Startup Series: TAE Technologies
Today's guest is Harry Hamlin, actor, author, entrepreneur, and Founder/Secretary of TAE Technologies.
TAE Technologies (pronounced T-A-E) was founded in 1998 to develop commercial fusion power with the cleanest environmental profile, and represents the fastest, most practical, and economically competitive solution to bring abundant energy to the grid. With over 1100 issued patents, more than $880 million in private capital, six generations of National Laboratory-scale devices, and an experienced team of over 250 employees, TAE is now on the cusp of delivering this transformational energy source capable of sustaining the planet for centuries. The company’s revolutionary technologies have produced a robust portfolio of commercial innovations in other large adjacent markets such as power management, energy storage, transmission, electric mobility, life sciences, and more. TAE is based in California, and maintains international offices in the UK and Switzerland. Multidisciplinary and mission-driven by nature, TAE is leveraging proprietary science and engineering to create a bright future for us all.
In this episode, we cover Harry's unlikely path to becoming a climate tech entrepreneur, the origin story of TAE Technologies, their vision, progress and current stage, and a broader discussion about fusion, it's potential, the different approaches, and how far away we are from seeing commercial success.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter at @jjacobs22, @mcjpod, and @mcjcollective, and via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded March 16, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
How TAE Technologies’ founder Harry Hamlin became a climate entrepreneur alongside a successful acting career
TAE Technologies and how it operated in stealth for many years
The potential of nuclear fusion
TAE Technology’s particular approach to nuclear fusion
How the company raised significant capital over an extended period of time
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Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey Show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well.
So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing, there's four criteria we screen for: determination to tackle a problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better.
There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you wanna learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website and click the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Harry Hamlin. Now you probably know that Harry's an actor who is known for his role roles as Perseus in Clash of the Titans, as Michael Kuzak in the legal drama series L.A. Law, and for his recurring role on the drama series, Mad Men.
What you may not know is that Harry is also founder of a company called TAE Technologies, which was founded in 1998 to develop the ultimate clean energy solution, a commercial fusion power source that in their words is compact, cost effective, capable of sustaining the planet for centuries and safe in every way. Now I was excited for this episode for a number of reasons.
One, grew up watching movies like Clash of the Titans, two, fusion is such an important and controversial topic to cover 'cause on the one hand, people say it will forever be 10 years away. And on the other, if it works, it can be a big, big deal. And presumably it is getting closer and closer, but how close is it? At any rate, we dive into the origin story for TAE Technologies, what it is that drew Harry to the space in the first place, how he went from being an actor to founding a fusion technology company.
And we also talk about the journey of TAE, their progress to date, where they are on their trajectory, what the key proof points are left to solve, how their approach differs from other companies that are vying to make fusion technology work and also just the promise of fusion technology in general. Is it over hyped? Is it under hyped? How close are we? If it works, what does it mean for our world, what does it mean for addressing the problem of climate change? I really enjoyed this one and I hope you do as well. Harry, welcome to the show.
Harry Hamlin: Hi, how's it going?
Jason Jacobs: It's going well. I- I have to say I'm a little terrified to have this discussion because when I was a boy, I saw Clash of the Titans and I swear that- that Medusa still gives me nightmares. And when I was prepping for this, I didn't know at the time, 'cause I was a little kid that it was actually you that was holding Medusa's head up. But like I still have nightmares about that. [Laughs].
Harry Hamlin: Well, I hope they're not really bad nightmares and I hope you can get some sleep. But no, that was a long time ago. And yes, I did- I did throw Medusa's head into some body of water where it then killed the kraken I guess. So yeah, I have that in my memory bank.
Jason Jacobs: So that- that's how I know you. And then we got reacquainted when I was just sitting in front of my computer and I saw a new membership application for the MCJ member community and it was from Harry Hamlin and I was like, "Wait a minute. What the heck is this?" So of course, we reached out and had to learn more about why you care about climate change. And then the more we uncovered, the more it was like, "Oh wait." Like this is not a new like passing thing for you. You've actually been at this for quite some time and we just didn't know.
Harry Hamlin: Well, that's, you know, it's not something that I talk about in my other life, my public life, which is, you know, the movies and TV. You know, I keep that separate from this. And also the company that I started in 1998, which is now called TAE Technologies, we were in stealth mode for the first 19 years and I was not allowed to talk about it.
Jason Jacobs: [Laughs].
Harry Hamlin: And we were not allowed to publish, we were not all- So the scientists were not happy about it because these are some the greatest nuclear scientists and engineers in the world and of course they live to publish. And they were making some of the greatest discoveries the world has ever known when it comes to plasma physics and you know, advanced nuclear physics and yet they couldn't publish for 19 years. So and all of us had to zip it and keep our mouth shut for the first 19 years.
And then in- in August of 2015, we hit a very essential milestone and we figured that at that point, when we had the imprimatur of a- a science advisory committee that's comprised of Nobel laureates and Maxwell Prize winners, they keep us honest. And when they- when they saw this milestone that we hit in 2015, they said, "Okay, now you guys can come outta stealth mode because you're legitimate." And so we did. And within 45 minutes of our coming out, which was at a conference in August, Science Magazine had an article up about us within... took 45 minutes for that article to hit the airways. So was a-
Jason Jacobs: Amazing,
Harry Hamlin: That's my middle account of that involvement.
Jason Jacobs: Well, typically with these shows, we start by saying, well, let's take it from the top, tell me about the company and what it does, but I actually wanna start a different way this time. And the reason is that I told you a little bit before we started recording about my story, how I was focused on something different and then found myself at an inflection point where I could choose my next path, and I was super concerned about climate.
