Jeff Lawson of Inertia: Building Fusion Energy Through Factory Economics
Jeff Lawson is the co-founder and CEO of Inertia, a fusion energy company working to commercialize inertial confinement fusion using advanced lasers and mass-manufactured fusion fuel targets. Lawson previously co-founded and led Twilio, scaling the company from an idea into a public company, and is now applying his product and company-building experience to one of energy’s most technically challenging problems.
In this live episode of Inevitable from Climate Week NYC, Lawson explains why he believes the breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated that the fundamental physics of fusion can work, while the remaining challenge is largely one of commercialization, manufacturing, and scale.
The conversation explores how Inertia is approaching the laser and fusion-target supply chains, why Lawson believes factory economics can transform the cost of fusion, and how lessons from software, semiconductors, SpaceX, and consumer technology are influencing the company’s approach to experimentation and manufacturing.
Episode recorded on September 22, 2026 (Published on October 14, 2026).
In this episode, we cover:
(0:00) An overview of Inertia
(2:28) Applying product thinking to fusion energy
(4:41) Building a culture of experimentation and learning
(7:05) Why “blow it up already” became an Inertia value
(9:11) How Jeff Lawson got into fusion
(11:20) What Inertia is building
(12:36) The basics of inertial confinement fusion
(14:14) Why the Lawrence Livermore laser isn't economical for commercial power
(14:47) Modernizing fusion lasers with semiconductor technology
(17:10) Scaling the laser diode supply chain
(19:41) The challenge of manufacturing fusion targets
(20:58) Applying mass manufacturing to fusion targets
(23:33) Designing a fusion power plant for utility buyers
(25:24) Fusion, AI data centers, and the timeline to new power
(26:47) Fusion as an energy source for industry and global markets
(28:09) What fusion could look like in 2050
(29:32) Why factory economics could shape the future of energy
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[Cody Simms] (0:00 - 3:23)
From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms, and this is Inevitable. Each week, we talk to the people powering the world and keeping it running to learn what comes next.[Cody Simms]
Jeff, do you want to come on up?[Jeff Lawson] (36:55 - 36:56)
Sure thing.[Cody Simms] (36:56 - 37:01)
All right, we have Jeff to talk with us all about the future of fusion here.Thank you so much, I'm glad you made it.
[Jeff Lawson] (37:02 - 37:03)
Great to finally be here.[Cody Simms] (37:03 - 38:15)
Today on Inevitable, we are live from Climate Week NYC at the J.P. Morgan Chase Tower on Park Avenue. Our guest is Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Inertia. Inertia is a fusion energy company building lasers and mass manufactured fuel targets to deliver grid scale fusion power based on technology developed and demonstrated at Lawrence Livermore Lab.The company came out of stealth a little over a year ago. This February, it announced a $450 million Series A led by Bessemer. It just opened a 50,000 square foot facility in Livermore, California for laser development and target manufacturing.
Jeff spent the two decades before this as co-founder and CEO of Twilio, the company that helped define the API economy for cloud communications, scaling it from an idea into a public company worth tens of billions of dollars. Today, he's applying those same operating instincts to lasers and physics instead of software code. Oh, and in April of 2024, he also became owner of the satirical news service, The Onion.
[Jeff Lawson] (38:16 - 38:24)
That always gets the most response. I built a multi-billion dollar public company. The Onion, yes, I like The Onion.[Cody Simms] (38:24 - 38:50)
Real quick, before we begin, I'd like to thank all of you for coming today, thank our friends at J.P. Morgan for hosting us in this incredible building. J.P. Morgan is dedicated to being the lead bank of the innovation economy, bringing together founders, investors, startups and high growth companies.J.P. Morgan helps give early stage startups, venture backed and high growth companies the agility needed to make secure real time and efficient decisions. Jeff, welcome to the show.
