Energy Drivers – Can fusion energy transform electricity generation markets?

00:00:00 - 00:00:55

Lance Mortlock

Welcome to our next episode of the Energy Drivers podcast. I'm Lance Mortlock and I'm your host of today's discussion with Greg Twinney, the Chief Executive officer at General Fusion. Throughout our series, we invite Canadian energy and mining leaders to discuss key issues, provide insights and ask challenging questions. Growing electricity demand continues to be an important conversation in the energy space. Most stakeholders question Canada's ability to generate enough electricity for successful energy transition. Perhaps it's time to look for more innovative and disruptive methods. Greg, thank you for joining our podcast. I've been, really looking forward to having you on the show, and I'm pleased we could finally make it happen.

 

00:00:55 - 00:01:06

Greg Twinney

Lance, thank you for having me. Really, really grateful for the opportunity to connect with you. Of course. Always good. And to be able to share our story. So, looking forward to this.

 

00:01:06 - 00:01:26

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. And I know you're a really busy, busy man, traveling the world and telling your story. Maybe that's a good segue, Greg, to kind of get into this, let's help our listeners get acquainted with you and tell us a bit more about your story and the company that you lead.

 

00:01:26 - 00:03:44

Greg Twinney

Sure, sure. That's a good place to start. So, you know, maybe, maybe one of the ways to just frame the context of all of this is to start with, why do we exist as a company? Why are we doing what we're doing? You know, because that's what drove me to join General Fusion several years ago was because of the why. And that that why really starts with climate change, right? Climate change, the challenge of climate change, and really the scale, the uncertainty and the urgency with climate change is, in my opinion, something that we haven't seen, we being humanity seen ever before. And, you know, to solve something that challenging, it can't be incremental. incremental helps, but you need a very transformative and disruptive solution to a challenge like that. And so that's the genesis of the company. It's the vision that our founder had when he started the company almost two decades ago. And it's one that I now lead in taking us from, a lab type environment to ultimately commercializing and solving this challenge using this new disruptive technology called fusion. So, you know, I guess, one of the things that people often ask is, you know, what is fusion? And maybe that's a place to start in getting into a little bit of what the company's all about. And really, fusion is the process of creating huge amounts of energy by combining light atoms. Actually, the sun and the stars are examples of fusion and sort of how the universe has figured out the best way to create energy over the long term. General fusion is in the pursuit of creating those conditions and creating fusion inside a machine on-demand. And, while the world's been kind of trying to do that for several decades, it's only now that the science and the technology, and the maturity sort of of even just the knowledge base has got to the point where now fusion is possible to be created here on Earth inside machines in a way that's going to be, majorly transformative.

 

00:03:44 - 00:03:55

Lance Mortlock

And fusion is different to fission. So fusion, you're bringing atoms together. Fission, you're splitting atoms. Is that right?

 

00:03:55 - 00:05:14

Greg Twinney

Exactly. Yeah. Is the exact opposite process or physical process. It's that kind of the other end of the periodic table, where you're combining light elements together to create a heavy element, and through that process get a huge amount of energy. Whereas in fission you're taking you're starting with a heavy element, you're splitting them into lighter elements. and it's so it's the exact opposite process. And the, the sort of difference between those processes are really around what the result and the byproduct is of the process. Whereas in fission, when you're, you know, splitting a heavier element, you end up with a light element that is really unstable. And it's the radiation that we're all familiar with when we think about traditional nuclear and nuclear fission, is this sort of byproduct of radioactive material that needs to be stored and, and dealt with in, on a long, long-term basis, whereas fusion, the byproduct is actually helium, which is one of the safest elements, ends up in kids party balloons, ultimately. And so, you kind of have a lot of the benefits of fission without the, the downside with regards to at least the byproducts of the process.

 

00:05:14 - 00:05:39

Lance Mortlock

And so, game changing when you can make that work without having that, the radiation, the byproducts and those challenges that, I think society has come to be familiar and concerned about. But inordinate amounts of energy, which 9 billion people on the planet need right?

