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- [00:00]
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Jacob Goldstein
Guaranteed Human Being a small business owner isn't just a career, it's a calling. Chase for Business knows how much heart and effort go into building something of your own. Manage all your business finances, from banking to payments to credit cards, all in one place with their digital tools. Plus access online resources designed to help your business thrive. Learn more@chase.com business chase for business Make More of what's yours the Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply JPMorgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase Company Are you running for
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- [01:53]
Jacob Goldstein
Pushkin. One of the biggest, wildest dreams in technology is nuclear fusion, smashing atomic nuclei together in order to make energy. And just to be clear, fusion is different than fission, different than splitting nuclei, which is the way nuclear power works. Now, fusion has the promise of being an incredibly cheap, abundant source of energy without some of the risks associated with fission, like, for example, nuclear meltdowns. As you'll hear in a minute, fusion could profoundly change the world for the better. But crucially, nobody has figured out how to do nuclear fusion in a practical, economic way. A bunch of companies are working on it, and Google and Microsoft, among others, have promised to buy fusion power from these companies if they figure out how to deliver it. So the stakes are high, the money is flowing in, but it's still unclear if or when fusion will work to deliver power at scale. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's yous Problem? I recently went to south by Southwest to host a Conversation about fusion with an analyst, an investor, and a guy who runs a fusion company. It was billed as the great Fusion Debate. How far away are we really? And as you'll hear, we talked about the promise of fusion and what it'll take to realize that promise. And we also talked about how the AI boom and the related demand for more and more power is shaping the industry. Also, interestingly, why having a ton of money flowing into the industry is not necessarily a good thing. Here's the conversation.
- [03:46]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
So I want to make the case that the fusion industry is a testament to 21st century capitalism. Capitalists have put more than $10 billion into fusion companies, something like 4 billion last year. And the amazing thing is most of those companies are probably going to fail. And most of the ones that succeed, if they do succeed, won't make a profit for many years. So this is an incredible bet. And it's not just sort of gambling speculation, right? If it works, it'll be great. It'll be the abundant cheap energy we've been dreaming of for years. So the question that we're going to try and answer today is is it going to work? And when will it work? And what do we mean by work? Fortunately, we have some of the smartest, most knowledgeable people in the world on this question right here to try and help us answer it. Can you guys just briefly introduce yourselves, say your name and your job as we say in podcasts.
- [04:49]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Yep. I'm Luke. I work for a company called Baylor Gifford, which is an institutional asset manager.
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Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Hi, I'm Melanie Windridge. I'm complicated. I'm the founder of Fusion Energy Insights. We keep people up to date with developments in the fusion industry. Also the co founder of Fusion X, which runs Fusion X Invest Conferences, brings together capital and opportunity in fusion and the founder of Fusion Advisory Services. We help people make decisions in the fusion industry. So we provide information, basically all of those. I provide information to people who need to know about fusion to help them make better decisions.
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Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
I'm Greg Peifer. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Shine Technologies. We are one of said companies. Of course we expect to succeed, as all of them I'm sure do. But we're taking a little bit of a different approach to fusion, which is we've actually identified commercial applications of the technology today where these can really meaningfully impact lives and improve the world and are using that as a path to practice and make fusion cheaper over time.
- [05:55]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
So just to start, we'll get into the details in a sec. But just to start, give me the dream, like, give me the long term. Why will it be amazing if this works? Capital W in a big way.
- [06:06]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
I think a lot of people are focused on the human energy needs over the next 10 or 20 years, but that's not what makes fusion interesting to me. Fusion, fundamentally, access to fuel is unlimited is the way to think about it. So as this technology becomes cost effective and we get better and better and better at it over time, the cost will continue to drop as technological sophistication continues to improve. And with no fundamental ceiling set by the availability of raw materials, fusion's going to move humans into this world where we can access energy at 10, 100, 1000, a million times more at a low cost than we can do today. And that's what's really exciting to me about fusion. It's not just like, can we decarbonize today? Can we meet the needs of AI, but what is it going to do to society? I think it's very akin to when the microchip first entered the market.
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Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Right.
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Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Like in the 1960s, we had no idea how that was going to transform society, the computational power that that would lead to. And it was an industry where we've seen literally trillions of times of increased cost performance over the last 70 years. Fusion has that potential. And so as we think about what humans can do long term, the sort of problems we can solve with access to energy on that scale, that's really the most exciting thing about it. And it's coming.
