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Announcer

Welcome to the Decoding Innovation podcast series, brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, Mitali Sharma, a principal in the EY-Parthenon Strategy practice, meets with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.

Mitali Sharma

Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Mitali Sharma. And today we're talking to Greg Twinney. Greg is the CEO of General Fusion, a nuclear fusion company. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Twinney

Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Sharma

Can you give us a background about General Fusion and why the idea that General Fusion is promoting is maybe unique?

Twinney

So General Fusion, our mission is to transform the globe's energy source to one that is ultimately going to be delivered via fusion, which is clean, abundant, limitless energy that is not geographically constrained. It doesn't have safety issues. It's carbon free. It's the holy grail of energy. And so, when I look at other companies around the world and other opportunities around the world, I can't think of another company that is going to be as disruptive as we will be when we have demonstrated and ultimately commercialized our magnetized target fusion approach to harnessing the power of fusion on earth.

Sharma

There's been lots of interest in fusion in the last few years. What attracted you to General Fusion in particular?

Twinney

You're right, there has been a lot of interest in fusion recently, and I think that's because of the incredible attributes of fusion. People have been trying to solve fusion since the 1950s, creating machines to replicate the conditions of the sun and the stars here on Earth. And that's a very, very difficult challenge. But recognizing how incredibly powerful fusion will be and when commercialized, the pursuit has been going on for many decades. But it's only in the last decade that there's been real advancement around the ability to actually bring this to market. That's because it's mainly additional technologies that bring great ideas to life. So, thinking about things like supercomputing power for running models, 3D printing for building machines that previously you couldn't build, these types of things have actually enabled fusion to become a reality.

And so why I was attracted to General Fusion in particular, is because of the approach, the technology approach. The boxes were ticked in the other areas like when I said how I look at a company that I want to be a part of, and how it has to be a huge mission, be very disruptive and big enough that it's worth the time and effort in order to do it. So those boxes ticked and pretty much any fusion company just because of the industry being so massive. But then I think about the last box, which is can I help that company? I needed to look at what is the technological approach that is being used for fusion and does it have a high probability of being successful and that not just technically and science wise, but ultimately commercially successful, meaning economics, in sort of delivering to the market in a way that customers could ultimately own and operate the power plants without teams and teams of scientists required. General Fusion has a very practical approach to creating fusion, and it has been at it for 20 years in terms of refining the pieces, the technology that will go into a general fusion power plant.

So maturity of the technology, practicality of the technology, and ultimately having everything required to sort of take that technology out of the lab and bring it to commercial is what attracted me to the company. It is a very, very unique approach and also a very entrepreneurial company. When I look at other fusion companies that are out there, a lot of them were started by academia or spin out of national labs. And so those are kind of science-driven companies, which fusion of course, is a huge component. But my belief is that fusion will be solved by an entrepreneur, not by a scientist.

Sharma

Let's double click on that. So talk to us about the technology and what's unique about it.

Twinney

Yeah. All right. So if you think about fusion, you're creating the conditions of the sun and stars on earth because sun and stars are powered by fusion. And it's really all about taking to light atoms of hydrogen, isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, and smashing them together under the right conditions. And when you smash these two atoms together, they fuse and release an extra neutron and that extra neutron is a huge, huge amount of energy. It's like a thousand times the density energy of traditional fission, nuclear fission.

So our approach is very unique. Maybe I can just tell you a little bit about how we create fusion in our machine, and then that will give you a little bit of background on why we're so unique and how we tackle these four big challenges.

So if you're thinking about how to create the sun on earth, you want to be inside a machine that is protected. And so, what we have done is, we've created a large fusion machine that is a large cylinder, a big cavity where we inject liquid metal inside of it. We spin the liquid metal around, which creates actually a cavity. Inside that liquid metal, we create a plasma which is ionized hydrogen, but 5 million degrees, and we inject it inside of this liquid metal cavity. And what we do from there is very unique. We take the liquid metal and we compress down much like a diesel engine inside of a cylinder compresses air fuel mixture. We're compressing down plasma using liquid metal, which increases the temperature from that 5-million-degree initial temperature to 100 million degrees and also increases the density. And what that does is creates conditions where fusion can happen. So all of that happens in in milliseconds, a very brief amount of time.

