From MIT to Kronos: Carl Weggel's Path to Fusion Innovation

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to another episode of the Chronos Fusion Energy podcast.

(00:14):
I am Priyanka Ford, the founder of Chronos Fusion Energy, and today we have an extraordinary
guest with us, Carl Wegel.
My mentor, founding partner at Chronos, and the lead designer of our patented Chronos
Smart Fusion Energy Generators.

(00:35):
Carl has an impressive career that spans over five decades with extensive experience
in the design and development of compact, ultra-high-field tokamak pathways for commercial
fusion energy.
His journey began at MIT, where he worked closely with Dr. Bruce Montgomery on the

(00:57):
14 Tesla toroidal field magnet for the groundbreaking Alcatore C tokamak.
This early work laid the foundation for Carl's deep understanding of high-field tokamaks
and led to his role heading the magnet division at Inesco, a pioneering fusion startup based

(01:19):
in San Diego.
There, he engineered powerful 30 Tesla, amni-heating, and 16 Tesla toroidal field magnets, designs
that, with sufficient funding, could have been among the first power-generating tokamaks

(01:40):
in the world.
Carl's influence didn't stop there.
In 2020, he became the senior magnet designer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a role that
further solidified his status as the leader in the fusion energy community.

(02:00):
Today, as the primary architect of Chronos' Smart Fusion Generators, Carl is guiding our
team towards commercial fusion energy with a focus on a-neutronic fuels like deuterium
and helium-3, which hold the promise for a sustainable and carbon-free energy future.

(02:25):
In this episode, we dwell into Carl's extensive experience and learn about the challenges
and rewards of working in fusion energy.
We'll explore how Carl's journey led him to Chronos and the innovative work he's doing
with our smart generators.
We'll discuss the importance of superconductors in modern technology, the challenges of fusion

(02:51):
energy commercialization, and Carl's vision for the future.
This conversation is a unique opportunity to understand the mind of a true fusion energy
pioneer and his perspective on the direction of sustainable energy.
I could not have gotten Chronos off the ground if it was not for Carl.

(03:17):
I am forever grateful for his expertise, guidance, and mentorship in helping me establish and
grow Chronos Fusion Energy.
So sit back and get ready to be inspired by one of the leading minds in the fusion energy
field.
Carl Wegel's story is one of dedication, innovation, and a relentless pursuit of a cleaner and

(03:41):
more sustainable world.
Here's my co-founder at Chronos Fusion Energy, Dr. Carl Wegel.
Carl, why fusion?
Why bother at all?
I'm an idealist and I've been very much a climate realist and I want to find a solution

(04:07):
before man time burns up the planet.
The fusion energy appears to be the, I thought, potentially the most successful and the one
with the greatest challenge and I love challenge so here I am.
Right, yeah, it's definitely fun doing difficult things.

(04:30):
When you got started, did you get started at MIT or were you somewhere before that and
you went to MIT?
I started at MIT in the summer of my sophomore year in the same location where my true brother
Bob had started the year before.
He was one of the best work lawyers in the world.

(04:53):
He was one of the best mentors in my life.
He was also in my career.
I was so enamored with his work and admired his work and enjoyed helping him and he more
than simply returned the favor.

(05:16):
So at the tender age of 30, I was impressed with designing all of the magnets of Alcatur
C, which is still the world's record holder for highest magnetic field.
So I was really, really grateful for the chance to work Alcatur C at MIT.

(05:39):
Yeah, so Alcatur C, does it still hold a record?
I think it still holds a record.
It still holds a record at the highest central magnetic field of 14 Tesla.
What was JET in, do you know?
Oh, much, much lower.

(06:01):
It was a far larger machine, but it was scarcely half that of Alcatur C. Alcatur C was a small
machine, a toy, but it sent not only the record highest magnetic field, but for a while held
the record showed that the H mode of plasma was possible and it was either A squared R

(06:31):
or O squared A, depending on the detail with which one it sent the results.
So I think it's been a part of the plasma skating balls ever since.
That is also the baseline design for our generator at Kronos, correct?

(06:53):
The compact sort of...
The scale laws have now been configured and the X-tomans have been tuned for the radius
1.97, which I object to, that I create proponent of dimensional analysis where one selects

(07:16):
the variables such that they are non-dimensional.
And once they're non-dimensional, then you can apply any exponent you want to, which
is the value of non-dimensionalizing the system.
And my dear wish, they were a scale law that was done in terms of dimensional components.

(07:42):
This is the one of the first vital applications of artificial intelligence.
One of the things that AI does is you can tell it many times, is everything deep into
the human mind, and that humans just ignore or fail to notice what it's telling you.

(08:05):
And artificial intelligence can take the time that humans can, because they can do it a
million times faster.
And it cooks out the information really quickly.
I've told that one of the areas where artificial intelligence is supreme is in computer programming

(08:31):
and that there are a lot of computer-permitted jobs that are in jeopardy because of that.
Yeah.
And a lot of the other jobs, like the project management aspects of it, I remember writing
400-page functional design documents when I was at Edison or Disney, where I wrote the

(08:53):
entire design end-to-end.
And it took me so long.
And now I feel like if I had chat GPT the way that I use it now, had I had it back then,
man, I don't know where I would have been.
Material science, I think, is going to be also very impactful for us, like the advent
of AI in quantum computing for coming up with new materials.

(09:17):
Very excited to see that, especially superconducting materials.
It's going to change the world.
You know this.
I mean, MIT is on the forefront of all of this.
Yes, yes.
Also in the news, I'm very pleased to see that adding Paul Weiss is super.

(09:41):
He's going to be an immense help in projecting the world-leading materials that are now available.
It weren't available a mere six years ago.
Yeah, Paul is amazing.
Tell me about Inesco.

(10:02):
How far?
Inesco was in business from 1980 to 1984.
They were formed of the ideas of Albert Bouchard, decided that at that time there were no high temperature superconductors.

(10:28):
So we said, well, we feel it improves performance by an exponent four, that is, the performance is proportional to the force power.
And as a consequence, we make the heart heal with whatever way we can, which is using copper.

(10:52):
So his idea was to build a central core, centrally vacuum vessel and surround it with copper coils and run the copper coils at high temperature and then run coolant through it.
And then the coolant would extract the heat generated in the copper and convert it back into electricity and would also be heated primarily by neutrons flying out from the plasma chamber.

(11:29):
And the neutrons would be slowed not by a wasteful shielding, but rather use copper itself as the shielding, the Tf coils.
And you could extract the heat from the neutrons, run it through a conventional rotating generator and generate electricity.

(12:01):
The team was assembled in San Diego, California, and for four years, they came designed Tf coils that were operating at 60 Tesla.
The own heating system was operating at 30 Tesla.

(12:22):
And if the full funding had become available in a timely manner, it probably would be generating fusion today.
And it's probable, it might well be worth a year development of that same type because the cost of these machines was quite low. You just need to control the fire.

(12:57):
What was the output of this machine? Is that comparable as well? Like, so low-cost output?
Yeah, it was planned for 500 megawatt to 1-inch-watt output.
Wow, that's pretty good.
Yes, of course the problem would be getting a very high Q out of the machine since the heat generated with the coils was a strong negative.

(13:29):
But it certainly was the best idea at the time. And I think it's now been supplanted by HTS.
Wow, interesting. But the general ideology of the machine, I'm sure bits and pieces are being used in other fusion energy systems. So maybe it was unnecessary evolutionary stage in fusion.

(13:57):
Well, since it ended up just being a paper study, and it was sort of an outlier, and it too generated some animosity.
So I doubt that anyone would want to get through the collaborative of HTS.

(14:28):
Right. Yes, I understand that. So your work has consistently pushed boundaries, especially with magnet technology and fusion. What were the biggest challenges at this time?
Like I am thinking after Inesco, what were the big challenges for commercial fusion at that point? And how much have we improved our chances now?

(15:02):
I think the biggest challenge in the past has been generating a very, very high magnetic field to a much extent that still exists today. It's been greatly limited by HTS.

(15:23):
The problem that has now appeared is that with HTS, HTS is a brittle ceramic. And if one stretches HTS by more than 0.4 or 0.5 percent, it runs in danger for the microcracks, and the microcracks cut the current density.

