Greg Piefer | Founders Letter

Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. Action. I would like to start at the beginning. Yeah. I mean, I was pretty much a nerdy kid that, you know, spent my recesses reading about particle accelerators and fusion reactors and things like that. You know, I was very much into Star Trek and love the utopian kind of, universe. I mean, I think my parents would say I've always been a dreamer.

I've kind of always believed that we can do really hard things, and I tend to see the path forward rather than the difficulty and it's not that the difficulties aren't there, they are. But that's what I tend to see. You know, as I got older and older, kind of realized access to energy is one of the things we're going to need.

If we wanted to travel to the stars and create sort of a more utopian earth. So I think that kind of got me really excited about the potential of something like fusion energy. My powder’s still good. Nuclear energy in particular, was going through what was believed to be a nuclear renaissance at the time. So I was in a fusion engineering program, instead of like a physics program, which is what most fusion programs are.

And our job as a group was to essentially look at commercialization challenges of fusion. So let's assume that physics can be made to work, how would you turn that into a power plant in a working model that would run with extremely high uptime and, you know, actually even be cost effective? Right. So that's kind of where I started to really dig in on, on the near-term applications of fusion.

We're actually going to change the world through fusion energy, but we've got this very market-based approach where we're going to provide products that create value all along the way. And that's it's interesting that it's like so bizarre in the fusion world, but it's how everything else is commercialized. You find a real product that you can actually commercialize right away, provide value to the world, and then the reinvestment is just very organic and natural and makes sense. So and it gets better and you can do more with it. So actually like from the beginning, our purpose has been to deliver cost-effective fusion energy to the world, but it's sort of always been a bit more grounded in a pragmatic, market-based approach.

I could talk about this stuff all day, and I'd probably lose my voice at some point, but I tend to see the path forward and the successes, but maybe discount a little bit the difficulties. And I think you have to, frankly, to be an entrepreneur or you just wouldn't do it. We've chosen some of the most difficult things to do on Earth.

I think when you zoom out, actually, the progress we've made in the environment we're in, I think is unprecedented. When you look at the type of facility we're building here from a nuclear perspective, like it was the 19 early 1960s, that something like this was last approved. And so, like, just people haven't done this and they don't know how to do it well anymore in the United States.

So we had to figure it out so being able to construct in a startup situation, a business that can still be profitable in the nuclear space, when I mean this is taken utilities under it's taken massive multinational companies under, you know, for us to be here and have moved the needle is really, really cool. So that's one thing.

The technology is another thing. It was always obvious to me that we could scale fusion in the way that we talked about, but it wasn't obvious to many other people and so kind of going through those demonstrations, proving it to people, we have the world record for a steady state nuclear fusion in the building, you know, just a few hundred yards that way.

So, you know, being able to prove that kind of stuff. And then honestly, over time, like just building the human talent and team that is so validating. The people that work here absolutely give 100% confidence that we can do the things we're talking about doing. Let's talk about phase one because, yeah, just hit a big milestone. So basically our approach and the reason it's phased and it goes back to fusion being expensive, not fusion being impossible, but fusion being expensive was clear to me that you couldn't make money off the energy from fusion today.

Not everybody believes that. So I'm saying clear to me but there's another thing that's producing a fusion reaction. Something called a neutron and it turns out there are applications for that neutron whereby you're doing fusion and you can sell the value of that neutron where it's far more valuable. So, phase one is actually taking advantage of that neutron for the purpose of testing materials.

It's about a million times more valuable, by the way, than the energy produced from the fusion reaction. So, so that neutrons are highly valuable and we're using it to make airplanes safer. and we're using it to make spacecraft, you know, work better and to make our defense capabilities continue to work well. So phase one is profitable.

So, yes, that's a huge milestone. you know, that's why we're here, right? We're here to create that value. And it's not just like it's all about the money, right? Like our company is driven by purpose and we want to make humanity better. And so, you know, having the phase one business become profitable is really validating for me.

It not only helps show people we understand that that's important but it's also going to help pay for the future development as well. Right. And on top of that, it's caused us to get good at building high-tech nuclear systems that we build in-house and building that manufacturing capability is absolutely going to be a competitive advantage going forward, because it's not really done very well by anyone else.

There is a major application for the fusion-based system here in Janesville that is starting to come online this year so we expect that to continue to help grow that phase one revenue stream substantially. Phase two required us to scale up fusion. We knew we could access markets that were probably ten times larger than the testing markets.

