What makes this moment different from previous waves of optimism?

Yeah, so fusion offers amazing benefits and we've known for many, many decades it's the ultimate power source, but it's really hard to do.

You have to get the fuel really hot, keep it hot and keep it together so it can burn and release all this energy.

And in 2022, just four years ago, three major things happened that fundamentally changed the landscape and set the stage for companies like ours to pursue commercial fusion.

And in case your listeners haven't heard, the first one of those is in 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab achieved ignition.

So they use lasers to squish a little pellet of fuel and get it to ignite and release fusion energy more than they delivered to it with those lasers.

That was a huge deal that showed the conditions we actually need to make commercial fusion possible.

So what do you think we'll be able to expect generally from the fusion industry in, say, the next five to 10 years?

Lay the groundwork here, and then, then we'll go a little deeper into, to what all this involves.

Yeah.

May- maybe I'll start with just sort of, um, mapping out the fusion landscape a little bit.

Uh, and what, what I focused on in RPE was sort of a, a middle ground between the two endpoints that I'll talk about.

But, you know, the way that stars, uh, make fusion happen is they use gravity.

Gravity doesn't scale down to something you can do on Earth, but people have been clever and they've found that you can use strong magnetic fields to help confine the plasma, the fusion plasma, 'cause as you heat up your hydrogen and it starts to ionize and become a, a plasma of electrons and, and ions, um, you can confine it.

You know, ions will spin around those magnetic field lines, and you could shape them to keep them confined.

Uh, talk about that part because obviously a very important part of this is not just, "Hey, wow, we got it to work," but can this thing be manufactured ultimately? And, and this is where sort of the Pacific story be-becomes kind of unique.