 

00:05:39 - 00:06:57

Greg Twinney

Absolutely. The sustainability piece of this is so critical when you're thinking about the long term, and with fusion while you the byproduct is, is one of the pieces that we just talked about. The other is just the fuel and the danger of the process on its own. With fusion, you're using hydrogen, you know, very small amounts of hydrogen, which are derived from, from seawater. And so, you know, this is a fuel that abundant and, almost limitless when you think about the amount needed to power the world for billions of years, there's more than enough. And seawater and, hydrogen in that to power the world for, for basically ever. And, you know, you can't take that fuel. You can to weaponize things. You can't use it as a means for sort of geopolitical leverage in the way that some other energy sources are used. And so, it's, it's something that is often talked about as the holy grail of energy, because it really has all the attributes of a long-term energy source needed to power the world.

 

00:06:57 - 00:07:13

Lance Mortlock

General fusion has a goal of delivering zero carbon energy to the grid by mid 2030s. At what development stages your technology? What milestones are you trying to accomplish between now and then? How close are you, Greg?

 

00:07:13 - 00:09:47

Greg Twinney

Yeah, it's a good question. People have often, when they think about fusion and if they do a quick couple of searches, they, they come to this conclusion that, oh yeah, fusion is many, many decades away and always will be many, many decades away. And, you know, it kind of ignores the progress, I guess you could say that has happened if you are on the inside and been working in the field and understand what's been happening, in fact, the sort of the figures of merit or, you know, milestones have increased faster than even Moore's Law in the last decade or so when it comes to fusion. And people been working on it for decades. And it's only now that we're getting to the point where real, meaningful milestones are being, achieved, by ourselves and others around the world. And it really. At General Fusion, our philosophy is one that started two decades ago with an end in mind that was commercializing fusion, not just creating it for the sake of it in a science machine or research basis, but really in a commercialisable way. And so we're starting with that in mind. We have, over the last two decades, been knocking down the biggest risks. First, you know, the cheapest and fastest way to knock down risks, make progress. as when what sort of the approach that we've taken and, and then you go from there, of course, to scale and integrate. But, today we're at a period in the company's, history where we are about to be demonstrating at 50% power plant scale that our approach, again, a commercially viable approach is going to generate milestones of fusion temperatures, which actually need to be 100 million degrees, and also conditions where we're getting more energy out of the process than what it takes to create those that fusion environment. And that's actually a milestone that only been achieved, in the last couple of years in national labs where you're you got to create, you got to create the conditions of the sun inside of the machine. So requires a huge amount of energy. And only in the last couple of years have we seen that the, experiments and the big lab machines have been able to get more energy out of that than what it took to create those conditions. And so our job at General Fusion is to take it to the next stage and into a, commercial format. And that's what we what we're working on in the next couple of years, we're going to be breaking through in a pretty major way.

 

00:09:47 - 00:10:17

Lance Mortlock

And, maybe building on that thread a little bit, Greg, when you think about your organization, very heavy on research and development and commercialization, eventually, have you witnessed technological surprises or unforeseen results where you looked at the experiments that you've been running. The pilot, so you've been running and gone, geez, like we did not expect to see that. Like if you had those moments?

 

00:10:17 - 00:11:49

Greg Twinney

Absolutely. This is an incredibly difficult science and engineering challenge. And, you know, we General Fusion are taking this very unique approach. And, again, the end in mind is to commercialize, but, you know, you need to take incremental steps along the way. And as we've been plotting our course in de-risking these major components of, ultimately, a commercial power plan, we've had plenty of, I guess, experiments, damage demonstrations where we thought on paper through simulations and research, we're going to work. But then as we demonstrated, in physical science, it didn't work. And so, we needed to pivot. So there has been many, many, periods along this journey where we've had to make pivots. For example, we've built, you know, over 24 very large-scale prototypes of, you know, plasma machines, which is an integral part of of our machine. We shot over 200,000 plasma experiments. We're shooting these big plasma experiments on an almost daily basis. And all of that has been informing simulations and our future roadmaps. And, like, like a lot of technologies, what you learn, you build from and you, you scale up from, it's just in fusion, you know, it's that much harder than a lot of the other tech companies that I've been a part of, at least where we've had a similar approach. But the tech hasn't been nearly as difficult.

