In 2021, Commonwealth Fusion Systems proved it had built the most powerful magnet in the world. The breakthrough was based on a specific material – a tape – that conducts massive amounts of current with very little loss.
Rick Needham, Chief Commercial Officer for CFS, says the breakthrough led to a $1.8 billion Series B fundraising round. Since then, the company has turned its attention to turning this scientific breakthrough into a commercial technology. And in late 2024, the company announced it had signed a deal with Dominion Energy Virginia to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant, ARC.
In this episode, Lara talks with Rick about how CFS plans to take its technology from the lab to real-world deployment. They discuss major milestones, like proving net energy gain and finding a customer for a technology that has never been proven in the field. And Rick makes the argument that fusion is much closer than most people think.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
Lara Pierpoint: Those of us who have been in the energy game for a long time occasionally ask ourselves, can we actually recreate the power of the sun here on earth? That’s the promise of fusion energy. The same reaction that powers the sun recreated on earth to provide inexpensive, massive amounts of clean energy. For decades, fusion has perpetually been 30 years away or 40 years away depending on who you ask. Critics dismiss it as an expensive pipe dream that burns through billions in research funding without ever having delivered commercial power. But four years ago, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California made history in December, 2022. They proved that fusion gain was possible for the first time in the history of fusion research. Their experiment produced more energy than was put into it, but that was in a controlled lab under a pulses experiment that costs three and a half billion dollars to build, let alone to operate.
No one yet has demonstrated that fusion can work as a commercial power plant that reliably generates electricity for the grid. Commonwealth Fusion Systems or CFS says differently. The startup has raised more than $2 billion and it claims it’ll have its demonstration reactor SPARC demonstrating net energy gain via a different configuration by the late 2020s. Then CFS plans to build arc. The world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Virginia. It’s set to generate 400 megawatts of clean power in the early 2030s, but there are still plenty of skeptics. Fusion is still largely the province of massive early stage r and d programs, and the physics remain brutally difficult. You need to keep plasma to a hundred million degrees Celsius and contain it with magnetic fields that are stronger than Earth’s. And even if SPARC works, can CFS really scale from a science experiment to reliable grid power in just a few years? The timeline seems impossibly ambitious. The costs are enormous, and utilities have heard fusion promises before.
But CFS isn’t just another fusion startup making bold promises. It has already secured a partnership with Dominion Energy and started the licensing process for its Virginia plant. Its SPARC demonstration facility in Massachusetts is 85% procured and employs over 330 people, and it’s built a thousand vendor supply chain across 30 countries, convinced major investors and attracted top talent from MIT. So what will it actually take for CFS to cross the finish line? And can this startup really deliver commercial fusion power within the next 10 years? I’m Laura Pierpoint and this is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years this week I talk with Rick Needham, chief Commercial Officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems about building the world’s first commercial fusion machine, securing that first critical utility customer and whether fusion can actually meet the massive energy demands of our AI driven future. Rick and I spoke in person last week at Latitude Media’s transition AI event in Boston. It’s an event focused on the intersection of AI energy demand and breakthrough clean technologies. So we dove deep into CF S’S scaling journey from MIT Spinout to billion dollar demonstration plant to actual commercial projects that utilities are willing to bet on. Here’s our conversation.
I am Lara Pierpoint and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. And this is the first time I’m saying those words to a sea of faces rather than a Zoom screen and my own boom mic. So thank you all for being here. This is really great. Thanks everyone. I am delighted to be here today with the Chief Commercial Officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Rick Needham. Rick, thank you for joining us. This is going to be really fun.
Rick Needham: Thanks for having me.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay, so in the previous conversation there was a bit of a discussion about how nuclear fission specifically is likely not super relevant on the nearest term timelines for what we need to build AI data centers. So with this conversation, Rick and I are basically saying, hold my beer because we’re going to talk about fusion. So Rick, let’s get into this. So fusion obviously really interesting, different technology. Tell us what fusion is. Tell us whether it’s actually 40 years away and always will be as the adage goes. And most importantly, why are we talking about this now at a data center AI conference?
Rick Needham: Yeah, thanks Lara. And I guess maybe just to set the stage a little bit, fusion is different than fission. So at its most fundamental level, fusion is the combination of small atomic nuclei together, which then releases a bunch of energy. Fission is the opposite. It’s splitting apart a big atomic nuclei and that releases energy Fusion is essentially what you see in the night sky when you look up. Those are stars, those are fusion power plants all over the sky. What we’re trying to do is to bring that energy source the source of 99.99% of all the energy you’ve ever experienced. Solar, wind, fossil fuels are all basically derivatives of our local fusion power plant. The sun. We’re trying to bring that down to earth and put it in a bottle and then get some heat and electricity out of it.
Why is it relevant now? Why are we talking about it now? Because there’s been a lot of advancements in fusion. People maybe haven’t paid as much attention to what fusion’s doing, but over the last 50, 60 years, it’s progress on its main criteria like how much energy you get out versus in has been faster than Moore’s law. It had a long way to go, but it’s been very fast. And the reason that’s been happening more recently now is we have a lot more compute and understanding of how do you control a plasma, which is a big soup of charged particles. It’s when you heat a gas up so much the electron strip from the nuclei and you have a bunch of charged particles. It’s also the materials. It’s in some cases bigger and higher power lasers. In our case, it’s the material called high temperature superconductors, which allows us to make really strong magnets.