(15:51):
By half, I'm sorry, by 10 percent. And if one tries to add a system with five fields, the stress gets higher, the strain gets higher.
And you run a losing battle that your current capacity of HTS gets to plummet by about 0.7 percent to 1 percent. The current density is a punch of about half.

(16:22):
So a new problem that I think not enough people will acknowledge, you're unaware, is the materials don't need to be strong. We've got that problem solved. They have to be stiff.
And there are only very, very, very few materials that are stiff. Tungsten is very stiff. Modular is twice that of steel. But it's very difficult to work with. And it too is brittle. You try to roll it to make it thinner, and it just fumbles.

(17:05):
And in order to keep it so it holds together, you have to roll it, not even at room temperature, but at liquid nitrogen temperature. And even there, you don't gain a great deal.
The other material is carbon fiber. It too has a modulus of heat. It can have a modulus of heat, at least twice that of steel. And that's the material that we plan to be using.

(17:37):
In the wings, there's materials like graphene and similar nanodendroids. Those can be developed at an affordable cost. They will eventually supplant that graphene as the safest material known as far as I know.

(18:06):
And we have funding, graphing and council, as one of our host consultants.
Right. We spoke to that. Yeah.
Also, you know, our, without naming the company, our partner that we've been working with that converts biomass to jet fuel also would like to convert biomass to carbon fiber using fusion as the heat source.

(18:36):
So there could be like a cyclical arrangement that we actually kind of discussed that when we signed our MOUs, where we would buy back the carbon fiber from them.
Pretty cool. Yeah, and who knows what other material will come through, you know, that Google AI designed 380,000 material compositions using quantum computing. So you never know what's possible.

(19:10):
And there are, the companies are generating these exquisite materials, not by the old fashioned trial or never, but rather by computer simulation and computer codes that have exactly the orbits of the electrons, or they swirl around the nucleus and the interaction of the electrons

(19:38):
with the universe towards it and then tell you which material has the highest melting point in not only in the world, but probably in the universe.
And a family of other ones that are a melting point that approaches that, but are perhaps made with much lower cost materials. But there's the half-fuel carbon nitrite. Nitrite is the current and probably the permanent victor in that race.

(20:21):
And we have collaboration with them. So we're keeping our eyes open to all of the world's best materials and the people who are developing them.
Yeah, we definitely want those partnerships. We want, we need to drill it into the heads of young people that material sciences is like an exciting thing to get into.

(20:53):
I think it's arguably the most exciting. I agree. Yes.
I think you should, you should go much, much further inside. Oh my God, yes. And also, you know, payload is like the, is a big, big factor in the rocket equation.

(21:14):
And if we can make lighter materials, which is, which is a lot of material companies that are after, we could make space travel, multi-planetary civilizations, we can make all that possible. All of that is engineering and materials right now.
Well, it's a collaboration. The carbon fiber that we plan to be, plan to use was in fact developed as an aircraft of use. Oh, okay. That's so awesome.

(21:44):
And it was, it was developed not merely for its lightweight and structural properties, but also that it could survive a lightning strike in much better than the, the available carbon fibers.
Carl, in all of these, all of these projects that you worked on building various fusion energy generators out there, how many people is too many people in a team? When does it become bureaucratic and conversive?

(22:25):
I, I, you probably will enjoy this answer. I think by the time you reach 500 at the very most, you probably have too much interplay between people that you can't make much further progress.

(22:49):
Plus, well, you begin to get all down and you begin to get overly cautious and you run the risk of not being able, that you're unwilling to take any risks at all.

(23:12):
Yeah. And when you build a machine, you've got to be taking some risks or you're not at the level of performance that fusion seems to demand that you be.

(23:34):
Yeah. I see where you're going with this. It's, it basically becomes conversive and bureaucratic after, after like a 500 person point where decisions are slowed down and progress is almost slowed down because there are too many hands in the pot.
That, that makes sense to me. Nine people is low. That is shockingly low.

(23:58):
That the Alcatraz A was designed with a team even smaller than nine and even Telma with fusion.
It was just a small team assembled from the survivors of Alcatraz C mod. Right. And when you have a team of nine, your ideas at the top nine people in the world.

(24:28):
And when you have a team of 40, you can want a team of the top 40 people in the world leader, people who are active, the pinnacle of knowledge, or having passionate young people who devote all their energies to working on it.

(24:49):
And when you assemble and for the day, and when you get to team beyond 80, you're beginning.
There are no more top level people in those you've got to be one of the ones who are willing to join you. And if you start adding people who are not top level people, they may very well not contribute to the design.

(25:21):
And why are they there that you could have mackeys that you hire somebody because there's great computer programming and they program whatever you tell them to, but they don't really fully understand what it is they're working on.
And that's the whole level.

(25:45):
There are great level people.
You need to sort of question their work because they may not know quite what they're doing and they need guidance.
I understand. Okay, there's also the aspect of

(26:07):
that the company needs certain people for a certain span, but then there is the obligated to the people when, when they're when they run out of their expertise.

(26:29):
That's kind of why I picked the general business model that that we've been that we've been working on Carl like we literally have our ignition system that's being built by another company, we have our heat capture system on the other end built by another company,
we have the magnet systems built by another startup that's coming out of Brookhaven National Labs, we have our red coat tape being built in Houston. So it's almost as if we just we just are the people that put the Lego pieces together.

(27:00):
And we're enabling an infrastructure of about 200 companies that would work with us in order to do these things because then you not only do you have that flexibility of your contractual agreements you also enable a large infrastructure like an economic
infrastructure where the best people who do the best things, you just buy it from them, rather than having to build everything in house.

(27:30):
Anyway, like, moving on from that.
I was like, there are several.

(28:05):
I was, again, was my twin brother, we saved my mother of $53 million that they built a laboratory to integrated science and engineering, which was almost $200 million.

(28:27):
And they needed to magnetically shields the building because the building intelligently or no I'm not sure, had decided that the two were going to do all of their nanotechnology in this one building.
And that meant using the two major tools of nanotechnology, one of which is very high magnetic fields magnets superconducting magnets or dimensions or dimensions is something that generated a for a few tests one.

(29:06):
And in the room and they call themselves in the cell next door, they might have a electron microscope, which are sensitive to feel the billions of that field generated by the high field magnets.
And they needed to use a new metal to magnetize in such a way that it's outside of the cell that had the high field magnet field, that it would permit and be low enough that they could put an electron microscope in the room next door.

(29:52):
And if they do so it would require taking everything off the walls of the building, putting on layers of this new metal, and then putting the features on the wall again.
And that's the previous company had come up with an estimate of $54 million to do this and I think about 18 months, and we came in to cooperate their results or see whether we can do better.

(30:25):
After doing analysis with a code from integrated software, we were able to cut the amount of metal by 102.
Therefore, it costs $54 million to start your 27.
Meanwhile, I were saying over and over again, use the new metal was not the cheapest way to go.

(30:58):
That its cheapest way was to replace all of their high field magnets with placement new magnets were designed in a way that they generated 90% field instead of the French field dropping off is our one of our two, one of our to the fifth.

(31:22):
It's a drop is over is one of our 11 so one of our to the 23rd power, such that the magnetic fields in adjacent cells was well below that top of the microscope, and we didn't get a whole lot of

(31:48):
acceptance by the first news.
We did get acceptance by the woman who was the founder of the project. So, she, she listened to us and decided that that that would be the way we go. But there was all this time that would take too darn long.

(32:14):
But they went to prime magnetic scene, Tennessee, got a quote, $1 million for all of the magnets in the building.
And also the time to their availability was was faster than the new metal. So they have adopted the $1 million approach, and the building has been up and running for almost a decade or more.

(32:47):
Wow.
Where, so, where is that now. How, how.
It's on Oxford Street in Cambridge. So it's, what is it doing now, like, is it still up.
Oh yes, it will be in use for a century or more.
Developing nano materials and something.

(33:18):
Yeah, no, definitely. So I had that that begs the question.
Did you need this completely shielded building because of the radiation and the neutrons like is like, what is.
It was just from that field. Okay.

(33:52):
Yeah. Oh, so, Carl, my, when when young people or when when the layman new people to fusion when they hear, oh fusion versus vision they say, oh fusion is completely safe and there is like a general.
I want to say there are the people who have heard enough about fusion who think and know that it's much safer, etc. But within fusion.

(34:22):
Basically, I think I'm driving at. If you were a new chronic, you could actually be within city limits. Yes, and within fusion, there is a dirty way to do it a cleaner way to do it. Like, there is a, I think I'm trying to get to that.
Yeah.

