Tough Tech Today with Meyen and Miller

Fusing atoms with lasers, featuring Thomas Forner and Pravesh Patel of Focused Energy

• Thomas Forner, Pravesh Patel, Jonathan Miller, Forrest Meyen • Season 3 • Episode 9

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If this company perfectly combines lasers and atoms, the reaction could be worth trillions of dollars.

Focused Energy’s Thomas Forner, CEO, and Pravesh Patel, CTO, join us to talk about making lasers. Lots and lots of lasers. But for what aim? They are pointing hundreds of directed beams at a tiny target: a millimeter-sized plastic capsule of deuterium and tritium, about the size of a peppercorn. These experiments may reveal a commercial pathway to grid-scale fusion energy. In contrast to other pursuits for nearly limitless clean energy such as stellarators and tokamaks, our third installment of the Tough Tech Today fusion series spotlights Focused Energy’s inertial approach to excite hydrogen isotopes. 

Uniquely straddling the Atlantic to tap into specialized talent pools in Austin, Texas, and Darmstadt, Germany, this team is leveraging discoveries from top fusion labs in the U.S. and Europe. The company has spun out of the Technical University of Darmstadt and combined with talent from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the first net energy gain from nuclear fusion was demonstrated in 2022.

In a planet hungry for energy, the company aims to generate significant revenues within a few years, fast-tracking commercialization of fusion energy while tapping into early revenues streams Focused Energy is deriving from testing other organizations’ technologies, cleaning up nuclear waste, and providing other valuable services as the company matures its laser drivers, high-gain ignition facility, and, eventually, establishes a pilot power plant. It is a lot of progress for a venture that has raised $82 million to date, including closing an $11 million Series A in 2023. From maintaining a permanent presence among regulators in Washington, D.C., to working with other energy companies to ‘educate the market’ about why fusion energy is now a venture-class investment opportunity, Forner, Patel, and the Focused Energy team exemplify a multinational collaboration of some of the world’s top minds.

P.S. Thank you to our tough tech champions. We really appreciate your support! If you’d like to level-up your support of our work, take a look at our pay-if-you-can membership options so you can help us bring Tough Tech Today to more folks!

🔖Topic Timecodes:

[1:50] Focused Energy’s approach to fusion
[6:07] Differences from WX-7
[7:41] Magnetic vs. inertial fusion
[11:16] How ignition discovery changed the inertial fusion industry
[12:46] Focused’s focus
[14:18] Biggest misconception about fusion in venture capital
[17:52] Comparison of risks between fusion, fission, and autonomous driving industry
[20:57] Developing in public vs private sector
[24:48] Founding story of Focused Energy
[28:23] Working between US and Germany
[34:30] Balancing cooperation and competition
[36:16] Connections to government and politics
[40:10] What’s on the whiteboard
[41:53] Number one technology priority for Focused Energy
[43:28] How does inertial fusion work?
[48:30] Focused Energy is hiring




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👏Credit Roll: 

  • Producers: Jonathan 'JMill' Miller and Forrest Meyen
  • Guests: Thomas Forner and Pravesh Patel
  • Hosts: JMill and Forrest Meyen
  • Editing: JMill
  • Transcript: JMill
Pravesh Patel:

Hi, I'm Prav. You have to say...

Thomas Forner:

I'm Tom, and we need to stay tough to solve fusion.

JMill:

Awesome. Okay.

Announcer:

Welcome to Tough Tech Today with Meyen and Miller. This is the premiere show featuring trailblazers who are building technologies today to solve tomorrow's toughest challenges.

Forrest Meyen:

Let's go. Welcome to Tough Tech Today. Today is the third part in our series on fusion. And today we're honored to have with us two guests from Focused Energy. We have Prav Patel and Thomas Forner. Focused Energy is enabling secure energy harvesting from direct laser-driven fusion, and developing a completely novel range of non-destructive testing for industry based on the same technology. Their technology is also very modular, which enables its use throughout industry. So we have Thomas Forner here. He's the CEO and founder of Focused Energy. Prior to Focused Energy, Thomas was a serial entrepreneur who loves working with data and people; he has run various ventures in the fields of e-commerce, nutrition, and software; building and scaling companies of various sizes. We also have Prav Patel, he's the Chief Technology Officer of Focused Energy. Previously, he spent 20 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on inertial fusion, and is one of the program leads at the Ignition Experiment at the National Ignition Facility that generated net positive fusion. Thomas, Prav. Thank you very much for joining JMill and today on Tough Tech Today.

