Kim Budil:
You know, one of the things that was pointed out in those stories was the sort of Manhattan Project approach to making fusion energy a reality, or the Apollo Program approach to making fusion energy a reality. We need that sense of urgency. If you want clean energy for the planet on a time scale that’s salient to solving the problems we’re seeing emerge today, then we really need to act like it’s urgent. It is urgent. People want to work on this. I have no problem recruiting. Best students in the country and in the world have been coming here for decades because they believe in this. They really believe this is something for mankind, not just a cool science project. But we need to be able to harness them and let them loose on some of these big, gnarly technical challenges.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice, and from entertainment to education.
REID:
These conversations also feature another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we’ve generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
I am particularly interested in our guest today, on our topic today, because fusion energy is one of the things that can unlock so much of what’s possible. Fusion energy is the same process that the sun gives. It’s the solar energy that powers everything that we do on the planet today. All of the biodiversity, all of the heat and temperature, and a bunch of other things that make that happen. And that’s something that we are looking at: can we make it ourselves? So, our astonishing guest today is Dr. Kim Budil, the 13th director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federal research facility. The lab uses science and technology to make the world a safer place.
ARIA:
Her lab, you might have seen it in the news, was the first to achieve scientific energy breakeven in a controlled experiment.
NEWS RECORDING 1:
Nuclear scientists call it the holy grail of clean energy they’ve been chasing for decades.
NEWS RECORDING 2:
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved fusion ignition-
NEWS RECORDING 3:
-have used lasers to produce a nuclear fusion reaction that creates energy.
NEWS RECORDING 4:
Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.
ARIA:
In other words, they produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive the experiment. And so, obviously, we are a long way off from harnessing fusion for day-to-day energy use, but this is the first incredible step in getting to a carbon-free future.
REID:
And this is so important because fusion doesn’t produce carbon, greenhouse gases, and can be an enormous amount of energy because almost anything that we want to achieve, whether it’s transport or even carbon recapture or anything else, all requires power. And if we can do that in the clean way that fusion operates, the future is bright and very possible.
So, your laboratory achieved a historic breakthrough last December. Before we get into specifics, how do you reflect on that moment now that it’s been a few months?
KIM:
That’s a really good question. It is a little bit surreal. You know, we’ve been working toward this breakthrough for 60 years, and so we’ve been making steady progress all through that time, but there is that moment when you get to the big goal where it’s a little bit unbelievable in the moment. So we’re absorbing it and getting energized for the next steps. And just so proud of our laboratory, of our collaborators, of our international team that’s worked on this for so long. The kind of persistence that they brought to this problem is really inspiring to me. So I’m just, I’m reveling, and I’m the luckiest lab director in the world, for sure, right now.
ARIA:
Well, I think you’re not the only one it inspired. [laugh] I think it inspired millions and, hey, maybe billions of people across the globe. But for us laymen, or lay-women I should say – we know that you created more energy than it took to produce the reaction, but can you explain that in, like, kettles of tea?
KIM:
So the actual amount of energy in terms of how many kettles of tea you can heat up is actually pretty small. It’s a few kettles of tea, but it’s created in a very, very short amount of time. So the power in that reaction is very high. But just for a very brief, you know, billionth of a second, kind of timeframe. So, you know, what we do in these experiments is we try to recreate the process that fuels the sun and the stars and the solar system. So, the energy source in the sun is hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, which are essentially heavy hydrogen atoms fusing together. When they fuse together, they create a helium atom and a neutron, which carries energy away from the reaction. And so, in the sun, the way that works is gravity: the sun’s very big, it has very large gravitational fields, so it squeezes the fuel in the center of the sun together and that fusion process is sustained over time. That’s why the sun burns and is bright.
In the laboratory, how do we create conditions where we can squeeze this little fuel pellet that we have for long enough and hold it together for long enough that those fusion reactions can begin to burn and self-sustain over time? That’s the trick, really, that we’ve been working on for all this time. We use a little different process than the sun, because we don’t have a gravitational field in our experiments that’s of that scale, so we use a process called inertial confinement. We take a little can, called a hohlraum – it’s about a centimeter long and maybe half a centimeter in diameter – and we shine a lot of laser energy into that. So we shine 192 laser beams into that little can, about two megajoules of laser energy.
