The New Energy Order | The Arts Club Dubai

A fireside chat between Francesco Sciortino, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Proxima Fusion, and Devika Thapar, Co-founder and General Partner at Wilbe, brings the global race toward energy abundance into focus. Together, they explore the promise of fusion energy, the scientific and commercial challenges ahead, and what it will take to move fusion from breakthrough research to a scalable, world-changing power source.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Culture Counter, a podcast by the Arts Club. Through conversations, interviews, and live recordings, we explore the ideas, people and voices shaping culture today. This conversation was recorded at the Arts Club in Dubai as part of our cultural program, and examines one of the most consequential technological races of our time. In this episode of The Culture Counter, Francesco Schettino, the CEO and co-founder of Proxima Fusion, explores why fusion energy has moved from scientific ambition to strategic reality, why governments and investors are now committing billions to the sector, and how technologies like Stellarators could fundamentally reshape the future of energy industry and global power. The conversation was moderated by Devika Thapar, co-founder and GP at Willoughby. We hope you enjoy. All right. So we're talking about the new energy order. Um, so we'll get right into it. Uh, I think you all will be aware that for most of human history, progress has been constrained by energy in nearly every major leap in civilization, be it the agricultural age, the industrial era, the information age, and now the AI race have all come in part by unlocking more and new energy sources. Now, if we solve for commercial fusion energy, in effect, we're going to be unlocking something that's limitless, uh, abundant, clean, safe, uh, and removing a constraint that's always existed for humanity. So you can just start to imagine what becomes possible if we, if we achieve it. Now, we met Francesco late in late twenty twenty two doing a program that we run. It will be for scientists that want to build companies, in effect turning breakthrough insights, ideas, and research into generational companies. I'm the co-founder and GP of of Wilby, and we're an early stage venture capital firm that invests exclusively in scientists and engineers like Francesco. At inception stage. And we do that through a platform that we run where we combine training community know how, lab space and early capital in the hope that we can spot and support companies like like Proxima. But coming back to twenty twenty two, that was a time when Europe was shutting down nuclear plants. And, um, what stood out for us when we met Francesco wasn't just his optimism and the scientific credibility of the project, but was the clarity of vision that you had on the path that you wanted to lay out for, for Proxima and why the why now? And the case for fusion made sense. So we went ahead and backed Francesco and the founding team even before Proxima was incorporated. And the rest is the rest is history. And for almost three years in. And Proxima fusion is now the fastest growing stellarator company in the world. So let's start at the beginning. Why is it now that governments and investors are pouring billions into into the sector? What's changed? That was different before. Happy to go into that. Hi everyone. Nice to be here. The key tailwinds for fusion differ for different kinds of concepts. So Proxima works on what is called magnetic confinement fusion with a dome in a in a concept that is called the stellarator that I'll tell you a little bit more about. For us, computing the ability to numerically optimize devices where human minds couldn't get. Without this level of integration, That's a first major tailwind. The ability to make magnets that are much more powerful than anything that has been around before. That means our devices, instead of having to be theorized to be football fields, they can become something that is leading to commercial viability. And then theory as advanced, and the ability of actually understanding how the various pieces of physics and engineering can lead to economics, that's that's changed in other kinds of fusion. For example, laser fusion, there have been advances in how powerful the lasers can be in other domains, how powerful capacitor banks can discharge electricity. So depending on who you ask, fusion is somewhat similar to a religion in the sense that people disagree so fundamentally that you have to build your own understanding of the field to to pick what you think is going to happen. It's the clearly, the early days of fusion industry. There are now sixty fusion companies around the planet, about thirteen billion dollars now invested privately in the field. So it's more than just a little bit of, um, a fluffy thing. You know, there is there are companies that are going to become trillion dollar companies in the field at this point. They still wins. Now mean that we're going out of national labs and universities focusing on engineering, execution, building commercial cases, spin outs and so on. And if we just did a one on one on nuclear energy, um, without going into a lecture, um, what's the so we know fusion energy is different from fission. Maybe you can give one line on that. Uh, and then what is nuclear fusion? Uh, and what are the dominant approaches for achieving it? Yeah. So many of you are familiar with nuclear fission. Every nuclear that you've ever seen deployed is fission. Fission means splitting. And it's the process of taking a heavy nucleus and bombarding it with neutrons usually. And that nucleus can split and then it can split in many, in many different ways. That process