But I've only been at it for three and a half years and certainly have some imposter syndrome coming in having no training in this area prior. And seemingly, our journeys have a lot in common other- other than the famous actor part. And lots of people in our community are also in different phases of- of that journey, of trying to find their way and figure out where to anchor and how their skills can be most applied and how they can make a living doing it. So can you talk a little bit about, I guess, where did your passion for, or concern for the problem come from and where did the opportunity to be involved with it commercially come from and how did those end up intersecting?
Harry Hamlin: Well, there's a lot to unpack there. But in terms of climate change, I first heard about climate change in 1971. It was just a coincidence that I was living in a- in a fraternity house in Berkeley, at UC Berkeley and the kid who lived across the hall from me, came into my room one day kind of in a panic, holding a letter from his father. His father worked for the National Science Foundation, had been setting the ice sheets in Antarctica for years. And he wrote to his son that they had just discovered, his team had just discovered unequivocally that the world was on the brink of historic climate change. And they were able to identify that because of the- the changing ice caps in Antarctica.
And I- I... It's- it's a moment, you know, we have these moments in our life when we remember exactly where we were and what time it was when- when I heard that JFK had been shot, when I... the moon landing happened, you know, there's a lot of... 9/11, all these things that... You know, but that moment when I heard that the world was on the brink of historic climate change, it was kind of indelibly burned into my consciousness and I became obsessed with the- the idea that this could be happening and followed the whole evolution of the ecological awakening of- of our zeitgeist over the '70s and '80s.
And, you know, during the '70s, there was also that the oil crisis and we became aware of our dependence on foreign sources of oil. We became aware of, you know, how energy and our dependence on various sources of energy was compromising us. If- if- if somebody, for example, decided to turn off the juice, what would happen to us? And so that was a- a motivator to try and find a solution for our energy crisis at the time.
But then as time went on, we began to realize that climate really was changing and there really was... You know, it started kind of with the, our awareness about the ozone layer and how the ozone layer was being depleted in certain parts of the- the atmosphere and people came very aware of how that and hydrofluorocarbons had- had an effect on the environment. And people became more conscious of what human activity was doing to our environment.
You know, there was really no effective solution that was on the horizon. I mean, people were talking about solar panels back in the '70s, but not doing much about it. Certainly this wind turbine idea hadn't really been fleshed out and they hadn't- I had never seen any wind turbines until the '80s. But then in- in 1980, I was in living in Rome and I was at a cocktail party at the Swiss Consulate in February of 1980 when a gentleman came up to me in this party.
And he- he said that he was a nuclear physicist from Serbia, but he had a lab in Princeton, New Jersey, and he was working on a brand new way to make electricity that was absolutely clean and non-radioactive, and couldn't blow up, couldn't melt down and was basically taking Einstein's E=mc^2 and applying it to extracting energy from that. This guy so passionate about, you know, his project in Princeton and he- he just was infectious. And he asked if he could- he could have my address in LA and send me some stuff, some literature on what he was up to.
And I gave my address, I never thought I would hear from him again. And then when I got back to LA that spring, there was a big package from this guy and- and- and a bunch of published papers that he had worked on. And he invited me to come to his lab in Princeton but, you know, I was not that interested at the time to take him up on that. But then it so happened that I was asked to play Hamlet at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey in 1982. The production was a success and so my picture ended up on the front page of the Princeton paper.
And he saw my picture and he went, "Whoa, that's the guy I talked to in Rome, blah, blah, blah, blah." And he came to the theater and- and invited me to his lab, which was across town. I went and it was a big lab of all kinds of machines and stuff. And it- and people walking around with white lab coats, it was very impressive. But I still didn't understand a thing about what he was trying to accomplish, you know?
And- and he was working on a neutronic fusion using a helium-3 and deuterium as fuel. I didn't... I'm not a chemist, I didn't know what the heck those things were. But I did some research on it and I found out that- that deuterium is heavy hydrogen and that helium-3 is an isotope of helium that doesn't exist terrestrially, except in the very deep trenches of the deepest, uh, trenches in the ocean. But it's on the surface of the moon, it's everywhere. It's proliferate and [inaudible 00:11:51] on the moon. Anyway, this guy continued to sort of hound me all through the '80s. I went back and did another play there a couple years later, Faust and saw him again.
Jason Jacobs: Why you, do you think? Why was he so interested?
Harry Hamlin: Well, because I was interested. He was always coming at me with more information and I was always gobbling it up. I mean, I- I think a lot of people might have listened to his spiel and gone, "This guy is out of his mind. This is... It sounds like way too good to be true what he's talking about, the idea of being able to extract energy from matter without any deleterious side effects, you know, and create electricity that would power the world forever." Just seemed like, "Wait, that's just... it's way too good to be true." And I was by the way, skeptical for a long time.
Jason Jacobs: And before this guy came along, I mean, you mentioned that in the '70s, you- you became aware and quite concerned about what was happening to our climate. Did that then translate into starting to think about and do research on different solutions or was it mostly just kind of recessive concern while you were going about your- your regular Hollywood life?
Harry Hamlin: In the '70s, it was still recessive concern. You know what I mean? It... My career was just getting going so I was spending a lot of time, you know, working on memorizing lines and working on scripts, reading scripts and- and doing movies. So, yeah, it was kind of in the background until I heard this guy speak and then I connected those two dots in the room while he was talking. 'Cause he said, "This is the silver bullet for energy production and it's gonna... it's a way that the..."