So there’s been all these advances. One of the recent things that’s happened too is for the first time in human history achieved net energy gain with a plant out in California. So we’ll talk maybe more about that. So it’s been proven like this can work and this can work on earth. And why is fusion interesting? Just well, I would ask all of you to think about any sci-fi book series or movie you’ve seen, if it’s like 20 years in the future or more, what do they all have in common? Humans have mastered fusion, have mastered fusion as a source of energy. And why? Because it is the ultimate source of energy. It has all these great things about it. It’s clean, it’s scalable, it’s secure, it’s safe.
It can provide limitless energy from a fuel source. That’s this for those listeners, I’m holding up a glass of water. One little bottle of water can fuel your entire lifetime’s worth of energy. It is the most power dense form of energy known in the universe. That’s why the stars, the universe decided billions of years ago. Fusion is the ultimate power source. So it’s exciting times now. Happy to talk more about why is it coming soon? The short answer is we’re building a plant just about an hour west of here that in 2027 we’ll show net energy gain in a commercially relevant architecture. So when the people say it’s 30 years away, we say the proof of it, and this is a cup of heat coming out of it is 30 months away. And if you don’t believe it, ask a few people here have taken a tour. It’s coming sooner than you think.
Lara Pierpoint: We’re going to get into all the details around that. First and foremost though, you all are effectively a startup. I don’t know if that’s what you’d call yourselves, but you’ve raised over $2 billion, which is not typical for climate tech startups. So how have you been able to secure that level of investment?
Rick Needham: Well, I mean certainly we’re going after markets as in the trillions. So whether it’s the power generation equipment that could be deployed everywhere in the world or it’s the electricity that comes from it, those are big markets. But I would say we’re also have taken a very thoughtful approach to what is our approach to fusion. And we’ve decided we’re going to take the most scientifically proven architecture. We can talk more about it. It’s basically a magnetic donut called the Tomac, and we apply this key innovation, much stronger magnets that allow us to shrink that way down. So it’s actually a device that you could actually build and finance and become a power plant. So just the approach is one thing. I think the other thing where we’ve been able to raise that amount of money has really been relentless execution on the most critical milestones for us to prove that this approach works from our series A.
That critical milestone was built at very, very powerful magnet, which people said you cannot do. There’s not enough material in the world to build it. No one’s ever done it. It’s not going to work. We said, we’ll do it in three years. Shame on us. We did it in three years, in two months, and by the way, that’s in the midst of COVID and supply chain disruptions. That proof of that magnet three months later we raised 1.8 billion series B. And the reason is big people see that magnet, they understand how it fits with this architecture and they say, oh my God, I can see how you could actually build a financeable fusion power plant. And then I say the last thing is just which leads to the relentless execution is a team of multidisciplinary folks who’ve come from some of the companies who have done the biggest and hairiest and hardest things in the world, combined with people who really understand plasma physics at the most fundamental level, combined with people who’ve built thousands or millions of units of something manufacturing. And we put all those people together in this mix and they end up, we’ll talk about challenges, but they’re able to then address problems that come up in a very collaborative way and then get to execute on that. And then that becomes a problem in the rear view mirror and they’re onto the next one. And we had so many of those along the way as we build this machine.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s awesome. Okay, so on The Green Blueprint we talk about building things, but let’s start at the beginning of the story here because a lot has come before this thing that you were in the process of building right now. And the story actually starts at MIT and weirdly enough, I was there. So let’s talk about that for a second. This was back an untold number of years ago when I was in graduate school with Bob Magar. You were CEO, we were all hanging out at nuclear science and engineering barbecues. Various friends of ours were getting tattoos of something called the Al Couture CM OD, which was a science experiment on their arms. This is what happens when you go to nerd school. Tell me about the key breakthrough that happened in those moments at MIT that underpins the company and then how your relationship with MIT has changed and carried you through to where you are now.
Rick Needham: Yeah, and I’d say by the way, our chief marketing officer gets tattoos of the SPARC machine now on his arm when he goes to conferences. So how did this happen with MIT? So the founders were basically plasma physicists, PhDs and postdocs who are working in MIT’s plasma science infusion center. And they were working on this basically world record setting tomac that sits just a few miles down the road here at MIT or used to, it’s now gone. That had great performance. That team at that time, like in 2015 ish timeframe also came across this new material called high temperature superconducting tape, basically. And someone asked, what is that for? Oh, this is this new high temperature superconductor tape, and what does that do? Well, that allows you to run massive amounts of current through this with very little loss as long as you keep it pretty cold.
And they thought, well, if you could wind that around in a circle, basically you could make the biggest, strongest, most powerful magnet in the world, a large bore magnet that would allow you to shrink this plant down to a much more manageable, much more compact size. And we can get into high temperature superconductor and why it’s all better, but it basically means you’re almost unlimited in the amount of magnetic fields you can do. And the power of e fusion plant is to the fourth power of the magnetic field. So it’s a huge lever to pull. But funny enough, alor C and the efforts at MIT were funded by DOE, and then that went through a period of time where the DOE pulled funding from it that caused the students, our founders, basically to scramble find funding, and they actually went as MIT engineering students down to Congress, the lobbying their Congress members to, we need more funding to do this.