 

00:11:49 - 00:12:50

Lance Mortlock

Maybe a related question. I'm imagining, you know, you've been in the role a couple of years, you're working on a technology, which is out there, leading edge, very disruptive. And to your point, Greg, like you're trying to literally change the world. I mean, when I was at your facility a few months ago, it struck me meeting the team how passionate they are about and the potential impact that this has to a planet that is, you know, facing this, this warming and this existential threat. From a leadership perspective, Greg, there are a lot of naysayers that say this technology will never work, it's not proven, we've been trying for decades. Like how do you lead through that, Greg? How do you cut through the noise and stay focused? Must be hard?

 

00:12:50 - 00:14:47

Greg Twinney

Yeah, it has its moments, for sure. And during those moments, have to constantly go back to remind ourselves, why are we doing this? And you know, how important is it that we are successful, and we see it as, you know, incredibly important, and we know the reason why. And we go back to that when we have our tough moments and, and reflect, and ultimately, what this type of work brings together is, is a culture of like, innovative, and focused people who really understand that this is a grand challenge. It's not going to be straightforward; it's going to be difficult, but it's going to be worth it. And, you know, we don't do it on our own, right? We, we leverage all sorts of national labs around the world. The science that's been done over the prior decades, we leverage all of that and pull it all into, our roadmaps. And our goal is to advance it further than what's been done previously in, in, in a faster way. And it's done through rapid iteration. You know, if you think about, I don't think about think about space with rockets. Right. The first rockets were small. The first few didn't. They blew up and, but they kept iterating because they knew what the goal was. And while the ultimate goal of Space-X might be to, get to Mars, they didn't start with building the rocket that's going to go to Mars. You know, they started by, you know, leveraging solid scientific basis and starting to prototype. And that's the approach that we've taken. And so, we have built the capabilities inside to rebound from challenges. And we know that we, have done that multiple times over and over. And it really just builds up an incredible confidence inside the organization that we can solve any challenge that comes our way on this path.

 

00:14:47 - 00:15:01

Lance Mortlock

And on this path, like how much commercial fusion energy could the facility contribute to the grid? Like, what does that look like? Is this scalable?

 

00:15:01 - 00:16:00

Greg Twinney

So, the the beauty of a fusion is that you are, you know, you're building the energy source in a much different way than most other energy sources. You're needing to extract something or, capture something as a fuel source, whereas in fusion, you know, you're actually creating it. And what that what that allows for is for you to build machines, power plants that are, as sort of, there's a limit to how small you can go, and sort of a 100-megawatt type power plant is what we believe currently is sort of the smallest. So, it allows you to build power plants at, at different, different sizes and wherever you need the power and our power plant design is, one that will generate about 150MW of energy and, can scale up from there by using multiple units in tandem.

 

00:16:00 - 00:16:23

Lance Mortlock

So in terms of the energy system does like I'm imagining Greg, like where this fit is you, displacing conventional coal power plants and potentially natural gas power plants and connecting to the grid and replacing that once this technology is, is proven.

 

00:16:23 - 00:17:04

Greg Twinney

Yeah, absolutely. The target is to replace those carbon-based energy sources that you just mentioned. And, you know that, in itself, is a difficult challenge. But when you think about the energy demand in the coming decades, not only do we have to replace those, we have to add new energy to the grid and, eventually start removing carbon from, the atmosphere, which is going to require even more energy again. So, all of these things requiring massive amounts of energy that, fusion will be able to step in and take care of.

