YouSaid · the spoken record

David Kirtley

lines on the record: 180
first: 2025-11-17
most recent: 2025-11-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm continuously in awe It works And I know that that sounds a little silly to say. But the more that I learned in my career around the balance of exactly the right temperatures where life works, exactly the right balance between the electromagnetic force and the strong force. Those are things that Hard to imagine are accidental. And And so we talk about how beautiful nature is, but then you look at what each of the leaves on the tree really is and each of the cells and each of the atoms and each of the quantum substructure of that atom. And I'm just all amazed that all the pieces come together”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Path sooner. And I'm excited by that outcome of the Fermi paradox. And then at that point, those civilizations have a star that you can't find anymore because it's all covered and are there thinking and growing their intellects rather than actually having to physically expand.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their cognition, grow their ability to think, they grow their brain, they grow their intellect. And I feel like in the last few years, we've seen a massive trend that maybe this is the thing that happens and that we do grow our intellect and we grow the intellect of the species by AI and advanced tools. And as a society can just get smart enough that we don't need to go plant those flags everywhere. And so the Matroyshka brain is a Dyson sphere where a civilization has covered the entire sun in essentially solar panels or collects its light in some way and uses all of that power to power intelligence, to power computers and to power brains. And I think we're away from that, a ways away from that, but maybe AI and fusion together gets you actually along that path.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I, as I have gone further and further in building fusion systems that work, I've become more optimistic around the Fermi paradox specifically. And there is several of them that I think you're referring to something called the great filter. Something happens that filters out life. The dark forest is another philosophy around, sure, it's out there, but everybody's hiding because they don't want to be noticed. But I think about something else, actually. The philosophy that I've always loved, and I'm going to pronounce this wrong, so I apologize, Matroyshka Brands, is that, and that's Kardashv level two, that civilizations get so advanced and they focus not on expanding physically and expanding in space and expanding their reach by planting flags in new places, but grow”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to imagine anything else that right now where does energy in the universe come from? And it comes from fusion. It comes from stars. And we know that that's the process. And so whether they're harnessing the star itself, Carteshev type 2, or are they bringing fusion along because they want to go somewhere and they're bringing it with them to go visit? I think that that's pretty... That's pretty likely. You bring up the Fermi paradox. How come we don't see alien civilizations, even if it's infinitesimally small chance that there is life on any one planet and infinitesimally small that life grows into intelligent life? There are, however, almost infinite planets around infinite stars. And I think that's a question that many scientists and everyone has wrestled with over the years.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With just like in space, systems that are smaller have higher performance and can deliver more whatever the mission is. And in our case, the mission is electricity”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one thing that people in the aerospace field know, especially if you're in deep space, you can't waste anything. That every watt of electricity you make, you better use because it was expensive to get it or the solar panel. Every ounce of every joule of heat, every watt of heat you make, you have to reject with a radiator. And it's super expensive and heavy. And so you build in space as efficient as possible. You recirculate your water and your air and all of those things, you're efficient. And it's something we brought into thinking about fusion, energy efficiency, is that you want to, if my goal is to make the product, what's the product, the product is electricity. Don't waste any of it. Recover every what you can by recovering electricity directly. Recover every electricity from the fusion process is efficiently as you can. And you end up with...”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you make electricity from fusion using a steam cycle, you now need to have somewhere, you need something cool. So you get hot water, you now have to be able to cool it. And in space, there's nothing to cool. There's no working fluid to cool off of. And so actually a lot of the steam-based systems that in fusion don't make sense for space. And so that's where some of this direct energy, this energy efficiency matters. It actually comes to some of the origin story of the team that founded Helion. Before spinning off Helion to focus only on fusion, we worked on a mix of things, advanced materials, rocket propulsion, fusion. Fusion rockets, fusion materials, all of those things.