They did get it, but they also then realized at that point, oh my gosh, are we going to be at the whims of government policy and funding? And that put the idea on their head, how are we actually going to do this? And the idea came, we’re going to do as a company, if we spin out as a company, we can do this. But in order to do that, what we want to do is establish a very strong relationship with MIT, where a lot of the technology has been developed. And we spun out in a very interesting deal with MIT, where we continue to be one of the largest sponsors. I think we’re the largest private sponsor of research at MIT. We have people who at MIT work on some of the r and d problems while we have a company that’s working on commercializing this. And so we have continued a very tight relationship with MIT. This has allowed us to, what we say is be born at scale. We actually have an enormous amount of technology behind us. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants and we’re advancing it further. But this relationship with MIT continues.
Lara Pierpoint: Sounds very cool. And let’s go back to this moment too, because you mentioned the sort of cutoff of funding from Washington DC and that was a pretty insane moment because it was an even crazier reason than just sort of political whims that this funding got cut off. It was about funding for Eater, which I think as folks may know, is a massive experiment in Fusion. It’s multiple countries that are building this thing. I don’t know if you have the number on how much money has been spent on Eater so far, but it’s a massive, massive building, a massive machine, a huge undertaking. And so we really can’t overstate the amazingness of this idea that Commonwealth Fusion and these folks had around the size differential here. That was so critical right at that moment.
Rick Needham: Yeah, I mean, fusion work to date had largely been done by governments. It was large funding programs, research, trying to understand it. Eater is the largest construction project in all of Europe. It’s probably the one project in the world. Reagan and Gorbachev decided this is one thing during the height of the Cold War that they could work on together. It actually been worked on already a little bit, but now it’s got seven different countries to run it. It’s probably the one place where the us, eu, uk, Japan, China, Russia, are all involved in the same project. It’s like a mini un, right? And so you can imagine trying to get work done there and project manage when every country is saying, I want to go build that part in my country. It’s a very difficult project. It’s way over budgets over time, but it also built out a lot of the science.
It built out a lot of the supply chain. It has developed a lot of technologies that we benefit from. The funny thing is though, once we decide to spin out of MIT and become a commercial company trying to, our goal, our goal as a company is not to build a fusion device that works, that is necessary but not sufficient. Our goal is to deploy commercial fusion power. And what does that mean? That means, yeah, you need a device that works, but there’s a whole lot of other things you need. You need stakeholders, you need supply chain, you need investors, you need, one of our early hires is a chief movement builder building a device. We’re building a product, we’re building a company, we’re building an industry, we’re building a whole ecosystem. You have to do it. It’s a whole new thing. And to do that, you need a company to do it. It’s not a national lab. And so we continue to try and make arguments. We need to add funding to commercial fusion, not just the research. The research has been great, continue to benefit from it, but we’re focused squarely on commercial fusion.
Lara Pierpoint: I love that. I’m going to point you to the sort of most niche nerdy item in the list you just mentioned, which is let’s talk about supply chains. So much fun. So you mentioned that there’s a magnet that you all effectively need to build. A lot of folks were skeptical that you could build this magnet period. Not only did you build it, but you had to create a supply chain around it in order to be able to do the things you’re doing. So how did you do that as a company, effectively as a startup company?
Rick Needham: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, when we saw this material, this is great, we could build a magnet out of it and then it’s like, well, how much is available? A few maybe a hundred meters of it. And for our device, we use thousands of kilometers of this stuff basically. So how do you build that up? Well, we work very closely with the producers of this tape. I actually have some tape. Your listeners won’t see it, but anyone who wants to see it come up afterwards, it looks like a cassette tape. It’s basically mostly steel, and there’s one layer in there. It’s basically one micron thick where you can send about 2000 amps across it with zero loss. So amazing miracle material, Nobel Prize in 1986, but not produced in any volume until the 2000 tens. So we’re only just starting to get the stuff.
So how do we build up that supply chain? Well, we worked very closely with supply chain. We worked with them to identify what are the holdups that would prevent them from going to more scale. Originally it was like, well, we’re not producing it at the level or the quality that we think you need. So we actually, in some of our critical technologies, like understanding what is the quality of the tape and therefore where can we put it in our magnet so that we could actually take lower quality tape and still use it as a user. We help them increase their yield. So more tape coming. We actually are better at measuring it than they were. So we would take the tape, measure it and tell ’em, here’s how much we’ll pay you for it, because what the performance is now, they mostly have that ability now. But building up that supply chain, we grew that market, that capacity by 40 times over the last few years. Quality has gone up, prices come way down, volume’s gone way up, and it’s continued to do so.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m really struck by the comparison of what you’re doing to the journey that Kale has had in the United States. One of my favorite fun facts is that prior to some time in the year 2000 to two thousands, the largest purchaser of kale in the United States was Pizza Hut, and they used it to line the edges of their salad bar. So it wasn’t to eat, it was literally for decoration, and that has changed dramatically. So you’re basically taking superconducting magnetic tape to where kale is now.