And, uh, he was explaining that nuclear scientists had known since the beginning of the nuclear age, that fusion would ultimately be the way we derive our energy. It's just very, very difficult terrestrially to create a fusion reaction which is the same reaction that's going on in the sun, but it's not impossible. And nuclear scientists have known that it's not impossible, just very, very, very, very difficult to achieve.
And specifically what the approach that TAE is taking, which is non-radioactive, which is using fuels that are benign boron-11 and hydrogen, that that is a much, even much harder reaction to acquire. But it's the only one among the three ways that you can make fusion um, and terrestrially that are known, the only one that's non radioactive and that can be applied commercially without extraordinary innovations and materials going forward now. So when I heard this guy talk about it, it seemed to me like this guy was describing the silver bullet for all of our energy challenges, fossil fuels and everything.
Jason Jacobs: So it sounds like a lot of years went by between when you first heard about it and when you formally became involved and started putting your name and credibility and platform behind it. Did you have technical advisors that you trusted that helped you assess that this was for real before you took that step? But I know it was many years ago at this point, I'm ju- I'm just curious.
Harry Hamlin: Yeah, no, I did absolutely. I mean, I... this gentleman asked me to become a member of the board of directors of a company that he was forming. Once he moved- he moved his operation from Princeton to UCI, to Irvine, California, because he wanted to collaborate with the head of the physics department at UC Irvine. And I- I joined his board reluctantly 'cause I still thought I was quite skeptical about the whole thing. But I went to the first board meeting at UCI and he introduced me to my fellow board members.
And the first guy he introduced me to was a guy named Murray Gell-Mann, who I had known at the time had won the Nobel Prize for discovering the quark, the smallest constituent of matter. And then he introduced me to Glenn Seaborg, who I knew had won the Nobel Prize for discovering plutonium and who had run the Department of Energy under four presidents, was called the Atomic Energy Commission then. And Glenn Seaborg became kind of my mentor.
Glenn Seaborg was one of the greatest nuclear chemists in history of nuclear chemistry. And he ran the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and he and I became quite close, became good friends. And he- he was the one who inspired me to become a shepherd for this technology. And he said, you know, he said that I had a profile, I could get people on the phone, I could basically advocate for this in Washington DC and within the financial community and see if I could get some traction and see if maybe we could get some funding to get a- an experiment going, but it was Glenn Seaborg, Nobel laureate who inspired me to do it. And it ultimately inspired me to s- to start the company.
Jason Jacobs: And you mentioned that this seemed like a silver bullet. Before we get into fusion or TAE Technologies specifically, there's many that would say that given the interconnected systems nature of the problem, that there are no silver bullet solutions for climate change. Do you s- still believe that there are? And if so, it'd be great to understand how you think about that and what makes you believe it. I- I hope it's true, but it's different than what I've heard from a number of people so I wanted to ask you about it.
Harry Hamlin: It's a silver bullet for our energy production problems. It's not a silver bullet for climate change because there... as far as I know, there is no silver bullet for climate change. I mean, that train has left the station and it's inevitable given the self-fulfilling feedback loops, positive and negative that are out there right now that climate change will continue, there's no stopping it. They're mitigating factors and there's adaptation.
And this will help adapt because it will be a- an inexhaustible energy source that will allow human beings to adapt to what will be a very very different climate situation over the next few centuries and millennia. So adaptation is really the only way we can calm our nerves about it, to put it that way. I mean, it... I mean, we're screwed basically. There's no solution for climate change. I wish there was. Were we to be successful with this within the next 10 years, which is our- our hope and expectation, we're still 50 years, 75 years too late. Had we come up with this 75 years ago, yeah, we could have maybe turned the ship and not hit the iceberg. But unfortunately, we didn't do that and we are going to hit the iceberg.
Jason Jacobs: Putting aside again, fusion and TAE Technologies, if you just look at where we are with climate change and where we need to go, I mean, it- it sounds like your view is that- is that things are pretty dire regardless us of what we do. There's so many initiatives happening in so many different areas, not just in innovation, but in everything. What is your theory of change here? Like ho- how would you like to... Fusion aside, what do you think is our best path forwards as a species given where we sit and the problem that's in front of us?
Harry Hamlin: There's a lot to unpack there. I mean, global thermonuclear war aside, look, there's no solution to climate change. The IPCC said that three years ago said we had 11 years to become carbon neutral, or... And that was... There's no chance that that's gonna happen. You know, that was three years ago. They said, you know, we- we had 11 years left. So yeah, it is pretty bleak. I- I wish I could say, "Oh, there's a- there's a grand solution for all of this," but there isn't for the, you know, the species.
I mean, this is an existential moment because the- the climate during human history recorded human history has been relatively stable until now and now we're gonna see a climate that's gonna be changing rapidly and more rapidly as it becomes more rapid. It's just one of those feedback loops. So, you know, the best thing we can do is do all the things we are doing now and accelerate those things, redouble our efforts to do all the things we're doing now.
And, you know, if you add fusion into the mix or who knows, there may be other energy solutions out there, they're just as robust as fusion will be down the line. I mean, you know, the reason that I'm focused on fusion and you know, this kind of nuclear energy, which is completely benign nuclear energy, not- not radioactive nuclear, the reason I'm focused on it, because we- we need a base load source of power.
We need power that can- that can smelt steel, power that can make aluminum, power that can drive our- our industries as we go forward. And as the world develops and underdeveloped nations develop, we're gonna need, you know, many, many, many terra, whatever they are, joules of power over the next millennium. And it, you know, there's only one way to get that much power, and that's to burn all the fossil fuels we're gonna find, you- you know, over the next hundred or a thousand years, or we find another power source, we find another way.