(34:56):
It becomes brittle and becomes scrap and the fusion scrap that you generate is much less involved in and what what we use here is.
Decays, many, many much faster that the, the materials that are perfect safe in less than a century, whereas the radioactive materials from vision are still dangerous, 100 centuries from now.

(35:31):
After we forgot when we believe them. So it's much preferable to use fusion of any sort. But if you have a new trauma, it's instead of having to replace the back and you're basically every six months or so, it'll last for the complete life of the machine, five years, 10 years, 20 years.

(35:56):
There's so, so little radioactive damage to it. Yeah. And this is really delightful for people who are building power plants that if you have to take shut them down and repair them every six months means you need a second machine that they do.

(36:17):
And so the cycle is one half and best.
Whereas with electronic, you can consider the machine to be more or less comparable to the turbine power generation of today.

(36:39):
It's very little maintenance. Right.
Yeah, and that would be the goal.
The materials would be easier to acquire.
It would be at a lower cost.
I always get asked about or or let me put it this way.

(37:03):
I always get asked about fusion energy and fusion energy breakthroughs, but I never get asked about fusion energy working at a steady state.
Can you help us maybe understand what that evolution like, what was it before? Like, because the breakthroughs that we hear about are they turned it on for 10 seconds and proved something. Right. And so, and then we're talking about if we're going to plug it into the grid, this thing's got to run all day.

(37:36):
We can't afford to have downtime, maybe a day or a year if that for repairs, but it's just even it would be best to avoid everything. And I know that.
So, yeah, help us understand steady state versus the breakthroughs we've heard of so far. And I wish people would ask me more about the about it fusion at a steady state. Actually.

(37:58):
It's been fairly recently that people are at long last asking about a power plant that actually would be of interest to standard electric companies.
And that in the past, we've tried to achieve the maximum performance we could, irrespective of how short that time might be.

(38:35):
And yet, has been demonstrating a close links of many seconds, and certainly holds the record in approach to a to an actual marketable fusion machine.
So, quite a long way to go, but they're much closer than would it be possible.

(39:05):
And so, when we look at future super reductors, designers are beginning to see what see whether a continuous machine is what what machine is will be a continuous machine.

(39:26):
This is exactly what we studied earlier about core deprotection, which is one of the gains that we're seeing as the
If you have a certain temperature, certain properties, there's a self-generating mechanism

(39:55):
that causes the current in the toroid, the donut, to be able to maintain at a value where
you're power generating for a long period of time that will eventually be able to achieve

(40:16):
continuous operation that you have external devices like the neutralized ion beam that
shoot high velocity particles and they coax the plasma current and they maintain the very
small losses that occur.

(40:40):
The plasma itself has a very valuable feature called the bootstrap current and the bootstrap
current is a self-generating current and what's left over is only this little bit that needs
to be supplied by neutralized ion beams.
So a spherical tokamak can become a steady-swing machine.

(41:06):
The other type of machine is a stellarator but the design of these systems would be very,
very complicated and they're sort of at the beginning of the analysis.
There's a few more years that need to be done before the stellarator can approach or become

(41:29):
a true steady-state machine.
Which one would do it first then, logically though?
The spherical tokamak?
I think the tokamak, the spherical tokamak because it's got such a head start.
The number of stellarators that have been built is quite few and as it consecrates a

(41:56):
sort of scale off of them, for them it's not well known yet.
So how did you remain so resilient, Carl?
Out of all of the ups and downs in the fusion industry, you've been a witness to all of

(42:17):
this.
People talk very badly about the cold fusion ideas by the way.
We should probably talk about that a little bit.
But how do you stay resilient?
What made you keep going?
First of all, I grew up so that I could survive down time so much better than someone with

(42:41):
a family and children.
Also, I have skills in magnetic shielding as I mentioned so that I was able to do the
magnetic shielding with my home alma mater and be able to do that well.
And I also have experience with the magnetics of magnetic resonance imaging.

(43:08):
So when one field is down, I find another field to do it.
What's the hope for the next decade for fusion?
I think it's glorious that for the first time private industry venture capitalists have

(43:32):
become enamored with fusion and with the type of passion that the venture capitalists can
have on a project.
It makes wonderful, wonderful progress and there's a whole bunch of marvelous ideas that

(43:53):
are being not really toyed with but funded for the Hyperloop.
Finally, high speed transportation and SpaceX.
Yeah, Elon man.
If we had 10 eons on this planet, we could fix everything.

(44:17):
I hope that continued more venture capitalists who have these huge, obscene amount of money
and they realize that the only thing they can buy with money is a tiny fraction of that

(44:38):
money will supply all of the world we need is to buy something that will last them for
centuries perhaps.
If someone can invest a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or a billion dollars

(44:59):
in a fusion, they made their name in history, a Hyperloop going between Los Angeles once
and Las Vegas or something that they will buy their name in lights.

(45:22):
Edison invented the lowly light bulb and he's remembered forevermore.
It would be good if it wasn't one person that took the limelight and if it was a largely

(45:42):
shared concept.
It could be a race and some of them will invest in something that doesn't work in their own
member.
It will be something where it will be shared amongst perhaps quite a number each of whom
has developed a system that gets adopted.

(46:11):
Do you know there's a reddit post that says that you're not a real person and that you
are a figment of my imagination?
Did you know about that?
I don't think you knew about that.
Yeah, so that's what they say.
I just want to do a great deal of documentation.

(46:38):
My number of publications, no one is going to approach that of Gerald Klosinski.
I've enjoyed what I've been doing.
Oh no, that's not a reflection.
No, a reddit comment is not a reflection on anything that's based in reality.

(47:01):
It's supposed to be a cesspool and you're supposed to engage it as such.
It's the cesspool of humanity where pretty much everybody is anonymous and there is nobody
with a real name.
There are cowards that say whatever they want to say.
They say a lot about me, by the way.

(47:23):
In the beginning, I was like, oh my God, why am I bringing this on?
Then I live in Los Angeles.
I live around a lot of people that get a lot of attention, shall we say.
I'm like, I'm not used to this.
How do you guys deal with this?
They're like, every, everything is public.

(47:44):
Any publicity is good.
Anything bad is good publicity.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm not such an LA person.
But they say that nobody would be talking about you if you weren't doing anything real.
That's worth talking about.
So I take it as a compliment now.
To say I don't exist means they have to read something that shows that you have nothing

(48:07):
to name.
Yeah.
And so I've never had any real enemies.
And so I'm blown away.
So Carl, one of the names that echoes through our hallways, quote unquote, at Kronos is
the name Bruce Montgomery.
Can you tell us a little bit about Bruce Montgomery and your early work at MIT?

(48:33):
Absolutely.
Dean Bruce Montgomery is my mentor.
And he is the person that resulted in my career, especially in fusion energy.
That Bob, who went to MIT, I went to Harvard, during the summer of his freshman year, he

(48:55):
was Bruce Montgomery's very first employee.
The following year, Bruce knew where to look and precisely what he'd get.
So he hired me during my sophomore summer.
And I had a glorious time.
And together, Bob and I developed the first analogic formulas of a finite element.

(49:21):
That was a treat to be able to work with Bob.
After graduation, we both joined the MIT Magnet Laboratory.
And I worked from 1964 until 1966, when I went to Tufts Graduate School in mechanical

(49:44):
engineering, while Bob filled my place at MIT at the Magnet Laboratory.
In 1973, Bruce invited me back to help with the design of the Alcatore C, which even today

(50:07):
is the highest magnetic field ever achieved with a tokamak.
To do so, I developed two new materials, one of which may never be able to be used in the
future.
And I developed again because it was a thick 0.6, a centimeter and a half thick copper

(50:32):
plate, cold rolled to spring temper.
And it was cold rolled on a powerful mill that revere copper and brass, the same revere
that rolled the copper for sheathing for the sailing ship.