transforms part of the mass in the original nucleus into energy. That's the famous Einstein formula that you might have heard about. E equals MC squared. That formula means that mass is the same in physics as energy. And if you go through this reaction of fission, you can transform some mass into pure energy and fission power plants. After we as humans, learned how to blow up things with fission and make nuclear bombs, we also learned how to control it. And that gave rise already quite early on, right after the bombs. Basically, we learned about the same time. Arguably, we learned how to control it and make sure that this process doesn't run away. That's a key point for fission. Fission. From a physics perspective, is dirty. Easy fission can be imagined as you get two special rocks, you bring them close to each other and magically they start getting hot and you're like, what's going on? There is something spectacular here from nature. And that's because if the true materials are uranium that is enriched and there are enough neutrons that are going that are bouncing around, the uranium starts running away. It starts breaking apart, and you end up with an enormous amount of energy. That does not happen in fusion. Very different, very different. So fusion is the process that powers the stars. It's the fundamental. Most of the energy in the universe either derives from gravity or effectively is a nuclear fusion form. It is nuclear. I'll come back to to that. So there is nuclear fission and nuclear fusion fusion, as the word says, it's about joining things. But those things are not heavy ions, heavy nuclei. They instead, the lightest elements. The universe is more than ninety nine point nine nine nine percent. Made of hydrogen, the lightest element that came out of the Big Bang, basically in the center of the stars. The conditions are so extreme. There is so much pressure, so much heat, that some of these light hydrogen atoms can start banging against each other until they fuse. When they fuse, they become after a chain of events, they become helium and other heavier elements. And in that fusion of nuclei, part of their mass is transformed into energy. The result is kind of similar to the one of fission. You have mass going into energy, but the way you go about it is completely different. It's the opposite ends of the periodic table. So the the way we classify elements, fusion has a lot more energy compared to fission. So it's more energy dense than a small number of reactions can give you an enormous amount of energy if you were to have a spoonful of fusion fuel. So literally just the amount of liquid that you can fit in a spoon that would have the same energy as thirteen tons of coal, which means you could power Dubai with a few water bottles effectively. Water has hydrogen, H2O, and if you had heavy forms of hydrogen, some are widely available, some we need to make. You could power humanity forever with the most abundant, effective, effectively with the most abundant element that exists. It sounds too good. It's very hard. Exactly. Sounds very good. So. But to get that spoonful, you essentially need to fuse the material or isotopes together at very high temperatures. How high are those? That's right. So in the center of the sun, we believe the sun is doing fusion at about ten to fifteen million degrees. Ten to fifteen million degrees. Sounds like a lot. Until you hear that what we're trying to do on earth requires ten times more. And we do that routinely in many national labs across the world. So the kind of devices that proximal fusion works on Stellarators at their core need to reach one hundred and fifty million degrees. Sounds scary. That's the easy part. The difficult part is doing that enough, meaning having a high enough density of the fuel and keeping it stable, keeping it in a way that doesn't damage your device. No materials survive a million degrees, not to speak about one hundred and fifty million degrees, so you have to come up with something quite smart to confine this matter. In our case, we do it with magnetic fields. Okay, one last technical question. Then we get into the fun stuff. Is that an engineering challenge to keep it? It hasn't really been for. So we've been chasing fusion for six or seven decades, depending on where you start. We've built fusion bombs. So an H-bomb is a fusion bomb. It's a H stands for hydrogen. And we've learned how to do those in the nineteen fifties. And we know that they are incredibly much more powerful than fission bombs. And that's the nasty side. We have not learned how to make them how to make fusion for controlled power. And that's what we've been chasing over time. We have wildly underestimated the comparison of the complexity of this for six decades. And so while at every stage there is an old joke, fusion is always thirty years away. Whenever you talk about it, it's still thirty years away. And that joke kind of got old by now because there are, as I said, sixty fusion companies that are going out to private investors saying, look, it's not the physics challenge anymore. We can translate this into an engineering challenge that unlike in physics, you can put on a roadmap, you can put on a budget. Now the challenge is there are sixty fusion companies out there. They talk of very different things. Somebody has got to be wrong, but somebody's got to be right. Now there are two dominant approaches that people talk about in fusion. So there's a tokamak and stellarator. Why are you betting on the stellarator? Yeah. So in magnetic confinement fusion or magnetic confinement fusion approaches have to do with magnets. I am actually a tokamak physicist by background. So tokamaks are the most conventional way of building donuts with magnets. What I mean by that is