 

00:17:04 - 00:17:50

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. And you, you mentioned earlier, Greg, that, you know, when you look at nuclear energy, there's a lot of discussion about nuclear as an alternative power source that might become more prominent through the small modular reactors in Canada. But as you point out, fusion energy doesn't face the same level of scrutiny over safety and radioactive waste. My sense, Greg, is, you know, at the end of the day when 9 billion people on this planet, we need a lot more energy. Probably the answer is all of the above. We need fusion. We need fission. We need more renewables. We need hydrogen. Don't we need it all?

 

00:17:50 - 00:18:40

Greg Twinney

Yes. I am, I'm a fan or a proponent of all sources of energy that are, not carbon based. And I think that, you know, again, back to the beginning, the urgency, the scale, and the uncertainty with climate change means that we need to be, tackling it in multiple different ways. And, you know, I see fusion as an incredible energy source of the future. But to get there, we're going to continue to use, you know, renewables. And I do think that there is a place for fission as well. And, and if nothing else, we should, keep using the fission power plants that we've got in place now that are safe and operating in an economical way.

 

00:18:40 - 00:19:09

Lance Mortlock

One of the things I'm excited about is that your organization, Greg, is based in Vancouver, and you advocate for fostering innovation in our country. Why was the company founded in Vancouver when you could be in Europe or in the US? What was it about being a Canadian enterprise over other jurisdictions? Was it just the history of where the company started?

 

00:19:09 - 00:20:28

Greg Twinney

Yeah, it's a good question. I get that, I often get asked that, you know, as you mentioned, at the beginning of the podcast, you know, around the world quite often talking to people everywhere. And I get asked, why are you in Vancouver? Why did you, you know, why is the company there? And it really does go back to our founder, Dr. Michel Laberge, he was based in Bowen Island, an island in B.C., when he founded the company in 2002. And, from there with a few, people sort of started to scale up the organization again, taking down the risks towards creating fusion conditions and ultimately a commercial power plant. And the company grew and grew in, in Vancouver. And really, as we continued to grow, so did the sort of technology ecosystem here in Vancouver. And there is, quite a thriving environment for clean tech in Vancouver that we, get to be a part of, which is fantastic. And that that involves, access to talent, access to other leaders, capital, high tech skills, those types of things. And, really, it's turned out to be that, this is a fantastic place to build a clean tech company.

 

00:20:28 - 00:20:53

Lance Mortlock

And, and obviously it's a highly academic complex. And you use the words Greg, scientific field, I think, and Alex, maybe you could just quickly fact check there. So, I think Canada ranks pretty highly in terms of education, from a G7, G20 perspective, is there maybe a couple of facts there you could pull up, Alex?

 

00:20:53 - 00:21:31

Alexandr Kim

Yes, I believe that's the case. I actually have a publication by OECD in front of me called the program for International Student Assessment, where they double check and verify the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds and mathematics readings and science across OECD members. It does appear that Canada is above the average by a few dozen scoring points, which I think is great, especially in mathematics and science, where among the leaders, alongside with Singapore, Japan, Korea, Estonia and Switzerland. So I think that's probably a fair claim, Lance.

 

00:21:31 - 00:21:38

Lance Mortlock

What do you think, Greg? Like, like thoughts reactions to that. Is that, is that kind of what you expected?

 

00:21:38 - 00:22:39

Greg Twinney

Yeah, that would be exactly. That'd be what I expected. You know, we tap into, you know, Canadian academic institutions in a pretty serious way and have relationships, across the country in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, various universities, also in Canadian nuclear laboratories, like there is an enormous amount of talent in Canada, that can, you know, maybe they haven't worked in fusion specifically, but have the skill sets to be able to adapt and come across to a company like General Fusion or others that are working in fusion and be incredibly valuable. And, I do think, though, that this is going to be a massive industry and for Canada to continue to compete, we need to be continuing to feed the funnel of talent. That's something that, will work very closely with the Canadian government and various institutions to make sure that we are thinking about the future and building those capabilities here in Canada.