Thomas Forner:

Thanks for having us.

Pravesh Patel:

Thank you.

Forrest Meyen:

So let's kick it off. With really quickly, like, how would you summarize... we've talked with a bunch of fusion companies so far, and how would you summarize kind of your approach to fusion. And based on all the other companies out there and kind of what makes your company unique and special?

Thomas Forner:

Focused Energy is special because we really look for commercializing fusion as early as possible; as we see, one of the biggest challenges in fusion is to raise enough capital, and also not to build another national lab, that to build a company and focus on customers and products. That's why we have developed a modular approach to fusion that allows us to untap markets early on to generate revenues already this year, and ramping up revenues to 100 million by the end of the 20s, and then really paving our way to fusion and unveil fusion, ultimately, in the 30s.

Forrest Meyen:

Amazing. Yeah, that is definitely a contrast to what we've seen on some of the other companies where we've talked to as they're very, very focused on the end goal. But they do acknowledge that it takes a huge amount of capital to get there. And if you're not going to, you know, have this unlimited source of capital, like how do you, you know, how do you sustain yourself if that's your business plan? So that's, that's very unique. What's been the hardest part about...? Or has there been a big challenge and kind of finding the alignment between near term markets and kind of your long term goal and making sure that you're still pointing in the right direction of the ultimate goal, while you we serve the near term customers?

Thomas Forner:

Of course, I guess this was the biggest challenge, but also our concept from the very beginning. So we see fusion companies as let's call them wave makers, not wave riders. And so what we need to do is we need to build a whole new ecosystem. And this cannot only be done by just one company and you also need strong partners, industry partners. And these industry partners typically are risk averse. So you need something that attracts them to invest into these markets. And this is technology that we are developing, and that we productize and market early on. So first step is that we have started with a completely outfitted and operating target lab. So we build our proprietary targets, but at the same time we produce targets for other labs. That's a small revenue stream, but a growing revenue stream. Second step is that we use the lasers that we build that we develop, the targets that we develop, and diagnostics that we develop anyhow for fusion and just assemble it differently. So like with Lego bricks and build a non-destructive testing machine early on, a neutron source, immune source and X ray source with a micro accelerator business. And this is going to be the product that we are launching in two and a half years from now. We already have a first customer, pilot customer, a German energy company. And we do non-destructive testing for nuclear waste. So we analyze nuclear waste barrels, so we can look through them with our machine, and can detect what is in the inside. And this is just a huge change for this market. Because today, the only way to analyze it is open the barrels,

take a sample, close them again:

this is expensive, this is time consuming, this is dangerous. And we found a completely new way to do this. And also, this is the way how we develop the laser for fusion and ultimately build our fusion power plant with a combination of lasers, targets, and diagnostics as well.

JMill:

That's really interesting. Is this an approach that has less direct heritage to the famed WX-7 facility and reactor than some of the other sort of approaches to fusion that would be maybe like sort of direct lineage to team members or to the discoveries of that reactor?

Pravesh Patel:

WX-7, you mean that stellarator?

JMill:

That is correct. Yeah. Is there any sort of relationship other than the fact that they're also working broadly in the fusion realm?

Pravesh Patel:

Oh, yeah. Our kind of heritage goes back to NIF (National Ignition Facility).

JMill:

Completely separate.

Pravesh Patel:

Yes.

JMill:

Yeah.

Pravesh Patel:

Yeah so WX-7 is a magnetic fusion device. And we're studying... our approach is inertial fusion energy.

JMill:

Okay, does that then make it so that in terms of, you know... I liked to understand the access to talent for fusion systems then. So it's not necessarily that someone who may have had as much experience on a stellarator design, it's not like they can just move organizations over to Focused Energy and plug right in, there's actually a lot of sort of separate sort of physics at play, then to further the approach that you're pursuing versus some of the other kind of companies that we have looked at in the past?