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, honestly, in a lot of ways, that's how I got into Fusion thinking about that intersection of energy and space travel. And when you are in the solar system around Earth's orbit, collecting the sun's energy makes a lot of sense. And it's free when you're in space. You get a lot more of it because the atmosphere is not blocking it. And so that's why spacecraft run on solar panels. But if you want to go further out, the sun's irradiance falls off as r squared radius squared, and it's a long way out there. It doesn't take very long before there is not a lot of energy anywhere from the sun. And so you have to bring it with you. And in space, mass is expensive. Mass is hard. That's the rocket equation. And so being able to bring high energy density fuel is really exciting. And that's what fusion enables. But here's one of the challenges.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can now use electricity as its rocket fuel. And so there's some really powerful, interesting things you can do, even deep space, it gets also more enabling, but even just launching from Earth. And so I think it opens up things we don't really even think about. There's just been theorized, wow, if I had a massive amount of power in a small place that is low cost, this is what it could do. I'm excited by what it can unlock that even we can think about now, but even what we can't think about, or we don't know yet.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because humans need to eat, and that's really critical. But it's about five feet tall all over the earth. Why can't you do it at 500 feet? Why can't you build a building where you're actually growing in the building, you're growing plants? I spend a lot of time thinking about growing plants, ironically. At high densities of food densities, so that we can eat and we can exist and we can coexist in a way that's energy dense and rich. You mentioned actually going to space. How do we go to space now? We take methane fuels or hydrogen fuels and we burn them and we launch a rocket. There's all kinds of cool beamed rocket technologies that I looked at early in my career where you can beam microwaves. And so you have a microwave craft that doesn't have to burn any fuel. And so if you have really dense, really good power on Earth, you can beam it to that microwave craft. It can now”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot about how what does vast amounts of low cost energy, low-cost electricity enable? And how does that work with nature? And if you have power, and this is why one of the reasons we love fusion, is that energy dense. So a 50 megawatt facility, we believe, fits in a 27,000 square foot building on the order of an acre for 50 megawatts and compare that to solar would be 2,000 acres, at least in Seattle. And what you can do there is transformational. And a lot of folks talk about desalination and clean water so that we can be in places where there's not a lot of water and those things. I actually think about food ironically, is that how much of the Earth's surface that used to be nature is now farmland. And we need it. Like, we're going to grow.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have room to go. And that's at today's use. So a hundred times today's use, we still have tons of fuel. Let's go do it. And what does that unlock? What does it unlock to have power a hundred times the output that we actually do here on Earth right now? And I think that's pretty transformational. Do we have those huge AI data centers? Do we have brains that can now think? At rapid speeds and now innovate, I think that that's pretty powerful future.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the Cardiff scale, Cardishev type one civilization is when humans are either catching or generating as much power as what's incident on the Earth from the Sun. Type two is the next big one where you're catching as much energy from all the way around the Sun. So massive amounts of energy. And a lot of times people talk about it as incident, as in you had solar panels the size of the entire planet blocking all of the sun. But I think really you should be thinking about it as what can we generate? What can we make here on Earth? And what we know is that we're only a fraction right now of Carship Type 1. And we got some work to do. And there's not a lot of technologies that can get there. Just from the point of view of the fuel. But if, as some research say that there's 100 million to a billion years of fusion fuel on the”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if we can get to that, if we can get to making a generator a day, you're not now talking about hundreds a year. And deploying them is also hard at this scale. How do you go and deploy power plants and deploy generators at this scale and do it quickly? Interestingly, data centers are a little bit of a nicer challenge in that way because we wouldn't build one 50 megawatt system and have to go build a site for it. We'll build a site and put a hundred of them on that site and have large amounts of power for that large data center. And so that in some ways is actually in the chicken and egg problem of how do you go deploy hundreds of thousands of fusion generators. Data centers are an interesting application where very immediately you need a lot of power in a very small area and you can go do that now. What does that mean? That means I'm going to need more than two conveyor belts. That's for sure.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know this can be done. And so for Fusion, the call is there and the market is there too. If you can get electricity generators cheap enough, then it's worth doing.