| So your approach to fusion is "the same CFS but stay at roughly the size of the SPARC prototype instead of scaling up"? When you say "Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years" are you talking about your own reactors, or others? For that matter, are you trying to partner with CFS and license their technology or are you intending on starting "from scratch" (from whatever is publicly available)? If that timeline is for fusion in general, what do you think your timeline looks like? Assuming adequate access to funding how soon can you build a Q>1 reactor? How soon after that can you actually go to market and sell a reactor? --- On an unrelated note, I'm curious what you think of the current approaches to commercial fusion being attempted. Are Tokamaks the only game in town in your mind? Or do the various other approaches also being tried out right now have a good shot (MIF/Zpinches/etc)? Any particular approaches you think are particularly likely to succeed. This being ycombinator and a startup I'm obligated to say that I don't ask this question because I think it impacts your commercial viability much, the greatest risks in fusion definitely aren't the competitors. I ask it just because I'm curious what people willing to start a fusion company think of the competitors. --- Ships make a ton of sense to me as an early market. An 11 figure market (according to my own napkin calculations awhile back) where power is much more expensive than on land. At the same time it's never struck me that the hardest part of building a fusion company is finding a market. |
We won’t be the first to Q>1, I’m super excited for SPARC to achieve that and will be prepared with champagne.
We’re targeting early 2030’s for our reactor, we’re going straight for the full thing no sub scale reactor in between (we do have a plan for milestone-ing it out in a meaningful way)
I’ve worked on a few alternative approaches earlier in my career (FRC at Princeton, dense plasma focus at LPP Fusion) … I think all fusion approaches are worth looking at, but I’m placing my chips on the tokamak. If I were to pick a runner up, the stellerator.