Sachin and Adam
00:18:11 · Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:18:11] S0: Which, to my knowledge, hasn't been done before in our field. Again, maybe it hasn't. I'm not aware. Maybe it has been done in China, but I haven't seen it. And the body of work to make that possible, right, includes big team doing a full engineering design effort, making sure you've got a full bottoms up cost estimate, building and validating the component, showing that they work, going through and qualifying a really large base of suppliers that hasn't delivered these these kinds of systems all of the development work, all of the community engagement, permitting, and licensing work to get this thing built. Huge body of work on the part of our team to to derisk this project to the point where we could make... Break ground. And I think a lot of that was possible because we had so much structure and discipline around the road map from the beginning. [00:18:50] S2: With the roadmap you said before, so if you achieve all those different states like net facility gains, steam turbines, once you do all that and you prove it out, is that then just a obvious pathway towards tens of billions of dollars of revenue? Because once you've done that, we need cheap, clean, abundant energy. Is it as simple as that? Like, this is gonna take over the energy market?
00:19:09 · Carrie von Muench
[00:19:09] S0: Yeah. So long as you build it in a way that's scalable. Right? Like, if you're... It it all depends on cost, and it all depends on how quickly you can build. And so a lot of our design choices from day one have been tied to deployability. I mean, you guys said it at the beginning. We've got lots of power sources today that work. We just can't seem to build them fast enough. So our job, obviously, is to build fusion machines that work, but also to build them in such a way that we can deploy them faster than anything else out there. And that means a couple of things. That means building in this modular way so you can come down the cost curve and deliver rapidly. That means rightsizing your nameplate capacities for the infrastructure that we have. So right building these things such that they're economical at the couple 100 megawatt nameplate capacity range, you can site them next to 115 kV lines. You don't need to go all the way up to three forty five. That means making sure you're not reliant on rare and expensive materials. So making sure your bill of materials is relatively simple, can be sourced domestically is really important. And it makes... It means making sure your systems are maintainable and serviceable. Right? If you have something that doesn't have high uptime, that only has 40 or 50% capacity factor, then it's gonna be hard to meet the needs of these customers who need five nines reliability. And so for us, yes, we've gotta deliver fusion power systems that work. We've gotta design them such that they're the most scalable source of power out there.
00:20:21 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:20:21] S1: And are there kind of any priors that will help us imagine what Pacific Fusion could look like in fifteen years on a company level? Right? Like, you know, I don't know much about the history of of large kind of power companies, but, like, what could what could this look like? [00:20:35] S0: You know, it's an interesting question. Like, what are the right comps for a fusion company? I think one pretty good analogy is that, you know, the fusion industry now is where the space industry was twenty years ago Yeah. Where you had a bunch of government r and d, but not a lot of private companies actually delivering commercial products to customers. And then you saw this transition relatively quickly that has made the space economy as we know it possible. Yeah. I think we're in a similar place with Fusion in terms of the private sector picking up and commercializing things that are possible because of fifty years of public innovation. [00:21:09] S1: Yeah. [00:21:10] S0: And I think in some ways, the challenges... Like, idea that this thing was impossible, x hardware challenge was impossible until someone did it. Yep. That's similar. Right? People say it's impossible until the day it's done. [00:21:20] S2: Yep. [00:21:20] S0: And so I think we're at that kind of moment for fusion. [00:21:22] S2: Yeah. In researching this episode, what's come about is that this is not a physics problem that we're dealing with. It's really an engineer and operational problem. So as COO, what are the biggest challenges of operating a company like this?
00:21:22 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:21:22] S2: Yeah. In researching this episode, what's come about is that this is not a physics problem that we're dealing with. It's really an engineer and operational problem. So as COO, what are the biggest challenges of operating a company like this? [00:21:35] S0: You know, it's not... People ask a lot, like, what is... Where are the biggest risks or what, you know, what do you worry about most or what are the hardest parts? And it's not a question of one big risk. It's just the mountain of minutiae that has to come together to deliver a project like this. Right? It's like every little part that has to get here on time, every single manufacturing operation that has to go right, every piece that has to come together to get the facility delivered on time, all of the work with our public sector partners that has to continue. And so I think really for us, it's how do you build a super efficient operation across multiple sites that, that can deliver on the timeline that we've laid out. I think that's the fundamental challenge and the fundamental risks they're in are not binary risk. It's not can we do it? They're risk to cost and schedule. And so a lot of what actually occupies the calendar every day is trying to figure out how to manage that as pragmatically as possible.
00:22:24 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:22:24] S2: This sort of makes me think about when we did an interview of PsiQuantum and a documentary And you sort of go into quantum computing thinking it's this one big innovation. It's all this totally new technology, but a lot of their approach was like buying what they could, like all these pieces that have already been made before, and a lot of their worries are similar to you. It's like, is this gonna arrive on time? We've gotta fit together thousands of pieces, there's all these different rooms. It's like, it's this big, like, almost these Lego pieces that you're hoping arrive on time that you can put together, and then the costs sort of work out. [00:22:53] S0: Yeah. I think that... I mean, you know, you're looking at many of them right here. I think the more you can design your system for modularity, the more control you have over your supply chain, more effectively you can partner with folks, more redundancy and resiliency you have, the more likely it is, again, that you can... The more you can absorb and the more likely it is that you can maintain schedule and budget. But we... Yeah. We certainly have looked to a lot of other first of a kind projects to learn what tends to work and not work and are trying to draw on that experience here.
00:22:53 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:22:53] S0: Yeah. I think that... I mean, you know, you're looking at many of them right here. I think the more you can design your system for modularity, the more control you have over your supply chain, more effectively you can partner with folks, more redundancy and resiliency you have, the more likely it is, again, that you can... The more you can absorb and the more likely it is that you can maintain schedule and budget. But we... Yeah. We certainly have looked to a lot of other first of a kind projects to learn what tends to work and not work and are trying to draw on that experience here. [00:23:19] S1: I wanna ask a question about, like, the science and art of company building. Obviously, you know, in this conversation, you've pulled on a few different threads about how you guys are approaching company building. But do you have any kind of, like, guiding philosophies or way in which you guys have built Pacific Fusion?