- [07:30]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
I mean, one example, it's just an example, free unlimited energy. I know we don't know what we'll do with it. You couldn't have guessed iPhone or AI 70 years ago. You might have guessed AI actually, and you might have guessed iPhone. So guess what would we do in 70 years with free unlimited energy?
- [07:47]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Yeah, I mean, you can go anywhere from the super practical today of like, we would have unlimited clean water. Right. You can separate salt from water for free. If energy is cheap, you can pull carbon out of the atmosphere for free almost. So this is super practical, like other, you know, if you want to let the imagination wander, we can cut trip times to other planets, you know, from years or many, many months down to weeks. And so there are ways to expand. You can let the imagination go on some of these things, but fundamentally, I think you're looking at a path out of energy poverty for the 8 billion of U.S. that don't have access today. You're looking at being able to solve some of these major problems and then you're looking at unlocking things that we just can't even imagine today.
- [08:42]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Right.
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Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Okay.
- [08:43]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
So that's the dream. Now let's spend a long time talking about why it's hard and what we have to figure out to get there. And maybe more concretely, let's try and put a stake in the ground. When's it going to happen? And not when's that going to happen? But let's start with when will there be fusion power on the grid? When will somebody's house get electricity from fusion?
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Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Do you mean making money selling it or just, like, technical proof?
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Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Technical proof sounds a little small. I feel like a real power plant. That's for real.
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Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
That's economic.
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Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Yeah, that's economic. So, Melanie, you want to just put a flag in the ground.
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Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Goodness. So if I were. No, actually, I don't want to put it back. I'll tell you a couple of reasons why it's a really, really hard question. And of course, it's the question. When people talk about fusion or you're asking about fusion, the first thing they say, well, the two questions they want to know the answer to, when are we going to have it? What's it going to cost? I get it. Those are really good questions. But first thing is it's still kind of an exploration. And so it's very difficult to make predictions of exactly what's going to happen and when they're going to happen. So that's difficult for the timescale thing. But also there are a lot of things feeding into it, a lot of moving pieces. It's not just the science. And actually we're moving in fusion from this science phase, if you like, into an engineering phase. We need to be able to build fusion power plants. There have been demonstrations. You could say there was a famous breakthrough, if you like, in our field demonstration in 2022, when the National Ignition Facility, which is a laser experiment, got more energy out of fusion reactions than it put in to make them happen. And that's big because fusion happens in stars. You need to have really extreme conditions, stellar conditions, hundreds of millions of degrees to make fusion happen. So we've had that sort of scientific breakthrough. But now if you move into what it takes to actually build a power plant, and as Greg said, one that's economic, that's going to last for decades within, despite these extreme conditions, that's a big thing. That's where most of the challenges lie. Now, then you've also got to be able to pay for it. Who's going to pay for it, there's a lot of investment going into Fusion now. And Fusion already has for customers, Google, Microsoft, Araki, it's a supermarket chain in Japan and any energy company. So there are people willing to pay for it and regulation, you have to be able to regulate it. But anyway, all of these moving pieces are coming in to the determination of when this is going to happen. So if you want to have some idea of timescales, I mentioned the lab, the national lab, getting more energy out than in. Private companies need to do that. There's a number of private companies working on fusion. Estimates are that this decade, the rest of this decade, so before 2030, they're going to be proving out the technology required to get to that energy break even point. Maybe by 2030, 2032, we might see energy break even. Private companies. If you think about, let's say assume four years, if that's optimistic, maybe for building, regulating, maybe you get electricity first. Electricity, let's say by 2036. Everything, in my experience of doing kind of hard things, everything takes longer than you think it will. But when you're looking back, it happens faster than it seems. Like it was raising a child really fast. Yeah, exactly. Raising a child, it seems really fast looking back. So I would say that for the public, when fusion happens, it's going to just come out of nowhere, probably. They probably won't realize. Meanwhile, there's been lots of work going on in the background. But now is the time when companies are getting involved. The people are positioning themselves, governments are positioning themselves, companies are positioning themselves, supply chains are positioning themselves. Because now is the time when those people who are going to actually benefit from fusion, as in make their fortunes from fusion, now is the time that they are jostling for position.
- [13:05]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
This is a perfect setup for Luke make their fortunes from fusion. Luke, you have an investment in fusion right into Greg's company. We should say, why'd you do it?