(50:55):
And that was rolled on a mill which was very powerful, but is no longer available.
If it's available anywhere, it's in the heart of China somewhere, when revere copper and
brass went out of business.
It also used the best, I believe, in my estimation, austenitic stainless steel, an austenitic

(51:22):
stainless steel which contains a lot of manganese.
And manganese results in a very rapid work hardening.
In fact, one of its major applications is on snowplows, the very front edge of the snowplow
that contacts the asphalt is made with high manganese stainless steel because even if

(51:46):
the material starts out as moderate strength, the minute it grinds over the surface of asphalt,
it becomes hard as can be.
One of the delights of working on Alcatraz Sea in addition to designing all of its major
magnets except for the Ohmic heating system was also the person who evaluated the companies

(52:15):
that were going to work at Alcatraz Sea.
And we got three bids for making the material, and one of them was here in Everett.
And the person who was working on them was highly skilled and familiar with aeronautic

(52:36):
super alloys.
He thought, this will be a piece of cake.
And it wasn't.
It took him many months to find something strong enough to cut through this spring temper

(52:57):
type 216 stainless steel.
And he did a beautiful, beautiful job.
And one of the features of being the person who evaluated the manufacturers was I took
a tour of the plant and asked him, he had looked at all of the drawings and I asked

(53:22):
him which particular machine was going to be used to make this particular set of parts.
And then I asked him what the tolerances were on those machines.
And he would say, well, plus or minus two mills.
If we install a new heating ventilated air conditioning system that can control the temperature

(53:46):
to within degree, we can cut it to plus or minus one mill.
I would say, no, we can leave it plus or minus two.
And I would go back and I would redo the drawings, just changing the tolerances on them.
And this resulted when the machine was, when Alcatraz was built, it went together like
a Swiss clock.

(54:08):
That initially Bruce would try to put something together and say, Carl, it doesn't fit.
And then as he would come up to try and meet me, the technicians I would say would try
to get it.
We call it, it fits.
After a few incidents like that, Bruce had complete confidence in my work.

(54:31):
So I was absolutely delighted.
The next experience also came with Bruce.
Coming out before C, I was a tender 30 years old.
There would be people twice my age who would have killed to buy that opportunity.

(54:52):
So it was a real mill felt feather in my cap that Bruce would have that much trust in me.
Bruce came in 1980 when Inesco in San Diego proposed to make a series of five room temperature
magnets, which also were designed for 16 Tesla.

(55:19):
And they asked Bruce to come to San Diego and be the head of the magnet division.
Bruce, who was very high up in the esteem of the magnet laboratory and of MIT in general,
had a wonderful house in Sudbury with his wife and children.

(55:45):
And he evaluated Inesco's offer and said, declined and said, no, but I have an engineer
here that's going to waste because I had designed an Alcatraz D, which was a follow on.
And the Department of Energy, who evaluated MIT's work and sought to its funding, said,

(56:14):
this is a marvelous machine, but it's not your turn.
Come back in, say, seven years and we'll fund it.
And Bruce said, well, Carl can't wait seven years.
So he offered me to Inesco.
And I snapped it up without a second thought, even though it did mean leaving the wonderful

(56:41):
environment of MIT and the Boston area.
So Bruce was definitely my mentor.
He made me the magnet designer that I am.
And Bob and I were the only outsiders invited to Bruce Montgomery's funeral, which was just

(57:05):
a year or two ago.
That it was a small family event.
But by that time, we were considered part of the Montgomery family.
Yeah.
I've heard I've really heard a lot of amazing stories about this man from you.
Yeah, that's so awesome.
You never forget the people that give you your first opportunities, you know, take the

(57:29):
chance on you.
I certainly hope that's true.
Yeah.
So you've been on the forefront of tokamak and fusion generator design for the last five
decades.
What got you into the field?
What was the big interest or the motivation behind behind all of this?
Well, I have a big, a very big environmental streak and the possibility that fusion energy

(57:57):
would supplant fossil fuels and become these source of electricity and and and process
heat, etc. was irresistible.
So I love the challenge and I'm very meticulous.
So as a consequence, I really need to work on projects that demand that that personal

(58:23):
trait so that, you know, Alka Torsi, as I mentioned, still holds the world's record.
And I'm also fascinated with the new materials and the possibility of using them that someone
I know not who said that more progress is made by using new materials than is made by

(58:48):
optimizing the existing materials.
That, for example, ITER is probably an thoroughly optimized version of what one can do with
the existing materials back at the time that it was designed.

(59:08):
As a consequence, it has a major radius of something like five point seven meters and
a central field of five point eight Tesla.
And along comes Bob Moongard and Professor Dennis White and several and a group of five
founders and a large number of people from the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center that

(59:37):
they discovered that high temperature superconductors had finally reached the point where the current
density in the HTS high temperature superconductor was such that it could be used for a tokamak.
And so Bob Moongard and his team are very much augmented by the Plasma Science and Fusion

(01:00:03):
Center designed a device that used to be HTS and at a sum of maybe cost of five percent
of ITER could at the initial design come within half of achieving ITER's performance.

(01:00:24):
This looked really good, really wise, wise use of money.
And so Kamigol Fusion Systems was founded and I was their first employee and their second
same day.
So once again, either fate was intervening or the people recognized that we were in fact

(01:00:51):
the best team for designing the magnets that Bob had worked for the magnet laboratory for
35 years as a rocking chair as his 35th year device when the magnet laboratory was closed
and a new grander facility embodiment was built in Tallahassee, Florida.

(01:01:17):
So what wait what was built in Tallahassee?
Oh in Tallahassee, Florida is the new United States high magnetic field that in fact it's
sort of two divisions.
One is in Tallahassee, Florida and the other is at Los Alamos.
The Los Alamos concentrates on pulsed magnetic fields and the high magnetic field laboratory

(01:01:44):
focuses on continuous magnetic fields.
Things like nuclear magnetic resonance at a gigahertz resonant frequency which is like
230 23.5 Tesla.
So you got into all of this to begin with for fusion energy, am I right?

(01:02:09):
Yes I mean of all the magnetic things that were being designed that were really true
that were of fascinating interest.
The first of course was fusion energy and the second was magnetic resonance imaging
which is another magnet system that required great great great care in design and construction

(01:02:36):
and it would be and benefits humanity immensely.
Imagine being able to look into the very center of your body without having to without even
have to touch with a pin.
You just focus these rays on it and sweep back and forth and up and down until one gets

(01:03:00):
the behavior at least one of these little fumes or pixels into the medicine and sometimes
other fumes and then by the amount of energy that it reflects back to the wrist to the

(01:03:20):
camera you can see your heart and lungs and pancreas and each one of them is clearly is
clearly identifiable.
Yeah that's remarkable.
Well in fact I guess I owe my life to an MRI that back in 2013 I had a brain tumor and

(01:03:49):
taking advice taking knowledge of the mummification in ancient Egypt 4500 years ago when they
wanted to mummify someone they had to get rid of those components of the body which

(01:04:09):
just decayed so rapidly that there wasn't any way of preserving them so they scraped
one of those organs the brain out through the nose and so a wonderful surgeon at Massachusetts

(01:04:30):
general the same thing it went through the nose came from tumor which was about the size
of a golf ball scraped it out and fortunately discovered that it was benign but it was it
was it was dangerous enough that in in one month it would have grown sufficiently such

(01:04:50):
size to have made me blind and in six months it would have ruptured the ascending parotid
artery and I would be dead.
And it was all found with an MRI machine.
Absolutely and each five years I go back to have enough new MRI to make sure that it hasn't

(01:05:17):
begun to regrow and thus far I'm clear and with a long lifetime ahead of me that I once
again proposed to use unfusing energy.
So that's interesting I did a brain scan after a car accident and after I it was just something

(01:05:38):
that they did and it and when they when I saw the video of it like I literally got up
and went home after that so it wasn't like a big accident or a big deal or anything but
when they gave me the video of the scan I fell in love with my brain like yes because
I'm like oh my god this is such a beautiful thing I don't want anything to affect this

(01:06:00):
beautiful thing like and I never knew like you're so ignorant to like this thing that
just works all the time and you take it for granted and then I could actually see it I
actually saw it and I was like oh my god it's so it's so cute I love it.
It's very very very beautiful and if you want to have an indication of brain yesterday Bob

(01:06:25):
and I went to the Reading Symphony Orchestra and they featured a nine-year-old fourth grader
playing a violin concerto with unbelievable ability and it's and as is done typically

(01:06:48):
entirely from memory and I cannot grasp just the power of the brain to remember every single
note when it when it occurs and your fingers have to be whizzing along even faster than
your brain can do it but brain is exerting control somehow but it is unbelievable the

(01:07:17):
thing that the brain can do and I think when I sit back and ponder the things that you
do and things that Bob and I do I wouldn't believe possible that some little blob of
protoplasm of cells and neurons could possibly do but what it does but it obviously does.