Rick Needham: I would say yeah, we don’t use tape to put it around our cafe, but that being said, we do use a lot of tape, but that’s an interesting tidbit. I haven’t been compared to kill yet.
Lara Pierpoint: First time for everything on the show. That’s great. Okay, let’s talk about what you’re building now because this is so exciting. So you’re building this SPARC reactor. Tell us where you are in that process and what it means to you as a company in your journey.
Rick Needham: So what are we building? We call it SPARC. It’s kind of a demonstration device. It will prove that we’re able to show net energy, gain more energy out than in from this fusion architecture. Again, it’s about an hour west of here that’ll produce about a hundred megawatts of thermal power. So a lot like 500 to a thousand times what the National Ignition facility did, a substantial amount of power. And his design point is actually a gain of 10. So 10 times, actually it’s 11 more heat out than in. It’s going to be producing heat, it won’t be producing electricity. And this gets back to what is the key focus thing that you do, and we focus on the absolute, what is the next de-risking point we need to show. It’s like turning hot stuff into steam and spinning a turbine. People have been doing that a long time, so we don’t need to do that.
So this produces heat. The next step will be building our power plant. So we can talk more about that. But this device, what makes it kind of amazing is it will be the first time that we have a commercially relevant architecture, one that you can see and you’re like, I can totally see how you just build that and build a bunch of ’em. That’s very modular, that’s delivered in a construction fashion. We work with a local constructor. It’s not some fancy firm. So I’m like, we’re going to build buildings, we’re going to build stuff around it. We’re going to build all the systems that support it, and you hit a button, it hits net energy gain. You hit a button, it does it again, you hit a button, it does it again like how a power plant would work. You just want it to work. That’s what we’re going to show with SPARC. SPARC is the basis of our power plant, which we call ARC, and that’ll be a 400 megawatt electric plant, a one gigawatt thermal plant. And we can talk more about that. We’ve already announced that our first site is going to be down in Virginia.
Lara Pierpoint: So I want to pause here and talk for a second about net energy gain. So again, I think I’ve maybe said a couple of times just in this conversation, what a big nerd I am. I still remember the day I found out that eat of the IPI is negative one that is seared in my memory as a very key moment in my life. Another one is December of 2022, when I found out that at the National Ignition facility, they produced more energy than they had put in for a fusion reaction. So now I think to folks who understand the energy industry, this should feel very basic. You obviously need more energy than you’re putting into the system, but it’s a huge deal for fusion, and what you are talking about is revolutionary and groundbreaking. The way that NIF does this is with a type of fusion called inertial confinement, and you guys are doing it a very different way. It would be earth shattering for you to show net energy gain. And you’re talking about a very close timeline. So get real specific here. How are you going to do it? How sure are you that you’re going to do it? Is this still there’s fundamental science, but you’re ironing it out? Is it an engineering problem? What makes you so confident you’re going to be able to get there?
Rick Needham: Yeah, so as Lara, as you rightly point out, there’s two ends of the spectrum of how you achieve fusion. What you need to achieve fusion and more energy out than in is basically you need three conditions. You need it to be hot enough. And when I say hot enough, it’s really hot, like a hundred, 150 million degrees centigrade. So hot. You need the fuel to be dense enough so enough for the fuel around and then you need to contain it enough to hold it together. Enough lasers do this by just pounding a pellet so fast as nothing that it can do otherwise than just implode and fuse magnetic confinement. On the other end of the spectrum, what we do is you actually hold that plasma for longer with a very strong magnet. The magnet makes the spirals at the atomic nuclei do very tight. So it keeps it together so it’ll continue to fuse.
So that’s the differences. Why are we confident in this? Our architecture, this goes back to our original, why do we raise so much money? Our approach is based off of the most kind of scientifically proven approach to get to it, kind of a commercially relevant version that will get net energy, and that is this Tomac. So that is a magnetic donut. There’ve been about 150, 160 of these things that have been built over the last 50, 60 years. They’ve marched up this performance curve I talked about that’s been faster than Moore’s law. They’re right about at the hump to get over net energy gain. The problem is that the magnets at that time could only be so strong. They’re based on another technology, low temperature superconductors, which basically have a cap on how strong a magnetic field you can have and still super conduct. By the way, we superconductors, we’re running thousands of amps.
We don’t want it to burn up the copper that would otherwise be there. So you need something that can carry thousands of amps. High temperature superconductor allows us to hop way over that. You can have very high magnetic fields and continue to run it. So why are we confident this work? Tomax had been shown to work. The next step was to build it big. You couldn’t build a strong magnet. That’s what Eater is. The difference between Eater and us in terms of size and dollars is this material, this high temperature superconductor material is big strong magnets. The physics inside the machine are not much different than Eater, which has been studied ad nauseum, right? I mean plasma physicists look at what we’re doing and say It’s kind of boring. You’re not pushing the plasma physics. Exactly. We’re going to learn stuff because it’ll be the first one that actually has a burning plasma, a plasma that is generating enough heat to keep itself going.