Pravesh Patel:

Yeah, so there's, there's two kind of big

Forrest Meyen:

Yeah. So when you talk about that moment of approaches to fusion. There's a magnetic fusion, and there's an inertial fusion. So magnetic fusion has been principally funded through government labs, pursuing fusion energy, and nationally, and then internationally with projects like ITER. They're pursuing tokamaks and stellarators and devices like that. Inertial fusion comes from a history of work on high energy density physics. And basically ever since the laser was invented, back in the 1960s. Physicists realized that they could use lasers to create very high energy density matter. And back in 1972, there's a very famous guy, John Nuckolls from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who published this concept for the first time of using these high energy lasers to implode small pellets of deuterium and tritium. And calculated that, you know, if you did this implosion, just right, you could compress deuterium and tritium to densities and temperatures higher than the center of the Sun. And you could initiate a fusion reaction. And that fusion reaction could potentially produce hundreds of times more energy out than you put in. So that concept was first published in 1972. And national labs, particularly national security labs, in the US, in all over the world in France, in the UK, in China and Japan, have been pursuing this concept of laser-based inertial fusion, and it's taken 50 years to do. But the National Ignition Facility was kind of like the final machine in a series of increasingly larger laser machines that were built specifically to try and achieve this, and to try and achieve ignition—that is, producing a thermonuclear explosion that produces more energy than then you put into it in a laboratory. And that's what the National Ignition Facility at Livermore was built for, and what it finally achieved, you know, this last year. And then there's other other labs around the world that have been pursuing that concept as well. So our scheme kind of directly comes from that. So in terms of like, our team members and our talent, you know, we're drawing from that community. And we can also take advantage of laser technology developments over the decades that have been invested in, like by the US government and other governments, target technology, simulation, co-capabilities, diagnostics, etc. So we're kind of really starting from a very mature, you know, scientific and technological, kind of stepping stone, and kind of launching from that. ignition achieved, what really did that mean for the industry? And, you know, especially on the commercial side, like, how did it change the landscape and perhaps, you know, enable your startup to flourish?

Thomas Forner:

I would say it has not immediately changed it: it's still about to change it. So it took some time. That this, there's a lot of education that is needed for the investor space. And that's what they all have been doing for the last 24 months, to hire experts, to get a deeper insight into the different fusion approaches. And finally, they have seen the net energy gain from NIF. This definitely has changed the view on inertial fusion. So this is now seen as one of the main approaches to fusion, and maybe the very one of the very interesting ones, when it comes to commercial viability in the long run. As you build on lasers, as you build an industry lasers, as you have proven technology also, that has changed other industries, like chip production recently, like automotive manufacturing where it uses lasers, at a high rep rate, 24/7 running for seven years without maintenance. That's what we want to build for fusion. And this is ultimately then a cheap source. And yet it's about the cost for the levelized cost of electricity so we have a competitive price for electricity in the end, and that's how we that's how we built Focused Energy.

JMill:

With the idea of building something that's able to run for such a long duration, is somewhere in there where the modular concept comes in terms of like how to size for a future projected grid baseload? And how then do you build a system that is kind of more like an elastic?

Thomas Forner:

Yeah I mean, it's determined by the size of the target and the amount of laser energy you need for igniting it and for getting a net energy out. So there's a sweet spot that we are aiming at, it's probably at the lower end, at point five gigawatts of electricity to the grid, and on the upper end property, two gigawatt or maybe even more. And this is determined by physics in between. So how much fuel can you assemble? How many lasers do you need? And the modular concept means we are conceptualizing the lasers, so rather small lasers and many of them, so like a couple of 100, or maybe 500, 600, 700, lasers, and you just add more lasers or less lasers, depending on how much energy you need on the target.

Forrest Meyen:

Hey, you mentioned there's a lot of education needed in kind of the investment market. What do you think the biggest misconception about fusion is from the venture capital community?

