Can we chat?! My name's Ally and I'm Chief of Staff at CFS. We have been having many conversations lately about how to effectively help the world understand if a company, govt, or approach is on track. Drawing inspiration from the biotech world that has technical complexity and long time horizons to market but has well understood value inflection points along the way , we have been thinking about how to establish milestones for the fusion industry that are meaningful to all concepts, easy to understand, public, easy to measure. Especially since fusion we know is hard and it's hard to unpack. These milestones can help measure the race. Would love to brainstorm about it. Lmk and I'll send my email!
I'm curious if you came across a deeper dive on how big the impact of ML will be as an inflection point driver for speeding up fusion development. My own intuition is that it might well be the new tool needed to divine the correct settings needed to make it all work (particularly with Helion's approach), but I'm curious how that shiny tool obscures other technical obstacles. Any thoughts or references you might have stumbled across in your research would be super appreciated!
Winning the fusion race via headlines and Twitter is not the same as actual net positive output fusion.
The focus on "triple product" is irrelevant - the problem has always been control, because we have had fusion since the first fusion bomb exploded in 1952.
What we do not have is the sheer size and gravitational force of the sun - which confines its fusion reactions to a mere 700000 kilometer radius sphere.
Magnetic fields don't work because they aren't constant, magnets decay not least because of fusion outputs and even the sun has 100000 km flares. Now the "trick" is the massive use of external energy to charge a laser for an extremely brief fusion burst - or in other words, not self sustaining fusion.
I am not sure whether to hope more that I am wrong or that we don't get a massive fusion failure in the form of a containment escape.
Can we chat?! My name's Ally and I'm Chief of Staff at CFS. We have been having many conversations lately about how to effectively help the world understand if a company, govt, or approach is on track. Drawing inspiration from the biotech world that has technical complexity and long time horizons to market but has well understood value inflection points along the way , we have been thinking about how to establish milestones for the fusion industry that are meaningful to all concepts, easy to understand, public, easy to measure. Especially since fusion we know is hard and it's hard to unpack. These milestones can help measure the race. Would love to brainstorm about it. Lmk and I'll send my email!
I'm curious if you came across a deeper dive on how big the impact of ML will be as an inflection point driver for speeding up fusion development. My own intuition is that it might well be the new tool needed to divine the correct settings needed to make it all work (particularly with Helion's approach), but I'm curious how that shiny tool obscures other technical obstacles. Any thoughts or references you might have stumbled across in your research would be super appreciated!
Winning the fusion race via headlines and Twitter is not the same as actual net positive output fusion.
The focus on "triple product" is irrelevant - the problem has always been control, because we have had fusion since the first fusion bomb exploded in 1952.
What we do not have is the sheer size and gravitational force of the sun - which confines its fusion reactions to a mere 700000 kilometer radius sphere.
Magnetic fields don't work because they aren't constant, magnets decay not least because of fusion outputs and even the sun has 100000 km flares. Now the "trick" is the massive use of external energy to charge a laser for an extremely brief fusion burst - or in other words, not self sustaining fusion.
I am not sure whether to hope more that I am wrong or that we don't get a massive fusion failure in the form of a containment escape.
Love the baton passing analogy. So true in so many areas.
Packy constantly setting the bar for great, holistic tech posts.
Great dive - love to see it! Sharing on @fusion_industry twitter.
Our data from the 2022 report is out of date and we'll see a new on in a month or so.
Let me know if you'd like to write an early piece on it.
Great Summary!
Although I couldn't help notice that you included Ex-Fusion out of Japan and not Kyoto Fusioneering. The latter is the most well funded here.
https://kyotofusioneering.com/
Is the USA still likely to lead, or we just know more about their companies and where are other key countries in this race?