(01:07:45):
It does we can our brains like as a collective humanity we can fathom black holes in the
corners of the universes and multiverses and you know quantum mechanics and the macro and
the micro if at all and it's really a remarkable thing.
It's taken humanity to space it's made sense of all these things it's a beautiful piece

(01:08:11):
of muscle.
So oh absolutely they think the quantum mechanics and they mean quantum computing that if if
it didn't actually exist I would swear it couldn't be done but and I think that someday

(01:08:34):
there will come a formulation that makes quantum computing a lot more sensible and believable
than it currently does.
At the moment I'm just dipping my toe in into quantum mechanics in that there's a fellow
who's developing a new theory that will more or less assimilate quantum mechanics and relativity

(01:09:07):
so trying to do this the thing that Einstein spent his life trying to solve and he sent
me copies of his general relativity quantum mechanics and it was so far above my head

(01:09:28):
that I read it with fascinate read into it with fascination but decided that I would
need to start with a little more introduction so he's written another work where he's he's
he's taken his formulation and from it derived both Einstein's formulas of relativity and

(01:09:56):
Newton's and Maxwell's equations and it's amazing it's he presents it and certainly
your writing is being very very readable and and he goes through formula manipulations

(01:10:19):
in the way that I do that most people most writers would just say you know from equations
one two and three one can derive equation four and and I do the equation you know even
the very simplest one is solve equation one or you put you into equation two solve equation

(01:10:44):
two for V take V and put that into equation three and solve for W and that will and that
will be the equation four so you're really taking one little baby steps and when you're
dealing with really complicated equations taking the time to to go through the mechanics

(01:11:12):
exact mechanics of derivation I think is is worth the authors time mathematics is you
know like the language of the universe and so I mean there's no that is one of the one
of the most amazing things is mathematics is that you take a few derived equations of

(01:11:40):
any sort in mathematics they will be true at the farthest reaches of the universe and
you know they are that they're that they are of a sort that that they apply everywhere
if a number is prime in our universe it will be prime everywhere and that sort of makes

(01:12:03):
one one tangled to think of it if the for a mathematician with I can see the delight
in being mathematics if you get that that feeling of that what their work does is universal
yeah yeah I mean number theory primes like Fibonacci sequences like all those like kind

(01:12:25):
of blow your mind when I learned about Taurus says and like when you really learn about
Taurus says and the energy movement within a Taurus and the fact that our fusion energy
generators are Taurus is like that there's a connection between those two yes and I like
to say that it comes from from research with magnetic bottles that it was thought that

(01:12:54):
if you have a region with a lowish magnetic field or very large volume perhaps and then
at the very end you have a very high magnetic field maybe 20 30 Tesla that any any ion that
no matter what it's what its momentum is will bounce against that high field and will be

(01:13:19):
reflected that they will gradually penetrate and they it's its direction will be changed
until it's reversed 180 degrees and bounces back and forth imagine back and forth but
they discovered that no matter how high they made that that cork in the bottle energy still

(01:13:45):
seeped out and the MFT me was the Americas and maybe the world's attempt to make the
best bottle possible baseball shaped magnets and they found that even that genius was that

(01:14:07):
when they built it which at the cost of many many many millions of dollars by that time
they discovered that instead of having the ends just have energy leaking out bend it
around until the two end to two corks were facing one another and then you could even

(01:14:30):
eliminate the cork because any energy that that escaped out one cork would compensate
went back into a new volume just from the other directions from the north or south pole
and as a consequence tokamaks have by and large taken over the sphere that they're all

(01:14:52):
of the leading and how t of the maggots have been achieved with with these tokamaks so
one possible rival is the stellarator which was whose geometry in most embodiments is

(01:15:14):
is so contorted that its drawback will be that magnetic fields in those designs can
never be very great because the bending forces on the magnets would otherwise destroy them
so I wish dendelstein 7x to succeed but I have my doubts.

(01:15:42):
We're building a new stellarator in Tennessee and I read some reports saying it's the first
ever stellarator in America and then I heard I talked I spoke with somebody a few weeks
ago that talked about other stellarators that they had worked on so I was a bit confused
on that.
Yes there's a big stellarator at Princeton plasma physics laboratory that the NSPX the

(01:16:08):
national spherical tokamak I'm sorry there is a stellarator in it and anyway there if
one does Wikipedia there will be a mention of at least three US separators.
Gotcha maybe it was the first one ever being built by a private company perhaps that was

(01:16:31):
the first.
Anyway I have a question that for you that I've been asked before and it feels like a
little bit of a stab to the heart for me but like I do I do overcompensate when I answer
this question so I'm curious there have been more than one project that that we've heard

(01:16:54):
such things about like you use the word Ponzi scheme I think it has like this but yeah but
not I know that Ponzi scheme is specifically a little financial but but there have been
other projects like cold fusion every time somebody brings that up it's just kind of
like ouch like shots fired you know like yes I know what I know what you mean.

(01:17:19):
But how how how do you explain that why are there these ideas in fusion that have come
and gone and haven't been able to prove out and the person that seems to be selling it
always looks like they're overselling it or perhaps it's been true and it's overzealous

(01:17:39):
people and I feel like you know like I'm an overzealous person and I feel like my technology
is going to work and you know what I mean like so I guess it's a two-part question one
is why has that been true with fusion energy and is that a parallel with other technologies

(01:18:00):
and two why are we different now?
I think it goes back from from from Voyager.
So are you it's like cold fusion where we're going to see technology go at fusion technology
moving forward and there could potentially be cold fusion in the future is that what

(01:18:23):
we're kind of saying?
Well it could the idea is is the that cold fusion is so comparatively cheap that you
could build a thousand or maybe a million but at least a thousand cold fusion apparatuses

(01:18:44):
all right.
Each one of it's each one of one of it is designed that varies the you know the liquid
the temperature the voltage the current the salt and whatever trying to find out what
it was you know what they did that they got a signal that they swear generated more heat

(01:19:08):
than put in and generated neutrons and why if other scientists have tried to replicate
it that there's something about their replication that just wasn't quite right and they're
so cheap that you could build a thousand of them that are wrong to make a thousandth one

(01:19:31):
a maybe wrong too or maybe right but it's something with a huge huge huge risk but the
rewards are so gigantic because there's would if if if if only you could do it but they
try it well we did do it once well do it again we can't we keep trying but something is different

(01:20:00):
and so there's a reason why there's more tokamaks being built than than magnetic bottles because
magnetic bottles have don't seem to have the success that tokamaks do.

(01:20:20):
So yeah so that's that's interesting I'll say something that I've never I've never really
mentioned this to to anybody before because anytime you say the words cold fusion in not
so much the fusion energy scientific area but outside like in in popular culture or

(01:20:44):
something it has a thing of a it has a feeling of a Ponzi scheme built into it because I
feel like humanity felt like they were promised something and that there that we were at the
brink of something that they never got so I have a I have a relative in my grandfather's

(01:21:06):
generation who was the head he was a nuclear physicist and he was the head of the nuclear
program in India and when he passed away in 2011 I'm going to say I inherited basic I'll
say just by default and I was the only person interested in this so I got all of his scientific

(01:21:29):
writing so I got boxes and boxes of this stuff I spent a better part of a year going through
some of this anytime I had free time I would go through it and I found so much work on
cold fusion and I've never told anybody this and I have stacks of paperwork like I have

(01:21:51):
stacks of paperwork and he pretty much put together he was he was he was yeah he was
the head of the nuclear commission in India for a long time but he was a physicist at
heart he was a nuclear physicist at heart and he was super into fusion energy talked
about it all the time told me about it when I was like seven years old so this is why

(01:22:13):
I inherited all his work and I never looked into it too much because it's like oh maybe
cold fusion was like a thing that was in the he was writing about it 20 years before 1997
1997 is when it kind of came into the popular arena and I think humanity felt let down when

(01:22:34):
it didn't work well I think it didn't work yet yet right sure that I think I think that
that the popular view of cold fusion being upon this scheme is is unwarranted that I

(01:22:55):
think these people who worked on it I think I think they very sincerely believed that
they were on the right track and that they and that their instruments told them that
that there is no other explanation other than cold fusion and and and one of the main things