 

00:22:39 - 00:22:49

Lance Mortlock

And I would imagine the federal government is very interested, Greg, in what your organization is trying to achieve, given their policy agenda. Is that fair?

 

00:22:49 - 00:23:38

Greg Twinney

Yeah, absolutely. The Canadian government has been supportive of us in in many different ways. In early days, financially, with good financial support and, R&D type support, which of course is, incredibly important in the early stages of a company like ours. And now as we look forward, we're seeing the Canadian government starting to lean in and think about fusion as a real, meaningful industry inside Canada and as an opportunity outside Canada as well. And, you know, whether that's fusion, regulatory policy, whether that's creating a national fusion strategy, all of those things are really starting to percolate inside, the federal government. So, it's fantastic for us as a company that's able to help lead the charge and provide some valuable input into that process for the Canadian government.

 

00:23:38 - 00:24:21

Lance Mortlock

That's interesting. Very interesting. I'm assuming your technology requires some critical minerals and major components to operate and harness fusion energy. Previously on the podcast Greg, I've had some other guests, and I've said that our abundance of natural resources is a key national strength, and we should do a better job of leveraging that where possible. When you think about what you're trying to achieve, Greg, from a supply chain perspective, are you able to procure the right critical minerals and the major components from Canadian suppliers, or do you need to go overseas to get what you need?

 

00:24:21 - 00:26:46

Greg Twinney

That's a good question. So, we’ve taken a very unique approach to, creating fusion conditions and the machine that's ultimately going to be a power plant. The end in mind of course, is a commercial power plant. And some of the, thinking that goes into that is ensuring that we have the materials and, and the, the capabilities to build general fusion power plants, in the near term. And so the approach that we have and one of the constraints that we put on ourselves is to make sure that we are using materials that are available now and that the, capabilities for building the components of a general fusion power plant exist, because there are enough challenges with solving fusion that you don't need to go and create additional challenges of trying to come up with new materials and ways to manufacture things that are going to even make the timeline longer. So for us, we’re using mostly existing materials and, really the, the critical mineral that we would use, I guess would be, would be lithium. But it's such an incredibly small amount, I think a power plant would use less, less lithium than an EV car battery has in it, for an entire year. So, you know, it's a, really not constrained by, by materials. But this is unique to General Fusion. A lot of the other approaches to fusion, do require some, you know, critical mineral, materials. And that's a big constraint in the industry right now because, you know, recreating the conditions of the sun when you're creating fusion inside of a machine. So very, very hot temperatures and there are neutrons flying around that are smashing against the wall of the machine. And, if you're not using an approach that kind of sidesteps all of that, you need to come up with materials that can withstand those conditions. We take a approach that kind of sidesteps all of that. We use a liquid metal cavity for creating fusion. So, when fusion is happening inside our machine, it's actually happening inside, a liquid metal cavity of lithium. And so the machine is not actually damaged in any way when we're creating fusion conditions. And so that's unique to us. It's something that, allows us to not be too worried about materials and, critical minerals.

 

00:26:46 - 00:26:49

Lance Mortlock

How hot does the machine get, Greg?

 

00:26:49 - 00:27:25

Greg Twinney

Yeah. So, to get, these, these light atoms to fuze together, they don't want to. You need to have the right conditions. I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that the sun and the stars are examples of fusion happening. So, you need to create similar conditions inside your machine. And that's, that's, that's 100-million-degree temperatures in order to fuze these atoms together and do that in a way that has enough, enough density that, you, you can overcome the, the fact that these atoms don't want to fuze together and eventually get them to fuze and release all the energy.

 

00:27:25 - 00:27:40

Lance Mortlock

So, you’re talking a hundred million degrees in a floating cavity of lithium, and it needs to be floating so that doesn't melt the machine. Right?