And what we did in December is produce more fusion energy out than we had laser energy into the process. So two megajoules laser energy in, three megajoules fusion out, which was super, super exciting. It’s the first time that’s ever been done in the laboratory.
ARIA:
I mean, I love that anyone can understand, like, two went in and three came out. And so, when you think about next steps, is the next step, “okay, next month we want to get 10 megajoules coming out, and then a hundred, and then…” Or – what are the goals coming forward?
KIM:
So, um, 10 megajoules would be great. [laugh] I like the way you think. [laugh] We – so there’s a few things that work against you in this process. One is that any little perturbation in those capsules can cause the capsule to break apart. So, as the capsule breaks apart, the fuel cools down. When the fuel cools down, the fusion turns off.
So we have a lot of work to do to make those capsules, better, more precise, more robust, so that we can repeatedly produce high fusion yields: three megajoules and more, we hope. The second thing is we have been steadily turning up the energy of the laser by making improvements to the ability of the optics in the laser, all the big glass pieces, to withstand damage from these very high laser energies. And a little bit of energy helps a lot. It allows you to push a little harder and a little faster, so we’re gonna keep working on that. The goal is to increase the yield. Our first goal was to get to a stable platform that can ignite routinely, so we’re gonna work on repeating this experiment. And probably, for me, my internal goal is getting to something like five megajoules over the next year. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it did take us – you know, we’ve been working at this facility for 10 years, so it took us 10 years to get to three megajoules. Getting to five in one year would be a pretty big deal.
ARIA:
Love it. That’s scale. [laugh]
REID:
So, where do you view the scale of opportunity when it comes to nuclear fusion? For example, is there a world in which energy is no longer a limited resource?
KIM:
I sure hope so. And I think what we did with this December result is demonstrate the fundamental building block of what a fusion energy future could be built upon, right? I don’t want to understate the challenge of getting from where we are today to a fusion power plant. But the, you know, the, “could you do it?” part has been answered. We’ve demonstrated that in the laboratory we can achieve the conditions required to do this. Can you do it 10 times a second? Can you do it with gains of 40 or 50, not 1.5? Can you do it economically? Those are all important questions for a fusion energy future. But the fuel is abundant. And for inertial confinement, you know, people talk a lot about the fuel that we use, which includes deuterium and tritium – tritium is a valuable resource and relatively scarce – and ICF doesn’t require a lot of tritium to get started. The capsules are very small and the amount of tritium we use is quite small. So again, it’s quite plausible that you could think about building a fusion energy industry around concepts like inertial confinement and having the resources you need to really do that.
So, I think it’s great. And I think – you know, fusion energy is baseload generating energy, which is really one of the common complaints people have about this energy transition we’re embarking now: “it’s fine to say we’re going to use renewables, but the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.” And that’s true. And you can mitigate that with storage and we’re working on that as well. But fusion energy would be 24/7, 365, baseload, scale, clean, carbon-free energy. I just think that’s too good to not make a really good run at it.
REID:
One thing I think your average person doesn’t realize is that fusion, in many ways, is much safer than fission. They understand why fission isn’t necessarily safe because you’ve got Hiroshima and other examples of – and Chernobyl – of serious lack of safety, or serious challenges with safety. I’m obviously very supportive of modern developments and fission is another thing. Say a little bit about why fusion actually has a higher safety characteristic.
KIM:
Yeah, so very fundamentally: in fission, when you start a chain reaction, it continues without any inputs from you. So if you let a reactor run away, the fissions will continue. And that’s why fission is a core component of nuclear weapons, because that reaction is easy to harness.
Fusion’s the opposite. If you take the pressure off, the fusion reactions stop. So there are not the same kind of issues with a runaway, where you would get uncontrolled energy production out. In these little pellets, in this experiment, we burn just a small fraction of the fuel, a few percent. Again, we think you can plausibly burn up to maybe 20% of the fuel. So again, it’s self-limiting in terms of how much energy you can get out. The second thing is that tritium decays fast, so you don’t generate the kind of long term radioactive waste that fission does.