[Jeff Lawson] (38:51 - 38:52)
I too will endorse J.P. Morgan's space.[Cody Simms] (38:53 - 38:57)
You've had quite a journey over the last 24 hours. I hope you've had plenty of coffee.[Jeff Lawson] (38:57 - 39:05)
Thank you. The exact one flight that stood between the Jewish holiday and me being here on time got canceled at 2 a.m. So I apologize, but here we are.[Cody Simms] (39:05 - 39:36)
Here we are. I wanna start somewhere personal, which is part of why I think this whole conversation works a little bit, which is I started my career in product management. Like I'm a venture capital guy now, but I consider myself a product guy.And I think you did too. You were one of the first PMs at AWS, years before Twilio. And most of the hard tech world gets built by engineers and scientists.
You're not one of them, at least by training. So how does a product person see things differently walking into a business built on physics instead of code?
[Jeff Lawson] (39:37 - 41:14)
It's a really great question. I mean, you know, first of all, I would say while my co-founders are the domain experts. So one of my co-founders, Dr. Annie Kritcher is the lead designer of the NIF experiment, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that achieved ignition. So December 5th, 2022, that big announcement, she's the physicist who made it all work. My other co-founder, Mike Dunne, he ran the LCLS, one of the largest experiments, laser experiments over at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. And before that, he designed a power plant for the Lawrence Livermore National Lab based on the technology.So they are the deep domain experts. And the way I think about it is I am here to actually bring together all these different talents and allow them to work together to unlock this world changing outcome. That's what I bring to the table.
Having built a company, and what I've seen is that you've got scientists who have a certain way they think about the world and academics, people from national labs, you've got all sorts of different skill sets, but rarely in that group, you actually see entrepreneurs or scaled entrepreneurs, people who have built companies. And so what I have been finding, the skill that I bring to the table here is really helping them to build a company. And something I used to tell people at Twilio is that I'm building two products here.
I'm building the product our customers buy and I'm building the company. And the company is itself a product. Is it the kind of place where great people would want to work?
Is it the kind of place where you can get stuff done? You think of a company like a product and you design how you want that place to work. And so I would say that sort of working backwards from how is this place going to work to go solve some of the world's hardest problems, that's the sort of product thinking that I bring to the table.
[Cody Simms] (41:14 - 41:18)
As a product guy, I assume it's a bit of a culture of experimentation and a culture of discovery.[Jeff Lawson] (41:18 - 43:30)
Especially when you think about the places in the world that do these large experiments. So think National Labs. They are funded by Congress.And one thing I have found is if you are funded by Congress, you don't like to fail. And so these are environments that are very risk averse. And so one of the key things we've had to do as we build the culture of Inertia is to find the right balance between scientists who are great at what they do, but maybe a little more methodical than say a startup or a commercial enterprise would tend to be.
And the rule of software, which obviously moves at lightning pace, which isn't exactly appropriate for deep tech either. And so finding that right balance, and here's an interesting example of that. I'm a big believer that you want symbols that symbolize the culture you're building all around your office.
At Twilio, I hung customers' shoes in every conference room. As a reminder that one of our values is wear the customers' shoes. So we literally ask customers to give us their shoes and we hung them on the wall with their name and their company.
And the reason we did it is so people would ask that exact question. People would come in for interviews and say, hey, I have a question. Why are there shoes on the wall?
And it is a great intro into, this is one of our values. We wear our customers' shoes. So at Inertia, one of the things that I decided was, at Twilio, we had this day one value, which I just blatantly ripped off from Jeff Bezos.
The idea that you're never done. It's always day one because you can never rest on your laurels. Why?
In the world of software, everything is so easy to replicate that you always have to keep building and keep being more ambitious. It's the exact opposite here, actually. What I did is I put a counter on the wall, six foot tall numbers that count up the number of days since we started the company and that counts up.
And it's a constant reminder every Monday in our all hands meeting, we look at the number and we say, that's how many days it's been since we started this venture. Did we get that many days worth of work done? Because every day matters.