(01:23:20):
is that these these scientists by no means got anything out of cold fusion that all they
got was a very very mud soaked reputation and which again I think is an observed that

(01:23:42):
yeah but but worried too but but their their heart was in the right place and the work
that they were doing supported the technology that they were trying to build at the time
yes I think I remember you and I spoke about there was a breakthrough with with room temperature

(01:24:05):
superconducting that felt promising that maybe about a year ago and and we were talking about
the implications of such a thing with fusion and being able to potentially get rid of a
cooling system in the future because of that advent of that technology so that's true thanks
thanks for reminding me yes yeah so I think that I think I remember this conversation

(01:24:31):
yeah so I feel yeah there's something to it but there's hope for the future I feel like
maybe in our tenth tenth iteration of smart we'll be able to do something like that in
the future yeah with with tokamaks we built lord knows how many of them and each one has

(01:24:57):
gotten progressively better in part major major major elements depending on the quality
of the materials that went into the device the quality of the engineering that went into
the rice the quality of the money that went into the device and I think that it's better

(01:25:22):
if people would think about cold fusion and withhold their judgment for god's sake that
imagine imagine Edison trying one material after another and he went through literally

(01:25:43):
one thousand different materials before he got a light bulb that would last long enough
to be marginally commercially useful and cold fusions in this in the same situation of you
we don't know enough about material we don't know enough about plasma physics if we if

(01:26:12):
we had perfect knowledge of perfect plasma physics equations and perfect material properties
equations we wouldn't have to build all of these tokamaks works now with computers we
come a long long long long way to be able to simulate a tokamak without as a as a thousand

(01:26:41):
there are far less than actually having to build one and as a consequence we can make
more progress with each one we actually go down to build but there's probably materials
that that we'll be using in in smart which I hope will include high electrical conductivity

(01:27:03):
carbon fiber that Bob Mungard would probably said we'll we'll build our machine that way
but the material wasn't available until until they are or at least not known until the engineering
of of of spark was they committed to it what to a design one of the oh go ahead no sorry

(01:27:33):
yeah no that makes sense that's like the general evolution of technology I guess and and it's
a cat and mouse game for like constantly making your technology better like just like your
iPhone you get an upgraded camera you get an upgraded case you get a faster computer
chip and and and we evolve and the company that evolves the best gets to stay on top

(01:27:59):
in and such as life what was called fusion like what what was the win like what was the
original lie so to speak like I don't even know oh well a fellow ran current through
some materials and while he was doing that he had some sort of called the de-viter counter

(01:28:26):
but something that countered neutrons and his device his measured unit said that there
was neutrons coming out of his little contraption and we also had statements like the water

(01:28:50):
got for state hot and said her and claimed that these were all in consequence of the
neutrons being released from some whole process of using well in our current mind I said
current knowledge of processes there wasn't anything that would explain the existence

(01:29:21):
of these excess neutrons and and I think his his results with with the top of the to have
more you know in the killings startup community that's remarkable because I am well I owe

(01:29:44):
a party director Dan T Nannadweiler which I can tell you honestly I asked about something
maybe the resistance of lead and she got lower and lower and lower,

(01:30:05):
but it lived perfectly just exactly what you'd expect curve.
And then as it reached liquid helium temperature,
it suddenly turned a right angle down and went left gate to zero.
And he said, I don't believe it.

(01:30:27):
And he ran the experiment again and again and he said,
there's something going on here that you can't explain.
The material should have a resistance curve that looks like this.
And it does. And then it goes to zero.
Something went wrong with my equipment.
And then other people replicated it themselves.

(01:30:50):
And after a couple of years, they had to say,
there's something we don't understand at all.
And we don't have a theory for it,
but it looks like lead loses resistance at this temperature.
And then they began testing other materials and found a whole bunch of others

(01:31:12):
that had the same property, but at different temperature points.
And they all went the same. And now we talk of superconducting.
It was like we actually knew anything about it.
And we just accepted it.
All the materials like rare-worth barium copper dioxide,

(01:31:34):
it was superconducting.
There was a time back when I was at the magnet laboratory, it was...
This is Brookhaven.
Manganese disulfide MMS2.
And people at the laboratory, I think Simon Schloener and Ficketer,

(01:31:57):
measured the electrical resistivity as a function of temperature.
And it reported that as a function of magnetic field.
And said, I've measured it up to 20, 30, 40 Tesla.

(01:32:22):
And based on that flat curve,
we can't find a field at which this Manganese disulfide goes normal.
I mean, it becomes a normal conductive.
And all of us for years, and for decades, said,

(01:32:43):
you know, this Manganese disulfide,
it would be fantastic for magnets, if only we could find a way
to get it to carry a factor of frugensity.
And we never did find some way of making it carry that factor.

(01:33:08):
Although maybe it's worthy of reexamination.
But the rare-worth barium copper oxide, likewise,
it's, I think the Manganese disulfide was a great deal flatter
than indicating it didn't go normal until a higher field in red cell.

(01:33:29):
But all of these materials are just fantastic beyond
the wildest expectations of back in the era
when people were trying to find something that today
would qualify as a low-temperature sieve reductor.

(01:33:52):
But back in the 1960s, Bob and I found a niobium,
it's a conium magnet for Harvard.
The conium is like the toughest material on the planet, right?
One of the toughest.
One of the toughest.

(01:34:12):
Interesting.
I think that people will take bits and pieces of that experiment
and use it in areas of fusion.
But I don't think that anybody would ever call their project cold fusion ever again.
I don't think that there's a soul that exists that would ever do that.
I think the main is tarnished forever in the public sphere.

(01:34:34):
It's like saying Chernobyl.
And their science has a loss that some youngster will
use the vast computational capabilities of the everyday

(01:34:59):
and examine maybe a completely different concept.
And someday someone may well come up with cold fusion
and make centuries.
But if it's at all possible, and one can never,

(01:35:19):
one never has the absolutism that one has in fear of the matter.
But we say that three and five and seven and eleven,
thirteen, five numbers,
and three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen will still be prime numbers.

(01:35:42):
Because we can prove absolutely that a prime number is a prime number,
an irrational number is an irrational number, instead of a...
Whereas in science, everything is open to reexamination.
That people disparage evolution because evolution is merely a theory.

(01:36:05):
Well, merely a theory, but with 99.999999% probability that it's accurate.
Because there's so much data that says that it is.
We can trace the numbers of the numbers that are in the data.

(01:36:27):
And horses back into the ever seen miniature horses,
about the size of a dog, and skeletons all the way from then up to the present huge animal that they are today.
And we can make ways of measuring time, counting tree rings to get back to.

(01:36:50):
We can go back a couple of thousand years by doing tree rings,
and we can do carbon dating, and show that the Earth is up to like 12.6 billion years old,
and the universe is 13.8 billion years old,
and have a multitude of parallel waves, independent parallel waves,

(01:37:16):
that all converge on the same numbers.
But there's always room for unspoken general relativity and special relativity.
We had Newton's laws, which were fantastic.
Except they couldn't predict that if the Earth was known to be whizzing through space,

(01:37:39):
that the speed of light ought to be different,
whether it was to directly charge you, directly against you, and from the sides.
And so there's always room for new theories,
and some new theory may predict the possibility of co-infusion,

(01:38:04):
and somebody will go out and do something that has never been done before,
and the whole universe will be super-tiny.
I think that humanity will reach a point where all other fuel,
kind of, maybe not solar, but like everything else,

(01:38:26):
kind of doesn't seem very scalable anymore,
and it'll just be who can make the best fusion energy generator.
And I think when we get to that point, I think it'll take us about 200 years,
I think, to get to that point,
and then it'll just be a game of who can make it smaller, who can make it cold,
you know, and then maybe that's what brings,

(01:38:46):
or maybe the AI will do something spectacular and we'll have co-fusion in 40 years.
You never know.
Speaking of your second figure of 40 years,
I would say that by 40 years, we will show that these are viable,
and it'll take…

(01:39:09):
So then the heating problem with sending our fusion energy generator to space,
and like the big issue being the heating,
so that would be resolved in half a century, you think?
That one might take to the end of the century, but…
Okay.