Thomas Forner:

Yeah, I mean, one very important aspect is timing. So, I mean, we're all building complex machines, we're all building in concrete. So this means you have a long time frames for building that. This is typically not in the range of a typical investment for VC investor. So this means you need to find concepts, how they can invest and then exit somewhere, because typically they have timeframes of maybe 10 years or 10 years plus one or two, if you are the very first investment in a fund. So that's one hurdle. The other hurdle is, if it's a binary bet, so if if it's really, you don't know, today, whether you're going to make it in 15 years or not. So it's a really binary bet. And I mean, of course, we are addressing the by far biggest markets that you can address, but I wouldn't do binary bets. So this is one more additional thing. The other thing is, the community is very, very small, both in magnet as well as in inertial fusion. So you only have, let's say, a couple of 100 people globally, who know about fusion. And there are many, many approaches that are, from our point of view, not scientifically anchored. And we believe in science, we believe that approaches need to be scientifically anchored. And we also believe in publishing it. And that's one challenge that investors need to overcome to differentiate in between approaches that might look nice at the first view, but turn out to be just impossible. And that's what we see quite a lot.

JMill:

I think we would all agree that a tough tech company would be, at the core, is science advantaged, and thus, scientifically anchored... some of those other approaches that feel maybe sort of less backed by science? Is it perhaps an issue with probably, that the teams around it may not realize that right, that they may have the blinders on, so to say, or not realize that some aspect of the science and math and engineering actually is a big unknown, and that they're going ahead anyway, at the risk of it not being sort of invented in time, they're kind of driving along the road, and it's not paved, right, you know, too far ahead of them. And so is that something that there would be perhaps some some sort of rough, maybe painful, sort of contractions of some of the fusion companies, the for profit ones, at least, right? That may not realize until it's hundreds of millions of dollars after that, they actually didn't have sort of the science figured out in time.

Thomas Forner:

Yep.

JMill:

Okay. That's a tough thing for the industry, and something that we kind of see playing out maybe a couple years ahead of time, with autonomous cars, you and I were talking ahead of ahead of recording that you know, with the autonomous car industry there was a lot of, I think, appeal and thought that it could be sooner than later. Fusion in some parts, some folks I think will say it may also have that kind of feeling that maybe it's, it's... feel they could like.... five years compared... to like five years away. However, with autonomous cars, that's analogous to something that like we experienced almost every day, driving a car around. Whereas with a big project, like an infrastructure level project is something that maybe those those investors and the teams building it like you are aware of, that these are measured in, in half decades or multi decade endeavors, right, compared to the autonomous car folks, which maybe had a shorter timeframe in mind.

Forrest Meyen:

We'll get the autonomous cars soon, but it's gonna take time.

JMill:

Full self-driving beta is still very much more like alpha

Thomas Forner:

I was in San Francisco two weeks ago, and it's amazing seeing all this robot taxis driving around.

JMill:

But I think maybe just after you left perhaps. I mean, Cruise was sort of, I think forbidden through regulation to from from driving because of very recent pedestrian injuries and deaths that happened.

Thomas Forner:

It happened when I was there.

JMill:

Yeah, and so that was like a flash in the pan on the scheme of autonomous car technology that Cruise vehicles are around, no driver, just paying passengers onboard. And now they're kind of tucked away back into corners again on private lots because people are getting hurt. But fusion I would imagine would have, it's a completely different kind of risk calculus so to say.One, it's not fission, which we are aware of kind of, you know, things go wrong and kind of go boom, it sounds like that with fusion, if things go wrong, the whole thing just kind of shuts off.

Thomas Forner:

Yeah, it's just nothing happens. You just don't hit the target. There's no implosion, there's no energy, there's just nothing.

JMill:

So there's no like, death rate laser beam. I'm picturing like the Deathstar gone wild?

Forrest Meyen:

Or you point it the wrong way?

Pravesh Patel:

But I think there's still like an

JMill:

Right. educational hurdle—that that's one of the things where we, along with the other fusion companies, and the whole fusion community is trying to do I think is educate public and people on the differences between fission and fusion, and that they're really like worlds apart in terms of like, safety, and hazards. The private sector is something that... let me say it differently... um, you know, we have safety, certainly, I mean, and educating the market is very important, of course. But then there was a decision that each of you must have made, and to say, you know, this is time to make a for-profit company, as opposed to, you know, as opposed to, you know, nonprofit or maintaining a government or research lab somewhere saying, you know, it's time to kind of quote unquote, sort of spin out. And that could be an incredible way to access the power of the private markets to manifest something that actually will make an impact. Right. So it's not just sitting in a lab. But could you walk us through the mindset that you've had, and maybe some of the decision points, because I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs, some are a little bit too quick to spin out, others, researchers that may be like, well, let's just stay in the lab and just keep working on like whiteboard equations. How'd you decide?