a device that is the shape of a doughnut. So there is it's like a ring and you have magnets around it that create a magnetic cage. You need the magnetic cage because you can't have the matter, the hot ionized matter at one hundred and fifty million degrees, touching any material surface. So you're effectively creating a magnetic cage that keeps this hot, ionized matter what is called a plasma away from the walls. Both tokamaks and stellarators fundamentally are that doughnuts with magnets. Tokamaks are simpler in the sense that all they're magnets are flat. They create this donut in a way that if you were to cut a slice, every slice could look the same. Whereas a stellarator is a bit of a tougher beast. Interestingly, stellarators were thought of first. So in nineteen fifty one, Lyman Spitzer at Princeton said, okay, I've tried all these different things to make particles bang against each other really hard. Nothing works. Let's try to get a magnetic field that spirals around in a circle, but it needs to spiral. It cannot be just it's not a particle accelerator that goes in a circle. And Lyman Spitzer figured out you have to play with the magnetic field geometry in complicated ways to get that geometry right. He absolutely failed from a practical perspective. One of the geniuses of twentieth century physics. But from a practical standpoint, he was well ahead of his time. We could not build these things precisely enough. We could not numerically optimize. In nineteen fifty one. So next step was a tokamak came up. Tokamak is a Russian acronym, was formally made known in nineteen fifty eight by the Soviets, who said, look at you silly people playing with tokamaks, with stellarators. They are just not giving you anything. For more than a millisecond. We've come up with something that is much simpler. You build what is called a solenoid in the center, and you create a large current in a tokamak. And without going into too many details, that makes your device simpler because it looks the same as you go around. Maybe at that point I show a picture of what stellarator looks like. Um, that's a stellarator. Maybe not something that tells you a whole lot at first, but what you're seeing here is a stellarator in northern Germany, and that's the the stellarator the Proxima fusion came out from. Um, we spun out in early twenty twenty three from the Max Planck Society. That's an organization of national labs in Germany, The Institute for Plasma Physics is basically an. Institute for fusion is an organization with one thousand two hundred people working just on fusion, and this baby device here costed the German government about one point five billion dollars. And Germany. When we started in twenty twenty two, I was one of the European research coordinators for tokamaks. I lost faith in tokamaks being at that stage where they could translate into economic viability, and my co-founders dragged me into this in some sense. And after infinite discussions, we we came to believe that the concept behind this thing actually has a clear focus on engineering on on execution that we can put on our roadmap. We can actually go closer and faster to commercialization. So what you're seeing here, you can't quite tell, but it is a doughnut shaped device. It becomes clearer if I go here on the left, you see the same thing that you had there. So the left drawing is a visualization of what W7-x is. Of course, in a in a model, whereas this one is an actual photograph I can point out. Maybe on the left there you have your typical, uh, German sized mensch. So that's a normal human. Uh, nothing special. So you see that the device is really big and that, uh, at that scale, you can't tell from the photo, but this device is not is an experiment. This is not a power plant. It was never designed to be a power plant. But with the kind of progress that we're making also together with the Max Planck Society, it divides about that size fifty percent larger, can make a gigawatt of energy. What does that mean? Enough energy for a million people. We'll come back to that. That's the energy density that we care about and why we're chasing fusion after seventy years. So on the left you have w7-x with the plasma, the hot ionized matter being the pink thing. You see that this pink stuff is turning around in a twisty manner. Around it you see some gray magnets and then some orange magnets. There is lots of magnets. These are superconducting, meaning you have to keep them very cold in such a way that they don't lose any energy. On the right hand side, you see a different beast. That's a design the Proxima fusion made public. It became public in February last year. We called it a stellaris design, and it was the result of what we promised. Originally at the pre-seed stage, we said twenty twenty two. A bunch of things changed, made me step out of tokamaks, step into Stellarators, and we said we can actually put together all the elements of physics and of engineering. It's going to take us two years, we said, and it's going to take us a team from scaling from five to thirty people linearly. Very simple model. After one year we were done. We published stellaris, and this is the first concept that we believe has ever been shown. That puts together all the elements of the story for a commercial fusion power plant. That's right. So this thing on the right is actually not the same scale as the thing on the left. It's about twice as big. The w7-x, the stellarator that we actually built side to side is about twelve meters. The thing on the right hand side is about twenty four. Stellaris on the right hand side would make three gigawatt thermal, which if you convert into electricity, is about one gigawatt electric. So that powers the city of Munich. Wow. I remember when