So we’ll learn new things for sure, but we are in a very conservative area of plasma physics. But by putting this new innovation on it, we’re able to shrink it down. So we’re very confident, and by the way, we work very closely with the external world and experts. We’ve shared our designs and what they’ll be seven of the most, 10 highly cited physics papers are still the ones that are our design basis for our ARC machine. We work with most of the national labs. We invite in critique, we share results. It’s something our CEO put an open letter out last June to the industry. It says how to build trust infusion, how to build trust. Infusion is actually get the ecosystem to understand what you’re doing. Don’t hide the ball. Don’t come and say, Hey, look, trust us, this works. No, no, we’re going to show you our work.
Just like when you get your homework done, you get the right answer. You’re going to show your work, your teacher’s like, how do I know you did it? We show our work. We invite people in and that’s an important part again, of building the ecosystem and building the trust so that when you do show up with a device that works, it’s not like, oh yeah, did it really work? No, no. It’s like we have people who say, yeah, this actually will work again, it’s kind of boring. People have said this will work, and we bring them all along with us. I would say when we talk to communities as well where we know we’re going to be deploying these things, we bring them in as well. Our plant outside and Devons in our west of here. We bring the community in, we say, this is what fusion is, this is what it’s not. Our closest neighbors are only 400 yards away and now they’ve turned into what is fusion? How do we know this works? Now they’re like, can I get a power plant? When are you guys building a power plant? Some of my team just talked at our quarterly community meeting the other day about what are the economics of fusion and things like that. So having the right community engagement is incredibly, incredibly important to us. We know, again, build a device, build a machine, build a company, build an ecosystem, build a movement.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I love that you’re getting into this movement building piece because I don’t think a lot of startups have a chief movement officer. I don’t know if it’s actually a C-suite position with you guys, but still that’s incredible. And I’m curious to know what makes it possible for you all as a company to do that. I mean, I know Bob himself is one of the most humble, collaborative, incredible humans on the planet, so I’m sure that helps. But also is there’s something about the technology moat that you all have. What is it that makes you so confident that you’re able to do what so many startups don’t and go out and be really obvious and open and collaborative in your approach?
Rick Needham: Well, I think mean part of it’s actually to Bob and others and our founders. It’s part of the DNA of the company. In some sense, people join the company because people say it’s a moonshot. I say it’s a star shot actually. It’s actually such an incredible vision of what this company could do. Fusion writ large is the ultimate power source We like say it’s not just the next energy solution, it’s the final one. What’s better than a fusion power plant, a better fusion power plant? And hopefully there’s a lot of different architectures that will work. So there’s that element to it. Everyone’s super motivated and excited about the mission. What I would say is also the mindsets of the people in the company and working together very collaboratively. We solve problems. There’s problems. One of your questions was some of the challenges we’ve seen in building SPARC.
We see challenges every day. Some of them turned into company existential questions like, oh my god, for building this big magnet, how are we going to solve this one? There’s one where we had to put a copper cap on top of the magnet just to cover up the tape, and we realized, unless you make that electrically homogenous than if you lost power, it could get a hotspot and damage the magnet. This was like, oh my God, how do we solve that? And that was like, if we don’t solve this, we’re not going to be able to build these magnets. And that turned into production with our plasma physicists, with our team material science. How do we solve this? Oh, we need someone who can weld copper. Newsflash only about 20% of the welders in the world weld copper. They typically don’t weld copper. So we had to go find that.
Then you had to find an oven that you could bake it in. Oh, we found one company with an oven. Oh, sorry, that oven just broke last month and then we no longer use it, so we built our own oven. It’s just this problem solving thing that took six months from this is an existential problem to it’s solved and good news. We just produced the last copper cap for SPARC last week, and we have lots of examples of this where it was like critical problem, bring the right team together with the right mindset, solve it, move on to the next one. You always wish everything could be smooth. It never is, right? But as long as you have a team that’s resilient and kind of works together, then I think you can solve these things. So that gives us the confidence that we can actually solve the problems. And we just know the plasma physics, the basis of the design is well understood and well characterized, and when we have net energy gain, we’ll be in a new regime, which will be great, but we’re just confident the science will work. It’s basically an engineering problem right now. Build a complex machine, but if you get that right, you’re off to the races.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s amazing. I mean, that’s an incredible statement that it’s an engineering problem that you all are solving, which is so cool. Yes. And as you say, there are challenges and you described a great one for us. This is cool how you kind of solve this copper plate problem. Have there been other moments like that? What are some of the other things that have popped up that have been major challenges in the context of building this first of a kind facility that you’re building?
Rick Needham: The obvious one is we can go down some technical routes, but I’m also going to go beyond technical. But for one technical one is even just the architecture of the magnet that we’re building. No one had ever built in large scale. The kind of magnet that we’re building is non insulated, nont twisted. It’s basically layering the tape right next to each other. It’s interesting when a magnet is running at cryogenic temperatures, copper actually becomes an insulator because it’s not superconducting. So everything’s not superconducting. It becomes an insulator. So you can do things like you can make a metal thing that actually is an insulator for this magnet. But we came up with a new way of doing this in a large scale and there was a real question within the company, do we do that or do we do what people had done with high temperature superconductors, which is layered tape in this cable, twist it, and then you have current running through the cable.