(01:39:29):
Any predictions that I or any sane person makes?
Well, I believe we turn out to be…
Yeah.
Shoulder their prediction that the…
If we…
If the people are successful with either artificial intelligence or with quantum computing,

(01:39:51):
the increase in knowledge will be so incredible.
Like in the same way that you had the graph of progress and fusion,
the Moore's law in that…

(01:40:12):
Computing.
In?
All these things are exponential improvements and exponent…
Exponential improvement, if it has a time frame of two years,
it takes no time at all.

(01:40:37):
Yeah, ITER did that.
Two to the 10th is a thousand, which means that everything gets a thousand times better
every 20 years.
Right.
Yeah, ITER has done that study where they have…

(01:40:57):
Where they talked about how fusion has outpaced Moore's law so far.
And…
That's the most reassuring, satisfying graph I've ever seen.
That's true.
And the real one is that people have been grumbling and saying it will never happen,
that it will never happen. The fusion community has merely been building these machines and

(01:41:24):
insufficiently spreading the news of just exactly what wonderful progress has been made.
A bunch of passion-driven, dedicated people by and large.
Yeah, the fusion community overall, I've seen quite a few.

(01:41:44):
I've seen the finance world, I've seen the software development product, that kind of world.
I've seen even the oil world at Schlumberger and Edison.
I worked at all of these different companies.
I've never seen an industry and a group of people that are as dedicated as the fusion energy group.
There's something really special about the tenacity of the people working at Eurofusion

(01:42:09):
and Eater, MIT, even at Wisconsin, Los Alamos.
It's just like, the more you learn about it, the more you learn about these human beings that are
just working so hard, working so hard towards making the world better.
When all we see is doom and gloom and all the news and everything.
There's this set of people that are not doing it for the money,

(01:42:32):
they're doing it for better technology or the betterment of the planet.
And it's just, it's so, man, like they deserve to see huge wins over the next decade.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I think it is for many of us.
It's an addiction in the same way that sort of gambling is, sports betting, etc.

(01:42:58):
It's a puzzle that's difficult enough that it really gets your juices flowing.
But promising enough that you just can't resist giving it another try.
Each time you build a device, it doesn't quite perform perhaps up to snuff.

(01:43:19):
It gives you the information about where you should look next.
And since the devices are only built, your device is only built maybe once every decade or so.
You spend a lot of time developing a whole lot of new tweaks that you can do with the next system.

(01:43:43):
And so I think it's an addiction, a very happy and a very useful addiction.
A very useful addiction.
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.

(01:44:04):
Would you do it if you had to do, if you were 20 and picking a major, would it still be the same?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's super cool.
I feel with Eater, how was that, like how was that time when you knew that the world was going to dedicate this kind of like seven countries were coming together.

(01:44:37):
They were going to dedicate and take this thing seriously.
And that would have been like at the height of your career in terms of you'd be getting into it after your education and in a practical way.
How was Eater? Was Eater a win? Is Eater a win now?
Well, I couldn't get it, but it's not my cup of tea.

(01:45:09):
I would be so impatient that I could not wait from 1980 to 2030 to see promising results.

(01:45:30):
I would have opted for something that was going to be a lot cheaper and a lot faster.
I was with Bruce Montgomery and with the Magnet Laboratory and it tasted first blood with

(01:45:52):
Alcantara A and with Bruno Coppi's idea that the high magnetic field was the way to go.
And I would be impatient to see whether Bruno's and Bruce's idea was right.
And then if it was right, then I'd want to build a good follow on it.

(01:46:14):
And I'd want to build a follow on it.
When the time it took for Eater to be built from 50 years from 1980 to 2030,
I would have built at least five devices and I hope 10.
And as a consequence, being able to tweak the results and infuse the results and change something

(01:46:39):
that was being greater than Eater in the same 50 years and cost a tiny fraction of what Eater's
costing. And like the idea that it was a multinational conglomerate that worked on it.

(01:47:00):
And I think delightfully wonderful is the Webb telescope.
I've been too impatient to work on that.
Because of the timeline and it has a parallel.

(01:47:22):
Obviously, I feel like the big, big plus, especially now since we're like,
I guess we're in the precipice of World War III. I don't really know. It's all depressing.
But having tritium in your system and using tritium for fusion energy,

(01:47:48):
does that defeat the whole narrative of how fusion is better for nuclear proliferation?
Because then you have like a.
That's true. The tritium is going to be in all of the hydrogen bombs that one builds and

(01:48:10):
and one's just siphoning off a small fraction of the amount that in fact they beat the tritium
that one gets. Sort of a side, what do they call it, the same way sides are related to hydrogen bombs.

(01:48:34):
That going to helium three is.
It takes the pressure off.
Tritium market.
I think we could just use standard can do type reactors or something similar to generate it.
An oversupply of tritium and then allow it to decay to helium three.

(01:48:59):
I think it's. Man's intolerance of man.
Worries worrisome about World War three.
That's yeah, that man's intolerance of man.
Yeah, I just I just feel like if we were to have.

(01:49:24):
If we were to make fusion energy like global commercialization strategy 4050 years from now,
I imagine there will be hundreds of fusion energy generators working and
plugged into the grid and and providing energy.
I just feel like if they were deuterium and tritium and you had the lithium walls that

(01:49:47):
bred tritium within it and it would have like a tritium capture system inevitably as part of its
design because that would be required. I'm sure by the NRC, but it's where you do build that system.
You still have a system that's that's producing tritium and has the capacity to do so.
So I don't know how how much.

(01:50:10):
Of that would make it.
Like a dangerous thing to be around and and the neutrons, of course, from that process. I feel like if we were to build thousands of fusion energy generators starting two decades from now, something like that it would need to be.
It would not. It would need to not have tritium. It could be one of many, I guess, electronic processes, but it would just not be tritium like.

(01:50:34):
I think the whole fusion community is looking forward to a day of a new topic fusion and we just have that.
I'm going to be a little more patient and we want to build one of them now.
And and.
We're we're taking.

(01:50:55):
I did design a.
Magnet, which by designing a 16 order.
I was able to cut the weight of the device by a factor of three.

(01:51:18):
So that was a real pleasure, but I. I don't know whether it was ever built.
It would have been the same concept could have been used for a wire magnet and somebody perhaps they shall.

(01:51:40):
But at the moment, most devices are.
A little bit stodgy, I would say.
We've so you've you've touched in your career, you've touched on the magnets that go into the Hyperloop concept.

(01:52:03):
You've worked on the magnets that go into MRI as well as fusion.
If we were to have a third, let me add one more.
The one that actually is more products than the MRI is magnetic meditation.
Well, magnetic meditation is in fact.

(01:52:28):
Used by Hyperloop and and almost the ultra high speed real transportation.
And so it removes the friction and.
I'm sorry, so so that's what removes the friction and makes it go faster is that levitation concept.

(01:52:48):
Absolutely, I see that iron.
Iron few of iron.
Minutes to about 160 miles an hour and maybe and if you have a loose.
Straightening of the rails that they do on the high speed shipping in Japan.

(01:53:13):
Just needs some work that is, but I am I'm real well.
I don't know if I'm around, but that comes to a new level at which we gain friction.
And the ability for the wheel to push on the rail.

(01:53:34):
So, yes, and there's both attractive magnetic levitation, which is dynamically unstable.
And then there's a magnetic levitation, which is what uses and that's a magnetically stable.

(01:53:57):
You need German high speed train.
They use attractive and require to have ultra high speed sensors to tell whether the.
Train is attracted to the wheel or repelled.
And adjust the field and the magnets to compensate.

(01:54:20):
Can you stick this on a car like, why would Elon go the hyper loop route if he could.
Take up well, I guess the technology is not the ancillary technology is probably not ready for such a thing, but.
Can it be can we can we apply the same thinking to cars like individually?
I know they're not on the rail, but yeah, I don't think you could because I think.

(01:54:47):
Most of the high speed rail operated tube.
And you get some evacuated tube so that, but there are.
Providing you travel on the on the tubes.
There are many concepts that you have individual cars using the tube, so you can.

(01:55:14):
You have a 1 person in this carrier or.
Or a whole train that linked up carriers of this sort to come up.
Which create the full train.
Okay, so this is so hyper loop is a practical way.
I think I think because we talk about Bruce Montgomery quite a few times, I remember.

(01:55:39):
You saying that he was 1 of the original advocates for this today.
Remember that yes, he worked on someone, but mostly his associate professor Henry Cole was the.
He is a telephone.
That's show I believe for creating the concept for make that claim.