we were starting drafting this public private partnership with the W7-x was foundational to the company. Do you think that, by the way, I think that's pretty unique for across the world? I don't think there's any stellarator or any fusion company, maybe Commonwealth Fusion. You can correct me if I'm wrong. That has such a unique public private partnership with an institution of this kind, with a billion and a half being poured into it and a thousand people working on it, that actually benefits what we're building. Yeah, that was the design of the company, basically, and a bit of background there. So Commonwealth Fusion Systems is currently the largest fusion company on the planet that has been out of MIT. They've raised three billion dollars. They're really good guys. They're building a device. Maybe connecting to your original question, how far is fusion? How far away is fusion? Next year, you should expect Commonwealth Fusion systems to announce ten times more energy out than in for 10s. So just a demonstration. This is happening next year. That's not a power plant. It's a demonstration. CFS is in a very strong position. I was doing my PhD at MIT when they spun out, and we know each other very well. And the story of CFS is partly what inspired Proxima, in the sense that the CFS spun out from MIT fusion community, which focused mostly on tokamaks. So the most conventional way of doing magnetic confinement fusion. The tokamak on the MIT campus was a fantastic device. I loved it to my bones. It was called Alcator C-mod. It ran for twenty years. And then one day the Department of Energy decided to delete the A line from the budget. And my supervisor, who was in charge of the project, he simply didn't see a budget line and got very upset. And the project eventually was shut down. And CFS came out of basically the realization that it was both a moment of crisis. There was no budget to keep the largest experiment on the MIT campus to going forward, and there was an opportunity which related to these new magnets, these high temperature superconductors, or hctz for short. So they said, keep the science. We claim that we know enough. We're just going to brute force it on an engineering level by making more powerful magnets. Five years later, give or take. I'm in Germany with those that became my co-founders. Lucia was still at MIT and Martin was at Google in California, and we saw a publication coming out saying basically that we could numerically optimize the shape of Stellarators to overcome the last physics drawback, the magnet technology was advancing. We learned how to design stellarators this twisty version much better. And we said, actually, we can think about the evolutionary scale of what we're trying to do here. We need to do it in public private partnership. This is not a venture capitalist cowboy kind of field where you put some private money and everything. You just throw more money at it. That's not gonna do it. It's unfortunately much more complicated. So we said, let's go and work with this one institution that we are lucky to be part of. At that time, take the know how from W7-x. Apply computing in a different, very non-academic way. Let's build a simulation framework and optimization framework that can do things that you don't see in national labs. And let's see how far we get. You mentioned Lucia and Martin. So I remember again, when we when you had finished the, the course, uh, you said came to us, me and my co-founder Ali said, Ali and D I'm serious. I want to build this thing. And one of the first questions we asked was, okay, so who's going to be on this journey with you? And you had convinced not just one, but seven other founding team members to join you, and not just from the lab here at W7-x, at the Max-planck in Germany, but from Google X, MIT, other parts of the world. And then soon after recruited a brilliant C-suite team with folks coming from space X, from the competitor Commonwealth fusion engineers from Tesla. How did you convince all these people to join you in Munich? A lot of the hiring, the the recruitment philosophy came from Martin, who was. He's a mechanical engineer. He went to undergrad with my sister in Cambridge. He was introduced to me with my sister. And Lucio was your best man? Yes. Um, my sister introduced me to Martin when I was seventeen and said, this is the best engineer in Cambridge. Little did I know that fifteen years afterwards I was going to start playing, uh, interesting games with Martin, uh, in fusion and, uh, the Martin after mechanical engineering in Cambridge, he went to McLaren formula one. Really fun place to do extreme engineering. I would argue without really a purpose. And then he went into Google, became a senior software engineer, then went to Google X, was the head of simulation of autonomous aviation company in Google X, and then he said, time to find a mission. Time to take some risks and do something that defines my engineering career, my legacy. And I was at that time with Jaret and Jonathan, other co-founders, and I said, I have a risk for you. I can show you that we could do something amazing. We could get it wrong. But, um, that's, that's how it jumped. And then the recruitment process is sort of a repetition of that. Uh, Martin has been brilliant along the way. Uh, we've managed to attract, um, the game is often hire somebody better than yourself at every, at every step. Some team members change the way you look at the game. Oftentimes for context, we're about one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty people at this point, three years in more or less. And, uh, key people. Niko Riva joining us from Oslo was at MIT. Um, was the key person working on the kind of magnets that we needed, stepped in, changed the game. Rob