There were reasons to do both. The team wrote a hundred page report on which one should we do long, hard technical arguments over the course of months. But then it turned into over the course of a week, we got to make the decision. This was a risky decision. This was a bet, the company decision, but there was faith that we could figure it out and let’s go do it. I think we can figure it out and good news it worked out. So we’re building those magnets today. So that’s a real technical bet, the company kind of decision that we’re willing to take that risk and with our investors, take that risk, make that bet and go forward. If we did it, it totally changes the game on those magnets is built in a very different way, could be much more cost effective. So that’s on the technology side.
I would say. The other things that have come up again is beyond just the machine. Like great if we have a machine that works out here, SPARC, how do you go license that? How do you go deploy a fusion power plant? No one’s ever done that. How do you deploy a fusion power plant? So we knew from the very beginning we got to work on things beyond just the technical side. So working on how do you actually license it and worked with the nuclear regulatory commission to make sure they understood who’s traditionally licensing fission plants. What does it mean to license fusion? Well, fusion is a reaction. That’s not a chain reaction. It has very different safety implications compared to fission. There’s no chance of a meltdown, no runaway, no decay, heat doesn’t have those issues. Fusion, the flip side of it being so hard is it’s really easy to stop.
We get the question sometimes, how do you protect the environment from the plasma? It’s like, no, we got to protect the plasma from the environment. You literally blow a breath of air into this thing and it stops. So it’s it’s very different safety mindset. And by the way, I told you I’m a fission fan, my first job as a submarine officer. So I like fission, but I love fusion because of many reasons. And this is the interesting thing is how would you license something like that? The NRC hasn’t done that before. Well, there’s parts of the federal code that licenses things like particle accelerators. That’s what a fusion machine is. It’s a particle accelerator. We shoot neutrons out, makes heat, we turn that into electricity. So we work with them to make sure the licensing regime for fusion falls under 10 CFR 30 for those who are interested.
But it’s basically a materials framework where we just have to be responsible stewards of the materials that are on site, which include tritium and some activated materials. That’s all. We’re not licensed by the design of the machine. We’re not licensed by the operations of the machine. We’re not licensed by the genealogy of every single piece and part that goes into that machine. What does that mean? That means we can actually license a fusion power plant in less than 18 months and less than 10 million as opposed to a vision plant under 10 CFR 50, 52 or 53, which is like 500 million to 1,000,000,010 years, a five to 10 years. That’s a huge advantage. And why do we know that? That’s true? Because we have our license from Massachusetts right out here. We’re ready to go and we’re super excited about that. And by the way, it means not just that you can start sooner, you can deploy sooner, you can deploy faster. It also means we have the opportunity to improve an existing plant fission plant. If you have a new reactor coolant pump that’s better, faster, cheaper, safer, all the things that you’d want, you can’t put it in. That’s not what your license is for. For us, we don’t have a license around the design. We have a better pump, vacuum vessel, whatever piece of part, we can actually put that in and improve an existing plant and deployed across the whole fleet.
Lara Pierpoint: I don’t think it can be overstated how much this matters. And so you’re really starting to point now at a challenge that exists I think for almost every climate tech startup, which is that you’re in the middle of building your demonstration and you’re behind if you’re not already doing prepping, de-risking your commercial installation and obviously the one after that and the one after that. So this is incredible that you all have been at the forefront really on the regulatory regime and creating the regulatory regime for commercial fusion reactors. I know that at some point there was a debate about whether the nuclear regulatory commission should regulate fusion at all. So is that a debate you all took part in? How did you think about that? I know that there are folks that say this should be totally different. It’s not fission, so we don’t even use the same agency. I was at Exelon back in the day before when it was still Constellation and Exelon altogether, and I remember this was a really big topic of discussion because as the US’ biggest nuclear operator was like, well, we want to be a fusion operator and this is the regulatory body we know how to work with. So there were a lot of arguments on both sides. So I’m curious just to know a little bit more about where you all stood in that debate and how this came out and whether you’re happy with the result.
Rick Needham: So to cut to the chase, we’re happy with the result because it would allow us to deploy faster. But very importantly, with the right safety mindset, we’re not trying to rush something that’s unsafe. It’s got the right considerations for people, for people operate the plant, for people in the community around. We don’t have my community level events that are dangerous. So we we’re happy with the result. We did engage in that conversation obviously. So the NRC is to be clear, the NRC has provided guidance, like this is how you would license a fusion plant. It’s actually licensed a state just like a particle accelerator would be, or at a medical facility that uses radioisotopes and has some things that get activated because of that. So it’s under the same part of the federal code. There would be, I mean, you could always say, why don’t we come up with a whole new way to license fusion plans?
Like, well, okay, good luck. How do you get a whole new regime? What we discovered is this actually could fall under an existing regime. This existing regime is byproduct materials basis. How do you actually license particle accelerators? That’s a part of the federal code that does that. This falls under it. That means that the states were an agreement states we agree to fall under that, basically have the authority to go do it. NRC doesn’t weigh in. You have the authority, you go do it, which means we need to work with states. So in Massachusetts, we’ve worked with the Department of Massachusetts that control radiological health and things. And yeah, we submitted the application, we got the license, and it fits in a manila folder. It’s not like a room full of stack full of stuff. So very involved in that conversation. By the way, the first country to do is actually the uk.