And that's becoming one of the values at Inertia, which is this notion of, yeah, we can't sit around and deliberate for extended periods of time. In fact, failure is an option. In fact, it's the only way you learn and we are going to fail at a great many things in the service of learning what is right in this Edisonian kind of way.
[Cody Simms] (43:30 - 43:41)
Not in a move fast and break things failure, or is it? I mean, I know that's a meta-ism or Facebookism, but does that degree of software experimentation make its way into what you're doing?[Jeff Lawson] (43:41 - 44:23)
In a way, yes. First, I'll just start about the thing that I actually like about that value. And there's a lot of things about that value and the way it's evolved at Meta that I would say I don't like. But the thing that is brilliant about that as a corporate value is that it literally gives you permission from the CEO and founder of the company to break things as long as you're learning, as long as you're moving the company forward.At how many companies, if you broke the website, the thing that makes all the money, do you have a career path ahead of you? That's the default of almost any organization. But at Meta, Zuckerberg gave permission to say, if you are learning, you have my permission to actually break the place as long as we're making progress.
And that is rare. Now, they also have systems that countervail that so that you can't actually break the website.
[Cody Simms] (44:23 - 44:30)
I've heard their executives say that if something actually broke in production, they don't blame the person who broke it, they blame themselves for not building the system.[Jeff Lawson] (44:30 - 45:43)
Yeah, you blame the system that allows someone to break it, right? So you actually have this kind of value, of course. So at Inertia, we actually have one of our values is blow it up already, which is interesting.It's taken us a year to really settle on. Is that really one of our values? But very early on, it took hold.
Why? Because we thought about SpaceX, actually. And the thing that that implies, blow it up already, implies two things.
Number one, people look at SpaceX, they look at the Boeing counter example, and they say, wow, Elon was willing to blow up rockets in order to learn faster and do it in a public way. Wow, that was so bold. Actually, I don't think it was that bold because he figured out that that actually is great content for the internet too.
So, you know, it's actually pretty genius. But the real learning there is not the willingness to blow up the rocket, but the enabler, what allows you to blow up rockets is the fact that he could manufacture the next rocket for about $30 million in about two weeks, versus Boeing that spent billions of dollars and it would be multiple years before they'd have another rocket to test. So when your next rocket is years and billions of dollars away, you are precious about it.
When your next rocket is weeks and millions of dollars away, you are free to blow it up. And so the real learning is to put yourself in an environment where you can afford to try many things. And that's the Edisonian approach that we are really adopting at Inertia.
[Cody Simms] (45:44 - 45:48)
You mentioned Annie Kritcher - talk about how you two met and how you got pulled into this in the first place.[Jeff Lawson] (45:48 - 47:56)
Yeah, totally, right? What is this like software API person doing in fusion? You know, when I was back in college, I was interested in physics.I took all the physics classes I could get my hands on, but obviously it wasn't what I did with my career, right? Becoming an entrepreneur in the era of the internet. So I was running my company for whatever, 16 years.
And in December of 2022, when ignition was announced, for the first time ever, an experiment created energy from fusion. You know, we all saw that news. It was front page everywhere.
And I was like, holy crap, this thing that I always assumed was science fiction that would never happen in our lifetimes might very well happen. And so I kept expecting that there was gonna be, you know, news that, you know, the next day the news ends as some startup got spun out of Lawrence Livermore to go build the first commercial power plant out of this technology. And I kept waiting for that announcement.
And you know what, it never came. And so one of the things I had on my to-do list was to go figure out what is going on in the world of fusion. And so I handed the reins of my company Twilio over to my successor in the beginning of 2024 and had this on my to-do list.
Well, I got to meet Dr. Annie Kritcher, the lead designer of the NIF. And my question for her was this, how come I haven't seen some startup going to commercialize this yet? And her answer was fascinating.
She said, yeah, I've been kind of wondering the same thing. But she said, I'm a physicist, not a business person. So, you know, what do I know?