- [13:18]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
It's partly a nod to the challenges which Melanie talks about. I think we've demonstrated that it's possible to do fusion. The question is now is it practical and then is it profitable at the end of it? And to get through those kind of three stages of scientific engineering and commercial breakeven is going to require a lot more capital than has been required to date, I would argue in the fusion industry to get there. And that's a really big challenge for investors. When you say the path to de risking something gets more expensive as it gets closer to the finish line as opposed to less. And so the industry as it's been led to date in its current form, I guess by government and by academia, et cetera, has not been the best advert for investors looking into Fusion to say that, oh, this can be profitable and this can be a high returning pursuit within the time frame that clients have. So we're quite lucky in our clients have got a long term time horizon of five to 10 years. Ten years is probably about stretching it in the public markets or even in the private markets.
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Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
10 years sounds like it's stretching it
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Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
for fusion, which is the problem we come back to. If you need to say that within 10 years fusion is going to be commercial and profitable and on the grid and we've completed the development of it. That's a really, really risky proposition to take with clients.
- [14:33]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
You just need to find somebody to give you liquidity. Right? That's the other option. If somebody comes in.
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Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
There's one option, if you're a really early stage investor is usually the exit for them of realizing the gain on the risk which they've taken is to sell the company to someone else. Someone else comes in and says, okay, we like the kind of risk we're taking from here. So you might start to see people who fund it, what have been arguably science projects to date might say, okay, well we've de risked the technology to here, but now there's a kind of investor that comes in and wants to take engineering risk and they might find that really attractive as a starting point because they can say, oh well, these people have de risked the science. Now I'm just taking engineering risk.
- [15:10]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Just to be like super clear, one sentence like why did you put money in?
- [15:14]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
So we think there's a path to profitability that's far sooner than selling commercial electricity onto the grid. I think, I mean Greg will do a better job than I can at telling this story, but there are many more things you can do with fusion besides just producing electricity. And it's that journey. Getting from where we are now to that I think is more interesting for investors, particularly at the moment. And I think we were talking beforehand and you sort of make the SpaceX comparison. We didn't start off with. Well, we started off with an ambition to get to Mars in SpaceX, which we're investors in. But the path to getting there has been commercializing low Earth orbit. It hasn't been sending your rockets to Mars as soon as possible. It's been building that financial sustainability to the point where when you want to take a trip to Mars, the cost of that is trivial in comparison of what it was 10 years ago. And so you're trying to make that the option on the investment rather than the core thesis that everything, all the risk rests on. And so there are smart ways to introduce business principles and staging the strategy of a company in terms of what markets they go after, which might make it easier to go after the end goal. Now that can often, if you present it to academia or other places, sounds like selling out, right? Or some big bad investors come and says, oh, we need to make profits now, rather than all you did was
- [16:30]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
reduce the cost of getting to space by 10x. Come on.
- [16:33]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Yeah, exactly. Like it or not, we have to figure out a way that this is commercial in order for it to succeed.
- [16:40]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
So just to articulate the metaphor, right, in the case of SpaceX, the big dream is going to Mars. The practical reality is just getting to orbit more cheaply. By analogy, the big dream here is cheap and abundant power beyond our dreams. And so what is the getting to space for you, Greg?
- [17:00]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Fusion. It makes energy, which is what we're all interested in long term. But that energy is carried by particles called neutrons, at least from the easiest fusion reaction to do, something called deuterium and tritium. And it turns out that the neutrons from fusion actually have tremendous value on their own, used for different purposes. So you can use neutrons to take pictures of things. You can use neutrons to literally do alchemy, to turn low value materials into high value materials. You can capture the heat from the neutrons. I'd argue that if we're looking 100 years from now, the biggest value from fusion might be doing bulk scale transmutation of low value materials into high and not even electricity anymore.
- [17:35]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
And just so for a specific example, I know you're working on a, there's a big project you're working on right now to that end. Like actually building a giant building to do fusion to do that.
- [17:45]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Right.
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Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Well, and we have. Yeah, and we have. So we have products in the market today. So as I said, we started, we're kind of following a chip model. So in defense, we have customers who will pay us $100,000 a kilowatt hour for fusion output.
- [17:58]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
And what are they buying from you? Just extremely brilliant.
- [18:00]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
A picture. So we can use neutrons to radiograph modern jet engine blades, for example.