So, I think there’s still a huge effort that we need to undertake to educate the public about what fusion energy is and is not, and the kind of attention we pay to safety, and learn the lessons that the fission industry learned about what happens when you lose the public trust. We’ve been out talking to communities about energy transition and there’s not a lot of trust for new technologies because we don’t spend the time upfront to really explain to people what they are and help them be part of the process of, you know, creating the confidence in the technology to move forward.
ARIA:
I want to turn to one of the AI-generated stories. This AI story talks about four different breakthroughs. First, the development of advanced laser technology. Second, the discovery of new sources of tritium. Third, the design and construction of cost-effective, state-of-the-art fusion plans. And then lastly, the development of smart and resilient electric grids. Can you say a bit more about each of these?
KIM:
Well, I definitely think we can deal with the challenges, which are many and myriad, that we’re going to face in this place. So, the development of advanced laser technology, not necessarily based on quantum dots and metamaterials, is sort of a today thing. So, we have built high repetition rate (many pulses per second) lasers that deliver kilojoules of energy, for other applications. The NIF laser is based on flash lamp technology, which is exactly what it sounds like: big, gas-filled tubes that flash light into the laser amplifier slabs, and then a little pulse comes through and extracts that energy. That’s how the laser energy builds up. In diode-pump lasers, you can tune the diodes to very efficiently pump the laser glass, so you translate more of the energy from the diodes into actual laser energy. So, that’s a today technology. The biggest challenge there is cost. The diodes are very expensive because there’s not a big market yet. And so, you know, this, we hope, is going to be the start of a way to drive that.
New sources of tritium. I think tritium – I don’t want to understate the challenge of tritium, but I think tritium is a manageable challenge in the future. So I think, uh, there are ways to deal with that.
ARIA:
And what are the ways that we’re going to deal with that? Just so I know: the criticism is, “we don’t have enough sources,” and you’re saying, “this is doable, we can deal with it.”
KIM:
Right. So we know how to make tritium, we make tritium in reactors. One of the challenges today is we’re shutting down reactors. So the shortage of tritium is not a shortage of knowledge of how to make it, it’s a shortage of places to make it. And so we could take a decision that we’re gonna have a managed program of fission reactors that will allow us to generate tritium, for example, and we could find more efficient ways to extract tritium from the current production methods.
REID:
And I’ve seen a couple of investments that are looking at cleaner production of tritium, too.
KIM:
Yeah. Absolutely. And there was a program in the distant past on accelerator production of tritium. It has to be cost-effective, but there are other ways to make it. And in the fusion power plant, you would both recycle it – you’d capture the tritium and reuse it – and breed it in the reactor. So, you have to have a scheme that’s efficient enough to make that viable, but we have plausible pathways to get there. And then cost… economics right now, I actually don’t – I mean, that is a huge challenge. These little targets that we make are exquisite objects of art. They are hand assembled by a team of people that do miracles every day. Every day. I mean, they have the little tube, the little capsules, to millimeters in diameter. The little tube that puts the hydrogen in the capsule is thinner than a human hair. Just amazing.
So, this is not power plant ready. They’re very fragile, they’re very expensive, they’re very artisan. Expensive in the sense that you have to have an army of artisans to put them together. Um, we’ve gotta work on that. And that means experiments to understand what are simpler capsules, what are more cost-effective materials, what are better assembly techniques, et cetera. I think we can do it, but that’s a big one.
And then the development of smart and resilient electric grids, that’s just an everything challenge. The one advantage in the developing world, we saw it with cell technology, cellular phone technology: if you don’t have any infrastructure, you can start with better infrastructure.
ARIA:
You can leapfrog, you don’t have to deal with our messiness.
KIM:
Exactly. Yeah, in the US we’ve got to grapple with our aging and very fragile grid. And think about it for integrating renewables, whether we get to fusion energy or not. So there’s a lot of work to do on that front, but all the elements, they’re – I wouldn’t say they’re just engineering problems, there’s a lot of real learning that has to be done to tackle them, but there are paths to get to that future. The question is, are we gonna really do it? Are we gonna invest in a scale that gets the very best people together to think about these problems and come up with creative solutions?