So the UK and the US are the two countries today. We’re working very hard right now to harmonize that around the world. Italy, Germany, Japan, Canada are all on track to do this. The G seven energy ministers of us said we need to harmonize fusion licensing policy and approach. We agree. So we think this would basically remove the speed bump that otherwise, God forbid, Bob, if we got a fusion plant to work and we couldn’t deploy it because of some reason, and it wasn’t really because of a safety reason, it was just because it gets mucked up and how do you get it deployed? He wouldn’t be happy. So we’ve been working, we just know we’re trying to see ahead where those speed bumps are and drop them down so we can keep cruising.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m having a hard time imagining Bob Mungaard angry, but I’ll believe you on that one. So you mentioned that you’ve been able to convince folks at the national labs, other scientists that what you’re building is real, that you can actually achieve what you say you’re going to at the SPARC facility that you’re building, but you’ve done more than that. You’ve actually convinced a commercial customer that you can deliver a commercial energy, electricity power plant to them. And specifically this is Dominion Energy. So can you say a bit about how that relationship came about? How did you manage to convince them? What did you do to create this partnership?
Rick Needham: And I would say they’re less of a customer. They’re more of a partner with us and how we develop our first fusion power plant. What I would say is, maybe I should have said in the beginning, we faced two educational challenges. One is we talked in the beginning, fusion’s different than fission, lots of implications there. The other one is fusion is coming sooner than you think. And so we have been talking to utilities for a while about, hey, this is something you probably should be paying some attention to because in your IRP that may look out 10 years or 20 years, if this is not in one of your wedges for what’s a possible solution, and by the way it has a lot of great metrics associated with it, then you may be late to the game. And so we just want to keep you abreast of where we are.
We invite them up, come tour the facility, look at it yourself. We talked to them. And so this has been happening with several utilities with Dominion. We had someone within Dominion who actually went to MIT, understood vision and fusion, and he is like, Hugo was pretty interesting. And when he scanned the landscape, he said, wow, I think these guys have an approach that’s really interesting. And he came up and visited a few times and then convinced their CEO, Bob Lu to come up and Bob Lu came up and when he toured around and saw what we were doing, he left that meeting and he turned to his team and said, we should do something with this company. Not like on the third one, we should do something on the first plant. We should work with them to develop the first plant. One year later we have a joint development agreement and we’re building our first power plant on a Dominion owned site in Virginia.
So they’re a partner with us in terms of developing that project. They’re not actually the ultimate customer of that. We’re still working on those bits and we’ll knock on wood we’ll to talk about some of that stuff later. But they are enthusiastic about this as a possible solution. I would say Dominion has to be an all of the above company and utility because of the requirements of the Virginia law. They need all the things that they can get that’s low carbon. It needs to be within Virginia, they have the highest load growth around the nation, the home of all the data centers. They are in a fix and a fusion power plant. Deployable fusion power events would be an enormous solution for them. And so we give them great credit for stepping up and doing this with us and we’re super, super excited about their partnership. And when Governor Kin knew we were coming to Virginia, he was super excited. If you haven’t seen the press conference, I suggest watching it. He says a lot of great things about Fusion. We almost have to hold them back a little bit. But it’s been really, really a lot of fun working with Dominion and they’ve been a great partner so far and we expect to be a great partner for long term.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s great. Okay. I learned my lesson from Stephen a little bit earlier, so I’m going to make you be the one to make predictions. So if you had to bet, when do you think you would have this first commercial facility up and running
Rick Needham: Early 2030s? That means probably within a few, not 2030, but probably within a few years of 2030.
Lara Pierpoint: So how should the folks in this room who are thinking about AI and data centers think about fusion as a potential electricity source?
Rick Needham: Should think about it. It won’t solve your problem right now, we just talked about that, but it is the potential long-term solution that can power the AI transition. And it is in essence, we didn’t talk about all the benefits of fusion, but one of them is energy security. It is like the perpetual forever energy security source. If you have a fusion power plant, you own your energy, the fuel that goes into a fusion, there’s a longer answer. The fuel that goes into your fusion power plant is basically heavy water. It’s like the hydrogen with one extra neutron, deuterium one out every 6,000 hydrogens is a deuterium. So it’s basically filtered seawater. We make our other fuel tritium. So to fuel a 400 megawatt power plant would use gas canisters, deuterium that fill up less than half this room and then you shut the door. It’s fueled for life. There is no fuel input into the plant beyond that. And so it looks very much like a natural gas plant, but no fuel coming in and no emissions coming out. And when you think about an island nation like Temasek is one of our investors from Singapore, what does it mean to actually own your own energy? Do not have to import energy. It’s an interesting geopolitical question.
Lara Pierpoint: So let’s talk about cost for a sec because I think seawater, I think we all know probably doesn’t cost too too much, but these superconducting magnetic tapes, these other things you’re all talking about building, what is the cost trajectory here? You have talked about potentially getting to $50 per megawatt hour, which is pretty wild considering the kinds of things that you’re talking about here. So how are you going to get there?