- [18:08]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Like a fancy X ray. Yeah, X ray for a thing where X rays don't work.
- [18:12]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Exactly. Yeah. And just give a really specific example. So modern jet aircraft use very high temperature engines and they get high efficiency by running the Engine above its melting point.
- [18:25]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Frightening.
- [18:26]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
It's terrifying, right? Like if it melts, it explodes and potentially takes down the plane, depending on what type of plane you're in. And the way they do that is they pull cold air from the front of the engine, they compress it and they pump it through the each individual fan blade themselves. And so they have to cast these incredibly intricate channels to assure this cold air passes through the blade. And it's a tough process. And frequently in this process, a little defect is included in the manufacturing process. And only a neutron can see it. And if you don't see it, it doesn't fail in testing. It's kind of like a blood clot in your arteries. Like it's sitting there and then suddenly one day the pilot's going to have a bad day and it moves and it gives them a stroke, right? It blocks that thing, the engine explodes. If you're in an F35, you probably go down. If you're in an Airbus, you have a bad day. So this fusion reaction produces the neutron, as I mentioned, we kind of collimate it into a beam, we push it through the object and we put a neutron sensitive film behind it. We take an X ray, we take a neutron X ray.
- [19:25]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
So this is what you're selling now, a product of fusion. Great. So that's where we are today. Something's happening with fusion. People are giving money to do fusion.
- [19:33]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
And to your other point, we've invested now in a half a billion dollar plant that'll make 20 million doses of medicine every year when complete over the next one to two years. We take uranium that was once intended for nuclear weapons. So highly enriched uranium that the government has down blended. It's worth about $6 a gram after it's been downblended. And we turn it into a substance called Molybdenum 99, which is used to look for heart disease, it's used to stage cancer, it's using 40 million tests every year around the world and it's worth about $100 million a gram.
- [20:05]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
$100 million a gram? Gives one pause. Presumably use an extremely small amount.
- [20:11]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Yeah, about 0.1 micrograms. So it's actually pretty cheap for the patient at the end of the day. And that's why you can do so many millions of patients with this fairly cheap material. So this is what I was talking about, where you can use neutrons to turn low value things into high value things, albeit at small scale. And that's actually like, that's a commercial reality. We know that that works. We've invested in the plant. This will be the way that the Western Hemisphere produces isotopes for the next 50 years. Probably.
- [20:45]
Jacob Goldstein
We'll be back in just a minute.
- [20:56]
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- [22:00]
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- [22:59]
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- [24:01]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
so we haven't said AI yet. We've gone an impressively long time without saying I, so I'm going to say it. AI means the richest companies in the history of the world have an incredible demand for electric power, which seems good for fusion. What does the demand mean? I mean the most kind of dramatic one is Microsoft has this power purchase agreement with it's Helion, right? With a fusion company supposedly that's going to start delivering power in 2028. Which like I can't even get my deck refinished by 2028. Right?
- [24:36]
Jacob Goldstein
What does.
- [24:37]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Well, I don't know if you guys will answer this but a Is that going to happen? Let me just ask is that going to happen? Is there going to be fusion power for Microsoft in 2028?
- [24:47]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
We don't really know a lot about what they're doing because they don't publish peer reviewed papers in the same way that some other companies, most other companies do. Some companies are very secretive because there's a lot of intellectual property here and there is, I guess, complexity for the companies in how they publish their results for the scientific community community and therefore have their credibility and how much they protect. But there's also Commonwealth Fusion Systems which is a spin out from MIT and they're much more public about their work. They're based on the Tokamak concept which has been researched historically since about the 1960s. So it's the best understood of the fusion concepts. But it's really, really hard to engineer a power plant. But they're also the best funded of all the fusion companies. They've raised about 2 to 3 billion dollars. They have a power purchase agreement with Google as well, I think. I can't remember the exact date of their power, probably 2030. So they are, I would say more likely than Helion. And they publish a lot so we can actually look at what they do.
- [25:50]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
I'd imagine they're taking a portfolio approach to that as well. Right. They're not betting their business on is Helion or is Commonwealth going to be able to produce electricity on X?
- [25:59]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Well, sure. I mean, amazing. Microsoft's paying to restart Three Mile island. Right.