REID:
Well, one of the things that I think that people are going to be super interested in, and I can already tell from our discussion, you’re one of these thoughtful, careful scientists about like, “okay, this is what it looks like,” and are reluctant to do wild speculation. Although I’m about to nudge you a little bit in that direction, because one of our GPT-4 stories was this very optimistic kind of tale of how we would get to abundance and how quickly we would get to 400 megawatts facilities and so forth, trying to say, you know, we’ll get there. One, how did you reflect on the story? And then two, if you were to hazard – and this is the nudge – like, when should we be thinking fusion starts being possible for us?
KIM:
So, you know, one of the things that was pointed out in those stories was the sort of Manhattan Project approach to making fusion energy a reality, or the Apollo Program approach to making fusion energy a reality. If the country decided to invest $50 billion over 10 years, then maybe we’d have fusion power on the grid in 20 years, right? I mean, the timeline really is a function of how much effort and intellectual capital we can bring to bear on these hard problems.
I tell people the story all the time of how we built the National Ignition Facility. So when that project was authorized, seven of the essential technologies to make it work didn’t exist. So, first: can you imagine someone funding this project today? We come in and say, “oh, about this big laser, it’s never been done before, it’s, you know, 20 times bigger than anything’s ever been done,” and, “oh, by the way, there’s a few things, important things, that it won’t work without, and they don’t exist yet, but don’t worry about it. We’ll get it.” Well, we did, right? We got the money, we put these gnarly problems in front of the smartest people we could find, and they figured them out and they figured them out fast because the resource level was enough for them to really focus and do the things that are necessary to move fast. And so that connection, scale of investment, the amount of intellectual energy you can bring to the problem, and the pace at which you can move is a big part of this. And I’m worried about that. That’s a public investment in this, right? So patient public investment infusion is what got us to this point. Because no company in the universe thinks: “In 60 years if these guys get this ignition thing, boy, that’d be great!” I mean, yeah, it would be great, but, “I’m not paying for it, right?” So building a public program that’s big enough to drive these advances fast is the difference between fusion energy in 20 years and fusion energy in 50 years.
And then the private sector provides that driving timeline where they say, “if we’re going to make money on fusion, then you gotta get a power plant out in the field making energy for me, so let’s accelerate this program. Let’s take a little bit more risk because the payoff is potentially much higher.” And we in the public sector need that. We need that sense of urgency. You know, if you want clean energy for the planet on a time scale that’s salient to solving the problems we’re seeing emerge today, then we really need to act like it’s urgent. It is urgent.
So I am cautious in that I don’t want people to miss the part about how you have to invest to get there. People want to work on this. I have no problem recruiting. Best students in the country and in the world have been coming here for decades because they believe in this. They really believe this is something for mankind, not just a cool science project. But, you know, we need to be able to harness them and let them loose on some of these big gnarly technical challenges.
ARIA:
Do you have any thoughts on how, how do we get to that Manhattan project? How do we get to the increased investment? Like, you just said yourself that, you know, if you had come to the government today with this radical proposition, they would’ve laughed you out of town. And I sort of had chills. I was like, “oh my God, you had zero out of seven ready and you still pitched them on it and made it happen.” I don’t know. What do we do? Do we need billboards about this? Do we need more press? Do we need more lobbying? Like, what is the thing that we need so that we actually get the investment? Because, you know, the planet’s getting warmer and we know we don’t have the time to wait.
KIM:
I think there’s a couple things. We’ve had some friends in Congress that have been incredible supporters over the long term, that understood that this was really hard, and that we couldn’t make promises – we don’t know if it’s today or tomorrow or next week or next year – but that we were going to put our best energy and effort against advancing the field and making this thing a reality. So I really want to acknowledge that there have been people who’ve been putting their money where their mouth is on this issue for a long time.
But, you know, fundamentally it’s very hard in the government to have a sense of scale. If you’ve ever gone and tried to get money for a project, it’s just as hard sometimes to get support for a million dollar project as for a billion dollar project. I mean, it’s very – the psychology’s very interesting. If you think about 50 billion over 10 years, so 5 billion a year, for fusion, that’s a really small number relative to some of the things we spend money on. So, it’s not outside the realm of possibility. What we need is a way to generate confidence in the people who appropriate the money, that we are going to be transparent about the progress that we’re making, we’re gonna be realistic about the challenges, we’re going to tell them how we’re spending the money and why in this way or that way, and we’re gonna bring them interim wins for that. Not just take the money for 10 years and then come back at the end and say, “well, we got pretty close, but, you know, no power plant.”