If we could reduce the cost of fusion. But we had to reduce it by like a thousand times. We did that through clever use of, what we call gas targetry and neutron multiplication that allowed us to produce enough neutrons from a fusion process, that would allow us to change materials. So this is a process Nuclear engineers call transmutation, where if you hit an element or an isotope with a neutron, it actually becomes a different element or isotope. And these materials have a use. And that's why they're so valuable, primarily in medicine at a small scale. One of the reactions we cause we use neutrons for is to turn uranium that we can buy for like $6 a gram into a medicine called molybdenum-99 and molybdenum-99 is worth like $150 million dollars a gram.

Right. So, lutetium-177 is an isotope we produced for cancer therapy, which is worth like 1 to $2 billion per gram. That's phase two is actually like using the neutrons from fusion to drive the isotope production process. Historically, this has been done in very aged nuclear reactors. Most of them are over 60 years old and the supply chain is actually failing.

So we have a situation today where millions of patients every year are potentially denied treatment or prescribed worse or treatments, for things like heart disease, which is just totally unacceptable. So we built a pilot plant so we actually are producing the lutetium today. and that scheme is being used a lot in clinical trials. And we've built the largest, medical isotope production facility in the world.

It's located about 1000ft that way. And we're in the process of bringing that online. over the next 18 months, we expect to be turning that on, and that facility will be capable of producing about 20 million doses of medicine every year. So by far the biggest, in the world. Phase two started to build our competencies, not only in scaling that up and building more of these systems, but also, in tritium handling and tritium recycling and in many other areas, nuclear regulation, nuclear construction, nuclear chemistry, is another thing we had to get really good at what you actually ultimately need for fusion energy as well.

And so we've kind of mastered a lot of those skills and are now deploying them at commercial scale. But those actually skills do allow us to take one more step before going to fusion energy. And that's phase three. Phase three for us is actually recycling nuclear waste. So nuclear energy today, fission-based energy is an available form of carbon-free energy generation that suffers from two problems.

One, is cost and people are working on that. And two is waste. And so if that problem could be solved, that certainly should make nuclear energy and thus decarbonization much, much more accessible. So we want to take on that challenge. And everything we're doing in phase two is really perfecting the skills we need actually  to be very cost-effective in recycling waste that many people have tried it.

Generally the problem is they can't do it cost-effectively. So our goal is to take nuclear waste, turn it into liquid form, separate out materials of value, and separate out a form that can go back into reactors. That's about 96% of the waste stream, right there, and then of the remaining 4%, there's a very small fraction that's really long-lived waste and isolate that for treatment.

Just up to that point, we've already created a ton of value. We've removed 96% of the waste. We've allowed fission to say our fuel is now our waste, so we're generating a lot less waste, as a result and we also have this longer-term fusion narrative which says the next scale for fusion is to use those fusion neutrons, again, to do transmutation, but this time at a larger scale.

And instead of turning low-value materials into hyper-valuable materials, we're actually taking harmful materials and either making them benign or valuable. Phase four is fusion energy. That's the dream, right? That's like why we're here. That's the purpose of our company. And not just to prove it scientifically, but to actually be able to commercialize it in an economical way and to build a company that can build hundreds of working machines in the field that actually make a difference, not just for decarbonization, but for the future of humanity to provide energy and abundance.

And fusion is just like stupidly hard and complicated, and you need to practice to get good at it. So that's why we've got this phased approach, and we're scaling into it and scaling into our ability to build lots of facilities and support them. All these are going to exist in a nuclear environment. All of these are going to be kind of crazy construction.

They're all going to be really, really high technology. So practice. So we're going to get better. We're going to build a company that's sustainable that can tackle this. And that's kind of where we're going phase four. Yeah. When you wake up in the morning and you head into work.  what's giving you the fire? I think there's a combination of this excitement to level up humanity, and I think it's no less than the opportunity we have.

I mean, those aren't words that are too big. I do think this is a long voyage. You know, I think this is a multi-decade vision and I think it's going to be hard. it's that investment in people and people actually just doing the job and learning, you know, how to overcome these challenges.

So I see a company that's got a really awesome culture where we build some of the best people, self-actualizing. Right? Like they're just becoming the best versions of themselves and, and providing value to the world. And we have a really awesome large team that believes in what we're doing and I think we're looking at, you know, backward at the value we've created, but always looking forward at what's next, and looking forward with hopefully enthusiasm and sort of hope for, for a better world.