But it would seem to me that this physics breakthrough that took 60 years, $30 billion of government money to reach this milestone, it would seem to me like that is the hard part. And that going to commercialize it compared to that is relatively easy. And she said, yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of hard things you gotta go do.
But the physics cooperating is the thing that has eluded humanity. Some of the smartest people on this planet for 75 years, hundreds of machines have been built, tens of billions of dollars have been spent all around the world in pursuit of this perfect form of energy. And finally, one of them actually reached the milestone of ignition.
And lo and behold, no one was commercializing. Why was the question that she and I set out to answer?
[Cody Simms] (47:56 - 47:57)
So what is Inertia? What are you building?[Jeff Lawson] (47:58 - 49:03)
Well, here's the thing. What we found was a lot of people looked at the NIF and they looked at the NIF and they said, wow, that thing has a laser that is three football fields long and 20 stories tall. And they can only shoot the laser twice a day.And these targets are handmade to bespoke specifications. And they looked at this and they said, how could this ever be made into a commercial endeavor? Nothing could be further from economical than this giant science experiment.
And so they moved on and they said, okay, well, there's other forms of fusion that we're gonna keep investing in. And we looked at it with fresh eyes. And I didn't have any dog in this race.
I had made no investments whatsoever in fusion so I was unconflicted about it entirely. We looked at it and we said, well, wait a minute.
I think you're asking the wrong question. The question isn't, is the NIF economical? By any measure, it is not economical, nor is the Large Hadron Collider or any other giant science experiment.
What you should ask is, could it be made economical? And when you go to answer that question, you find out that the answer is actually yes. You don't have to believe crazy things to believe that you could take the fundamentals of the physics that have been proven and actually now go scale it up.
[Cody Simms] (49:04 - 49:13)
Can you help us with just the basics of what is inertial confinement fusion? How does that compare to other, very quickly, other forms of fusion that we've maybe been following in the news?[Jeff Lawson] (49:14 - 49:40)
Yeah, so let's start with the very beginning, right? Fusion energy is taking light atoms, typically isotopes of hydrogen, infusing them into helium in conditions of great temperature and pressure. And when you do that, you are able to compress them at hundreds of millions of degrees and hold them there for long enough.They fuse into helium and they give off a tremendous amount of energy. It's the exact opposite of fission. Fission is where you're splitting heavy atoms like uranium, plutonium.
This is the opposite. This is fusing light atoms.
[Cody Simms] (49:40 - 49:44)
And so you have to get to the point where the amount of energy you're putting in is lower than what it's generating.[Jeff Lawson] (49:44 - 50:48)
And so people have known how to create plasmas that start creating fusion happening in them. They've known that for a long time. It's just you have to exert all this energy from the outside to get a very small amount of atoms to fuse on the inside, giving off this little trickle of energy, right?And so net negative, it's great for science, but not anything useful for humanity, per se. And that's the huge breakthrough of Lawrence Livermore. So their experiment, what they do is they have this tiny little fusion target.
Imagine about the size of a peppercorn, this little sphere. Inside that sphere is a fuel of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. That little sphere is inside a tiny little adorable can.
The can is a couple centimeters tall and all that stuff is held in place by this little polymer tent. That's the fusion target. And then they hit that target with the world's largest laser, two megajoules of energy.
Hit that target. And if you get it just right, you can create this 3 million degree x-ray of an inside the can that symmetrically compresses that sphere of fuel, starts out the size of a peppercorn and ends up the width of a human hair.
[Cody Simms] (50:48 - 50:51)
Jeff, are you sure you didn't just want to play with giant awesome lasers?[Jeff Lawson] (50:51 - 51:21)
Yes, of course, that's what I wanted to do. And so that's the thing. The hard part is getting it to perfectly compress because for decades, people have been trying to get it to work and it is actually very hard to get all the parameters of this dialed in.So that's the experiment they have at Lawrence Livermore. And so people looked at this and they said, wow, that laser is so uneconomical. It's three football fields long.