Slate was the technical director for magnets in one of the key fusion companies, stepped in, changed the game Buster. See our chief technical operations officer. He was the senior director for production of space. He went to space, maybe twenty ten, something like that. They had two rockets on the floor and he was told by Elon Musk, make it forty. Do whatever you got to do. I want forty rockets on the floor. Change the processes. Change the way you do it. Learn from BMW. That's where he had built his manufacturing backbone. And that's not an angle that I had at all. So I didn't start Proxima thinking about how do you scale magnet production like rockets. So you have to always up and and it's the benefit of the journey is that you can convince people that there is a mission. And so it's not by offering a higher salary that you convince people, you have to treat them well. Make sure that their families appreciate the sacrifice in some way. But eventually that's not going to be enough. You have to sell that. This could change humanity. And you mentioned you didn't have a background on many of the things, which is true as a first time founder, what was, um, uh, harder than you anticipated when starting out? And on the contrary, what was actually turned out to be easier than you had probably expected? I don't have an answer for that. Easier because it's all a lot harder than you initially picture. But I think recruiting is, uh, and, um, and building a team that that feels culture is, is much harder and much more emotional than people appreciate. To sell somebody on sacrifices over extended times is hard. And we've done some pretty crazy things to, to convince people to move across the planet. Like, uh, some things I can't say, but, uh, you know, we have a, a story of moving back Europeans from the US, um, people that have gone to Silicon Valley because that's where you've gone to build great companies ten years ago still today, fantastic entrepreneurship culture. Europe has lagged behind in venture capital, and now there is venture funds being built, governments that wake up and there is an enormous crisis on figuring out energy, for example. So that's the story of Proxima stepping into being born at a time when Russia invades Ukraine. German energy prices go up. This kind of crisis call for ambitious people to step in and to say there are short term solutions. They're not going to fix the problem. Not enough. And then there are things that can change the GDP of a country fusion rockets, quantum computers, you can count them on on your hands. And fusion is definitely one of those recruiting people. Many of these Europeans from the US also Americans wanting to build in an ecosystem that suits them best. This has really made a difference. I mean, you already. I was planning to come to this later, but since you already touched upon it, uh, the very defining moment Europe was in when Proxima was born. And of course, energy sovereignty is, you know, uh, especially in the time of the AI race and all the data centers that power, it is obviously one of the hottest issues that dominates the geopolitical landscape. Uh, how does all of that determine who actually gets fusion to the grid? First complex question. Um, I'm here in the UAE as also discussing with various aspects of large funds. And it's very interesting to see that even in a country that is so rich of natural resources, this is understood. The world, the way we look at energy has become much more geopolitical. Fusion should be understood as being a domain that evolves with geopolitics, and that affects geopolitics. If fusion works, we change energy from being a natural resource to being a technology that displaces everything effectively. You can really say that humanity is fundamentally led by intelligence and energy. The two feed each other. If you figure out how to turn intelligence into energy technology, you get into a loop. If you get to a stellarator that you can build, replicate, replicate, replicate, you can power data centers. And honestly, data centers are on everyone's mouth and the least of my concerns. I'm much more interested in desalinization of water, empowering communities that don't, um, that can't access energy data centers may be the one thing that funds this crazy enterprise. That's the interesting thing. Hyperscalers obviously have a lot of cash that they want to use for their own success, and that makes a ton of sense. Of course, eventually technologies are pulled. You know, as Paul Graham likes to say, you need the nerds and you need the rich. And one without the other doesn't quite work. And if you manage to turn this crisis for energy into a moment where we get across the final barrier for commercialization of fusion, you don't just enter a new market, you enter a new phase of civilization. You detach natural resources from energy, from, you know well, the wealth of countries depends on something different at that point. So would it, uh, just diving a bit deeper onto the complexity of the question. So do you think it's, uh, in terms of what you're seeing and your experience, will it be a case of who has the most capital, who's investing or who is investing? And is it the head of the AI race, the best regulations? What are some of the factors? It's a combo, right? You need to you can't build this out of nowhere. One of our investors, uh, asks the provocative question of, but if Elon Musk wanted to take you over and, uh, put one hundred billion on the table and said, I'm gonna beat these guys and I'm gonna build Stellarators could he do it? And the answer is no. You can't buy stuff on Amazon to make a fusion reactor. And you can also buy people in the right way. You can buy teams that function. You can try if they're available, but