- [26:03]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
I mean they're exploring everything. Is it for them? I've got a sister who works in Google, actually, and she says that for them it's an existential risk. They need energy. So they're exploring, they're exploring everything. They're investing very highly in renewables as well, but they know that it's going to grow, the demands are going to grow and fusion gives them just a really important option for the future for energy. But they're also strategically investing in these companies as well. So there's an upside on the investment side as well if these companies succeed and they can really enable them, I suppose.
- [26:38]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Let me take a run at another falsifiable prediction. When will a data center be at least partly powered by fusion?
- [26:51]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
That's an interesting question as well because it takes you into the behind the meter conversation rather than the grid.
- [26:57]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Easier, right? Should be before like will anybody say a number 20, 30.
- [27:03]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
We don't like numbers.
- [27:04]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Yeah. I think fusion energy will have a role either on or behind the grid by 2040.
- [27:10]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
By 2040. Okay.
- [27:12]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
And I think we've got our own path. So we've collected data on our cost of fusion and we've looked at our last several product lines over the last 10 years and projected it forward. And if you just follow a straight extrapolation of how the cost has been coming down, our technology should be there around 2040. Okay, so there you go. Before 20, I'll say even before, slightly before the line.
- [27:37]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
And that's just sort of the Moore's
- [27:38]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
law of fusion as an extrapolation, to be clear. Could go fast with the breakthroughs.
- [27:44]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Drew a lot.
- [27:44]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
That's right. But that's what I think.
- [27:47]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
There are also different considerations, aren't there? Because it goes to your point before about you can sell things at different prices depending on the value. And so the value is going to be much higher to let's say a data center maybe, maybe also remote mines or. And also there are other countries in the world where the electricity price, they could pay a higher price, like Japan for example, because they don't have very many other alternatives. Japan, a very strategic, strategically going after fusion as well, by the way. And so you could see if people wanted enough, they will pay more for it. So then you don't have to Compete in the electricity market. They could just.
- [28:24]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
So I'm hearing something kind of lower than 2040. Are you taking the under here?
- [28:28]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Still think? No, I don't think I am actually, because you've still got to do the things to get there. There are still some phenomenal challenges on the engineering of power plants, but money is going to. You need money to build the machines, do the experiments, et cetera. So money is key. So if you don't have the money, it's going to be longer than 2040. But even if you had infinite money, can you do it quicker? Probably can't do it quicker than 2035, even with infinite money, because there's a lot of research that needs to be done.
- [28:56]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
I'd argue infinite money is a terrible idea. I think throwing money at problems actually makes the solutions really expensive.
- [29:03]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Why is it bad?
- [29:04]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Well, fundamentally, if a technology is going to change the world, it needs to create more value than it consumes. Otherwise it won't scale. Right. It could be a fascinating experiment, but nobody is going to. We're going to continue to make energy the old way if it's much more expensive to make energy with fusion. So investing infinite money in its development is going to give people the wrong incentives. I think it's really important for investors to also ensure that the companies and the boards of these companies and the management teams of these companies are incentivized to find ways to make cost effectiveness in their thinking from day one. And I do think there's a lot of focus on scientific milestones then to be followed by engineering milestones and then to be followed by cost milestones. I'd argue that's upside down. As you pursue the better scientific and engineering milestones, you, you have to be thinking about cost the whole time. You should be thinking about cost the whole time. You should be practicing. I'm not saying people aren't doing that, but the focus, at least from a high level standpoint is very, the hierarchy is very scientific than engineering than cost.
- [30:09]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
I think if you're looking for examples, I was being slightly facetious. We'd love to have more money in fusion. But if you are looking for examples, just look at the difference between the public sector and the sector, private, private sector now. And also how things have changed over the last, let's say 10 years because so before 10 years ago, before 10 years ago, fusion, maybe even a bit more. 15. Fusion was all public lab, it was all government funded public research. And it wasn't infinite money, it wasn't anywhere near enough money. But it was all just academic thinking driven. And so that they did a lot. They got to a point where we understood a lot about the science, but it also got to a point where the machines they were building were really huge, like Iter, which is a big billion dollar experiment being built in the south of France. And so people started saying like, what's next? And how on earth can we commercialize something that is this big and this expensive? And so the interesting shift that has happened, happened over the last 10 years is you've got private companies are sprung up and they're approaching the problem with a more commercial mindset. The conversation is very commercial dominated, private sector dominated, as opposed to the academia and even within governments they're thinking about how the public sector can feed into the private sector and what's needed because there's now a recognition that it's going to be the private companies that are going to drive fusion forward and are going to put it on the grid as opposed to a like a government project. Mostly there are countries. So that's the shift that's really happened and it's that shift from a sort of like infinite money mindset to a commercial no, we need to do this with constrained budgets and make it profitable. And I think that that's a really interesting shift that we've seen.
