The race to unlock nuclear fusion for low-carbon energy security

Lindsey Hall I'm Lindsey Hall.

And I'm Esther Wheeldon.

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Welcome to All Things Sustainable, a podcast from SP Global. As your hosts, we'll dive into all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business world.

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Join us every Friday for in depth analysis and interviews with leaders from around the globe. Together, we'll break down big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon.

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Today we're talking about a technology that some see as the future of sustainable energy. I'm talking about nuclear fusion. In simple terms, fusion creates energy by fusing the centers or nuclei of two light atoms, releasing a huge amount of energy, much like what happens in the sun. This is different from nuclear fission, which involves splitting the nucleus of a heavy atom to release energy. If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, that's Vision to learn more about fusion, I spoke to Chris Mowry, the CEO of Type 1 Energy. This is a company focused on delivering sustainable fusion power. In our interview, Chris explains the science behind fusion, why commercial fusion is now within reach thanks to recent technological breakthroughs, and why fusion can provide safe, abundant and reliable energy if it can be commercialized at scale. As we'll hear, Chris estimates, There's a nearly $1 trillion annual market for fusion energy worldwide.

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Type 1 Energy is part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, or SMI. This is a network of global CEOs across finance and industry. It was launched by the UK's King Charles six years ago when he was still the Prince of Wales. The organization facilitates private sector diplomacy with the ambition of making sustainability the driving force of global markets and value creation and S and P Global is a member.

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As our regular listeners know, for the past year the All Things Sustainable podcast has been working in collaboration with SMI to bring you interviews with SMI member CEOs from across industries and around the world. We'll include a link in our show notes if you'd like to listen to other episodes in the series today, we'll hear how type 1 energy is collaborating with other SMI members. As Chris says, scaling fusion requires broad stakeholder buy in from finance, supply chains, policymakers and more. Let's turn to my interview where Chris begins by explaining how the company got started.

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Type 1 Energy was launched as a venture company backed business three years ago. Actually I worked together with Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures in 2022 to diligence a very interesting idea which was at that time that there was actually an opportunity to take what we call is a direct shot on goal at commercializing fusion energy without the need to do any More big science projects that we could fundamentally stitch together a set of enabling technologies. And if we had the right team and partnerships, we could move directly to designing and ultimately catalyzing the construction of the first commercial fusion power plant before the end of the decade. Fusion is the power of the stars. It's in some fundamental ways the exact opposite of what people know as traditional nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is about splitting the atom. Typically we talk about splitting big heavy atoms like uranium to make energy, but as everyone knows, there's a lot of real world challenges around this. One is to make sure that nuclear power plants can remain safe. And along with that comes a lot of very challenging regulation and the associated costs with designing, building and operating nuclear fission plants in a safe manner. And that's really, if you look at the last half century, been the key impediment to really scaling nuclear fission as a reliable baseload source of carbon free energy. So if I switch over to nuclear fusion, or fusion energy as we call it, as I said, it's really the exact opposite. And what happens in the center of all stars, including the sun, is at those incredible temperatures, you actually fuse or combine the lightest atom in the universe, hydrogen. And through Einstein's alchemy of equals MC squared, you combine that into helium. And if you weigh that helium atom, it weighs just a little bit less than the sum of those two hydrogen atoms you started with. And when you multiply that by that massively big number, the speed of light squared, you get really the largest source of energy in the universe. That's what fusion energy is. Fusion energy is the combining of hydrogen fuel at conditions like the center of a star to form helium and release an incredible amount of energy with absolutely no carbon emissions, no greenhouse gas warming, environmental impact, and totally safely, it's just impossible to have the kind of accidents you have experienced, unfortunately in the history of nuclear fission. And because of this, a much simpler regulation and at a much lower cost.

2:21

Can you talk a little bit more about those benefits that you've just touched on?