 

00:27:40 - 00:28:28

Greg Twinney

Exactly. Yeah. You can just imagine, it. Well, yeah. Yeah. You're not actually, it's not actually, the temperature that damages the machine as much as it is when you, when you combine or fuze these two atoms together, you actually get a release of a neutron, a high energy neutron. And that's actually the that's the energy you need to capture. And you can't contain that neutron using any magnetic force and so what it does is it flies off and hits anything, the wall of, of any structure that's around it. And in our case, the structure that's around it is liquid, so it doesn't damage the structure. And that's sort of the that's the secret sauce of our approaches, creating fusion conditions inside a liquid metal cavity.

 

00:28:28 - 00:29:03

Lance Mortlock

Fascinating. Lastly, in my view, Greg, collaborating ecosystems of stakeholders tends to generate more value. And I've seen that in many parts of the energy system in this country that the more collaboration that you got, the better the solutions, the outcomes. Do you have working relations with government regulators, private sectors? Are there more opportunities to foster cooperation between the private and public sector in this space?

 

00:29:03 - 00:30:13

Greg Twinney

Absolutely. We do. It's a grand challenge. We can't do it on our own. And so we do work, with, with many others, public, private partnerships have been critical for us over the past, number of years. And that's inside Canada and outside. Inside Canada, as I mentioned earlier, working with some of the, funding mechanisms for capital in the R&D stages and then working with other bodies inside Canada, NSERC, CNL, etc., that help us, in scientific and engineering ways. In ways that we couldn't do on our own. We also do, have quite a number of partnerships outside Canada. And, you know, this is a global challenge that, there's a lot of expertise around the world. And what's really, fantastic about fusion is that there is an enormous amount of willingness to collaborate on this big challenge. And so we have built some really strong relationships outside Canada, the UK AEA and in other major labs around the world.

 

00:30:13 - 00:30:22

Lance Mortlock

Before we conclude, Greg, is there anything else that you'd like to mention or add to the discussion?

 

00:30:22 - 00:31:17

Greg Twinney

I think the key takeaway is that, is this moment in time, you know, General Fusion, we're a leader in the world on the path to commercialize fusion. And, but there are others. And so, I think what's always surprising to people is the level of maturity of the industry and how close we are to having commercial fusion. And that's not, something that just happened overnight. It has been decades. And given the challenge that we've got in front of us and the timeline, fusion, you know, sort of coming online in the next decade or so is going to be incredibly important and leaves me hugely optimistic, despite the big challenge of climate change that's in front of us. So I'd say, you know, I'm hugely optimistic about the future, despite the big challenge of climate change.

 

00:31:17 - 00:31:30

Lance Mortlock

Well, that's probably a good point to say thank you for your time and insights, Greg. It's been a pleasure having you on the show.

 

00:31:30 - 00:31:35

Greg Twinney

It's been my pleasure to be here, Lance. I really appreciate the opportunity.

 

00:31:35 - 00:33:38

Lance Mortlock

Maybe if I could conclude a little bit the discussion, with you today. It's been a pleasure talking to you about General Fusion, and fusion energy and really how it can transform electricity generation not only in Canada, but perhaps around the world. For our listeners, if you have your own questions or queries, you can reach out to EY, via the attached contact details. Finishing another great conversation and episode. I'd like to maybe share a few final thoughts with our listeners. I think one, fusion energy has several benefits, and Greg has talked about that. If it's commercialized, fusion energy could deliver clean, abundant, and safe electricity to satisfy widespread Canadian electricity electrification needs. Two, commercialization is a key principle for, general fusion. And Greg has talked about this. There are several organizations engaged in the race to be able to harness fusion energy, but they are often mostly focusing on scientific discovery elements. What's interesting, I think about General Fusion is that they're really trying to develop a practical and commercial product that could be brought to the market. And maybe finally, the ecosystem approach is key to unlocking more value. And I've talked about this before, but we need more private and public sector cooperation happening, happening in Canada. We also need more diverse business sectors that could provide resources and services for, other value chain partners within the Canadian economy. Ultimately, more Canadians and Canadian businesses could benefit from a collaborative ecosystem. So once again, thank you for joining our podcast. We'll see you on the next episode.