But that energy, the temperature and the neutrons all get released into this liquid metal blanket that compressed it. And that allows for us to protect the machine, allows us to extract the energy and actually the interaction between the materials we use in the liquid metal, and the plasma creates tritium. So that allows us to produce fuel, enough fuel actually, more fuel than we even need to sustain the plant indefinitely. So, you're creating your own fuel as a by-product of the overall process. And so, what this means is we're able to sort of create fusion using liquid metal compression system, which protects the machine, and extracts the heat. And we do all this using existing technologies. The company has been very entrepreneurial from the start in the approach that everything we do needs to be focused on a commercial power plant and it needs to use existing technologies to do it. That reduces the overall risk on the path to commercializing. Long explanation. Fusion is a complicated topic, however, hopefully that gives you a bit of background.

Sharma

The other thing that is a big issue, particularly for nuclear fusion, is net positive energy. How far are you guys from that?

Twinney

The end in mind that we are focused on is a commercial power plant that ultimately can put power on the grid. So you need to start with that in mind and think about the entire process of creating electricity inside of your power plant.

And we use this this sort of pulsed approach. I talked about liquid metal squeezing plasma, releasing the energy. The way that we are doing the compression and that we're pulsing this is using steam-driven pistons. And what that means is that we need a lot less energy coming back into the process. There's a lot more efficiency in the process because ultimately what we're doing is we're taking this this hot, hot liquid metal. We're turning that into through a heat exchanger and creating steam. We're recirculating steam back through our system to continue to create fusion.

We know exactly how much energy we will get out of our plasma when we compress it at large scale and have calculated using simulations, not just our own, to ensure that when we are demonstrating our technology, a large scale will be producing net positive conditions for a net positive ultimately plant. The challenge with fusion is that fusion works bigger, better and why that is, is because you're talking about plasmas that are in the 100-million-degree temperature range and that cools down extremely fast, as you can imagine. And so, a larger amount of plasma cools down slower than a very, very small amount of plasma. That's why you see a lot of the machines being massive machines because having more plasma allows you to keep it at those temperatures necessary for fusion. And so for us, we have demonstrated fusion at small scale, but because we're using our pulsed approach, we will need to pulse it on a regular basis in a machine before we're able to actually demonstrate the net positive that we know we'll get based on our simulations.

Sharma

Greg, net positive energy generation has always been hard, particularly for fusion. How’s general fusion tackling that problem?

Twinney

Great question. Always a big debate in the fusion world as to sort of net positive energy. I would say that this is where an entrepreneurial mindset with an end in mind for a commercial power plant comes into play for us. Our goal is a net positive energy onto the grid. And so, with that end in mind, we designed a power plant and ultimately a fusion machine that's inside that power plant that will result in net positive energy onto the grid. You start with that. You work your way back through the various systems that need to be developed to create this power plant. And we, for the last 20 years, have been working on large-scale prototypes, which are the major components of a fusion power plant using our approach. We have achieved a level of confidence in the system levels of these large-scale plasma injectors, large-scale compression systems, these types of things that we are now going to put them all together and prove that when you do produce fusion at this scale, you get the results of the simulations and that ultimately end in mind a net positive is demonstrated at scale.

Sharma

That's very exciting. How far do you think you are from that point?

Twinney

Yeah, so we are putting a shovel in the ground for our power plant, relevant sized demonstration of this technology in the beginning of 2023. A massive, massive milestone for the company despite having proven that large, large scale that each of these systems produce the results that we want. It isn't until we put them all together that we'll get the true credit for all of the IP and all of the expertise and everything, all the technology that we've built over the last couple of decades will get all that value when we're demonstrating at large scale. So it's very exciting time for us. We will be the largest, most power plant-relevant demonstration of fusion in the world.

Sharma

As you think about your journey, Greg, and you think about the commercialization angle that you've taken, was it the technology that was driving the way you thought about how you wanted to commercialize it or the commercialization was front and center when the team started to think about how to solve the problem?

Twinney

Front and center was commercialization and that was the goal. And I think that is the major differentiator between us and most of the other companies or groups trying to achieve fusion. Our founder started this company 20 years ago with the end in mind to build a practical, sustainable source of fusion that could ultimately disrupt the world and solve this climate challenge that we've got. The end in mind was a commercial power plant that scale. And then, it was his pursuit to find a technology that could solve that. So it started with an end in mind to build power plants that could ultimately be commercialized in a timeframe that mattered. And the second was finding a technology that would fit that need.

Sharma

Greg, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time today and good luck with everything. We will be watching.

Twinney

Thanks for having me.

Announcer

The Decoding Innovation podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word!

Sharma

On December 13, 2022, U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This podcast episode was recorded prior to that announcement.

 

The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.

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