5:25

Sure. So the benefits of nuclear fusion energy are really manifold. They start I think at the fundamentals is from a sustainability perspective. There's really no environmental impact of fusion energy. As I indicated, you're really just producing energy directly and some helium gas that you can put in your kids party balloons if you wanted to. There's no long term high level nuclear waste, no carbon emissions coming from this. And if properly designed, it provides really a source of reliable baseload energy. And because of the inherent safety, we believe that it can actually produce energy at a very economical competitive rate, which is really the key to mass adoption of this technology and the replacement of the existing sources of power generation, which remain today on a global basis, mainly coal.

5:29

And so the need for power is only growing, in particular with the explosion of AI. Talk to me about how that's impacting nuclear demand and the work that you do at type one energy.

6:31

Sure. Well, the growth of AI driven data centers has really, for the first time in the last quarter century, increase the total demand for electricity on a yearly basis. Certainly in North America and in Europe, you really see the demand for new power generation surging over the past two or three years. And the question really is, how does the electric utility industry meet that demand while also keeping an eye out in the long term toward this energy transition process, which, in spite of the bumps and bruises you can say that are being experienced these days, is certainly a long term trend that will not stop. And so fusion energy is something, especially because of the economics that are being increasingly embraced by the global energy market. We estimate that there's almost a trillion dollar a year market for fusion energy. If you look at the total global addressable market.

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So you've laid out the benefits, you've laid out the market. But talk to me about what are the challenges, what are the hurdles? Why are we not seeing more uptake or adoption of fusion to date?

7:45

Fusion energy is hard. You're basically talking about recreating the conditions at the center of a star here on Earth. And people have been working on this problem for a half a century. But what's really unlocked the, the ability to go do this in a commercially practical way are a couple of key technologies. And it really starts with supercomputing. While the process of fusion energy, the way I explained it, is at some basic level, pretty simple. The physics is very, very complicated. And it really takes today's most powerful supercomputers to actually calculate what's going on in a fusion reaction and being able to model it precisely enough that you can design a machine. Maybe just an example of this. We use the most powerful exascale Supercomputers in the U.S. department of Energy's National Lab network. We have access to the frontier and the summit machines at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of our partners. And with one of those machines, in two days we can do a complete simulation in full three dimensions using all the fundamental physics incorporated into the models. 25 years ago, it would have taken 500 years. So obviously it was never done. So modern supercomputing really unlocks the ability to design machines that can actually work and produce reliable electricity from a commercial application perspective. And then the other side of the coin, you have a number of key technical developments that really have unlocked a economical design. And I think the poster child, if you will, of this are modern superconducting magnets. They're incredibly powerful magnets that when energized, because they're superconducting, don't actually consume any electricity. And I think most people would be familiar with the idea of superconducting magnets when they get an MRI image. The MRI machine uses superconducting magnets, but these are relatively weak superconducting magnets. And the ones we use are a modern version that have just emerged from the laboratory in the last three or four years that are up to 20 times more powerful than these magnets in an MRI machine. And they let you design and build much more compact machines, machines that really make fusion energy economically affordable.

7:57

So it sounds like some promising developments on the horizon. What's the outlook for development?

10:27

Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, the thesis behind type 1 energy is that we can actually create this direct shot on goal. And so we are several years into a five year program to design the world's first commercially viable fusion power plant. And we have what we hope is our first end customer in the Tennessee Valley Authority, tva. And they have selected a site in Eastern Tennessee at the location of their retired Bull Run Fossil plant near Knoxville as the location for a first commercial fusion power plant project. And we're actually working with TVA as we speak on project development activities. And so really, over the next three years, we hope to get in a position where TVA is able to actually put a shovel in the ground and start construction.

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Just to dig in a little bit more into Type 1 Energy's model and how you operate and the kinds of clients you work with. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that?

11:27

Yeah, sure. So, as I mentioned, fusion is hard. And we want to make sure that we focus on solving and designing the things that have not yet been designed. And so in that way, you can think of type 1 energy as a company that's more a mile deep in an inch wide than, let's say, a mile wide and an inch deep. And that means in a practical term, that we have established a very powerful set of industrial partners that bring together things that people already know how to do, whether it's manufacturing steam turbines that actually make the electricity using the steam produced by our fusion machine to the fact that we have an end customer, tva, which already knows how to build and operate power plants. And so we don't do that. We're actually designing the power plant and providing the actual fusion machine. So our end customers are the big electric energy utilities around the world, the utilities like tva.