'Cause you know, unfortunately the renewables that we have now, which are great, I mean, and my whole home for example, is off the grid, from a residential point of view, all of that stuff, photovoltaics and everything is great, but there's never gonna be enough renewable energy to smelt the kind of steel that needs to be smelted, to drive the kind of heavy industries that need to be driven in order to develop the developing nation. So we need this new power source, whatever it might be. I'm just have... I'm focused on this one because I believe and I have believed for many decades that- that fusion is the answer to a lot of our problems, that I'm not alone at believing that.
Jason Jacobs: And if it's too late, why bother to try?
Harry Hamlin: Well, because that's what we do. You know, human beings meet problems and challenges head on, always have and always will. And we will not give up. We will find a way to adapt to this. And it's gonna require a lot of power to do that, more power than we have right now, more electricity than we have available now. It's gonna, you know... We're gonna need a huge energy source in order to get through this. And it's not gonna be, you know, it's not gonna happen quickly. It's gonna take, you know, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years.
I mean, the last ice age was what, 15, 18,000 years ago or something like that? I don't know the exact date, but it... You know, there are cities that we have in this country that were covered by, you know, thousands of feet of ice, 18,000. That's gonna happen again. So how do you deal with that? Human beings will deal with it. We'll figure out a way. We're not gonna give up and just roll over and die and hibernate. We're gonna figure out how to deal with it and you know, we're gonna need a tremendous amount of power to do that.
Jason Jacobs: And it- it sounds like at this point, you... And correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're much better versed on the whole holistic picture of the problem of climate change and the potential solutions across the spectrum to get us out of this. And while you are focused on one, it sounds like you have a much better sense today than when you first signed on with TAE about how that one fits into the big picture. I guess my- my question is when you picked fusion way back when, you didn't have that context. Was there any point along the way where you... given that you are so climate motivated, whether you questioned that fusion is the best place for you to have the biggest impact on helping us out of this pickle?
Harry Hamlin: Well, I- I did. I decided back in the early '90s that fusion was what I- that was where I was gonna focus. And now, you know, I wasn't- I wasn't coming out of a vacuum with that. I mean, Glenn Seaborg, one of the greatest nuclear scientists of all time was fully backing this. And now we have Ernest Moniz who was the secretary of energy under Obama who is on the board. We have Jeff Immelt who ran General Electric for many years is on our board. And it's a very robust board of- of advisors and also investors. And so I don't think I made the wrong choice.
I mean, I- I've focused my entire sort of non-acting life on this and on- on fusion, and there's a reason for that. And that's having looked at all of the different approaches to fusion in which there are several. This one, which is use- using benign fuels and, you know, ultimately when we get to fusion, we will be able to get their orders of magnitude cheaper than the other ways that are being explored right now. For example, tokamak, which is the Russian acronym for a toroidal approach to this kind of magnetic fusion.
Tokamak uses deuterium and tritium as fuel. And it's much easier to get to fusion using deuterium and tritium, but the only issue that is not really being discussed is that that fusion reaction will create what are called 14 megaelectron volt neutrons, or MeV neutrons. Now 14 MeV neutrons when exposed to any material that we know of terrestrially right now, for any length of time will degrade that material and it will become weak and have to be discarded.
So until they figure out the materials problem with deuterium tritium fusion, it's gonna be a very difficult road to get it to commercialization because these devices cost billions of dollars and they would have to be destroyed every couple of years buried and new ones built. Until they've come up with a solution to the materials problem, that's gonna be an issue that they're gonna have to contend with. I chose this approach because even though it's harder to get to, when- when we get to it, it will be easy to commercialize.
Here's a little anecdote that- that chief scientist, guy named Norman Rostoker. He... this is his idea, his approach to fusion, very unique approach, very different from anything anybody else is doing on the planet. He always said that the tokamak fusion or the kind that our US government is backing and the Russian government and the Chinese government, all the big governments are backing this other approach, which is deuterium tritium, he said they have a 99% chance of getting to fusion, but a 1% chance of getting to market. Whereas we have a 99% chance of getting to market and a 1% chance of getting to fusion. That's how he put it 23 years ago.
Well, so now 23 years has gone by, and we're now still 99% chance of getting to market, but we're now at maybe 70% chance of getting to fusion after 23 years of R&D. So I don't think it's been a waste of time for the last 30 years to be focusing on this and I- I honestly believe that- that somebody will get to fusion where if it's not- if it's not what we're doing, somebody will get to it and ul- ultimately fusion will be commercialized and will be the way we get our electricity for the next thousand years.
Jason Jacobs: I'm gonna oversimplify and there's kind of... You know, 'cause the caveat here is I don't have a lot of experience with- with fusion and- and don't pretend to, but there's kind of four buckets of perspectives that I've heard. And again, I'm gonna oversimplify for- for sake of discussion. But one camp let's call it, is it's the biggest, most important thing we could possibly do. And we have to do it and we're gonna put all our guns behind it and yeah, we should do all these other things. But like if this works, it'll be amazing, right?
And then another camp says, well look, all that's true, but it's gonna be 10 years out forever. And another camp says, look, that may be true, but it's- it's not a climate solution 'cause it's not gonna happen in time. And then another camp, you know, probably says it's a waste of time, right? And I'm just coming in, you know, trying to sort through all these different perspectives. And I guess why is fusion so controversial, do you think?
Harry Hamlin: Fusion is controversial the way nuclear energy is controversial 'cause nuclear, you know, carries with it the baggage of like Three Mile Island and Fukushima. I mean, all these different disasters that we've heard of, Chernobyl, these things that they come along with the whole idea of nuclear. So... But fusion, and particularly the fusion that I'm backing is completely different from nuclear efficient and completely different from the other fusion approaches, which are radioactive.