I forgot the best part. It's 0.5% efficient, meaning 99.5% of the energy that they pull off the grid to fire it is lost as heat and other waste.
[Cody Simms] (51:21 - 51:24)
Which makes it hard to get that net facility gain that you're talking about.[Jeff Lawson] (51:24 - 52:41)
Exactly. So people looked at it and they said, how are you ever going to create net energy if the very first step loses more than 99% of the energy? And they were right. But the answer to how you could scale it was actually right under our noses, which is two things basically.Number one, the laser, they're right. It is the worst laser you can imagine for trying to create net energy. But that laser was designed 30 years ago.
And at the time, get this, that laser is literally powered by vacuum tubes. These big flash lamps, eight foot tall flash lamps that are about 500 watts of power each. They can fire twice a day because they have to heat up and then cool down and all this kind of stuff.
Literally vacuum tubes. Well, here we are 30 years later and laser diodes have reached maturity. And these laser diodes, it's something that's whatever, few microns thick and few millimeters wide will have a kilowatt of energy, soon two kilowatts.
And you can stack them up into stacks of 25, 50, 100. You can get a hundred or 200 kilowatts into something that fits into your hand. And it is 60% efficient as opposed to these vacuum tubes are 4% efficient.
So the answer to how you solve this laser problem is right before our eyes, it is doing what everything else in our technical society did long ago, which is migrating from vacuum tubes to semiconductors.
[Cody Simms] (52:42 - 52:45)
You had some laser diode partnership announcements today.[Jeff Lawson] (52:45 - 53:45)
We did, just today we announced our partnerships with three of the major laser diode vendors because the key thing that we have to do is scale up.And so a lot of people looked at this, they said, okay, yeah, we've heard of these diodes, but they are so expensive to go build a plant scale laser would cost you a hundred billion dollars. And they're right, by today's costs, it would cost about a hundred billion dollars. But it would also take you about a thousand years to go build your plant because the global supply of these diodes is tiny.
So clearly you have to scale up. And what happens when you scale up semiconductor fabrication? Prices come down, right?
This is well understood. And when you have to scale up multiple orders of magnitude, now you see orders of magnitude and price reduction. And that's exactly what we were looking for in the industry.
So what we started doing a year ago was to go around and talk to all these diode vendors and look at how they're building these things. And if we had seen an industry that was highly optimized, brought to perfection, we would have said, oh crap, this isn't good. But what we found was this little cottage industry, corner of the semiconductor world, making these laser diodes.
[Cody Simms] (53:45 - 53:48)
Who were their customers before you showed up?[Jeff Lawson] (53:48 - 53:48)
Mostly directed energy weapons.[Cody Simms] (53:49 - 53:51)
Okay.[Jeff Lawson] (53:52 - 54:29)
You know, that's the biggest buyer of these high power laser diodes. And it's not scaled. They're assembled by hand. Literally people by hand in clean rooms are assembling them.They're made on legacy three inch wafers. This is like 25 year old semiconductor technology. So working with them, those are the announcements that we made today with several of our laser vendors is saying, look, we can go together and we can bring in automation that is readily available in every other part of the semiconductor universe.
We can bring in six or eight inch wafers, which are essentially the norm now for every other semiconductor and actually modernize and scale up these assembly lines and bring the cost down tremendously. So that's what the announcements today were all about.
[Cody Simms] (54:29 - 54:30)
How do you help them scale it?[Jeff Lawson] (54:31 - 56:13)
There was an analysis in 2012 by Lawrence Livermore and now a refresh of it in 2022. Earlier this year, STARFIRE Collaborative funded by the Department of Energy released another. Now, every one of these analysis of the diode industry said at scale, these things can be brought down two orders of magnitude.We're just waiting for someone to bring the demand. That's what they've been waiting for. And so what we're doing is basically brute forcing it.