11:35

In preparing for this episode, I heard a couple versions of a joke that used to make the rounds in the energy industry. People said that fusion is decades away and will always be decades away. I asked Chris about this.

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I think, again, that references the fact that without supercomputers, you were almost navigating in the dark in terms of trying to design and develop fusion. And so the first fusion machines were actually built in the late 1950s and literally on a slide rule. So you can imagine that at that point it was really just a shot in the dark, if you will. And people tried things, some things worked, some things didn't work as well. They try something else. So as computers started to emerge in high performance computing, really in the 90s, people got better and better. But it's really not been until the last five years that you could see the light at the end of the tunnel, if you will, on commercialization. So, I mean, that is an old trope saying that I really don't hear about anymore. If we look over our shoulders here in the west, we see, for example, China spending billions and billions of dollars building fusion machines on a global basis. There. There is a race today to see who is going to actually deploy the first fusion power plant in the world. And it's interesting because when you go up to Washington these days, and I'm actually heading up there tomorrow, that's what the conversation is with the administration, with the Department of Energy, is how does the government catalyze, through policy and other means, the actual launch of this industry in the United States.

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And so who are the frontrunners in that race and what are the hurdles that they're facing, would you say?

14:18

Wow, we're the front runner, quite frankly. So to be a little bit more precise, today, there is only one fusion technology that has been demonstrated at scale to operate in a stable and continuous manner. And that's our kind of fusion technology called the Stellarator. There are two Stellarator companies in the US and three in Europe. But we are by far the furthest advanced. We're the only fusion company with an end customer who wants to build a fusion power plant, and certainly the only fusion company that's generating revenues from an end customer for a fusion power Plant project.

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When I was preparing for this interview, the Type 1 Energy team shared some stats that really helped put fusion power into context. For example, that a five gallon bucket of seawater contains enough fusion fuel to power 170,000American homes for a year. Or that a teaspoon of fusion fuel is equivalent to about 44 tons of coal. Here's what Chris had to say about this.

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This is really the most powerful form of energy in the universe. But at the end of the day, this comes down to a couple things. One is economics, and second is access to resources and fuel. So unfortunately, the last century has been dominated in part by conflict over access to oil. And oil today continues to power industry globally. This is really an opportunity with fusion to change the game, if you will, because of course, every society everywhere has access to some water. It is the heavy hydrogen in water that is really the fusion fuel. So you don't really need access to a gas pipeline or oil wells or anything like this. Any society, any country really has the fuel, if you will, for fusion. And because it is so powerful, you really only need a limited amount. So this really unlocks not only the economics of the future of energy, but also addresses energy security at a very fundamental level, which is obviously inextricably tied and linked to national security.

15:26

So you talked about the work that you're doing here in the us you mentioned some developments in Europe, and then also the money that China is pouring into fusion. But I would think that really any country, any place on earth that doesn't have access to oil and gas reserves would be keen to develop this kind of technology. Is that what you're seeing?

16:40

Well, yes and no. I mean, there's obviously more than one or two countries working on fusion. But fusion, as I mentioned, is extremely hard. And you have to have the technology base, you have to have access to these exascale supercomputers. So I would say that it's really on the order of a half dozen countries really, that have serious fusion programs. And while Type 1 Energy is domiciled based in the US our headquarters are in Knoxville, Tennessee, and we have a couple of other offices and labs spread around the US and places like Boston. We're really very much a global company. We have a presence in Canada, we have a presence in the UK outside of London, we have a presence in Australia. So this is a global market. You know, sustainability and the need to drive the energy transition is not something that's restricted to the U.S. it's a global challenge. We have access to talent globally and by having these locations strategically placed, we can also access this talent and the expertise that exists in a lot of these locations around the world.