This program has spun out an immense number of technologies, and over the arc of 60 years, I think we lose sight of that. Your iPhone is filled with chips with very small feature sizes made by extreme ultraviolet lithography. The core technologies of EUV lithography were invented in the ICF program. So my lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Sandia National Laboratories – that foundational technology was invented on government investments using the things we were learning about building big laser systems and optics for these government programs. That’s just one. Microwave impulse radar – everytime someone backs up and that annoying beep tells you you’re about to hit something – that came out of the ICF program. So there’s millions of these great new stories, and I think we should tell them so that people know, you know, you’ll get a fusion power plant, but along the way you may get a few other things that have benefits we can’t even project right now.
ARIA:
So fusion needs a better PR person. We’re on it. Okay, that makes sense.
KIM:
Yes, you’re great. You’re doing your part. [laugh]
ARIA:
[laugh] Yes, we hope so.
REID:
We hope so.
Say a little bit about the geopolitics of fusion. Obviously one thing that’s very important is to make sure that we can attract talent to work on this from everywhere in the world. That’s one part of it. What’s going on, generally speaking, when you look at a kind of a global perspective on the geopolitics of fusion?
KIM:
I’m glad you noted that.
If you look at our program, we have lots of scientists from all over the world who came here because we had the facility where they could do the work they were really passionate about. And it’s been an enormous benefit to us. The very smartest people are flocking to this program, and we want to keep that current of global talent coming here. Other countries are pursuing this technology for a lot of reasons. Russia has built a large laser facility, scaled to compete directly with the National Ignition Facility, and to pursue what everyone agrees is a game changing technology, if you can make it work. China similarly has been building a series of ever larger laser facilities to try to, you know, advance in what they know is a strategic area.
So it is an area of strategic science and technology cooperation, and it’s a place where the US would do well to remember what S&T leadership is about, right? It drives our economy. It is why the US is this engine of innovation in the world. Because we have chosen not to be in second place, we have chosen not to be a fast follower. We’ve chosen to be pioneers in strategic areas, and this is clearly one of them. We do have fantastic international partnerships with some of our traditional allies. The French are building a laser, Laser Megajoule, which sounds cooler, I must say, because it’s French.
REID:
Mais oui. [laugh]
KIM:
[laugh] It’ll be a little bit smaller than NIF, but it’s built on the same core technologies, and because we worked so closely with the French, we were able to really advance some of the technologies we needed for our laser, because we had two facilities that were going to purchase components. For example, all the laser glass had to be produced by a very unique and new process, and so the fact that two facilities were going to buy laser glass made it more attractive to an industrial partner to stand up a whole new process to do that. So that’s been great and very fruitful.
Similarly, with our colleagues in the United Kingdom, we have a longstanding collaboration on the science, and that’s been hugely beneficial to us. It’s a way for us to work with our partners and allies to advance critical technologies that have real implications – economic implications, but also national security implications – and demonstrate the kind of partnership that is increasingly important in the world today. You look at what’s happening geopolitically today and the way the Western alliance has come together, for example, to support Ukraine – it’s really heartening to me. That’s a sign that we really, when the chips are down, we really understand what matters and what we value.
ARIA:
We also asked GPT-4 to tell us a story about one city plagued by rolling outages and expensive fossil fuels. And we asked about the city of Karachi, Pakistan, and how they in the future could sort of successfully integrate fusion into their grid and perhaps solve some of their problems. To your point, I feel like developing countries are like, “listen, all of you, you owe us. Don’t tell me to not use energy right now. Like, what are you talking about?”
So I would just love a reflection on that story. What, if anything – maybe nothing – but what did that get right about a city in the developing world transitioning to a partially fusion future?
KIM:
I thought that story was actually really quite good. It got several things right, including the timescale. I think that was the one that had the $50 billion over 10 years or something.