If I could articulate, you know, how benign this is, it can't blow up it can't melt down. It can only stop if there's an earthquake or an attack or anything like that. And there's no radioactive material involved, so there's no meltdown potential and there's no dirty bomb potential if the thing gets bombed because there's nothing radioactive about it.
So if I could get that point across and people would understand that, that you could put a reactor, a power plant next to a kindergarten and it wouldn't be a problem, then I think people will... it'll be less controversial and people will understand that it's a- a very benign way to use E=mc^2 to extract energy from matter, which is E=mc^2 is energy equals the mass of an a- the resting mass of an object times the speed of light squared, which is a huge number.
I mean, that means that here's our little logo for our company, for TAE. It's a flying pig. Because to your point about it, fusion always being 10 years away, people have said fusion is- will only happen when pigs fly and it's always 30 years away. Well, we've been doing this for 24 years now. So if fusion is 30 years away, then we're six years away from- from fusion, which I believe we are. The milestones that we've hit are significant and they point us in the right direction.
We have a- a group of Nobel laureates and Maxwell Prize winners who keep us honest, who come twice a year and look at what we're doing. And they have also given us the go ahead and they've said, "You're- you're right on track and we believe you can do this." So hopefully we can take the cur off of fusion and off of nuclear energy going forward because by the way, even fission, which is nuclear, which is radioactive, but still is- doesn't produce CO2. And so we're looking for a solution for energy that doesn't produce CO2 that could help mitigate... You know, fission is also potential option.
Jason Jacobs: And you said that- that there is no silver bullet for climate change and that fusion can address the power generation piece. So if fusion is successful, what's the upside case look like as relates to climate change? Like where do we sit without it and then where would we sit with it? And it'd be great to just understand in the language that a non fusion person could understand what success could look like for all of us.
Harry Hamlin: I mean, if we are able to achieve fusion, particularly with this approach, which is non radioactive and you know, we can get these power plants built and out, and- and our approach, which is linear is a much less expensive way to make power plants than it would be to use the tokamak orders of magnitude cheaper. The impact will be, you know, extraordinarily positive for the world. I mean, it... I don't foresee, you know, the world shifting over to exclusively fusion energy for quite some time.
I mean, e- even if we're successful, it's gonna take decades to get, you know, other countries involved and to get these things out there and to start making power without burning fossil fuels globally. But that will happen eventually. I mean, if we're successful and in success, there will be a transfer. It'll be- it'll take decades but and generations, but eventually all electricity will be made using either renewable energy, you know, photovoltaics, hydroelectric, or wind, or it will be fusion or fission 'cause there are- there are next generation fission plants that are being built around the world that will provide power without CO2, at least.
Jason Jacobs: And I- I wanna pick up on a few, just time horizons that we've talked about in this discussion. So you said that the IPCC has said that we've got 10 years and you also said that this is gonna take decades in best case. And you also said that it'll be our source of energy for the next a thousand years, but you also said it's too late. So I'd just love to unpack that a little bit.
Like how do you think about that 10 years? Do we hit a wall? Is it catastrophic tipping points? Like what happens if we're- if we're beyond the 10 years? And do you think that timeline is a real timeline or an artificial one? And then secondarily, can something that takes decades be a climate solution? And can we have a next thousand years if it's too late? Like so take those in any order and sorry to jumble three or four questions together.
Harry Hamlin: The thing about the fact that climate change is- is inevitable and the train has left the station, all of that. I mean, what we're seeing and what we knew would happen and Al Gore wrote about it very well in his first book, is that, you know, the- the- there are these feedback loops that are inevitable. I mean, as the ice caps melt, less sunlight is reflected back into space, more is absorbed by the earth, the earth gets warmer, melts more ice. I mean that's one feedback loop.
And then there's a feedback loop involving fresh water going into the North Atlantic and that- that causing the currents to change globally, which will also create another feedback loop. I mean, it's- it is inevitable as the permafrost begins to melt in Siberia, the more methane that goes into the atmosphere, the more global warming we have, the more permafrost melts, the more methane. I mean, it just goes like that. There's no stopping that. And there are a lot of people who are coming up with interesting solutions.
There's one company that I've been following who is making tiny little white balls that they want to put into the North Atlantic and to reflect the sunlight back into the- into space. There's a lot of solutions that are... people are coming with interesting ideas like that, but I don't think any of those ideas will ultimately stop climate change. I wish it would. So what fusion will do is allow us to adapt and it will make it easier to adapt. Though I don't see people stopping burning fossil fuels anytime soon, I wish they would, but you know, I just don't see that happening, I think it's gonna keep on going.
And in terms of the timeline that the IPCC said 11 years, and that was three years ago, you know, what will happen is there will be an inevitable rise in sea level, there will be these bigger storms, there will be, you know, bigger adverse weather events all over the world, there'll be migrations, there'll be people migrating because of drought because of the, you know, the inevitability of, you know, bread baskets basically drying up. There's a lot of things that are gonna happen. And yeah, and we're too late. But if we have... we had an in exhaustible energy source, we could do a lot to mitigate that and to help ourselves get through it easier. Kind of wish there was more positive. I wish you can say some stuff that said, you know, we're- we're gonna be fine, but we're not.
Jason Jacobs: And for those that hear the IPCC report and say that well, yeah, like we should work on fusion, but let's not kid ourselves and call it a climate solution 'cause it'll take too long, what's your response?