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the goal was how do we not just demonstrate fusion in the next decade, but meaningfully deploy it and start to answer, we have 4,000 gigawatts of installed fossil fuel capacity. How do we start replacing that with fusion in a meaningful way? And how do we get to not just making a generator every few years, but we want to factor a gig factor of these fusion generators rolling off the line on a month, one a week, one a day. That's the kind of plans that I task my supply chain team with like, how do you do this? How do we actually go build this? How do we go build a giga factory so we can have 50 megawatt generators coming off the line, being deployed on a truck, and then driving off the factory every day? And it's a tough challenge. I see what others have been able to do in Rockets and electric vehicles turning around huge factories.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coils are mass produced, capacitors are mass produced, and we make them all across the board is thinking about not what the next system is going to be, but making sure we're building the manufacturing and the infrastructure to build all of those systems. So we had a call from the White House a number of years ago for the bold decadal study in fusion of how do we get fusion, and it was helion and a variety of other companies from the fusion industry. And it's pretty awesome to be able to say there's a fusion industry now. It's not just a one-off thing or there's a fusion experiment or somebody has a prototype. But like, there's an industry. That Helion has competitors. That's great.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I tell the team that if we demonstrate fusion one time, and that's it, then we failed. That's not enough. The universe is powered by fusion. Humans need to be harnessing this and can harness this. For our society, for the good of society, for the good of technology. And so that's something that we push towards. And in fact, it's baked into how we design these machines.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the idea that AI can grow human cognition And our ability to solve problems. We can't let it be limited by power. And so I'm going to push as hard as I can so that that's not the limit.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is going to be high energy requirements in a local location and large amounts of it. There's been predictions recently from energy institutes that suggest we will have growth that rather than a 2% growth per year in electricity, maybe a four or six percent growth in electricity due to data center use. I think that is probably wildly underestimating where we're moving. And so”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I talk to AI experts, they talk pretty routinely about the power needs for AI. And in fact, in the same way in manufacturing that the cost of any one thing asymptotes to the raw material, for AI, the cost of computation, asymptotes to the power, to the cost of the electricity, and even more, that electricity is concentrated. It's in that AI data center, that brain where all the power is. And you really want a lot of high energy density. You want power generation right there on site. So it seems like just take those two facts a really nice match between fusion, which is”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Run those GPUs directly. That would be a really powerful. We could figure out how to do it. But those are some of the things that I think there might be some unique ways that fusion and data centers can really couple together. There's a whole cooling part to it too. Most of my cooling is cooling semiconductors and cooling power switching, just like a data center. So there's a lot of interesting engineering ways that we can bring those two together.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each individual pulse is different where you put in your fuel, you do fusion, you exhaust it through those pumps from eBay, and then power output and electricity out But there's probably some more clever ways to do this. And when we founded Helion, the goal was to build low-cost baseload electricity. And what we started to see, working with Microsoft, working with others now, that data centers are going to be one of the biggest power needs in the future. And we know that's coming up. And what's really unique is that power in this form, this direct recovery, not the steam turbine part, but direct electricity is already DC, which is steady, which is what computers really want anyway. And so are there really unique ways to take DC power sitting on this capacitor, and rather than going AC to the grid and having all these transmission losses, just going direct DC to the data center? Can you plug right in? And so that's some of the things that my team is looking at now is can you do that direct DC conversion at super high efficiencies and”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Output. And so as the grid needs more power, we can actually dial it up and down. And we've been able to demonstrate that with our fusion systems, the smaller ones, the smaller plasma systems, we've gone from zero, from off to all the way up to 100 times a second and shown we can do 100 Hz operation. In fact, that system we ran for over a billion operations and just ran it steady all day long.