ARIA:
[laugh] You were like, “yes, we need that money.”
KIM:
Yes, exactly. That is exactly right. Let’s write that into next year’s budget.
I liked the fact that it hit on all the elements of making this transition, because fundamentally the hardest part is often not the technology. It’s public acceptance, it’s integrating it into your current systems, it’s understanding the long-term issues around supply chain, and second-order effects that you don’t think about with technology. So I mentioned earlier we’ve been talking to communities about these energy transitions, thinking about nearer term steps like carbon capture and sequestration, as an example, or other carbon management strategies. And people really just don’t trust technology. They don’t trust experts, at the current moment, very much. And we don’t have a very scientifically literate public. We need to address all of those challenges, and I thought that story really focused in on the social aspects of how you make these kinds of big transitions, and how you make them successfully. Right?
I have gotten to do all sorts of amazing things. This – because of this, I got to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Who knew? Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, made an excellent point. He talked about politics in the following frame: unforgivable politics and forgivable politics. Unforgivable politics is politicizing science, right? You know, that is not something politicians should do. Forgivable politics is: “I need to get elected next time, and if I run on a platform of solving a problem in 30 years, that’s not going to help me get elected in two years.” So how do we create the conditions for a politician?
The centerpiece of that story is around the mayor making this big bet and it’s successful and she gets reelected. And that’s all really good. How do we create the conditions for elected officials to make these kind of investments and make it be value-add to them for the things that count? Because if they don’t get reelected, they don’t get to keep doing it, right? They have to think about the politics of the decisions they’re making. So, you know, talking about a future change just doesn’t have the same kind of electoral impact that talking about today benefits can have. So I think we need to think about that. Yeah. How do we create that environment? We’ve talked about it in terms of public health preparedness. It’s easy to talk about public health preparedness when you’re in the middle of a global pandemic. What do you do when you’re between global pandemics? That’s when you really need to do the work. So fusion has a little bit of that character to it as well. How do we create the conditions where elected officials will do the right thing?
ARIA:
Absolutely. And to your point, I think we can be mad at politicians for unforgivable politics, but for the other part, it’s sort of our fault. We have to look inward. It’s like, they’re only reflecting us. And so, it is the job of the media, it is the job of tech companies, it is the job of everyday citizens to create these conditions so that the politicians can make the right choice. And then hopefully we can hold them accountable to it. But, you know, like you said, if we could wave our hand and have fusion tomorrow, we would still need public sentiment, we would still need courageous leaders to implement it, we would still need a new grid. So, certainly technology is a huge piece of the challenge, but it sounds like it’s just one of many.
KIM:
Yeah.
REID:
Have you given any thought to what we as citizens, as leaders, as media people, et cetera, might do in order to help create the conditions that would incent our leaders to play more in that space? I mean, kind of a classic one would be – and I could always ask, you know, my friend JJ Abrams, “well, could we workshop this into some science fiction and some movies?” What are the things in order to help do that? Have you had any ideas there?
KIM:
Well, one has been the experience in the last month. People everywhere I go are celebrating this, which is amazing. When was the last time we had a story about a national lab that was this good and this sustained? [laugh] I’m loving that. And so captivating to people? You know, it really relates. So highlighting progress, highlighting the benefits of innovation, the small wins that come along the way, I think is really important. And it’s easy for us to focus on the bad things that happened, or the failures, or the things that didn’t pan out. So, tipping that balance a little more to the positive side of the ledger, and thinking about the people who do this work, and humanizing the work. I think science can seem very elite and very distant and on some, you know, higher plane, which, I gotta tell you, that’s not how it feels. [laugh]
Getting people to really see the work we do and the people who do it and how relatable that is. It really is. I’m an experimental physicist by training and by temperament. I consider myself a blue collar scientist. I build things, right? That’s what I do. And I ask questions, simple questions, about the world around me, and then I go out and mother nature tells me whether I’m on the right track or not. That doesn’t sound quite so distant or elite as, I think, how the public envisions what the pursuit of science is like. And there are many things that we do here that are just – when people really see them, they’re just so captivating and amazing. The technology we use is so cool, and the scale at which we work is so unbelievable, and the people are so real and energetic about the work that they do.
