and we know how because we're already doing both of those processes and chrysalis. So as we look to scaling to a waste recycling plant, we've already got essentially a prototype for it here, and you know we're going to build on that. It's the same part of the regulatory code that would license a recycling plant, same type of construction, everything.

Yeah, so that one is obviously complicated on multiple dimensions, right, I mean you have to whatever the technical side is. It's the technical side, but presumably you're dealing with nuclear waste, there's going to be a whole like political regulatory side. That's what is that a decade? When you think about that, ten years, twenty, like, that's a long game already, right, But the political.

Winds are changing, and I'm not talking about because of the current administration.

No, the world is becoming more pro nuclear you know, basically non partisan way.

But people are starting to learn that you shouldn't think an absolutely right like, are you more afraid of climate change or are you more afraid of the very very small risk posed by nuclear energy? Yes, And anyone who thinks about it from a mathematical perspective very quickly comes to Wow, climate change is going to hurt way more people than nuclear energy ever, will.

Even particulate emissions from you know, certainly coal plants are wildly more dangerous than a.

Physicially yeah, absolutely, And if you look at like coastal flooding and stuff like that, multiply that by like tens or hundreds of times in terms of impacted people.

So okay, so you're saying the political still, it's going to be it's going to take a while, and it's going to be hard despite the political shifts you're talking about.

Yeah, well see, you know, the US has had a long term policy band on recycling spent fuel, you know, but new executive orders that just came out are challenging that. So I'm trying to reinvigorate the nuclear industry. I mean, when you think you're going to do it twenty thirty two, okay, not ten years, but not too far off of ten years in a pilot plant, okay, because we want to prove the economics first.

And then can we get to the big dream after that part? When do we get to free energy for all of humanity?

Now?

Are we ready?

So?

The cool thing is as you look at like these fusion systems that you use for recycling, to spend fuel. They look technologically very much like fusion power plants, but you're still getting paid at least twenty times as much per reaction and they don't need to operate ninety nine point nine nine percent of the time because you know, people freak out if a city loses power for good reason.

Yeah, if you slow down.

Recycling a material that has a ten million year half life, no big deal, right, Like you fix the machine, you get to learn, and you get to move forward.

So, and we're going to have.

To build dozens, if not hundreds of these fusion systems to solve the global problem with nuclear waste. So through economy of scale and through practice on a much more forgiving environment where you're getting paid more per neutron, we think we can get that next you know, that next factor of ten or so that you need to be cost competitive and drive and the fusion engine.

So really, in your mind, the recycling nuclear waste is like a sort of a straight line. It just ramps right up to just generating energy.

Yes, in my mind, and this is very hard for a lot of people to gress, but it really is exactly that. So I'm glad that you I'm glad that you put that together right away, because it is.

That so the sort of fusion reaction you would be running in that context, it's the kind of thing that well, let's let's go back to Q. Let's go back to this idea of getting more energy out than you put in, right like in that setting, how does that happen that at some point in the future somebody has to do that?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, And I know that's not your primary goal, and it's a compelling case for why that's not your primary goal. But like, do you get to that just by incremental engineering tweaks? Are you ever gonna have to like have some you know, physics level technological insight or do you just think you can keep optimizing and optimizing what you're doing and you'll sort of eventually get to more energy out than you put in.

Now we'll need we'll need we'll need physics optimization too. Like so, and even going from phase one to Phase two, it was it was new technology. Yeah, but the truth is through practice and building over time, it's a different path and you have a different technology evolution path than

When you say you don't think it's more than ten percent likely to be successful, you mean the particular technology you are betting on using. Yeah, you think it's very unlikely that it will work to put out more energy than you put into it. It probably won't. It probably

Yes, it would be fantastic.

And it's kind of funny because you know it's becoming a competitive world in the fusion space, and like, I'm cheering for everybody I love. Really, i would love to see anyone be successful and moving forward. And look, we're going to have an awesome economic and manufacturing engine. We'd love to work with whatever technology prevails. At the end of the day, We're going to continue to adapt our strategy and invest in what looks like it's doing great,

We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Let's finish with the lightning round. What's one thing you would do if you had free, unlimited power?

One thing I would do? Well, you know, all goes back to minority childhood and space and star trek, right, Like, I'd love to build a series of spacecraft that would go back and forth from the Earth to Mars and otherwise. I think, you know, if you've got a fusion engine that becomes very very fast and very very easy, you know, this nine month travel time is actually insanely problematic for humans. The radiation you get up in space is going to

You think you'll go to space, well, you know, it's funny.

I used to always want to be an astronaut, but the the reality of very tiny, closed in capsules is something that I'm not like super big fan of. So if we had starships or something a little more spacious, I'd love to, but not so much in today's way.

Mean you need you need fusion power to build your Catillac Big cadillact space.

Exactly right, exactly right.

If you weren't working on fusion, what would you be working on?

I'd probably also be working on the same thing. I do think like even with fission, there are ways to build uh spacecraft that can go to and from the different planets in the Solar System very cost effectively and fairly quickly.

Fusion will be.

Fast, but we can we can get that.

We can get the time down to a couple of months, probably with fission.

If you go anywhere in the Solar System, where would you go?

You're in the Solar System?

You want to do anywhere in the galaxy? I don't care, it's just a question.

Well, yeah, I mean, if you could go anywhere in the galaxy, it'd be great to go to some place where you could witness like a supernova happening from close range without being obliterated. The world's most spectacular fireworks show would be something to see.

Greg Pifer is the co founder and CEO of Shine. Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. We are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bruguheer. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.