Pravesh Patel:

And for me, you know, as I said, this has been a 50 year kind of endeavor to achieve ignition by like inertial fusion, to achieve a burning plasma and plasma that can produce more energy than you put into it, like for the first time on Earth. So there's been, especially in the US, there's been a huge amount of government investment in national labs, and in these kinds of facilities, like I was saying, in the codes, in the underlying science, in the underlying technology, particularly for laser-based inertial fusion, which is what we're pursuing. So for me, I think when we actually kind of hit that milestone of ignition two years ago, then, you know, then all the attention was okay, we've done it once. Now, you need to do it repeatedly. Now, the discussion was all about fusion energy, and how to produce fusion energy, you know, to address climate change. And so for me, you know, then I was looking at how you do that within the national lab, within the government, kind of, you know, infrastructure. And it takes a long time, you know, you're writing proposals, you're developing the community, you're trying to get government funding, because this is all government funded. And the thing, it takes a long time to do that in government, then with private industry I could for me, I could see that, you could, the benefits of trying to pursue a commercialization strategy. In the private industry side, you can spend money fast, you can make decisions fast, you can tolerate much more risk in the private sector than you can in the public sector. So you can move... so I kind of became convinced that you could actually move several times faster, and you could do what might take, you know, 30 or 40 years in the public sector, you could do it in 10 or 12 years in the private sector.

Forrest Meyen:

So, kind of to follow on that, like, on your own journey. Can we rewind a little bit, maybe even a few weeks before that ignition experience happened to the founding of Focused Energy. Thomas, can you tell me like, what were you thinking when you decided to found a fusion company? You know, you have a very diverse background and a lot of different industry and you woke up one day and you said, today's the day we're going to, we're going to solve the world's energy crisis.

Thomas Forner:

Kind of but not really. So I was working for with other investors and startups on deep tech, different technologies. So and then coincidentally, came to fusion, and I got to know Marcus, so my cofounder, Marcus Roth, and he is one of the most amazing guys I've ever met. He, and it's like... it was feeling like something really, really, really big, probably something, if you look back in 50 years, it's the point in time in humankind, when there was probably the biggest change that ever occurred. So we will have the chance the first time on the holy grail of energy, and really increase the availability of energy by a million times over. And this is going to change anything that we are doing today. And being part of this is the best thing I can imagine. And having a broad overview of different technologies and how they come together means laser development on the one hand, data, quantum computing, AI on the other hand, material science, nanotechnology is the third pillar. So this is seem to be for the first time that different technologies are mature enough to make it happen. And now the only thing that we need is to start integrating it. And then we were betting on NIF. So Marcus was also working at NIF 20 years ago. And our bet was that NIF would show ignition and net energy gain, and we thought our goal must be to hire the best people in this space from the renowned labs. And that's exactly what we did. And then it was coincidence that NIF was demonstrating the first ignition shot. And then a year after, a bit more than a year after the first net energy gain. This was really coincidence. But this was our bet from the very beginning. And yeah it could not have been more exciting, as it was, to have such fantastic people around us. And wherever it leads us, we are going to contribute that we unveiled fusion.

JMill:

That's really incredible. Two locations, two different countries, two different continents. I'd like you to walk us through the strategy of that. And I suspect has to do with the legs of the stool that you mentioned before in terms of sort of relevant technical domain. So what is the US-Germany? How... why and how do you do that?

Thomas Forner:

Um, so we started with University of Darmstadt. So we took over IP and the target lab of University of Darmstadt, this is where the Marcus has his professorship. And then we knew that we need to work with the US labs as they are the most advanced in science, and we wanted to build on their breakthroughs. And that's when we reached out to Livermore. That's when we reached out to Prav. We got Prav on board very early, we got Bill Goldstein, the former director of Lawrence Livermore, at the very beginning on our board, we have Teddy Callahan also in our team full time, she was designing the targets, she was also in the program lead with Prav together. So we have two of four scientific leaders of Livermore on our team. And it's really a combination of strengths in the US, mainly the science and also the regulation which was much more advanced at this time in the US; and German engineering, where you have fantastic laser companies, where you have the leading laser companies in solid state lasers, so like Trumpf Laser Systems is one of them. You've Fraunhofer, where laser development is taking place and bringing hese advantages or these opportunities together was our idea. And also we though energy is or has always been, it's global. Then we have, of course, geopolitics today, but still, it's a global good. And we need regulation in all major countries. So we need to solve it in Europe, you need to solve it in the UK, we need to solve it in the US, that's what we are supporting as well. And we knew, or we were also betting that governments will start investing. And it then turned out that the DOE is setting up a program, now Germany is setting up a program, UK already has a program. And we created a structure that allows us to apply with different parts of what we're doing in different countries or even on different continents. And that's what we have been doing. And we have succeeded in that. So we have raised public funding from US, from Germany and from the European Union so far.

Forrest Meyen:

Awesome. Yeah, that's a very good strategy. So you can you can build on grant money, and you're not diluting yourself out.

Thomas Forner:

Yeah, and you know, you need to, because the amount of money that is going to be needed for fusion is huge. And as I said, we are pre-product, we are pre-revenue, we don't... I mean, we are trying to make a difference in commercialization, but still, it's a challenge. It's a challenge to build the first product, and it's always hardware. And for building hardware, you always need a lot of money early on.

Forrest Meyen:

Yeah, how do you keep your teams connected as they work on different parts of the world?

Thomas Forner:

Yeah, well, it turned out to be one of the major challenges for a while. So meanwhile, I would say we found each other. So we are kind of working virtually from the very beginning on so we do teams, we have created structures that allow us to do project management. I mean, actually, we use the same as in software development, there's obviously, Jira, Confluence, for engineering projects, of course, MS Project if you do a design freeze, and then detail it out, there are different methods still. But to keep the overview, the software industry has told us how we can work agile, and keep people from different cities, different continents together, and the time zones even help because we never stop working. When we stop in Germany, we start in the US.

Forrest Meyen:

It's like shift work.

JMill:

Yeah, that's incredible. I find it really inspiring for I mean, some of the toughest of tech that is like, where there are some aspects that are able to be done in silicon and like, you know, simulating a digital twin or whatever, that when the equivalent for fusion energy development, but there are very sophisticated site specific kind of work that also needs to occur and that you are finding that kind of maybe that new normal of a hybrid, a way of doing that. It's something that may be forced with your efforts... just been growing in terms of multiple sites multiple clients.

Forrest Meyen:

Yeah, we've definitely employed a similar strategy, the lunar rover business. So we have an office in Luxembourg, focusing on a particular technology that's interested to the Luxembourg Space Agency and European Space Agency, and we've office in Australia, also kind of for some technologies that they're interested in. So but it really helps, I think, you know, it kind of helps the nations and the company itself work together, but helps the nations kind of feel like they're kind of all collaborating towards a goal that really, you know, in fusion and kind of in my passion space, I think really should be a global goal of, you know, solving some of these challenges that face humanity. Energy is probably more important than space exploration, but they're tied.

Thomas Forner:

As you've just seen the US Department of Energy and the UK Department of Energy have started in collaboration.

Forrest Meyen:

Exactly. Yeah, that's great.

JMill:

The science is all the same. Right?

Forrest Meyen:

Science. So speaking of collaboration, I would like to learn a little bit more about how you collaborate with other other companies in the industry because like you said, you know everyone and you found ways to kind of like provide targets for some companies, and how do you balance you know, cooperation and competition, to something that works for everyone involved?

Thomas Forner:

I would say it's easy the more different the approaches. So collaborating with tokamaks and stellerators is easy, but also the overlay is not that big. So we have maybe kind of similar challenges when it comes to reactor design. First of all tritium breeding, the fuel cycle. So this is where definitely collaboration is very easy. It's more difficult in the IoT space, but we even maybe, Prav, you had recently some context, but there are some interesting approaches maybe.

Pravesh Patel:

Yeah, I think we're at such an early stage, and there's been this huge growth of new fusion companies in the last few years. Still, most of them have been in kind of magnetic based systems; in the inertial fusion space, it's still really just a handful of companies around the world. So I think right now we see far more benefits from from sharing and working together and trying to promote inertial fusion as a really viable route to commercial energy than we do by, you know, competing.