So we are breaking ground next year on our prototype scale laser system. It's called Thunderwall. It is a 10 kilojoule, 10 Hertz, 10% efficient laser system.
It is the unit cell of what we will ultimately go build a thousand of in a factory to power the first of a kind plant. That laser itself is 50 times more powerful than the next most powerful diode laser of its kind and will be by far and away the largest diode order ever placed in the world for these laser diodes. And we are going to overpay for that laser.
But that is how we are kick-starting this supply and demand curve and not just saying, and we hope you get around to making a lot of them and bringing the price down. We are hands in there and we are hiring people from Apple, for example. Multiple hires from Apple who their job at Apple was to go and take some designer's idea for the next iPhone and then go figure out how to make it in a factory by the billions.
And so those are the kinds of people who know how to go partner with vendors. Say, okay, we need a scale up chain here. We need to do something that is first of a kind, but we've got cost targets, we've got yield targets, we have units per hour.
A phrase that the physics community had never said before, units per hour. And it's sort of bringing together these two worlds of physicists who understand how this all works. And then industrialists who know how to scale and put them together in a room and help them to make that happen.
[Cody Simms] (56:13 - 56:18)
What's next on your bowling pin list in terms of supply chain bottlenecks to knock out?[Jeff Lawson] (56:18 - 57:18)
The other thing I didn't mention is these targets, right? So the other thing people cling to is this: these targets, they're handmade, they cost $100,000 each and you need to shoot 10 per second for a commercial power plant. So you're gonna blow up a million dollars a second.And people said, oh my God, how can you ever build a commercial plant if you're blowing up a million dollars a second? And of course they're right, but they were wrong about what the cost of those targets would be if you mass manufactured them again. I looked at this and I said, okay, they run that experiment about six times a year.
Okay, each time they run the experiment, they make a different target because they're testing out new parameters. And so this is a little bigger, this is a little smaller, this one's doped with a new material. Let's see how that goes.
Every time they run the experiment, the target is a little bit different made to spec. I looked at that and I'm like, oh wait, I know what that is. Those are called prototypes.
They've been making prototypes over at the lab for the last 60 years and they finally built one that is good. Okay, what do you do if you are building a startup and your prototype market wants it? Now you go to a factory and you figure out how to make it at scale.
And that's exactly what we're doing with these targets.
[Cody Simms] (57:18 - 57:24)
And I assume those are partnerships and one that you haven't announced yet, but that you're similarly working on like you did with the laser diodes?[Jeff Lawson] (57:24 - 57:32)
Yeah, and a lot of it is done in-house. Unlike the laser world where there is an industry, it just isn't scaled yet. Nobody makes fusion targets at scale.And so we are having to go build that. But it turns out -
[Cody Simms] (57:32 - 57:35)
Which is part of the reason for the large Series A that you raised.[Jeff Lawson] (57:35 - 1:00:10)
Yeah, and it's the fusion target has only four parts. Can you believe that? Four parts, the little outer can, the little sphere, the fuel inside of it, and the little tent that holds it all in place.Four parts. And I think about our modern smartphones. I don't know how many parts are in a smartphone, but I'm pretty sure it's more than four.
And yet we make a billion of those a year. So can we make these fusion targets at scale? Absolutely.
In fact, the very methods you use to make these four parts are readily available in other industries, making that little sphere. Where do you look? You look to the ball bearing industry, who can make very precise round things for cents apiece.
You know, you can look at the little can. Turns out it looks exactly like a bullet, and it is made of lead. You will just stamp them out like you make bullets, right?
So these are imminently solvable things. And again, these people we're hiring from the likes of Apple and all that. They look at these things and it's just a process development problem.
And that's exactly what we're doing. But here's the interesting thing. We took our design.
We said, okay, if you start mass manufacturing these things, so instead of making them by hand and carrying them around on a pillow, like that's almost literally what they do. And you start mass manufacturing them. You run them assembly line and your yields are not gonna be 100% and you're gonna make mistakes because you're mass, like whatever, okay.