(01:56:04):
Nice.
Yeah, so coming back to like magnets and you've seen you've seen like massive applications.
What are I've also seen magnets being used to launch into space, like launch goods.
Parts components into space and how does that work? Carl?

(01:56:28):
That works by what's called the rail gun and that's actually been 1 of my goal.
I take the design the energy storage inductor for the real time.
And the Arctic back in the.
That was really the picket Kenny arsenal in New Jersey fired in 3,317 gram projectile.

(01:56:55):
At 4 10ths of the escape velocity.
So that later on there been rail cut that extra pass that performance, but it was certainly stellar at the time.
And there's already an ideal margin in the South American Alps South American.

(01:57:19):
Rockies that that it has just has a slope of just the right angle into steady slope and they would build a.
Rail gun that comes from the base of the mountain up to near the peak of the mountain and by using a rail gun of that length.

(01:57:40):
What could it get the philosophy up to this velocity furthermore when the projectile scapes at about 15,000 feet.
You would be in in the less dense air to it.

(01:58:01):
Avoid the frictional slow down and then is there a magnet then on the other end to catch it?
I had a stupid question. Well, we're at home.
The whole idea is to have this rail gun so long that they can accelerate the usable payload.

(01:58:24):
To escape velocity now can't be used by personality.
The humans are in force is way too.
But construction materials, etc. could be launched to the to this space station or anything else that might happen to be.

(01:58:46):
Yeah, you could certainly launch the.
Little GPS.
Satellites and the cell phone satellite such that we have so many sets.
You could go anywhere at any time and there'd be enough of those little satellites overhead that you could be.

(01:59:15):
Have uninterrupted cell phone.
Yeah, there's a documentary on Netflix. I think I told you about this before. It's it's like a 4 part documentary and it's how the telescope was launched in different components and how there was a robot that put it all together when it was in orbit.

(01:59:39):
And the whole it's a fascinating documentary and the engineering that went behind this is just so beautiful. Beautiful.
And that's just amazing.
And that's a kind of project that would have me.

(02:00:00):
Oh, the pictures that we're getting back from that, you know, and.
Every time I see that I'm like, wow, there are a million fusion energy generators. That's a picture from millions fusion energy generators.
Billions if not 200 billion. Yeah, billions trillions.

(02:00:24):
Trillions, right? The trillions of fusion energy generators right there working.
That's it's interesting. I would love to.
I definitely plan to, but I would love to launch.
Our fusion energy generator, break it up into components and have one in orbit as a charging station.

(02:00:45):
But I think for us, it would be more practical to just go to the moon for the helium 3, and then we could be a giant charging station on the moon. I would love to build that.
I don't know. It would take thousands and thousands of people and billions of dollars.
It would be worth it. Yeah, I worry about the.

(02:01:10):
The fusion plant in the space.
Because you the size of the radio is to exhaust the waste.
That'd be a real challenge.
What about what about if we had room temperature superconducting magnets if that, I mean, room temperature superconductors, like the breakthrough that wasn't so much a breakthrough from last year.

(02:01:38):
If we had materials like that, um, wouldn't.
Would the heat would be lower and we even need.
Job, so now I'm interested in the applications.
Everything we can do that's pretty important to me.

(02:02:02):
But in enough in a fusion generator, sorry.
A nine instrument number of materials. There's one of them in that.
Some some young whippersnapper is going to find it.

(02:02:26):
Yeah, yeah, and soon soon. I assume.
Yeah, just based on the general trajectory of things right now.
Kind of coming back to the computing computing.
Throwing computing at fusion is going to bring about.

(02:02:48):
A breakthroughs over the next decade or 2 that is going to be absolutely remarkable, whether it be plasma control or coming up with new materials.
But there was a, there was a Washington Post article just this last weekend with Bill Gates talking about how the future of actually requires fusion energy.

(02:03:13):
To come online and Bill Gates is, you know, the founder of breakthrough energy capital and breakthrough energy.
It's indeed investor in commonwealth fusion and and Sam Altman, who is who is the investor of helium from day 1. He also has said the same thing.

(02:03:36):
And Sam Altman is, you know, has the responsibility of running open AI and so he is also talked about how.
The future of computing requires fusion energy because.
I was reading some of these stats recently, like, like, Bitcoin took up the same amount of energy as Idaho.

(02:04:00):
And we were talking about how.
The energy consumption of a of putting in a search term in Google.
Versus the energy consumption of putting in a prompt into.
Chat, it's 11 times more energy consumption per prompt.

(02:04:23):
Between the 2, so so I think fusion energy needs computing and computing needs fusion energy.
And Sam uniquely might be on to something here, but, but.
But I'm kind of excited about putting those 2 things together. I'm excited to live in a time where we can put those 2 things together.

(02:04:43):
Oh, oh, yes, there's been.
I think economists who've done detailed studies of.
I think quality of life.
For versus per capita energy consumption, and they're linked very, very tightly. Those who have lots of energy.

(02:05:11):
I have.
Leave a much, much higher standard of living and if if continents like.
Africa.
Consumed the same amount of energy rate.
That we do here in America, we sort of pretty much fried the planet.

(02:05:35):
So we in order for for energy consumption to rise in those areas of the country where it's so desperately needed.
The only source that we can tolerate is is the fusion.
When I was a kid, I remember in India, there was this politician. I just remember this like, political ad vaguely.

(02:05:59):
Where he was promising 1 bulb in every house, because he said, if you have a bulb.
You can educate your child like that was his selling point to Indians.
Because we're education minded people, so he's like, I promise you 1 bulb in your house. And if you have a bulb, it means you have an educated kid. And that was his.

(02:06:21):
Entire spiel so yeah, it's interesting to go from there to here.
Yeah, we'll see how it goes.
Yeah, I guess that's not on the to do list for us out here.
Yeah, anyway, I really, I really wanted to know about.
That crawl I wanted to know, I suppose.

(02:06:45):
What are the limits of what we can do with the fusion energy generator and.
What would be the ideal fusion energy generator is also something I'm curious about what you think would be.
Well, of course, the 1st step is the step.

(02:07:06):
We're taking, which is to leapfrog spark and make an a new tronic.
Machine and I think that.
That will be the 1st of I hope it will be the 1st of a new tronic machines and later on.
Some someone in genius will and using and using.

(02:07:30):
Room temperature, high temperature superconduct using room temperature superconductors and.
Graphene support plates with graphene's young ones and and.
A a conductor that doesn't suffer from from a strain.

(02:07:52):
Limit so that there will be wonderful advances, maybe going to pay for on eventually.
But at first, first, I think we will make a big splash in the pond, I think.
Well, I think that we're on the appropriate path of.

(02:08:14):
Generating an unlimited power for the planet that will can raise the standard of living.
Of everyone and can raise it to a point where.
We will be too happy with what we have.
And I'm willing to steal from somebody else's because we think we are.

(02:08:39):
Demonstrate by having having more and we don't care that they made somebody else.
Be it suffered from our greed.
Yeah, we thought we could power source.
And the technology.
It will become available everywhere.

(02:08:59):
Where there's fuel for it, which is to say everywhere.
And as a consequence, there won't be the greed.
Of somebody looking over their their fence and seeing a greener lawn somewhere else.
So.
It would have like abundance where humanity is comfortable enough.

(02:09:21):
Where man is in love with man and not so much.
That is tolerant towards this, the successes of his neighbors.
Yeah, I get that.
I think I think all a lot of things that would get us to that point would be things like.
You know, computing a lot of cryptocurrency, all of those things.

(02:09:43):
Man has lots of aspirations for AI and automation and Internet of Things and everything.
All of it really comes down to having clean sources of energy.
Because the way that we're doing it right now for humanity, that's not sustainable 100 years from now.
And so we are at like we're at that junction for humanity where we absolutely need fusion energy.

(02:10:06):
I'm excited to wake up every day.
Yeah, there are graphs that show the close dependence of energy availability and standard.
And the energy will be essentially as a consequence.
They standard living of the people that we turn away from because we don't want to.

(02:10:34):
We don't have the energy to give them to raise their standard to ours.
And so it's a dictator to have that.
Yeah.
And it's such a promise that keeps keeps me happy and alive.
Of course, I love that.

(02:10:54):
Thank you so much for doing this.
Let's come. I'll talk to you soon.

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From MIT to Kronos: Carl Weggel's Path to Fusion Innovation

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