JMill:

With you mentioned earlier the need to educate the market. And also that there's becoming more abundant government origin, like non dilutive sources of capital or grants. Have you found as a company that you've needed to develop say regulatory strategy, maybe even like hiring of lobbyists to go to sort of respective, like nation state capitals to talk with either Congress people or whoever, regulators broadly and also to be able to kind of get sort of written into upcoming requests for proposals? Could you like... because I know that regulatory aspect is something that a lot of startups face. And it's kind of like a black box for a lot of us.

Thomas Forner:

That's what we've been doing from the very beginning... so both in US and in Germany, in Europe. So we are very well connected to politics, we have someone sitting in Washington here in the US, permanently taking part in all the meetings. And of course, that's why we collaborate, by the way, also with other startups to work together on regulation, to work together on the fundings that are available, or that maybe become available. And same in Germany, so you need to have a close contact to politics, and in the US, to the Democrats as well as to the Republicans because in the next election, we definitely want everyone to pursue fusion investments. Same in Germany on the different levels with the different parties, and Europe is the most complicated thing. So the European Union but you have too many people at the table.

JMill:

It does take a lot of signatures to get something done. But we've seen with like the NATO Innovation Fund, that's you know, raising a billion euros, that was what... I think they got 27 signatures. And so stuff happens. There's a lot of sort of capital, just kind of a lot of colors of money tucked here and there and Germany have a different driver. It's fascinating. So would you say that, would you go as far as saying that, that your regulatory strategy is kind of a competitive advantage for Focused Energy, in contrast to plenty of others?

Thomas Forner:

No, I don't think so. I mean, it's a competitive advantage being connected to politicians and being known as, so we definitely want to be the leader in inertial fusion energy, and we want to be seen as that. And that is paving the way to get additional funding. That's definitely going to be competitive advantage. And that's why you then can profit from programs that come up as soon as they come up. But in terms of regulation, it's more for the market as a whole. And it's pretty much... we've seen it in the UK: they have demonstrated how this might work out so they have put fusion into environment and medical. So it's now treated as a proton therapy center, and not as nuclear anymore, and that's what we aim for.

Forrest Meyen:

So are you ready for this question? You got an awesome whiteboard behind you. May ask what's on it? Or is it the secrets to fusion energy?

Thomas Forner:

It's our secret formula.

Pravesh Patel:

I was debating whether to wipe the whiteboard just before.

JMill:

You see we did not.

Forrest Meyen:

It's someone's mechanical engineering homework, we got some stress and strain going on.

Pravesh Patel:

No, it's just our strategies for our approach to basically like our science and technology research parts to kind of de-risk science and technology. And one of the advantages of inertial fusion is because it's very modular, you know, the lasers are separate from the targets are separate from the reactor chamber, you can work in parallel on these things, and kind of bring them all together into a single integrated system. But you can develop the technologies independently before bringing them together.

Thomas Forner:

And the milestones help us to measure technology readiness levels. And what we want to do is we want to increase the TRLs and ultimately then build, what you call in other branches a minimum viable product that allows us to demonstrate all the technologies that we ultimately need for a fusion power plant, but for much less cost. And that's what we aim for.

Forrest Meyen:

What's your number one technology priority? Like, what's the thing that needs the most attention to increase the TRL?

Pravesh Patel:

It's hard to choose between... inertial fusion like is... the two key things, ingredients, are lasers and targets. And so we're kind of working hard on both of them in parallel, but they're both big challenges, like, for each of them, we know how to build one, you know, once, in kind of low quantities, you know, so for lasers, we can build a laser to the right specifications that you need to achieve inertial fusion. Livermore has demonstrated that. But then what you need for commercial energy is a laser system that's much more energy efficient, that's much lower cost, that's much more reliable, that will shoot a million times a day, very robustly and reliably. So that's the technology challenge there. And then similar for targets, we know how to produce these targets, one at a time. And again, we have to produce those a million at a time, a million a day. Again, you know, high production volume, low cost. So both of those, you know, are big technology challenges that are kind of independent and that we can work on in parallel.

Forrest Meyen:

Can you paint a mental image for me of like, what one of these targets looks like? Like, really curious on the size of it, is there a geometry that matters or is it just kind of a material composition?