I just really wish the public could get more access to that. And I know it’s hard. There’s a lot of things going on in the world that aren’t great. But that positive message about the possibilities of science and what it can do for us in a good way is super important. And I don’t think this is too parochial, but experts matter. When I go to the doctor and I want someone who really knows what they’re doing, I really value that. I value the time it takes for someone to become truly expert in their field, and helping to rebuild that respect and understanding, that it’s not elitist, it’s just, from my perspective, service, right? We work in service to science, our lab, we work in service to national security. We feel that commitment very acutely. And I would love people to believe that, cause it’s true. It’s really true.
REID:
Well, we 1000% agree.
KIM:
And if JJ Abrams wants to – yeah, if JJ Abrams wants to come, like, we are totally open. [laugh]
REID:
Well, I will ping him. [laugh]
We completely agree on moving towards this possible great future, and people understanding it, and capturing some hope and optimism and a move forward versus fear of the future.
So on that note, we will go to a rapid fire section that we do. So our first question is: is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
KIM:
Recently, someone pointed me to the book Apollo. It’s a relatively old book by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. And it’s not about the astronauts, it’s about the program to build the technology to take astronauts to the moon. I actually listened to the audio book, and when they were in the control room during the moon launch, my palms were sweating. [laugh] What people are capable of when you put these challenges in front of them, what we have done as a nation, I just – like, we can do anything if we really, you know, put our mind to it. So that’s my current recommendation.
The associated movie, not about the whole program, but Apollo 13 where [laugh] the scene where the engineers, they have to figure out this problem on the ship and one of the engineers comes in and dumps a box of junk on the table – it’s like duct tape and some paper and all this weird stuff – and says, “okay, this is what we’ve got!” [laugh] “How do we fix this problem?” The engineers were the hero, and I really love that. I just thought that sense of team and the MacGyver-ing of the solution to the problem – those kind of things inspire me.
ARIA:
Absolutely. They brought compassion. And then the scale of human ingenuity. And even, right, even when you know the end, your problems are sweating. [laugh]
Where do you see progress or momentum outside your field that inspires you?
KIM:
Really it’s AI and machine learning. It is changing everything about everything. And for me, the big revolution that’s coming is in biology. Our understanding of biological systems, human health, and our ability to cure diseases. I mean, the rate at which we are learning how to use tools like gene editing, or how to design drugs and therapeutics to tackle long-standing dread diseases is amazing. I’ve told my kids – maybe I’ve warned my kids – I plan to live to be 150 [laugh] and it’s looking more plausible by the day. So that’s it for me; it’s just mind bending how fast that’s moving.
ARIA:
And we didn’t pay you to say that.
REID:
Yes, exactly. [laugh] And which technology outside of the physical material sciences, and some of the ones you’ve talked about, are you most excited about for its ability to also add to your work and the fusion work?
KIM:
I think it’s the work we’re doing in advanced manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, at its simplest, is just the 3D printer that you can buy at Costco and make little plastic parts on. It reminds me of those old plastic extrusion machines at the museum where you could make like a submarine or a, you know, anyway. Advanced technologies – combined with design optimization, digital engineering, AI – are allowing us to foundationally rethink everything about technology, because you can build things that were inconceivable five years ago.
And it is going to make this fusion thing, I believe, go. We’re going to be able to use that to – how we’re thinking about getting to that fusion energy future.
ARIA:
A final question for you: can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve in fusion if everything breaks humanity’s way in the next 15 years? And what’s the first step in that direction?
KIM:
If everything breaks the right way, in 15 years we should be breaking ground on our first fusion pilot plant somewhere in America. I hope. And that is definitely within reach with the right kind of program, sense of urgency, scale, investment, all those things are true. That would be a fitting bookend to this Wright brothers moment, to have our Apollo moment, in 15 years, where we take the first step to putting energy on the grid.
REID:
Dr. Budil, this has been amazing and I look forward to meeting you in person at some point. Thank you for joining us on Possible.
So that was fun, super energizing.