Rick Needham: Yeah, we think there’s a lot of opportunity to drop down our cost curves pretty rapidly. First, the fuel is a blip. It doesn’t even barely, when you do an OPEX stack chart, it shows up literally as a line. So it’s like de minimus and it’s basically available everywhere. So it’s basically limitless fuel with respect to the cost. One of our bigger cost drivers are the magnets and the tape, but those are really interesting cost down curves. So if you think about the magnetic tape, the high temperature superconducting tape, it’s like in units of meters and a process that’s spitting out meters of this tape. And for any one plant, like I said, we use literally thousands of kilometers of this tape. And the process for making a tape is a thin film deposition process. What companies use thin film deposition and got the massive scale at low cost and driven down those cost curves like First Solar.
So you can imagine this process even in one machine, we have so many doublings of capacity of, it’s just we’re on extremely rapid cost down curves. We actually own the magnet manufacturing ourselves. It’s very modular. Each of those, there’s 18 magnets, these big DHAP magnets that go around and each of those has 16 pancakes in it. So it’s like 288 pancakes right now. I just got back from touring the site yesterday. We’ve got a stack of pancakes. It’s like our own local ihop. Instead of putting syrup on it, we put copper caps and solder. But now it took us about six months to get the first pancake done. We’re now spitting out one a day. That’s an example. And you think about the machining, the people time to go do that. We’re on very rapid cost down curves.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m now wondering how mad people would be if you put real syrup on these pancakes. But we’ll go there some other time, not be happy. Not be happy. Okay, good to know. Last question for you. What advice do you have to the climate tech startup community? There are a lot of things that make you wildly unique, including the value proposition around fusion energy, the amount of money that you’ve raised. But what lessons can folks take from your success so far?
Rick Needham: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think there’s a few things that I think have been helpful for us. So we are a little bit unique. I mean, we are focused on this massive trillion dollar market, and fusion is a stepwise change and literally a human civilization defining thing. So we got that going for us. But there are things that we do that I think others can do as well. One is focus relentlessly on your next critical de-risking. For us, it was the first one. Build that magnet, focus on that and make sure people, and part of this is storytelling. Make sure people understand what that is. Let’s be honest. Showing a magnet go up to 20 Tesla. It’s not that sexy of a thing to be honest. You’re seeing a little thing creep up. But if people understand what that means, and this is part of the storytelling, if you can have a magnet that does that, you can build a fusion power plant that does this, make it really clear what that linkage is and show how that one key thing is a de-risking element.
Like right now, the key de-risking we’re doing is SPARC. So we have people come into SPARC and we show them it and we say, this is what it is. So it doesn’t have all the equipment in yet. We’re building it. But when this happens, when this turns on, when this shows net energy gain, the world’s in a different place. We’re now in a place where commercial fusion is possible. We’ll have to come down affordability curves and all that stuff, but it’s possible. So be extremely clear about what your key de-risking thing is and focus the heck on that. And then the other thing is this gets back to the team and working on problems. Problems are going to come up, they’re always going to come up. But I kind of refer people to probably watch the movie The Martian. And I do like this quote from Matt Damon during that where he said, if you have a problem, come up, do the math work. The problem. Of course, his life depended on it. So yes, of course, but the life of your company may depend on it. So work the problem. Don’t say people have told us many times that’s not possible. But for a team that’s really motivated, sometimes that’s the motivation they need. Oh yeah, that’s not possible. We have a bunch of people from SpaceX and Tesla and we’ve built things that no one thought was possible. We can do it here. And to what end to changing humans relationship with energy forever, that’s a pretty cool thing too.
Lara Pierpoint: I love that. That is an incredible note to end on. Thank you so much, Rick. This has been a great conversation. Really appreciate you and everyone being here. Thank you.
Rick Needham: Super. Thanks Lara
Lara Pierpoint: And before, thanks everybody. Before I fully pass the mic back to Steven, I just want to say one more thing, which is thank you to the Latitude Media team. I have had such a great time meeting and working with all of you, and I’m guessing I’m preaching to the choir here, but I can’t say enough about how incredible this organization is. And I think particularly right now in a moment where if you were like me and you read the New York Times on your phone, and then you find yourself throwing your phone across the room because you can’t handle the reporting and how much opinion and lack of facts there are. All of you at Latitude are incredible humans and incredible reporters, and this is such a vital service that you’re providing to all of us. So thank you for having us here today. Thank you.
Rick Needham is the Chief Commercial Officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Lara Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardick. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to thegreenblueprint@latitudemedia.com. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have a fellow clean energy or climate check traveler who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the Clean Energy economy. Hey, listeners, I wanted to jump in here to let you know that we’re going to take a break from our regular biweekly release schedule over the summer. So this will be the last episode of The Green Blueprint until August when we’ll be back with new stories about the people building and doing really challenging things in the climate space. In the meantime, keep sending us ideas for the show. We love seeing what you have to say. And check out similar content on latitude’s website, latitude media.com, where the team is reporting on all types of first of a Kind projects. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in August.