Pravesh Patel:

Yeah, so and this is one of... magnetic fusion and inertial fusion are very different in lots of different scales. So in magnetic fusion, you have a big machine, that you fill with DT gas, over a very large volume, maybe like several cubic meters of volume of gas that you try and heat up and achieve fusion. In inertial fusion, these pellets are, you know, perhaps size of a peppercorn? Yeah, a few millimeters diameter capsules of DT that contain just a few milligrams, very small quantities of DT, and that's what we shot on NIF, a tiny little pellet, around two millimeters in diameter filled with some DT gas. And on NIF, that was placed in the center of the chamber, very carefully inside the center of like a 10 meter diameter vacuum vessel, and 200 laser beams came in and fired on it. They use this scheme called indirect try before they hit the capsules inside a cam, they hit the can, it produces x rays, the x rays kick the capsule, heat up the outer surface of lates. And you have this rocket reaction that then compresses the inside of that tiny little pellet of gas. And if you get that to the pressure and temperature higher than the center of the Sun, it will start fusing. And if you could get it to high enough pressure and temperature, it will fuse, produce energy, that energy will self-heat that implosion to where you no longer have to provide energy, that DT will just heat by itself, increase in temperature and produce very large neutron yield. And that's what happened on NIF with one pellet. And so now to go to commercial fusion, our targets kind of look the same. But now you have to inject them, you have to inject them at something maybe like 10 times a second, and fire the lasers 10 times a second. And if you can do that, with these tiny little quantities of DT, you can get to like gigawatt electric power levels.

Thomas Forner:

So if you want we build the nuclear combustion engine.

Forrest Meyen:

Basically, yeah.

Pravesh Patel:

But that's one of the kind of inherently safe features of this is you're using tiny tiny amounts of fuel, a short time, repetitively.

JMill:

You had mentioned earlier about how you're able to take, I think it was nuclear waste and be able to do like an inspection on that. I don't understand how that kind of inspection is related to the other aspects of fusion.

Thomas Forner:

It's mainly depending on our approach. So our approach is a bit different from what NIF is doing. So we compress the pellet directly with lasers. And we then have divided this whole process into two steps. The first step is compressing with lasers and creating this dense plasma. And the second step is igniting it with a sparkplug. That's why I called it the combustion engine. And the spark plug is a micro accelerator. So we shoot with a different pair of lasers into a cone that is sticking in the target. And we shoot on a foil that is in the cone and accelerate the protons from the backside of the foil and create a proton beam and the proton beam then hits the dense fuel and ignites it. The reason why you don't use lasers directly because the lasers don't get in anymore, because it's too dense. So you need ions to get in. And the best ions to do this are protons. And this is a micro accelerator that we built. And the same concept can be used for accelerating other particles. So we can accelerate neutrons, we can create X rays, we can create muons with the same concept. And that's what we call the modular concept. This allows us to build this accelerator early on and build a different product out of it.

JMill:

Well, you know, I think something that with... as we come towards the end of the episode I'd like to offer.... are there certain kinds of what you're looking for, as a company, are there certain kinds of people, whether it's by demographics, specialty, etc, that would be helpful. Or any other sort of points that you'd like to make advocating for fusion and Focused Energy's approach to it. It's your time.

Thomas Forner:

Sure, I mean, talent is crucial. Scientists as well as engineers. And we just need people that bring along the experience or at least excitement, and ideally from also not from... it's always difficult to bring in someone who has too long worked in a corporate environment. It always takes a while to adapt to a startup because it's very different way of working. And therefore, ideally, deep tech startups, engineers from deep tech startups who want to join a fusion company. That's exactly what we're looking for.

JMill:

Closing words, Forrest?

Forrest Meyen:

No, I just really want to extend my thanks and appreciation for having both of you on our show today. I think

Thomas Forner:

Thank you. all of our listeners have been really excited to see another perspective from fusion, especially for a completely different approach than that they've learned about so far. So

Forrest Meyen:

Thanks so much. It was great talking. thanks again for joining us and best of wishes on your endeavor. We definitely need the energy. So go make it happen. Thank you.

JMill:

Thank you so much.

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Forrest Meyen

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Jonathan “JMill” Miller

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