So we took all the tolerances that we can achieve with the various processes we're using, which are not perfect. And we plugged them into the model, the same model, or they call them codes, that they used to design the NIF experiment and can very accurately predict ignition and the yield of these experiments. Because it is informed by many, many, many decades, actually, of experiments.
Most of them failures and then the successes as well so that they now can very accurately predict. We plugged all of our parameters into these models and we announced just last week that we have validation that our plant design will yield initially 25x gain on the target. So for a 10 megajoule laser, which is what we're building, it'll be a minimum of 250 megajoules of thermal energy coming out, which is more than enough to create a 250 megawatt power plant net to the grid.
And so that's one of the big milestones that we had because there was an open question. No one had ever modeled what would happen if you introduced all these imperfections into the target. So instead of assuming that we can make more and more perfect things, we said, actually, how do we make the crappiest possible target that still ignites and yields a bunch of energy?
And it turns out one of the keys to it is really oversizing your driver. This 10 megajoule laser we're building, it is going to be the world's most powerful laser by a wide margin in terms of average power, in terms of energy per shot, in terms of so many different metrics. But that's the key for the fusion pilot plant to making one that's going to yield a ton of energy and de-risk the physics with all these mass production that we're introducing.
[Cody Simms] (1:00:10 - 1:00:37)
Coming back to the fusion industry at large, we've got a few companies that have been doing this for many years now and have signed now large-scale commercial off-takes, Commonwealth Fusion with Google, I believe, and Helion with Microsoft. As we reflect back on sort of the agile sort of product mindset of build and break and test, do you think that having a commercial deal like that with date targets actually hinders product development?[Jeff Lawson] (1:00:38 - 1:02:01)
If any of those contracts had a penalty to the fusion company for not hitting the dates, then it would be a good conversation to have, but they don't. Those are really good marketing for both the fusion companies and for the buyers, but I don't think anybody believes the targets themselves are meaningful. The thing that we focus on actually was done by my co-founder, Mike, was started about 10 years ago when he ran this program at Lawrence Silvermore called Life, and the job of this Life program was to design a power plant based on the laser.They got together a bunch of physicists and they designed a power plant, so then they put together a board of utility company buyers who was chaired by the CEO of PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, California's utility, and they said, if we built a power plant for you based on fusion, how would you want it to work? And the executives, and they looked at the design, they were like, well, nothing like this. We do not want physicists running around our power plant.
We don't need laser experts running around like, we need to hire people off the street and have them run. Oh, and by the way, if something breaks, the whole plant doesn't go down for days while you fix it, it keeps going. And so they learned a ton.
They spent $100 million in five years in a feedback loop with utility executives to design a power plant that actually a utility buyer would want to buy and operate. And that's the core of our design. Everything's modular.
Everything is hot-swappable. Everything is designed with maintenance windows in mind in order to achieve a high operating percentage, which is really the goal. That's how you make money in a power plant is have the thing running most of the time.
[Cody Simms] (1:02:01 - 1:02:32)
Right now we're dealing with this huge, large load challenge of data centers and whatnot. There's a speed to power issue there that if you look at turbine backlogs and whatever have you, small modular reactor progress and nuclear fission, it looks like a lot of that time to power issue may get solved in the next three to five years. I don't think any of these fusion projects are on that timeframe.Do you view what you're building as a solution to the AI race or any of that? Or is this a totally different challenge that you're going against?
[Jeff Lawson] (1:02:33 - 1:03:11)
I don't think the short-term AI data center bet is going to be, or the AI data center problem is going to get solved by any advanced energy technology that doesn't exist on the grid today. It's just too soon. People need power today.So bringing any new technology online will take longer than those data centers have. And look, nobody knows if this AI boom is a bubble. I mean, most people think it probably is, but exactly how big and exactly when it bursts, nobody knows.