17:05

Okay, and this is maybe a good place to mention one of the global initiatives that type 1 energy is involved with, which is the Sustainable Markets Initiative. S and P Global is a member of the SMI. Can you talk to me about Type 1 Energy's involvement with the Sustainable Markets Initiative?

18:17

Sure. So the Sustainable Markets Initiative, or SMI was actually created by King Charles back when he was the Prince of Wales. And it's really centered around this concept that it's the private sector that needs to lead on sustainability and that while governments can facilitate and support, ultimately it's the private sector that needs to lead. And the purpose of the SMI is to send market signals that one can drive progress in sustainability broadly and still, as a private sector company, make money. And so the chairman of the SMI is Brian Moynihan, who's the chairman of bank of America. And it's really a collection of about 200 companies worldwide, most of them large multinationals, that are all vested in this thesis. And again, it's not just restricted to energy, but it spans everything from sustainable farming to water to sustainable aviation fuel. All of these things fall under this broad mandate of the smi. And I was fortunate enough about four years ago to be asked by the Prince of Wales to lead a fusion initiative within the smi. And so we've been working as part of the SMI members to put together coalitions across the entire value chain needed to actually deploy fusion. We're a fusion technology company, but it needs a lot more than technology to actually be deployed. Deployed. If you think about it, you're talking about finance, insurance, off takers, construction, supply chain. All of these things are needed to actually go execute any large infrastructure project. And fusion power plants are no different in that regard. So within the smi, we have access to companies that are committed to sustainability and the energy transition. And one of our key partners in this program is a company called aecom. It's one of the world's largest global engineering and consultancies. And I've become good friends with Troy Rudd, their CEO and chairman, and they are now an investor and risk sharing partner in Type one and this project with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Part of the power of the SMI is that it spans the entire spectrum of economic activity. And it's not just a collection of fusion companies.

18:33

So any other takeaways that our listeners should understand about the work that you've been doing with SMI or any of the engagement that you've had with other members.

21:00

I think the most important thing to recognize is that the transition to net zero will not happen without fusion. And certainly building a more sustainable future that deals with climate change, whether it's some combination or of resiliency, adaptation or mitigating what's happening today, that will take an incredible amount of energy. And there's just no way that the world can generate that much energy without fusion. It's just not economically feasible to do that. Certainly it won't only be fusion. If you look in the crystal ball in an energy transition perspective, certainly renewables have their place. Wind, solar, there's a lot of focus on energy storage. All of these things will be helpful, but they're not going to solve the problem. You need reliable baseload energy at a massive scale. And today the only technology that really promises to deliver on that is fusion. So for the listeners who care about the the energy transition as a cornerstone of sustainability, you should be rooting for fusion and the deployment of fusion as fast as possible, because that really is the pathway to energy transition to net zero.

21:09

Well, I think that's a powerful message and one that will resonate certainly with our listeners around the world. Another place where we're going to be seeing discussions about energy transition front and center is at the upcoming Sea SARAH Week conference that S and P Global hosts every year in March in Houston, Texas. I understand that Type one Energy will have a presence there. Our podcast will also be there doing interviews and covering what the energy world is saying about developments in this space. So we'd love to get your perspective. What conversations are you hoping to have? Are you expecting to have at that event?

22:32

Well, as you said, that's a great convening of key players in the global energy markets, including the big energy utilities that are really searching for ways to meet this unprecedented growth in demand for electricity, which we talked about earlier. So really the conversations that we'd be interested in and are planning to have are with those energy utilities that might be ready to be fast followers to TVA in adopting this technology as part of their long term power generation portfolio.

23:09

Yeah, and Chris, you've touched on like the big tension that we're seeing or that I'm seeing in the sustainability space is that there's this growing demand for power largely driven by AI and how do we meet that in a way that is sustainable? And a lot of the messaging I heard at Sarah Week in 2025 last year was that we're only going to get there if we use all available sources of energy, including oil and gas. And there's been a lot of rhetoric in the US about the need to ramp up oil and gas production. I just wonder how that current geopolitical landscape and political landscape is impacting the work that you do.

23:42

Well, I can tell you that the current administration is extremely supportive of fusion. I think they take a bit of an all of the above philosophy, which is fine today for us. The reality is we have to meet the energy demands of society, and fusion won't be ready to start construction tomorrow morning. So we need other things to bridge between now and the times. Fusion energy is scaling up. But in as much as fusion answers the mail, so to speak, with regard to sustainability, it's this other dimension of energy security that is incredibly important. And the ability to generate reliable baseload energy is also something that the current administration in the US Is focused on. So there's no dissonance between fusion energy and its promises and what this current administration is looking for. So, look, if you look out over the arc of the energy transition, it certainly transcends this administration. But to the degree that this administration cares about energy security and reliability and the geopolitics of energy, fusion is front and center to that conversation.

24:25

Fusion, as you said, speaks to the pillar of the energy trilemma when it comes to sustainability. But does it also answer concerns about security and affordability, would you say?

25:36

Yes, absolutely. Fusion is the opportunity to get the benefits of nuclear power at the price of natural gas. And that really speaks directly to the economics of fusion, which really should be extremely competitive, much more competitive than nuclear power, but also can be scaled much more quickly without these regulatory constraints that you have on nuclear power. You can really talk about and think about building and deploying fusion at a scaling rate much, much faster than you could, for example, with nuclear power and as a great complement to renewables. Right. We're running out of great places to put certainly onshore wind, for example. And wind and solar are not energy dense. They take a lot of land. And that comes with its own set of challenges here. So I think all of that is recognized and it really speaks to all three pieces here as you talk about. There's the sustainability piece, there's the energy security piece, which we talked about. And then the other part really is the economics and the competitiveness, which is something that is also, I think, really, really compelling about fusion energy. And frankly, one of the reasons why I think it has a very, very real chance of mass Market adoption because while countries like the US might be able to afford technologies that are not lowest cost for policy reasons, if you look at parts of the world that certainly need to be decarbonized in order to complete the energy transition, countries like Indonesia and India, for example, they can't afford things that are not lowest cost forms of generation. So fusion energy really has an opportunity, as we say, to compete with coal. And if you have a technology that can be deployed quickly at the same price point as coal, then you have a winner.

25:49

Okay, thank you. I'd love to end on a forward looking note here. Can you talk to me about what's your outlook for 2026? Chris?

27:46

Yeah, I think 2026 is going to be the year in which the TVA project really ramps up to the next level and where there's actually a complete financing solution. And that's what we're talking about with the US Government and the Department of Energy is how we catalyze this first of a kind project with government support. And so the goal here this year is to put that project on a firm financial footing. At this point, the future looks bright and I am hopeful that we will see that happen in this coming year.

27:53

Okay, well, Chris, I've asked you a lot of questions. Is there anything I didn't ask that you think is important for our listeners to understand about Type 1 Energy, the work you're doing and the outlook for nuclear fusion?

28:27

I would just say that fusion energy, for it to be successful, like any technology, needs to be embraced by society. If society isn't interested in a technology, it doesn't matter how good it is. So one of the things that we need to do is telling the story of fusion, the story that we just talked about. And we really need to develop a bigger set of stakeholders in this energy transition who really understand that to complete it in a practical sense in the real world, we need to bring fusion forward. And that is something that's really essential.

28:37

So today we heard how commercial fusion could be just around the corner thanks to recent technological breakthroughs. We heard how type 1 energy is working with electric utilities like Tennessee Valley Authority to design the world's first commercially viable fusion power plant. As Chris said, fusion provides a path to reliable, carbon free baseload power that can meet growing energy needs from AI while also addressing the energy trilemma of energy sustainability, security and affordability.

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These are all topics we'll continue to cover in upcoming episodes, including at the CERA Week Energy Conference S and P Global Hosts in Houston, Texas, March 23rd to 27th, so please stay tuned.

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Thanks for tuning in to this episode of All Things Sustainable. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

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And a special thanks to our agency partner, the199. See you next time.

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It.

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