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of this is trivial. But there are, I think, simple ways, and there's some really interesting engineering ways to do this. So just from the fundamental basics, as we're doing fusion, we push back on the magnetic field, we recharge these capacitors that start where the electricity started from. And that electricity then sits on a capacitor at high voltage, DC voltage that's steady. At that point, it's reasonably easy to make 60 hertz power, make traditional AC power the same way as you can take electricity in a battery and use an inverter and just invert that to AC power. And large-scale grid inverters, we know how to do pretty well. One of the sort of like unique things about a pulsed version of this, because it's pulsed and a repetition rate between 1 and 10 times a second, we can adjust the power.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have high speed ones and low speed ones. The traditional SLR cameras, which the ones that represent the right color, all they catch is the light, the integrated light, the flash. They can't see the plasma forming, accelerating, compressing. They can't see any of those things. They just see all of it integrated into one bright flash. But the high-speed cameras, they can see that. And so the high-speed cameras we can use to actually measure that, in fact, we put special filters on them to measure different wavelengths of light so we can tell, is it the hydrogen? Is it the heliciums? Is it the helium-3? Who's emitting the light? When are they emitting? What particles are emitting the light and when? And so by using those advanced diagnostics, we can now take movies of that. It's not as great as just seeing that flash.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things. So, one, to get access to it, we have Windows. We have small windows all the way around that we look into it with cameras, spectroscopy, lasers, other kinds of scientific diagnostics that we use to measure. And so you see the light emission through that, but also it's very bright. And so the actual vacuum vessels themselves that we use are ceramic. some versions of silicon and oxygen, typically quartz, but there's also some other centered materials. And it's so bright that they can shine through those materials. And so what you see is you see the light of, not fusion, when fusion's happening, thermonuclear fusion is so hot that the light is in the x-ray spectrum, and the human eye can't see that. But as that ice cold one million degree plasma, when you're just getting started, it's emitting photons in a range and light in a range that humans can see.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's really critical that we build the team and we do the hiring to make sure that everybody is doing that problem. Now, that doesn't mean it's not a hard challenge and to keep folks motivated. Helion now is over 500 people. But when we built Trenta, we're 50 people. So now there's over 300 humans working at Helion that didn't see us Build a system from a computer model, bring it online, and And so seeing that get built, seeing that, like it's just awe inspiring to folks. And I'll tell you the first time that it comes online and flashes pink and you see that fusion glow, it's awe-inspiring. It's all inspiring.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We certainly have people that say, no, this can never be done. And we had that before. We had that at the very beginning of, I want to go merge these plasmas together. And folks said, nope, that can never happen. And we went off and did it. And you can't compress an FRC because it's unstable. In fact, I actually still hear that. FRCs are unstable. And I say, yes, I know. Now, let me introduce you to S star over E and 20 years of studies on what we know about that and how we can combat that. And so we've been able to show through lots of skepticism that we can still build and iterate. And there are things I don't know. Let's just be totally honest as we're going to go build these things. We're going to discover new hard problems. If we're not doing our job, if we're not discovering new hard problems, we probably didn't push hard enough. We probably didn't push fast enough.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's the thought process. That's the mentality. We're going to do it anyway. Let's go do it. The world needs it. There's no physics reason this can't be done. Now it's a question of how fast can you build it? And can you engineer it to be as efficient as it needs to be? And those are... Engineering and manufacturing are ridiculously hard challenges, so do not short sell that. But that's the goal. And that's what we get up every day thinking about. This is something I was actually just thinking about and talking with some of my team in the last few days.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing to support that power plant. We're doing that today. We started two years ago on doing the work around siting, around the interconnects. How do you plug fusion in? What does it look like? How do you cite it? What are the environmental consequences? Who's going to regulate it? All of those things. So we spend a lot of time already and we're on our way. And it's going to be hard. Like no joke about it. This is tough. And it's something that we think about every day.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are. They are. And it is daily that we think about that deadline. We had been working with them on and off through all of those machines, through Grande, Venti, Trenta. So they had seen us build hit milestones, show that we can do fusion, scale up by orders of magnitude, and then access these advanced fusion fuels. So they had seen all of those things and seen the manufacturing we built. We're already right now building.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power plant will be powering the grid that the data center is plugged into. And we can get into the details of how the power grid works and such. But yes, so Microsoft will be buying the power from that power plant.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what we've been able to do is build rapidly build every few years bring a new fusion system online. In 2023, we signed a deal with Microsoft to build a power plant for Microsoft for one of their data centers. And this is a power plant that is plugged into the grid, generating electricity from Fusion. And with a very, very tough, ambitious timeline of 2028 for the first electrons from that power plant.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move quickly. And everywhere you can without sacrificing quality or safety, take shortcuts. That's the name of the game. We got to get fusion online as soon as possible.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The standard piece of G10 was not big enough to fit the end of the machine. And so we could have had one custom manufacturer manufacture a brand new piece of a custom size, build a new mold and a new machine. It would have taken, I don't remember anymore now, but probably on the order of usually these are about six to 12 months. Or I could go to a supplier off the shelf, have that delivered in a week, and now machine it with all the bolts in between. And then in-house have the G10 machine shop that can now machine the bolt holes to actually bolt those pieces together. And so that took extra engineering and having really clever and brilliant mechanical and structural engineers to figure out how to do that and still meet the needs of the fusion system. But that's what we try to, that's the kinds of teams we try to build at Helion is folks that want to really get their hands dirty, get hands on, build things, and”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can actually, I can point out on this picture one perfect example of what I'm talking about. So on the end is a green structure, green fiberglass. This is called G10. Actually, ironically, one of the main structural elements we use is this G10 fiberglass material. It's the same thing that's in PCB boards. It's the same substrate that's in every circuit board. And so we know it's strong, it's good with electricity. Only we get big pieces of it and machine it. But even in the end, you can see the bolts halfway through. There's nine bolts in the middle there.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have a ton of scientists because the science is critically important too, but they're supported by a huge manufacturing company. And our goal is to build as fast as possible. Some of the other things we try to do there vertically integrate. And this is to your point on Elon Musk, like this is one of the things he's focused on at his companies has been how do you bring it in side the critical things that are going to drive timelines, the things you can't just go by as a commodity product and get it here soon and make sure that you can go build those fast. And so we've done now a number of key vertical integrated manufacturing lines at Helion. I think we may be the only fusion company with a conveyor belt. Actually, our second one just came online now where we have, so we have literally our production line manufacturing power supplies at Helion so that we can move at maximum velocity rather than”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And building the team that wants to go build things. Like everyone at Helion, at least the vast majority of Helion, we hire engineers and scientists and technicians and machinists are hands-on builders. The company at Helion is very weird for a fusion company. Today we are 50% technicians, not scientists.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go make it happen. And so that's something that we routinely do, I think sometimes I have challenges with my academic colleagues on this, is that we have a difference opinion. Because at 3%, well, that's way better than 5%. So shouldn't you do that? You'll know your data better. 5% is good enough. Now, 50% would not be good enough. And so that technology wouldn't have been applicable. And so finding that middle ground is a hard thing to do and never compromising on the quality and the safety. Like it's got to work and it's got to be safe. But can you still?”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And everywhere you can. You still have to deliver the working product. That cannot sacrifice the quality. Do you really need the shiny brand new one when the used one is going to do the job? And we think about that across the board. Do we take the best plasma diagnostic, the most sophisticated plasma diagnostic in the world that's 3% that has an accuracy of within 3%? And it's going to take me three years, maybe a few million dollars to go build. Or do I take a technology from 10 years ago that's 5% accurate? That's good enough that I can go build in a month. And the answer for us, for Haliana, for the team that we put together, is that scrappy, I wanted to solve the problem. I don't need necessarily the best solution.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And get the same model that was made 10 years ago and get it on eBay today, right now. However, it might not work. Like, you don't know yet. There's some how well it works or how clean it is or any of those things. And so what we do is you don't go to eBay to save money. It does. It's cheaper and that's great. But you can also go and get three of those turbo pumps that are sitting in eBay right now bring those in-house, test them. Maybe only one of them meets the specifications you need. But guess what? You just got to pump in two weeks instead of nine months.