chances are you need to work with those that have invested also in public research for decades that have built an ecosystem. You can build a company, but you can't build a supply chain quickly. You know, manufacturing is something that requires extended investment. For context, in Stellarators, this optimization of this complex shapes maybe a leave it on this image here, the optimization of all this, of the plasma, but then of the magnets and the support structures and the heating systems, this is an enormous computational problem, which is what we can do in twenty twenty six. And we couldn't do in two thousand and six. There are probably about one hundred people on the planet that have a feeling for how this truly works out. There are a number of people that can click through a framework. If you design it right. And part of the job of what Proxima is built is a framework where incoming engineers can run a full chain of of simulation tools. But you need to have, you want to build this in an ecosystem that maximizes your return on investment. This is not at the stage where if you throw more money, it's just going to stick. So you need a government that has a crisis deep enough that they're willing to go out and change and they say, okay, we've gone low. Now we're going to have to make a number of bets. If one of them works out, it changes everything. You know, you can't say if anyone sells a fusion company saying this has no risk. It's just going to work. You put money, we multiply it by one hundred. It's all good. Call it out. It's not true. There is definitely. It's not an app. This is something where we try our best to quantify timescales, but we could be off by plus or minus some amount. I'm not even going to try to say how much, but again, it's the opportunity versus risk. The opportunity is so disproportionate compared to any other venture capital investment. From my perspective, the opportunity multiplier is so much bigger than the risk. I think the the risk of this working out or not is pretty similar to most deep tech companies, but the market scale and how geopolitically, what a bottleneck it can become to everything else. It's just disproportionate. So Germany can do a lot there because of shutting down fusion power plants and being in a very constrained energy space. Europe needs to reshuffle its technology cards, has some amazing industrial giants, which can be very enabling to building new technology companies. There are, I like to quote the number. There are five hundred and fifty thousand CNC machinists, so people that cut metal in Germany and three hundred zero zero zero only in the whole of the United States, five hundred and fifty thousand in Germany, three hundred thousand in the whole of the United States. It takes a little bit to breathe it in and to realize how far the US has gone into the manufacturing. So Germany has that kind of advantage. We started in Germany for a good reason. So that begs the obvious question where is China in fusion? China is investing heavily. Its fusion is part of their plan for the next things to conquer. And they're going heavy at it and they're good. And just like I said, they can't quite buy stellarator know how. My illusion is not that they. That China will not get to design stellarator stellarators that the next thing after tokamaks from my perspective and we're trying to make them leapfrog tokamaks. China right now is building great tokamak projects. It's investing about, give or take five billion in a couple of projects and they are training way more people than anyone else. Probably as many people as the whole West put together. Today, Europe still has about twice the number of people working in these fields, about eight times as many experiments as the United States. China is building four big projects at the same time. Europe is about eight large projects. China will be catching up as as a human eye. I hope that China will catch up and that it will build good competition. We need good competition. We need a supply chain to expand. The cheaper the parts become, the more every investor walks out with a bigger price if we get it right. So right now in Stellarators, I expect there are five years behind. Mhm. And, uh. You talked about time scales. What what is the time scale look like out here? So over the next few years, what are the big milestones that we're looking to achieve? Yeah. So one of. I can't quite point to it, but one of those twisty magnets that you see, those gray, twisty things, that's that's a superconducting magnet of w7-x. That magnet was made of a superconducting material. So something that, if kept cold enough, can run lots of current, create really strong magnetic fields forever. That superconducting material was niobium titanium. That's two generations old we're now working on not the next thing, but the one afterwards. We think it's mature. It's this high temperature superconductors. And in eighteen months we're going to show a demonstration magnet about three meter scale times two times one in the third dimension. This is going to be the most advanced magnet humanity's ever made. And once you see the magnet, you know that we can make an energy gain stellarator. So a stellarator that makes more energy out than in. Now, what's special about that magnet is that it's twisty like the ones of W7-x, and that twistiness enables a stellarator to be steady, state and intrinsically stable. By that I mean that it can run for as long as you want it, and it can do it in a very predictable way. So if we get this magnet right in eighteen months, then we can go and build stellarators. This is already manufacturing right now, so the design is complete. The R&D has already been done. The build out is not a joke. It takes a while. Yeah, but