Harry Hamlin: Well, just because it takes long doesn't mean you stop. We have to keep chasing whatever possible solutions are out there. We can't just not. I mean, that's what... When I first found out about this just 30 years ago or more, you know, I was like a dog with a bone. You can't just walk away from a potential solution or a potential mitigating factor like this, something that could be this impactful in the world.
You can't just go, "Oh well, I'll let somebody else do that," you know? And that's why I had to start this company. I started it because if I didn't start it, no one else would start it. And I knew that if- if I didn't step up and we didn't actually put our money where our mouth is, that this idea that Norman Rostoker had would just have died with him. No one would ever know whether it was true or not what he was thinking.
Jason Jacobs: So I don't know how many of them knew about it at the time, but what did your- your Hollywood peers think about you starting this company back when you initially did it?
Harry Hamlin: I didn't tell anybody. Well, first of all, we needed to raise some money. We needed to raise... I mean, we've raised about a billion dollars so far. So we needed to raise a lot of money. And I knew that if it was known that an actor had started this company and not a scientist, not an entrepreneur, not a... you know, that the optics of that would not be helpful when it comes to going to big banks and raising money or going to big...
You know, we went to NEA early on, New Enterprise Associates. And you know, now they're aware that I'm the founder of the company, now they're... I've never missed a board meeting in 24 years. And they- they go, "What's this actor doing in the board meetings?" And they've, you know, finally realized that, well, I was the guy who started the company, but I didn't want to have my name at the top of the... on it because I went- I went, "Wait a minute, people are gonna go, 'That's weird. Well, why would I write a check for $5 million to a company started by an actor, works on TV?'" You know, I mean...
So I- I really kind of took myself out of it just so that those questions wouldn't come up because they were inevitable to come up. And so now, you know, it's been- it's been... Since we came out of stealth mode in 2015, you know, I've talked about it, I've discussed it in interviews and things like that. And I did a TED Talk on it and just think about it. I mean, I'm going to go to Goldman Sachs and ask them to write a check for $50 million and they- they're gonna say, "Well, but who are you, you know, to be behind something like this?" So I just, I thought it was prudent to do that.
Jason Jacobs: And if you worried about the optics externally, what gave you the internal fortitude to proceed? Like did you... Were any of those conc- the concerns that you anticipated externally, did you wrestle with those internally about whether there's validity to those concerns about an actor starting a fusion company?
Harry Hamlin: I don't know if there's validity to the concerns. For me, it was like- like, "Wait a minute." If I was- if I was on the other side of this desk and someone was asking me to write a check for a fusion, I would want to be looking at the scientist who's behind it, or the engineers who were behind it, or the academicians who were behind it, you know, or the venture capitalists who were behind it, you know? And- and so having me be the front person, it just didn't seem like... And I was right by the way. We raised a billion dollars and we raised most of it without people knowing that I started the company. So I don't think I was wrong.
Jason Jacobs: And I know you've been at this a long time, so it's not like we wanna start from page one and go through the- the granular detail of the company history. But if you had to do kind of the cliff notes version just by- by chapter or by key milestone or whatever the- the easiest way is to kind of thumb- thumb through it, I mean, what are some of the key inflection points that the company's had over the last decades and where are you today?
Harry Hamlin: Well, the- the first inflection point which was when I had the idea for us to actually start our own company, that I was co-chairman of the board of advisors with Glenn Seaborg, who was the guy who won the Nobel Prize for discovering plutonium. So Glenn and I were chairman of the advisory committee prior to starting this company. We were looking for funders. We were looking for people who would come in and write a big check and get the license from the university and- and have Norman's work see the light of day.
And I was tasked with- with that, with finding these people, getting funding. And I interviewed people, and there were a couple of people who wanted to write big checks and, but we couldn't vet them at the university, they were people who had been disbarred from their... as lawyers or whatever. They were not vettable. So it became clear to me in December of 1997 when we were having a big meeting in Florida about their technology. And I was the chairman of the committee, became ap- apparent to me that there was no way we were gonna get any funding from any reputable source, that there was no appetite out there for this technology anywhere.
I'd already talked to billionaires, I've been to banks, I've been to Capitol Hill, I've been... Uh, I talked my ear off, people's ears off for years at that point and knew that- that this was gonna die if we didn't do it ourselves. And so I- I told the group at that meeting that we should start our own company and they all said I was outta my mind. They said it was crazy. There was a ragtag group of advisors who didn't really know each other and why would we get together and start a company?
And my argument was only that if we didn't do it ourselves, we would have a less than zero chance of ever seeing the light of day of seeing- of this technology ever getting out into the public arena. But if we did start our own company and we did get the license ourselves, we would have at least a greater than zero chance of this thing seeing the light of day. And that was really the only position that I could support. And I lobbied for that and ultimately one of the board members came around and said, "Okay, let's do it." And we started the company in April, 1998. So yeah, it was a thousand dollar check that I wrote out of our joint account at home. My wife said, "What are you doing writing a thousand dollar check to this company?" Anyway.
Jason Jacobs: And if you look at that almost billion dollars in funding that you have brought in, I mean, was that over many rou- Like was it a slow drip or was it a big bang? Did most of it come in in the, you know, in the more recent years? Like how did that come about and what were the sources of th- of that capital to the extent that that's information that you're comfortable sharing?
Harry Hamlin: You know, absolutely. 'Cause at first it was friends and family. It was just myself and a businessman named George Sealey and a good friend of mine, Andy Conrad, who lived next to me at my home in Malibu. And Andy now runs a company called, or a division of Alphabet called Verily, which is their life sciences division. And Andy, I asked Andy to come on board and help us make the deal with the university to get the license, 'cause I didn't know how to do that and nor did George Sealey.
But it became ap- apparent that we had to start our own company, and ultimately we did. And it was I think friends and family at first, George Sealey was able to get a man named from the Eden family in Canada to give us $500,000, which got us going, got our experiment going. And the first experiment was just with a piece of fiberglass sewer pipe because we couldn't afford anything else. And then couple years later, I think in- in 2000 maybe, Paul Allen was looking around for a private- privately funded fusion company and he- he hired a guy to go all around the world looking at different companies.
And the guy finally was giving up and he said, "I- I haven't found anything worth looking into." And kind of just before he was gonna give up, he discovered us. And he went to Paul Allen at Vulcan and he said, "You should invest in this." And so having Paul invest a million dollars, that gave us a certain imprimatur that we didn't have before. And then New Enterprise Associates, you mentioned NEA, they sent Nobel laureate, Arno Penzias who discovered the background radiation that proved the Big Bang.
Arno was working for NEA. And Arno came down and did his due diligence over a few weeks, went back to NEA and said to them that what he had discovered, what he had seen was the greatest discovery for energy since fire. Those were his exact words. So he got NEA to invest. And Arno has said you can use that quote from here to kingdom come, because he believed that after looking at the technology, that this was the greatest discovery for energy since fire. So that was kind of how that happened. Once the NEA got in, then- then the floodgates open and people... And s- it hasn't been... Not like, you know, with Commonwealth fusion, they got an- an infusion of like $1.8 billion over a two day period or something. This has been, you know, every year we're fighting for more funding.
Jason Jacobs: All equity?
Harry Hamlin: All equity, yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Given the risk profile and the time horizons associated with a problem like this, like other people that are starting down the path now, what type of capital do you think is the best source for this? And- and do you think that one can invest in equity rounds in businesses like this without a concessionary or an impact driven lens to that investment?
Harry Hamlin: No, absolutely. I mean, most of our investors are, you know, ESG aware. We haven't had any who have swapped and so we have to have liquidity event. That they all believe that this is one of the greatest investments they've made, you know, in their investment life.
Jason Jacobs: Financially or for the collective good?
Harry Hamlin: Both. They see that, you know, in terms of the payout down the line, because it's a, you know, definitely a trillion dollar business, that it's definitely worth making that investment. However, there's a whole new thing that's happened that I've- I have to bring up, and that is that this is a moonshot. It started as a moonshot in 1998 and our engineers and scientists, which are some of the best in the world when it comes to nuclear science and engineering have over the last 24 years had to invent new processes and new widgets and new things to apply to this new paradigm the same way when during the space program, people had to invent new things.
So we have now a division of the company that is only exploiting patents that we have already adjudicated and applying them in e- in entirely different ways out there in the world. For example, we have one division of the company which is life sciences where we have a brand new approach to, you know, cancer therapy called BNCT, or boron neutron capture therapy, where we can cure head and neck tumors in a matter of 45 minutes to an hour using this new technology. That's one avenue.
But we also have an- a division called power management. And we're- what we are as a company that deals with electrons, we're an electron management company. And fusion is one way to create electrons through the fusion process, but also we've created all these new ways to manage electrons that no one has ever had to create before in the world. So we can manage the grid in a way that's much more efficient than any grid management that's going on today. We- we have an electric car platform that is much more efficient than a Tesla, which I drive.
We have new storage and battery regimes that are much more efficient than the batteries that are out there now. We have charging regimes that are orders of magnitude faster in charging and sustaining the life- life cycle of a battery and even bring batteries like Tesla batteries into second use. So we've got a whole new different de-risk situation going on in the company because that's... All of those bits and pieces that are part of power management division, those are all on the shelf already. Those are fully baked, out of the oven and ready to go to retail.
Jason Jacobs: And is the job of those to bring in revenue to buy time to get to the big vision or do you envision that ultimately these could spin out into standalone companies themselves?
Harry Hamlin: It's a little bit of both right now, but definitely they can spin out into companies by themselves. The life science is actually is its own company, but the power management division is still part of the main company. But, you know, yeah, it's that revenue that will be coming in from power management will help finance the next two generations of machines for the fusion though, we... our financing is fine. I mean, we've- we're disclosing a big round right now that will finance the next iteration all the way through so that's not an issue for us at the moment.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And so for the machine and for getting the fusion to be truly commercialized, where do you sit today and what needs to happen between now and making that so? Like walk us through that path from here.
Harry Hamlin: Well, there were two major milestones that we had to hit in order to proceed, and we knew that. And if we didn't hit those milestones, it was a game over, you know, it was binary. Well, one of the last milestones is this one here, I don't know if that's readable or not, but this was the Norman milestone, which was hot enough. The first milestone, which happened in 2015 was long enough. So we knew that given the parameters of the machines that we had, that we could scale up from the milestone.
We knew that once we were able to run it for a certain amount of time in steady state, we knew that we could then scale it up. That was long enough, that was 2015. Then in 2019, we hit hot enough. We now know that we can get to the temperatures required within the context of our environment that we've created to actually get boron-11 and hydrogen to fuse. We've proven that.
So now it's a matter of scaling and the next iteration, the next machine, which is we call Copernicus, which is in development right now and will be up and running within the next 24 months, that machine will prove that we can get net energy out, that we can actually get to fusion. And once we have that machine, the final machine is called DaVinci and that machine is already on the drawing boards. And that final machine will actually be a prototype power plant. And that will be built by 2028, 2029 and up and running.
Jason Jacobs: And what are the key elements that need to be proved between Copernicus and DaVinci?
