11 ms·

That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of

That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of stress and fear!". Also pessimistic memories, but closer to the truth. In reality, we had initial seed funding for about a year. We had a number of goals we had established, including vacuum chamber, getting the ion source running, first beam, first neutrons. We fell way behind in the first six months because I made the stupid decision to try to build a duoplasmatron ion source to save money. This cost us about 4 months to make a shitty ion source that was full of leaks and barely usable. Luckily the experienced electrical engineer came up with an RF ion source bought used that did the job well enough. We actually ended up meeting all of our 1st year goals in just over a year if I recall correctly. By that time the money was running out, so DFJ basically extended the funding by issuing us convertible debt in 3 month increments. Every three months we would have a set of goals mutually agreed upon by the board, which was two of us and Tim Draper. This was pretty stressful for us, as we were living paycheck to paycheck and we had no idea if we didn't meet a goal if Draper would pull the plug. Tim was never anything but supportive but we understood the point of milestones. That is also when things got technically difficult, as everything we had done before was using existing techniques but when we went off-the-map things slowed down a lot. That went on for about 3 years. Basically the same dynamic as software guys tend to see in the classic death-march sprint. I blame leadership (myself). Eventually we ran up against some hard limits that wouldn't work with our design. We faced a choice between making an expensive bet on a supersized ion source (an inelegant brute force solution, which I know now would not have worked) or a new risky design (which also would not have worked). Tim was in favor of the brute force design, because he saw that as money being the barrier. I had my doubts about the brute force design, and I didn't want to waste the money on something that would only fix one of the 3 major problems we faced. I tried building the long-shot design. Then a piece of plastic got into the main turbopump and it ate itself. The 2000 market crash happened. Everything fell apart.

rossdavidh 7y ago
Fascinating, and also probably painful to live through. Thanks for sharing that story.
otoburb 7y ago
If you attempted another fusion startup today would the odds of success be higher, or is fusion still about as far away as it was 20 years ago?
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Fusion used to be aiming at being better than fission, because that was the default post-fossil energy source. But now renewables are cheaper than that. So the competition has gotten better since then, and continues to improve rapidly, and it's not clear fusion can ever get cheap enough to compete with them. Another argument is that fusion reactors will require robots to maintain them (even the aneutronic ones will become too radioactive for hands on maintenance). But if you require robots that can do that, why not just develop and sell those robots, which would be generally useful?
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    People say that about molten salt fission reactors too. The maintenance robots will need maintenance robots. Just sell the robots. Lots of people still in fission and fusion are assuming trouble with renewables related to intermittency, land use, grid integration, EROI, raw materials, etc. might arise as we approach deep decarb. If that doesn't happen, wonderful! If it does, then it may be nice to have some low-carbon atomic power stations on hand or in work to diversify the risk. It's basically the nuclear Pascal's wager. With a big risk like climate change, there's room for investors who choose to take an interest in nuclear. Fossil fuels still power the vast majority of the world. It's not yet clear that we're out of that woods. For instance, Japan just announced that they're building 33 new coal plants to replace their atomic power stations. How on earth does one reconcile this with the game-over-renewables-are-already-cheaper-than-everything popular narrative? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...
    - m0zg 7y ago
      If the climate change situation was really as dire as we're being told, we'd have nuclear coming out of our ears by now, and nothing whatsoever would be able to stop it. It doesn't have to be ultra-expensive if it's not bespoke every time you build it. The investment into fusion would also be 10x what it is today, and we'd already have a viable version of it, after a Manhattan-project style, do-or-die effort. What's puzzling to me is why the opposite seems to be happening: some parts of the world shut down completely carbon neutral stuff and build things that are going to emit gigatons of CO2 for decades to come. If we are to reach point of no return (or worse, have already reached it), the focus should be on building such an abundance of energy generation capacity that it would not only replace all carbon-emitting energy generation, but also help power atmospheric carbon capture at a scale that we'd need to avert the climate disaster.
_Microft 7y ago
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but would it have been possible to create products along the way that would have made enough money to have a longer or maybe even infinite runway? Would such an approach have flown with the VCs? I am thinking about something like creating an own ion source first, keep building and selling these and using the money to tackle the next problem. Then tackle the next problem. And so on. Two examples of different hard engineering problems being approached in different ways: Compare Blue Origin's and SpaceX' approach to developing reusable rockets. Blue Origin is financed by Mr. Bezos. If Bezos stopped that (certainly not intentionally but a bus factor of 1 is bad anyways), Blue Origin would be left with no sustainable business from what we can tell. I am convinced that in the worst case a defense contractor would happily buy in but for the company as a whole it might be over. SpaceX was developing reusable rockets by creating rockets (hard but not as hard as going directly to reusable rockets) first and selling services (that's even better than selling products) to customers to finance the development. They were even using already paid for rocket launches for their experimental landing attempts. That's a lot cheaper than having to pay multiple for a rocket just to see it blow up on landing (or reentry or sometime in between). The same could be said about Tesla, Waymo and self-driving. Waymo has to reach full self-driving (FSD) to start making money. If they fail, they company is dead or also needs to be sold. If Tesla fails to reach FSD? That would suck, they would have to pay back the customers who bought the FSD package early, maybe deal with a class-action lawsuit because of this and but they could carry on selling cars nevertheless.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Not to mention Tesla is a loss leader for battery manufacturing and power grid systems sales.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Fascinating, and also probably painful to live through. Thanks for sharing that story.