So I wouldn't bet on some technology that is not on the grid today to solve your tomorrow's problem. However, when's the best time to plant a tree?
[Cody Simms] (1:03:11 - 1:03:13)
Twenty years ago or today.[Jeff Lawson] (1:03:13 - 1:03:23)
Twenty years ago or today, right. So what we're doing is planting the tree of fusion today. And I believe that humanity's hunger for energy will always be growing.That's just the nature of a technical society.
[Cody Simms] (1:03:23 - 1:03:28)
Is it exportable technology? Do you think this technology can live outside the control of the United States?[Jeff Lawson] (1:03:28 - 1:04:45)
Yes, that's one of the great things about fusion is that you have no proliferation concerns. You know, it's not like fission where you're worried about, can you make bombs, does it create this waste product? Can you learn from it?Fusion is fundamentally clean, safe, cheap and abundant. And so it can be a source of energy for every country in the world. It can solve a whole host of other problems, desalinization, energy hungry, like great, you can solve that.
You can green every polluting industrial field because fusion creates a thermal product that meets the requirements of cement, of steel, of glass, of all these things that have to run coal-powered blast furnaces today because you need a high-quality heat product to power those blast furnaces, those industrial processes. When you talk about cement being dirty, that's what you're talking about. And fission can't do it.
Other renewables can't do it. Really, the only one that can do it is fusion. And so that's why you still have coal powering these industrial processes today, is that it just requires such a high-temperature point that it is really hard to have any form of energy that can reach it.
And so fusion has the promise not only of electricity, which everybody thinks about, but greening all those other industries. That's another $2 trillion industry of thermal product, as well as exports to other countries and developing nations and nations that we would care to not have a nuclear proliferation with.
[Cody Simms] (1:04:45 - 1:05:20)
Got one more question for you, and then we'll wrap up and let everyone get out of here. Even though I didn't get into The Onion and so many topics that I know I'd love to hear your perspective on, if you were living through the Great Depression in 1930s America, you couldn't have imagined a world powered by nuclear energy, let alone solar panels and batteries, and everything that came with those. You couldn't have pictured what 50 years from then would look like.When you think about what someone in 2050 will experience as just something they take for granted in their daily lives, how does fusion play a role in that?
[Jeff Lawson] (1:05:21 - 1:06:08)
You know, I don't fancy myself a futurist. I actually don't think I'm smart enough to predict that far out. And I think most people actually aren't either.The thing that I think is clear, I think by 2050 we'll have demonstrated that the two forms of energy that are the only ones that are being built at that time are solar with battery and fusion for a simple reason. I think they're the two forms of energy that are gonna benefit from factory economics. And every other form of energy where every project is bespoke, struggles to achieve economics, struggles to build at scale, struggles to see Wright's Law kick in where you get better and better and cheaper and cheaper as time goes on.
That's why you see fission plants have basically not improved at all since the 1950s. You know, we have not been able to do that.
[Cody Simms] (1:06:08 - 1:06:09)
But today they've all gotten more expensive.[Jeff Lawson] (1:06:09 - 1:06:48)
Yeah, and you know, SMRs hold that promise. I'm not sure they're gonna be able to fulfill on it. But I think fusion, you know, look at ours.The cost drivers of our fusion power plant are lasers which you build in a factory and targets which you make in a factory. Those are the two cost centers of fusion energy for us. It's similar, solar, panels, batteries, these are also things that are made in factories.
And therefore Wright's Law kicks in, everything gets cheaper and better as you scale up. So I think factory economics are gonna be the overriding factor in the next 20, 30, 50 years of our energy problems because it's such a powerful driver of economic outcomes that in the areas where we can unlock it, I think it will come to dominate.
[Cody Simms] (1:06:49 - 1:06:57)
Jeff, thank you so much for, I know you went through a lot of effort to be here. Appreciate you joining us and sharing what you're building with everybody. Thank you.
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. Learn more at mcj.vc and subscribe to our newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. See you next week.