Harry Hamlin: What's the matter of scaling? Thank God we have Google. And Google has helped us to figure out how to scale because they're using machine learning and they're using their algorithms to point us in the right direction so that we know when we start to scale up, they'll be able to help us fine tune the machine so that we can scale in the most efficient way possible. But, you know, given the simulations that have already been done by Google and other people doing simulations, we're pretty convinced that we're gonna get there.
So I mean, it's a scaling issue. It's not a materials issue 'cause we don't... Our materials, you know, we don't... For example, CFS, the Commonwealth Fusion Systems, they're using these what they call high energy magnets, which are really not very high energy, they're still really cold. But they're not close to absolute zero like the other super conducting magnets they were using in the past.
Those operate at something like, you know, somewhere between 10 and 20 Tesla. I think I- I'm not a- a magnet scientist. But I know that- that our regime requires much less of a magnetic field, so like in- in the range of one to five Teslas, as- as opposed to... So we don't have to have as big magnets. We don't have to use those gigantic magnets that they have to use. Their magnets are- are, you know, really an interesting component because they're these "high temperature magnets". But they use a kind of tape called HTS tape. And that tape is made in 350 meter chunks in order to maintain quality.
And the final iteration of Commonwealth fusions project, which is a, I think it's called ARC, the final machine will require 27,000 kilometers of this tape. And that's kind of not a story, it's being told by them. But like how are they gonna get 27,000 kilometers of this tape? That's actually the- the main source of the tape at the moment is from Russia. And that's gonna be a geopolitical issue. I don't wanna get too much into the- the differences between us and the other approaches, but our approach is just gonna be much, much cheaper and much more elegant if we can make it work.
Jason Jacobs: And if you look at the factors that are outside of your control, if you could change one of those that would be most impactful on accelerating your efforts, what would you change and how would you change it?
Harry Hamlin: Well, if it's outside of our control, it's outside of our control. Can you be more specific about what you're thinking about there?
Jason Jacobs: Sure. If you had a magic wand and you could change anything outside of your control. So it could be a policy thing, it could be a consumer behavior thing, it could be a NIMBY thing, it could be anything that would most accelerate your effort. So in other words, not a- a TAE specific thing, but an external factor and you had a magic wand superpower so you could change anything, what would you change?
Harry Hamlin: Well, I would think I would change attitudes. I would change the attitude of the constituents out there who are using electricity on a daily basis and get to have them understand, you know, what electricity is, where it comes from, you know, how we use it, how we need to be more efficient using it and that, you know, climate change is real. Uh, you know, the attitude that climate change is not real is one of the most destructive of all the things going on out there.
Jason Jacobs: And by constituents, do you mean citizens, regular people that are in their houses flicking, you know, turning lights on, turning their stoves on, things like that? And so if you did change their attitu- You know, if you were able to wave your magic wand and their attitude changed and they were more aware of climate change and more concerned about efficiency, how does that help bring TAE Technologies' offerings to market faster?
Harry Hamlin: Well, I'm not sure that it has that much effect on TAE, but it would certainly have an effect on in terms of efficiency, on, you know, how we use electricity, how we save electric, how we don't waste electricity and... But in terms of TAE, certainly if the attitude was okay, we need to get off of fossil fuels, we need- we need to do whatever we can to mitigate climate change, if that was the prevailing attitude out there, and I- and I think it is to a large degree. But if it was really the prevailing attitude, then I would see that efforts like ours, like TAE or Commonwealth Fusion or Helion Fusion, or General Fusion, or any of the solutions out there that have to do with new energy production, whether it's hydrogen fuel cells or whatever, all of those things would have much greater acceptance and probably get to market much faster.
Jason Jacobs: And for anyone out there who's inspired by your work, how can we be helpful to you and- and TAE? Is there anybody that you wanna hear from, or any other parting words that you'd like to convey to listeners?
Harry Hamlin: Well, I mean, yeah, sure. The idea that we are on the cusp of finding new energy sources and- and we are. I mean, the... Look, within the last 30 years photovoltaics have become kind of a daily thing. I mean, it's a... To have solar panels on your roof is not a big deal anymore, people are doing it all the time. You know, when you're driving along the interstates and you see wind farms, that's become a thing. I mean, it's okay. We accept that now. And I'm just hoping that we can accept nuclear energy whether it's fission or fusion on our way to becoming carbon neutral.
Because fission, you know, of course doesn't create CO2, but does create nuclear waste. And another thing that we can do at TAE is we can actually help to mitigate that nuclear waste using the same architecture that we have already created. We can actually emasculate a lot of the nuclear waste that's, uh, that's out there right now. That's down the road though. We have deals with France and- and Hungary right now to help mitigate their nuclear waste problems over time.
But that's another thing altogether. That's another one of the... That's a kind of an ancillary project that's come out of the 24 years of R&D. But I, you know, I think that we are positioned as humans right now to find a solution. We are positioned right now barring any geopolitical catastrophe that has nothing to do with climate change. I'm very hopeful and very optimistic that we are going to find the solutions that give us the opportunity to mitigate climate change and also to adapt to it over time.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Well, Harry, I feel like we could have gone another two hours, but I've already kept you enough. This was such an amazing, comprehensive discussion. And I appreciate you coming on the show and- and wishing you and the whole TAE Technologies team best of luck in your important work.
Harry Hamlin: Well, thank you very much. And my fingers are crossed. I'm- I'm confident that we're gonna do it, and if we don't do it, someone else will.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note that is .co not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter at Jjacobs22 where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers may be say that. Thank you.