ARIA:
I was just so impressed by her. It’s like, she is so optimistic about the future, and this isn’t blind optimism, This isn’t optimism – she wants to make billions of dollars. She’s been working her entire career for 30 years and she finally had this breakthrough and she’s so humble about it. She hadn’t been getting recognition and she says, you know, “I got to go to the World Economic Forum, like people called me, they wanted to talk to me.” And I love the idea of amazing scientists like her being the next generation of rockstars. She is the person that we should be looking up to. I want to tell my seven year old about her so that he wants to become a scientist. And so, I think we can take her optimism at face value because she’s, to your point, like, doing the work and then trenches every day. And that was pretty cool.
REID:
I’ve thought for, quite some time, that the kind of “fusion Apollo project,” “fusion Manhattan Project,” is absolutely imperative from both us, and a world, perspective. And I think one of the things that was a good note from her that kind of led a conversation between us was to say, “you know, look, in order to make that happen, we have to enable it. We citizens.” Because if there isn’t at least scope for it, support for it, then it’s very difficult for the politicians to go, “okay, you’ve elected me and taking these risks of heavy investment now for an uncertain end date and some risk in payoff in the future… is that something you would want me to do?”
You know, we see instances of that like, okay, Solyndra and so forth, and you’re like, well, but actually, this is trying to make that clean climate future and doing it as part of her portfolio is part of what makes it work. And I thought her expectation of appreciation that she – I love the fact that a lot of great talent from around the world still wants to work there, and that she doesn’t have any challenges with applications and recruiting, but we also need to help that work if we want to benefit from it in the way that we will need as a society and as a planet.
ARIA:
Yeah, absolutely. And she talked about Apollo and Apollo 13, and those were moments where everyone was galvanized and excited. What we need to do here is get the public involved, but also, as she said, we’re not just going to get fusion out of it. Science is gonna give us so many other things. When we’re doing this exploration, we’re going get the next generation of the internet, we’re gonna get the next technology that fuels mobile phone creation. All of these things are going to be expert byproducts. So how can we get people to buy into that big bet knowing that we don’t know what’s going to come from it, but there’s going to be exciting technologies and breakthroughs that we’re gonna get from investing in science.
And we have seen, lately, this real anti-science rhetoric from politicians, even from newspapers and media properties. And so that’s one of the biggest things I think we have to tackle here because we do need a pro-science, pro-innovation populace.
REID:
I think part of that is saying, “look, this science stuff isn’t like driving a car down the road.” Like, just a side comment from her was that in funding this material science, we also, of course, end up with the science that leads to the chips in the iPhone, or in smartphones. That kind of thing is actually, in fact, super important. And it’s part of the reason why it’s really important that great talent going to science – your seven year old – but also that we support and value that.
I also loved that kind of Apollo 13 moment where the engineers are the heroes, because it was engineering that not just put them up there, but also got them back. That sort of: “we can do these great things and we should do that.” There’s all kind of strange, you know, kind of anti-science, genetics running around. I’m not just talking about the anti-vaxxers – they’re saying “well, no, I’m right because I know that the vaccine is currently dangerous,” and you’re like, “well, look, if you said a million people get the vaccine and 30 people have bad responses and you save 200,000 lives, or 100,000 lives, you’re like, yeah!” [laugh] Right?
ARIA:
I’ll take that math.
REID:
[laugh] Yeah, the math works. That doesn’t mean the 20 or 30 people don’t have serious responses, right? But that’s the way that the vaccine thing works. And to be fundamentally pro-science, pro-the scientific process, that’s part of where we get to. Anyone who’s not pro-science should disallow themselves from an iPhone. They should disallow themselves from a car, they should disallow themselves… I mean, there’s just all of this stuff. Penicillin. No, no, no penicillin for you. And that’s precisely why we’re doing this podcast, to go, “oh my God, there’s amazing goodness here. Let’s go for the amazing goodness.” And, you know, she was, again, canonical in that what’s possible is not pie in the sky. What’s possible is not just dreaming. There’s actual path-making that’s already in progress towards it. And we can see it. There’s a lot of work to get there, and there’s some risk, and some uncertain journey. But like, let’s go towards that with commitment and grit and intelligence, and, you know, showing that is part of why we’re doing this.
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Brianna Bishop, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles.