“What I worry about is we'll have sort of fusion's Theranos moment … where investors say you didn't exaggerate, you actually duped us, right? And if that happens, it'll cool the whole market.”

I tell you one of the things that does frustrate me with the private fusion industry. We have developed computer models of plasmas in the last 15 years that are very close to what we measure, right? We're often measuring exactly what we calculated in the computer. And so guessing what's going to happen as you get towards fusion is not the right strategy. You need to calculate. And we can help a lot of the companies. We're helping 15 fusion companies by doing simulations basically for them of their things. We're not doing full simulations, although we're doing some work for those field reverse configurations.

And does the moment we're in with private money coming in, does it concern you? Because there's nothing I've heard that's convinced me that we're good. You know, you've got the, you started by saying that the US government's target is 2035 to 2040. And I tried to push you to say whether you thought 2028 was realistic. And I'm going to read between the lines. And so, you know, you don't seem over. convinced. Are you worried that this sort of moment of excitement just leads to, you know, just ends up dissipating and you couldn't really call it a bubble and a bust because it hasn't involved the, I was going to say it hasn't involved the stock market, but of course you've got TriAlpha TEA, which is now, has now become part of a quoted entity, as has, I think, General Fusion, which is a Canadian-based, you know, we're going to make a ball and then collapse a ball using pistons and explosives and all sorts of things. Also quoted now. Are you worried that there'll be a pushback, that people will end up in a few years saying, ah, that didn't work and it was all nonsense and that that would affect the programs that you work on?

When we started, I want to finish by talking about the costs and the economics of this, because doing it is one thing, but doing it at a cost point where it can compete into the energy system. And there's this marvelous phrase, which I'm afraid you've used a few times in other conversations, baseload. And baseload is regarded by many as the sort of the holy grail, you have baseload. But baseload, if you have an electricity source that produces 24-7, 365 power, in a world which is dominated by intermittent power, it's actually not fulfilling a very useful function in the energy system. Because every time it's windy or sunny, or you've got very cheap batteries as well, every time there's electricity available at a very, very low marginal cost, your much more expensive to run equipment is going to be shut down.

Well, you're making the assumption it's much more expensive, but it, you know, probably at least initially will be. Fusion can be switched on and switched off. There's no question that you could do that. But there's a cycle. This is true also. One can make nuclear power stations that you switch on and switch off. You just don't want to do it because the marginal cost of keeping running is not very much, right? Whereas because your fuel costs are so low, right? And your running costs are so low. You've got to keep the reactor there. So it is true that when you have a technology that's dominated by its investment cost and not its operational costs, you want to keep it running all the time.

Correct. But the problem here is that the running cost of a solar farm is almost exactly zero. I mean, it's really in wind, you've got some maintenance. So what we've got even in nuclear now, just running and maintaining a fission power station is $30, $40, $50 per megawatt hour. And so they're being competed out by wind and solar and batteries because the marginal cost is almost exactly zero. So it's a problem. And the reason you don't want to cycle, apart from the fact that you get temperature cycling and cracks and all sorts of bad things, the moment you power it down, it's not earning any money. And so the cost of the rest of the power goes up. So I guess I worry that you could do all of this. And in the end, other than the first few that are heavily subsidized, that it may never find its role in life in the energy system.