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to move. And here's an example we use a vacuum pump because in these systems, you got to pull out all the air. So we use a vacuum pump called a turbomolecular vacuum pump. This is a commodity. This is used in a variety of particle accelerators, scientific applications. There are many of them. They're robust. They last a long time. Also, have a very small supply chain. So if you want to buy a brand new turbolecular pump, you can, and you might wait nine months from the manufacturer to go make one for you and deliver it for you. But I can go today.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you go make one of a thing. And that because when you look at our fusion systems, we talked about these big magnets. And you could build one giant, big, complex, hard-to-make magnet that's heavy and you have to move it around with a crane and requires very complex machining by ultra rare CNCs or you could then make that out of a composite of 100 smaller magnets. Each of those magnets now can be made on a simple machine. Each of these magnets can be picked up by a human. They're light enough. They can be made and manufactured and mass-produced. And that's what we did. And that was our whole design philosophy on these machines is at every turn, how do we go faster? A classic one. That still to this day, I push the team on is, again, thinking about how do you move fast, eBay.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you should be looking at everything you do towards that lens. And so that's thinking about the materials you choose. At every turn, choose commonly available materials. If you have to wait for supply chain, for ultra-rare material, it's going to take you a lot more time. And so do everything you can to engineer a system that uses simple aluminum alloys, simple copper alloys. And if you have to use tungsten and maybe you have to use tungsten in some of your systems, which is a hard-to-find alloy, make sure you're using commonly available thicknesses of tungsten sheet. Those kinds of engineering analyses and thought processes at every step. And that's how we built these systems from IPA to Venti up to Trenta was always looking at how do we build systems that are easy to build and mass produced because this is the other thing that I don't know that early in my career I'd have predicted is that”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a system that showed 100 million degrees and was the first system that did deuterium and helium-3 fusion. In fact, as far as we know, the only bulk deuterium helium-3 fusion that has been done and also showed the 100 million degree fusion temperatures from an FRC. And throughout that time, the earliest work was government funded, government grants, SBIRs, and other type of government grants. And actually, the team involved myself and the rest of the founding team were really good at winning government programs, doing fundamental science, but moving very quickly. And there's a lot of ways to think about how to iterate and how to build quickly. I want to talk about the teams first, and then we can talk about some of the technology pieces to do that. But a lot of it is thinking about if your goal is to get the product electricity out to the world as soon as possible.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing in pressure and temperature. What we noticed is machine after machine. We always used Starbucks. We were in Redmond at the time, Redmond, Washington, and Starbucks cups sitting on top of the machine as the, this is the scale. They were too small to have a human really in the picture all the time. So the Starbucks cup was enough. And so then we switched to tall grandeventi. And then the biggest Trenta was the biggest system that came online in 2020.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at Helion, we've built seven systems. The first six were a series of prototypes that we built end-to-end that were focused on scaling the process of making these field reverse configurations, compressing them to thermonuclear fusion conditions, and demonstrating that you can do fusion and then increasing the scale, increasing the temperature and the energy. The very first ones were named after beer, actually the most successful was the inductive plasmoid accelerator, the IPA. And it was the first system that showed that the team could make these FRCs and hold on to them and understand some of the stability criteria, the heating criteria. And then we started increasing the field. Now, okay, great. We can hold on to one of these FRCs. We know how long, we know how to make them, but now can we squeeze on them and start doing fusion.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Science experiment is the best way to do science. And what I found is actually small iterative just building as fast as possible gets you there faster because you can learn, you can build, you can iterate, you can solve the problems, and then you can learn the fundamental physics, learn the scaling, learn the FRC and the B to the 3.77 power, and learn those things way sooner than if you would have just started on one megaproject and then waited decades to get to the answer.”
2025-11-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source