twenty twenty seven will show this magnet. We call it the stellarator mortal coil. Then once that's done, we go and build out a net energy gain stellarator. We call it alpha. It will be built in Germany. And that's a demonstrator. That's a demonstrator. Meaning you give me thirty megawatts from whatever source you have. I give you back thirty megawatts from fusion. So it's net zero. You could say it's not very useful. It's purely a demonstrator. It's the cheapest, smartest, fastest thing that you can do to show that the next thing should be a first of a kind and the first of a kind. We're targeting for the mid twenty thirties. We call that stellaris. That thing on the right is a blueprint for what it looks like for the kind of thing that we can design today over the next few years. It keeps evolving and evolving. And, and if you help us visualize it, how how big would stellaris be? Stellar is about twenty five metres side to side. The actual. You should think of this as the reactor core in some sense. Take your gas power plant your fission power plant, your coal power plant. Don't change most of it. You don't. We are not trying to change the switchyards, not the Turbine hall, nor the cooling systems. We want to change the way you make heat. So this is like a furnace. But instead of burning on a chemical level, it's burning on a nuclear level with fusion. And once you get this heat, you can boil water, you make steam, the steam moves turbines. And then you can make electricity if you want. So that would make three gigawatt thermal on a footprint of a power plant. That is exactly what we know and love already. So you don't have to change infrastructure. Oh that's fascinating. So that means we could essentially use existing nuclear power plants that aren't being used. That's right. And use them for fusion. That's right. And there is a we're going to make an announcement likely next week. Right now we're a bit dependent on a government being a little slow on, on this. But we we are going to announce reusing an existing fission nuclear fission site to build the first of a kind fusion power plant. And in your view, what's, uh, what are some of the big risks that kind of keep you up at night? I tend to group them in three categories for us. One is magnets. These magnets, this key milestone ahead of us. I don't mean to trivialize it in any way. This is really, really hard. Um, eighteen months. It's eighteen months away. Meaning that we've gone through the design, we've gone through the assessments of risks, and now we are deep in the trenches of actually making this thing. Magnets are the enabling hardware thing that makes these devices be that size as opposed to ten times bigger. So magnets is the one thing that we are cracking right now. Second is materials. And what I mean by that is not that we need to invent new materials. We have a baseline. And the stellaris design was intentionally designed based on existing materials. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't wish for better materials, because materials basically determine commercial viability. Eventually, if you want to really see a fusion founder terrified, ask them what about your maintenance scheme? How do you keep the device? Once it runs for some time, it surely gets damaged. Can you open it up and change things, and you'll see them in a moment of panic, because it's really hard. And maintenance reflects on the availability, meaning the uptime of a power plant. And if you don't have eighty and above percent availability, there is zero way you can make money. And if you don't make money, nobody buys your next power plant. And if nobody buys your next power plant. This is a nice toy and nothing more. So we have to make this commercially viable, which means we want maintenance to be easier, which means we want materials that are better and more resilient in these extreme environments. So it's magnets, it's materials. And the third is related to tritium production technology. Tritium is the heaviest form of hydrogen. And it doesn't exist in nature. You have to make it and that's fine. So are there specialist producers of tritium. Were you saying we have to be okay. So we in that design? Uh, one part that looks great, like much of it, uh, but a thick layer that you, you are seeing, but I don't know exactly how to point. It is what is called a blanket blanket because it surrounds the body of the plasma. And that blanket is a component that is made to absorb the neutrons and make extract energy and make tritium. Tritium is this heavy form of hydrogen that you are consuming and you are making, and so you are making it and putting it back in the machine and it's in a loop. So you don't need you shouldn't think of tritium as a natural resource online. Oftentimes you have this, the smartest fellow on Reddit saying, oh, but there is no tritium in the world. And we're like, yeah, we know. We noticed. That's why we're doing this crazy form of R&D to make sure that we are making our own fuel. And that's what makes the whole thing infinite. We don't need to mine tritium. We need to make it. So it's a technology challenge, not a trivial one. And so it's my third tough challenge. Magnets, materials and tritium. Tritium not tritium technology. Not the tritium itself. We need the technology to make it. Wow. How much of this is everyone following all these new terms that we're learning? Um, but but I will come to you guys shortly to ask what burning questions you have about, uh, fusion. Um, but let's get to the capital side of it. So we've raised, uh, two hundred and thirty million in private capital and a sizable chunk in public funding, uh, as well. How how does that make you feel? What comes next? It's a good start. Uh, it's not the end. Clearly this, this thing, if you think that it costs two hundred and thirty, you're a very optimistic human. Uh, it's going to cost a whole lot more. The value that we're creating is a lot more, um, a device like the net energy gain demonstrator that we are setting out to build. Now that we're about to announce this site for and that we are in advanced stages of of preparing for. And that's a huge milestone. That's called the Alpha. And that we are targeting to start operation of in the early twenty thirties, say, twenty, thirty two or so. That device is a two billion euro. So about two billion dollar investment. Key to the Proxima story is that we're doing this with a national lab and with a government, and the government is effectively an off taker of this as a research infrastructure. So it's the following step in between following W7-x and before stellaris. There is something in between there with two billion dollars. Basically, if we get it right, you build the one of the largest technology companies of the planet. If if this succeeds, this is not, you know, the valuation of a company like that, just like SpaceX is not based on revenue. It's based on the potential of taking over an enormous chunk of how humans make things. And the investors for this, you know, varied. There is the government taking a significant part in the game in Non-dilutive financing. This relates also to the announcement next week. And then so far we've had investors in Europe and the US, especially some, you know, we started with the more operational will be enabling people that actually help you to build the company, not just, you know, not you were not particularly helpful, I must say, on the design of this. Sorry about that. It's okay. Um, but, uh, you only need a PhD, a postdoc. It's okay, a born genius, you're forgiven. Um, but, uh, you know, enabling in many ways in actually building a company, which is a very, uh, practical, important element of the story. And then we had in the latest rounds, Balderton, one of the largest European investors, Lightspeed based in San Francisco, DST global also a large fund and. And now we are obviously in the GCC also exploring relationships here and opening up also to Singapore, Japan. I think this is this is a human endeavor. It does require a significant amount of capital, not an infinite amount. Um, but this is in the billion scale and, and the competitive landscape. How do how do you view that? We like to think that we are competing against time more than with any one company. But if I were to think of which company, I think the most highly of its CFS, which also happens to be the most funded company, I think the most funded for good reasons. As I said, I'm not I'm biased here because they're good friends. Um, but we are fundamentally competing. So they are building, I would call them the US champion for fusion energy. They started around twenty sixteen, give or take. And they have a remarkable story of bringing together the US venture capital ecosystem to build a device that doing it very well. I happen to think that they're building the wrong thing, but they're building the wrong thing very well. And so kudos for that. But they will adapt and I believe they will become a stellar company eventually. So we see them as the company that we have to catch up with. And, and it's better for humanity is we are in good competitive spirit and we build the same supply chains and we train more people that are just not enough people in fusion right now. Yeah. And, uh, is there any other champion anywhere else in the world? There are companies that are pursuing different approaches, which I don't mean to dismiss. Um, in late twenty twenty two, there was a big demonstration of laser fusion at the National Ignition Facility in California. And laser fusion is completely different kind of process. You take two magnetic magnetic confinement fusion. So you take many very powerful lasers and you point them towards a small pellet of fusion fuel. And you try to compress with the light hits this pellet and compresses it, implodes it, and then once fusion kicks in, that explodes. So it's a mini H-bomb, basically. And the. This has been defense research. It's. The National Ignition Facility is the result of the international treaty banning underground nuclear tests. In the nineteen nineties, the US and NSA started funding this effort, which reproduces some of the physics and some of the harsh conditions of nuclear weapons, but does it in a controlled environment? Most recently, there has been a view that that can be turned into an energy source. It's not what it was funded for originally, but some people think that that turns into a good energy source. My personal view is this is going to be much harder than people expect, because you have to do this pellet ablation at ten times per second to make it reasonable. So right now they do it at one once per day, give or take. They manage to get to net energy gain. Yeah. Okay. So more energy out from the small pellet than hits the pellet. The efficiency of the system is about one thousandth. So it's very it's very it's consuming energy a lot, not making energy. And you have to learn to do it ten times per second, which I think is a pretty difficult thing to do. That said, we need more people to try things. Fusion is big. Fusion needs smart people to try more. So I think that's it's good that there is diversity of thought and attempts. Yeah. So so everyone here has a very good understanding now of fusion. Of course the different approaches and what we're doing, what to invest in what what proposals to ignore. Thank you all for joining us here this evening. And um, and thank you to Francesco for sharing all this. I always learn every, every time we're going to be here.