- [31:59]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
I mean, Luke, how does it look to you as the person with infinite
- [32:03]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
money to invest or where she. So there's two approaches. If you think that fusion is inevitable and at some point civilization is going to be powered by it, I think that's quite consensual view within the industry. The question is when and how much?
- [32:18]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
To your points, how much money and how much time?
- [32:21]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Yeah, exactly. And so an investor faced with that problem has kind of got two choices. If you have to deploy capital into fusion, you can say, oh, I can take a portfolio approach. I can just invest in anything and everything because I just want to capture the one thing that works and that's going to be so valuable that it doesn't matter about fusion etf exactly all the other failures. And you take that approach. Or you could say, well, I'm just going to pick the winner and I'm either knowledgeable enough or arrogant enough or however you want to describe that to say, oh, we can just pick that one or two and that's the kind of risk it can take. Or you could say, well, what are the enabling technologies and enabling businesses that need to happen to support that goal? So rather than investing in a reactor which might end up pursuing a Utility business model, it might be heavily regulated. Why not try and find the company that's making the widgets that allow the reactor to do a particular thing. And often those companies end up being some of the most valuable ones in industries. It's not the one which ultimately is the face of it, it's the one that enables it. And quite a few of the companies have already cottoned onto this and are doing their own business lines around that are vertically integrating. So Commonwealth is a really good example that's making its own superconducting magnets for its reactor, but is also then going to market to hopefully sell those to other companies or sell those to other industries.
- [33:36]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Yeah. Can I leap in? Just say when, in your intro when you said no one's making money yet or. No, they're not. No one's going to make money out of fusion. Companies are going to make money for a long time. To your point, I don't think that's true. Shine has been doing it for years, I'd say, pioneering this approach. Approach. It's just really interesting to see that like a few years back. So Fusion X Invest, one of the companies that I founded, we've had a lot of these conversations in the earlier stages. It was very much like the portfolio approach. Who's going to win? I'm going to have a stellarator company and a tokamak company and I'm going to have a laser company and an outlier company and I hedge my bets. And people said, oh, it's a distraction. If you're a fusion company and you're thinking about making revenues, it's a distraction. He should be focused on the prize. That was a few years ago. In the, in the space of a few years, the conversation is shifting to exactly what you're talking about. So where, firstly, some of the private fusion companies are probably not being able to raise what they need to raise and are thinking like, well, we need to have, we need to get other revenues from somewhere. So how are they going to do that? So people have started selling their technology. When you're trying to solve a really hard problem, you're going to develop technology along the way that is potentially valuable in other markets. So companies are starting to do that.
- [34:54]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
What's an example of that?
- [34:57]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Magnets. You mentioned high temperature superconductors and magnets that you can make from high temperature superconductors.
- [35:01]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Who are the buyers?
- [35:02]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Outside of fusion, particle accelerators, medical grids, defense, aviation, There are a number. There are also lots of laser technologies, software technologies, power bank technologies, There are a number of different things that are being developed and are being sold.
- [35:21]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
I mean these can revolutionize the markets that they're going into as well. So what's the impact that fusion can have? It might be in completely obscure markets which you want to associate with fusion. So if we can make high temperature superconducting, does that mean we can make MRI machines for a fraction of the cost or make many more of them? Are people going to have access to that kind of scanning, etc. Because of a reactor design company that's trying to figure out how does it contain a plasma better? So again, there's all these different offshoots which might actually the significance of fusion. It's kind of like the space race, right? People say, oh, what did the space race do for us? And then you have this long list of non sticks.
- [35:57]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Why is that always the hands?
- [35:58]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
It always comes out and freeze dried food.
- [36:00]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Yeah, Velcro, Velcro. I'll take nonstick pans.
- [36:02]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
I don't the microchip to Greg's earlier point, in terms of like, like NASA needing these kind of level of computers for the Apollo program, et cetera. So again, the hope is with fusion, if we can get enough of that going as well, is that a way to be able to fund the next leap in terms of commercialization?