otoburb 7y ago

If you attempted another fusion startup today would the odds of success be higher, or is fusion still about as far away as it was 20 years ago?

pfdietz 7y ago
Fusion used to be aiming at being better than fission, because that was the default post-fossil energy source. But now renewables are cheaper than that. So the competition has gotten better since then, and continues to improve rapidly, and it's not clear fusion can ever get cheap enough to compete with them. Another argument is that fusion reactors will require robots to maintain them (even the aneutronic ones will become too radioactive for hands on maintenance). But if you require robots that can do that, why not just develop and sell those robots, which would be generally useful?
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  People say that about molten salt fission reactors too. The maintenance robots will need maintenance robots. Just sell the robots. Lots of people still in fission and fusion are assuming trouble with renewables related to intermittency, land use, grid integration, EROI, raw materials, etc. might arise as we approach deep decarb. If that doesn't happen, wonderful! If it does, then it may be nice to have some low-carbon atomic power stations on hand or in work to diversify the risk. It's basically the nuclear Pascal's wager. With a big risk like climate change, there's room for investors who choose to take an interest in nuclear. Fossil fuels still power the vast majority of the world. It's not yet clear that we're out of that woods. For instance, Japan just announced that they're building 33 new coal plants to replace their atomic power stations. How on earth does one reconcile this with the game-over-renewables-are-already-cheaper-than-everything popular narrative? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...
  - m0zg 7y ago
    If the climate change situation was really as dire as we're being told, we'd have nuclear coming out of our ears by now, and nothing whatsoever would be able to stop it. It doesn't have to be ultra-expensive if it's not bespoke every time you build it. The investment into fusion would also be 10x what it is today, and we'd already have a viable version of it, after a Manhattan-project style, do-or-die effort. What's puzzling to me is why the opposite seems to be happening: some parts of the world shut down completely carbon neutral stuff and build things that are going to emit gigatons of CO2 for decades to come. If we are to reach point of no return (or worse, have already reached it), the focus should be on building such an abundance of energy generation capacity that it would not only replace all carbon-emitting energy generation, but also help power atmospheric carbon capture at a scale that we'd need to avert the climate disaster.

_Microft 7y ago

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but would it have been possible to create products along the way that would have made enough money to have a longer or maybe even infinite runway? Would such an approach have flown with the VCs? I am thinking about something like creating an own ion source first, keep building and selling these and using the money to tackle the next problem. Then tackle the next problem. And so on. Two examples of different hard engineering problems being approached in different ways: Compare Blue Origin's and SpaceX' approach to developing reusable rockets. Blue Origin is financed by Mr. Bezos. If Bezos stopped that (certainly not intentionally but a bus factor of 1 is bad anyways), Blue Origin would be left with no sustainable business from what we can tell. I am convinced that in the worst case a defense contractor would happily buy in but for the company as a whole it might be over. SpaceX was developing reusable rockets by creating rockets (hard but not as hard as going directly to reusable rockets) first and selling services (that's even better than selling products) to customers to finance the development. They were even using already paid for rocket launches for their experimental landing attempts. That's a lot cheaper than having to pay multiple for a rocket just to see it blow up on landing (or reentry or sometime in between). The same could be said about Tesla, Waymo and self-driving. Waymo has to reach full self-driving (FSD) to start making money. If they fail, they company is dead or also needs to be sold. If Tesla fails to reach FSD? That would suck, they would have to pay back the customers who bought the FSD package early, maybe deal with a class-action lawsuit because of this and but they could carry on selling cars nevertheless.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Not to mention Tesla is a loss leader for battery manufacturing and power grid systems sales.