- [36:15]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
That's what people are doing and that's what we're seeing now. We've got increasingly private fusion companies come to fusion advisory services doing market studies, looking for the other markets where their technologies have applications. Those are where the opportunities are kind of happening today and those investors now who are looking for those opportunities as well in the supply chain companies and in the fusion companies who are doing other things besides just fusion.
- [36:40]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
I want to leave time for questions. So before we go to questions, I'd like to ask each of you to just give us one insight, one thought to walk out of the room with.
- [36:53]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Mine's easy. Fusion's already here. It's already improving your life, making it safer. Soon it's going to make it healthier and you know, the future is bright. I think it's already here.
- [37:06]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Yeah. Mine is that similar to what we've been discussing. I think that in any big energy transition, the people who engaged early were the ones who did the best out of it, you could say. And so I would encourage people to, to not be too dismissive about, oh, it's science fiction. Oh, it's always 30 years away. Just stay informed. Because to Greg's point, it's coming. The people in the industry know it's coming, and if you want to be with the wave instead of being overtaken by it, then it might pay to just be informed early.
- [37:48]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Okay, Luke, you've had time to think about this. One last word.
- [37:52]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Innovation has to be better and cheaper to be adopted at scale. I think a lot of the debate in fusion is often about how do we make things better and not necessarily about how we make things cheaper. And if you look at the pioneering companies that have come through Even the past 10, 20 years, they all had really cool technology and a lot of smart people, but they also had a business innovation which was intertwined with the tech innovation to the point where they were almost one and the same. If you can find businesses which have that, that can inform probabilities of success.
- [38:25]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Still to come on the show, audience
- [38:28]
Jacob Goldstein
questions the questions were truly interesting. And I'm not just saying that.
- [38:41]
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- [39:19]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
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- [41:30]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
thank you
- [41:30]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
guys and thank you all. This has been great. We have some time for questions. There's a mic. Just go ahead up and make a line at the mic so that we can hear you
- [41:42]
Audience Member (Questioner)
Very small.
- [41:43]
Mike
- [41:45]
firstly, thanks great panel. The sun and wind are genuinely free but solar and wind power are not. But because there is OPEX and capex and systems costs and I accept by the way your very interesting point about all the steps along the way from all of you but would fusion be really very cheap if not free? Or is that based on the current view of what the capex of the kit would be and so on.
- [42:16]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Thanks. My view is it will never be free but it will become cheaper and cheaper over time and as it does actually I expect the TAM to grow. So I look at it very in tam total addressable market for the product. So just like semiconductors have come down like I can't imagine in 1960 if you're a computer chip designer and someone told you compute was going to be 11 trillion of what it costs today you're probably like that's free. But it's actually the biggest markets on earth today. A trillion dollar market even Though that cost has come down that much. So no, I don't think it will be free. I think it's just going to continue to come down as we practice more. More, if that makes sense.
- [42:53]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Can I just add one thing to that? I think most of the energy technologies we've been built today, if not all of them, once they're built and in the ground, they have a fixed capacity. So you can't get much more out of your existing solar panel, your existing wind turbine, or even your existing combustion engine. With a fusion reactor, there's going to be an awful lot of software definition to it in terms of how it operates. And so it'll be unlike many other energy technologies where the aftermarket for these could be really, really valuable. So if you have a fleet of fusion reactors operating in this future, download the new firmware. Exactly. Just like the over the air software update, but will make a real genuine impact to these businesses, which are where the profitability margins of a utility company is usually razor thin. So even if you can tweak the output an extra 5%, 10%, that's pure profit. That's enormous for a company that owns a fusion reactor in the future. And so I think that's one thing which would be really nice to have in the future. There's lots of things to get there beforehand. But to your point around, how does it keep on getting better after installation? There's lots of paths where it could continue to get cheaper even without changing the hardware that's involved. And so that's something that gives me a bit of optimism around why this could still be relevant, even though at the moment it looks much more expensive than solar, wind, et cetera.
- [44:06]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Thank you.
- [44:07]
Chase for Business Announcer
I'm interested in parallel pathing, what we need to get to quantum computing. Infusion and lithium supply chains are a challenge today. Do you see, even with the higher energy density profile, lithium supply chains needing to move forward for us to really support these technologies?
- [44:26]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
Yes, on the lithium supply, the energy density is everything. And so when you look at 10 million to 1, it won't even be a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of lithium we use in batteries to fuel the entire economy. And I think as you look at fusion continuing to progress, per Melanie's point earlier, the innovation pipeline is insanely deep. My view is we are at the beginning of the Moore's Law curve starting in 1960 and new technology, it's not like one, we're going to commercialize a tokamak and then there'll be no other innovation in Fusion, it's going to accelerate the amount of money going into it, the amount of scientific capability going into quantum computing, AI, like, all these things are going to accelerate the development of fusion. So there are fuel cycles that come beyond, you know, deuterium and tritium that will not even need lithium. Right. You'll be going to even more abundant materials that are even more accessible. Fundamentally, fusion fuels are the most abundant materials in the whole universe. Light isotopes are the way the entire universe makes energy. Like everything we have today, solar fission, wind, it all is ultimately a form, a diluted, highly diluted form of fusion energy. And so when we can go right to the source, all of it, all of it. So when you go right to the source, like, fundamentally, I would argue that the fuel is completely unlimited. So that's not a thing I worry about.
- [45:42]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Let's do two more for people who are in line.
- [45:44]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
All right.
- [45:45]
Audience Member (Robin Carter)
Sorry, I gotta bend over first. Thanks so much for your presentation. I really enjoyed it. My name is Robin Carter. I just want to ask what role do you think publicly funded research or academia still has to play and in the development of commercial fusion, or. The way I originally wrote this question was, please speak charitably about publicly funded research and academics.
- [46:07]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
They're actually quite nice.
- [46:09]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
I think there's still a lot of talk at the moment about public private partnerships. It's not that the private, I mean, the media, particularly five, ten years ago, they loved to portray it as us and them and a race. And there are these pesky startups coming, coming in and all these upstarts who are going to turn fusion upside down because the public labs have been doing it for ages. And the private companies are going to take the prize, all of that, which fundamentally I don't think is true. It's the goal of the national labs or the publicly funded labs to develop the technology and give it, not give it, but funnel it into the private sector so that it can actually be made commercial. And so I think this is the time where these public private partnerships now are becoming more and more important. So there are some critical challenges on the way to building power plants. Things like we've mentioned tritium breeding. So there's the fuel. Tritium comes from lithium. So you're going to have to use neutrons to interact with lithium to make tritium. This generally is going to happen around the outside of the fusion device and that's where the heat exchanges will be and things like that. There's materials is a big challenge, like developing materials that can actually survive long enough and make an economic power plant. So there's a number of challenges. And these are, when I say challenges, these are the kind of things that are, let's say, benefit knowledge that is beneficial for the entire fusion community. So it's not really within the realms of investment for the individual companies, shall we say? It's not on the critical path for the individual companies. So that's what, that's where the academics can really come into play, helping to up the knowledge level in areas that are not on the critical path for the individual companies, but will help everybody.
- [48:01]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
We have one minute. Last one.
- [48:02]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
Go.
- [48:03]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
China. We just haven't talked about it yet.
- [48:05]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
China, China.
- [48:06]
Luke (Investor, Baylor Gifford)
One minute.
- [48:07]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
Who wants it? Perfect.
- [48:09]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
Okay. They're putting a lot of investment in even, like, even last year. They really, they've just gone all in in the last two years. I'd say really upping the investment. Funding research in academic labs as well as private fusion companies. They're making a big play. Do you want to add things?
- [48:26]
Greg Peifer (Founder and CEO of Shine Technologies)
I would just say throwing money at the problem's not the answer. And I would reiterate and I would just say, look, I put my faith in American innovation and creativity above just throwing a lot of money at national labs. I think it comes back to incentives and people in this country are properly incentivized to innovate. This is not a scale up of an industry that's existed for 50, 60 years, which China can copy and come in and do very, very easily. So it's not that I don't think we shouldn't try. Like we need to put the same level of effort in, but I think if we do, we win.
- [48:54]
Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
We started with capitalism, we're ending with capitalism. Thank
- [49:02]
Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
you.
- [49:10]
Jacob Goldstein
That was the great fusion debate. How far away are we really? Recorded live at south by Southwest, 2026, today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lydia Jean Cott and engineered by Sarah Brugiere. You can email us at Pro Problem at Pushkin fm. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of what's yous Problem?
- [49:43]
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Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
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Jacob Goldstein (Host/Moderator)
That's right, dude.
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Melanie Windridge (Fusion Industry Analyst and Founder of Fusion Energy Insights)
You're a good.
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- [51:14]
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