WEBVTT

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Mark Kushner: Welcome to today's, MIPSE seminar. We're very pleased to have Dr. Alison, who's, here from Eczema Energy Corporation. Her background, it's actually she started, well, I guess in…

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Mark Kushner: Price.

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Mark Kushner: here at the University of Michigan, doing your Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Engineering, before you moved to the University of Rochester to do your PhD. Then she moved to, for her doctoral work.

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Mark Kushner: In understanding alpha particle heating and ignition, she earned the Rosenbluth Award for Excellence in Plasma Visits. She then went on to work as a staff scientist in the International Confinement Fusion Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During that really important period where they,

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Mark Kushner: First achieved, ignition.

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Mark Kushner: She then has moved to join Eczema, Eczema Energy Corporation, and she leads the Target Design Program, which I think you'll tell us about today. Before you begin, I've got a couple of things to present to you. The first is the famous MIPSE mug.

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Mark Kushner: I don't know if you, have seen this before, but this, everything's been festive.

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Mark Kushner: We are also, very pleased to say that you are the Early Career Award, winner this year, and you get this lovely little plaque. Thank you!

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Mark Kushner: a little thing for it to go in. Perfect.

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Mark Kushner: So, do you all hear me okay?

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, thank you. This is such an honor to come here and come back. It makes me feel a little bit old, but… because it's been almost 15 years since I started at the university, but I actually…

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Mark Kushner: Part of my interest in plasma physics also happened because I attended MIPSE Seminars 15 years ago as an undergrad student here, so this program has been happening for a long time, and I'm happy to see that it is clearly still thriving with a lot of interest.

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Mark Kushner: So today, I will talk to you about XMR's approach to IFE. So, I oversee our target and implosion physics program there, so I…

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Mark Kushner: I'm always biased to emphasize that a little bit more, but Eximer, we are an inertial fusion energy company,

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Mark Kushner: from the first, and our main objective is to, right, build and design a nuclear power plant and sell electrons on the grid for a reasonable dollars per megawatt. That's the parent goal that we are all working towards.

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Mark Kushner: And so, I'll start out my talk by introducing you all a little bit to inertial fusion. The field, it was not always designed to be for fusion energy. Historically, a lot of the origins of inertial fusion were for the defense sector, but there's always been sort of dual applications of this technology, and for me, like, in my career, it's really exciting to be able to pursue the energy side.

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Mark Kushner: Which particularly became possible after the NIF achieved ignition.

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Mark Kushner: And then I will introduce you to eczemer and our roadmap to electrons on the grid.

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Mark Kushner: So…

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Mark Kushner: And these are some introductory slides, so I don't know how… I'm not assuming that you are all familiar with inertial fusion, but I learned about it as a student here, actually, so I think… I did nuclear engineering as a major because I wanted to do an engineering major that would let me take business classes, and I learned that

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Mark Kushner: blowing things up with lasers was an actual profession that people got paid to do, so I ended up finishing my degree, I… I worked in John Foster's lab, I worked with Alec Thomas for a semester, and then I went to the University of Rochester specifically because they train students to do laser fusion. Like, very specifically, they trained students to do that, so that made sense to me.

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Mark Kushner: And I figured, okay, if I go to…

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Mark Kushner: you know, I have a degree in nuclear engineering, I get a PhD at Rochester, then I can get a job at NIF, and that was the goal.

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Mark Kushner: So that happened, I got a job at NIF, then they got Ignition, and then you… you realize that, well.

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Mark Kushner: they don't really shoot enough experiments, so you don't really have a way to iterate on the design, and all of a sudden, there's this huge opportunity to raise money to pursue a fusion company. And so that's how I ended up in my current role at Eximer.

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Mark Kushner: But… All initial confinement fusion concepts, they solve the same equation, so…

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Mark Kushner: The term ICF, it often does mean using laser fusion to do nuclear weapons research, historically.

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Mark Kushner: But if you just look at the physics concept itself, right, you can use ICF also for power generation. And just to remove ambiguity and acronyms, like, when I use ICF, I'm just talking about doing laser fusion for whatever application it is.

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Mark Kushner: IFV typically means inertial Fusion Energy, and that refers to doing laser fusion to make electrons on the grid.

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Mark Kushner: So

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Mark Kushner: In a nutshell, you have a driver, so the driver is a huge part of the equation, and it is the most expensive part of building a facility. Well, okay, the first part is the building, then you have the laser, but maturing the laser is a huge deal, and so this is just a simple schematic, right, of the laser bay, switchyard targets, and…

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Mark Kushner: there's many different schemes for doing laser fusion. I think I initially made this slide for investors, because in indirect drive, you have a whole ROM,

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Mark Kushner: And you have to couple it to a target, so you can either put the laser on target, that's direct drive, or you can put it in a whole ROM, convert it into X-rays, and have that coupled to target. You might wonder why you even bother with a whole ROM? And the short answer is that, for those of you who are familiar with lasers, the laser profiles are often very, very

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Mark Kushner: Brummi. And so, when you put that onto a target directly, bad things happen. You cannot create a stable plasma. X-rays help with that, but it comes with a trait that you lose 90% of your energy converting laser energy into X-rays.

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Mark Kushner: Then you have to compress the field, so you absorb x-rays, or you could absorb direct radiation. You compress the field.

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Mark Kushner: It's a… it's a spherical rocket. So, we have a process, collisional absorption, where the laser enters the plasma, electrons oscillate, they collide with each other, and you heat it up.

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Mark Kushner: And what happens when you have an expanding hot surface? It expands, and the rest of the field has to implode inward. It's the rocket effect to conserve momentum.

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Mark Kushner: So, we use that to create what we call an implosion, and this is the process that allows us to compress a capsule to very, very high densities and very high pressures and hot temperatures, right? And provided you get the right densities, pressures, and confinement time, then you get fusion yield output and game.

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Mark Kushner: And there's different ways to do ICF, and to be fair to my friends in Pulse Power, you don't have to have a laser. I mean, they actually do use lasers, but you can also drive it directly with magnetic fields.

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Mark Kushner: And to be fair to the Pulse Power friends, right, technically they are doing inertial confinement fusion, they're just driving it using occurrence instead of with a laser.

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Mark Kushner: But every ICM architecture trades off how efficiently it moves through these steps, right? So with direct and indirect drive, you have the whole ROM, you're trading off energy coupling and stability.

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Mark Kushner: Actually, if you have current drive, you, you do lose a lot in cylindrical compression because it's not as efficient, but you don't have, like, the 90% loss from the rocket efficiency, so there are kind of a lot of nuances when you're comparing different ICF architectures.

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Mark Kushner: And…

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Mark Kushner: And I will focus on laser fusion. So, high-energy laser facilities in the U.S, they compress materials for all sorts of applications, and…

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Mark Kushner: There's only two facilities in the world that do that. Pretty soon there will be three, because eczema will build one. But when I… certainly when I'm a student, and I'm thinking that I want to do laser fusion, there is two options. I can either go to a national lab and try to find an advisor and navigate that whole situation.

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Mark Kushner: Which was not straightforward.

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Mark Kushner: Or you can go to the University of Rochester, so they have the Omega Laser Facility.

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Mark Kushner: They specialize in direct drive specifically, they do a lot of AGD research, and they… and there's, like, a very large community collaboration, so a lot of professors at the University of Michigan use this facility. Well, they use both facilities.

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Mark Kushner: And… but specifically there, they do direct-dry fusion, so they actually implode capsules of deuterium and tritium routinely, do experiments, try to understand what happens, and the goal is to set requirements on a next-generation facility, right? What would it take to ignite a direct drive pellet?

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Mark Kushner: But sometimes, there's not a path forward for a government-funded facility.

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Mark Kushner: Then the research kind of… Plateaus.

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Mark Kushner: So then we also… most people have heard of the NIF, I think, but for those of you who need

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Mark Kushner: who haven't, the National Ignition Facility is at Lawrence Livermore Lab. The field of laser fusion has existed since the 1970s,

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Mark Kushner: The main context is there was a guy named John Knuckles, and he was trying to figure out how can you create thermonuclear implosions in the laboratory, specifically for weapons research.

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Mark Kushner: And he considered a wide variety of drivers, but certainly once the laser was invented, a laser does the very important thing that it compresses a lot of energy and time and space. So it's a natural candidate for how you could create a thermonuclear explosion in the lab.

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Mark Kushner: And at Livermore, they had a decades-long program and multiple different drivers, lasers called, like, Argos, Shiva, Nova, progressively staged in energy before they…

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Mark Kushner: Landed on the National Ignition Facility in this laser architecture.

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Mark Kushner: And the MIPS settled on indirect drive for a couple of reasons. One of the main ones was the laser target imprinting problem, so…

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Mark Kushner: And I can discuss that in more detail.

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Mark Kushner: So, yeah, and just for context, because for target design, it's an important nuance, so direct drive means you're shining the beam directly onto the capsule. The problem, especially with solid-state laser drivers, is that the beams

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Mark Kushner: The beams are very crummy. Well, I… there's a…

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Mark Kushner: There is a more polite way to say it. The beams have very high speckles and contrast, and any perturbation in the beam profile, that perturbation is imparted onto the capsule, and

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Mark Kushner: like, what you need to know about laser fusion is that the compression has to be round, so anything that is not round makes this thing unstable. And the main trade-off in fusion is that you always want to compress the capsule as much as possible, but instabilities will always limit how much you can compress it, and you won't know what that limit is until you do experiments, but we do know that there are issues with beam profile perturbations onto the capsule.

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Mark Kushner: So you have to design… so there's a limitation on how much you can compress it, but

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Mark Kushner: all of that energy is going to the capsule. And then we have indirect drive, where again, if you shine the beam onto a high-Z hole rod, it re-emits X-rays, and that actually creates a much more smooth and stable implosion.

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Mark Kushner: And so I will… to be fair to my friends in magnetic fusion, so magnetically confined plasmas, they haven't completely demonstrated the burning plasma state yet, where the input work delivered is equal to, right, the self-heating by the plasma. But, like, JET got about 0.7.

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Mark Kushner: But… and laser fusion is the only concept that has specifically demonstrated, like, net gain and net Q, right? And, like, the NIF proved that you can… they can deliver 2 megajoules of laser energy, they got more energy out, and even if you look at the X-ray energy coupled to the capsule, which was about 220 to 250 kilojoules.

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Mark Kushner: And they've got an 8 megajoules of energy out, so that's a capsule gain. I forgot the number, like 40 or something. So, large gains have been demonstrated by laser fusion. They haven't completely been demonstrated by tokamax, but tokamax, to be fair, are close.

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Mark Kushner: And… and this is a plot, like, Sam Wurzl and Scott Hsu, they wrote this paper, several years ago. I was one of the reviewers when I was working at Livermore, and they were working at ARPA-E at the time, and their goal was, well.

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Mark Kushner: We have so many different fusion concepts. How do… to the best that we can, how do you create an A-B comparison to compare the performance of each and every one of these concepts?

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Mark Kushner: And there is something called the Lawson Criterion, where essentially you care about the…

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Mark Kushner: plasma pressure times the confinement time, and so magnetic fusion schemes, you have a lower pressure, longer confinement. Laser fusion is the complete opposite, right? Like, your plasma only exists for tens of picoseconds, right, if you've done your job right, and… but much higher pressure.

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Mark Kushner: You can also do, like, density times confinement time and compare it to temperature. So you can see that, you know, NIF is the only one that's actually achieved, like, a net burning plasma or scientific break-even. Eater and Spark are projected to be here, because you have to define it differently for a tokenAC. But the JET token Mac is the closest that

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Mark Kushner: From magnetic fusion to getting to a net queue, so… I mean…

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Mark Kushner: from a burning plasma perspective, like, the plasma physics for laser fusion is the most mature in this situation.

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Mark Kushner: But of course, we have a long ways to go, and demonstrating ignition is not enough. Yes, which is actually my next slide. So, for context.

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Mark Kushner: This is specific for laser fusion. So, this is a plot of capsule gain as a function of the Lawson criterion, and this is… simulations follow this, but this was… I actually made this with an analytical model.

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Mark Kushner: So, the NIF experiments are basically right here. So, in the news, for example, 20… Nick NIF shot 210808, that was the very first shot to achieve ignition, and there was about 7 different repeat attempts, and none of those repeat attempts actually recovered the yield.

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Mark Kushner: But if you actually calculated the loss and criterion, they were all within the error bar. It's just that you're in a regime where, because you're on such a steep ignition cliff, any small perturbation to your system will cause your yield to jump up and down.

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Mark Kushner: So you never want to operate here, but this is where NIFT is right now, and we'll see if they can hopefully get to somewhere where, you know, if you're there, then your platform is more useful for whatever application you care about.

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Mark Kushner: So this is the robust ignition regime you need to be in. So, ignition is important, but it is insufficient for a meaningful design of a fusion power plant, and even then, we're not even accounting for all of the system-level concessions that you have to make for a power plant to make sense.

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Mark Kushner: And, and then getting to why I actually… why I concluded that eczema had a chance. So, the, you know, the Wayne problem…

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Mark Kushner: when I was working at NIF, and we were thinking about, okay, you know, it makes sense to restart an inertial fusion energy program, so what are we going to do, and what actually makes sense?

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Mark Kushner: And the problem is, it's not even just that we need to push up the performance, but…

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Mark Kushner: how do you actually get the system stable enough that you can produce the reliable gains that you need, and you can overcome all the penalties that will happen in a power plant, which I will also explain.

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Mark Kushner: And the problem is that if you're limited in your driver energy, then the only thing you can do to achieve better performance is to compress the fuel more.

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Mark Kushner: And the problem is that if you want to compress the field more, you have to overcome hydrodynamic instabilities.

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Mark Kushner: So this is, like.

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Mark Kushner: Very high level, but you want your targets to be nice and stable and round, so it's not just about maximizing compression, but you have to have something that is robust and predictable.

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Mark Kushner: and boring, right? So if you can design a stable implosion that has the potential to deliver high gains, that's what you want.

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Mark Kushner: If you're… depending on a target like this, where it's very unstable, it's sensitive to any perturbation you put onto it, and you're depending on just improving requirements, you know, finishing your targets.

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Mark Kushner: Having stricter requirements on the laser, and that's the path that you're pursuing for high gain and robust performance.

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Mark Kushner: this is going to be challenging, and it's going to make your engineers not like you. So, the thing… so then what can you do? Well, what you can do is you can design a stable implosion, and you can just increase your driver energy so that you can ignite this robustly and get to high gain. So, this is something where…

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Mark Kushner: Plasma physicists, we do argue a lot, and we don't agree on a lot of things, but, like, most ICF physicists will agree that more driver energy will help. Like, this is one thing that almost every, like, laser fusion physicist would say, that they agree that having more energy is going to help.

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Mark Kushner: And it increases your engineering tolerance, ignition margin, and if you can design a capsule that is intentionally stable, and have a path to ignite that, and to have that design give you the gains you need, I think that path makes the most sense.

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Mark Kushner: But the problem is, how do you design a driver that can put enough energy at a reasonable cost?

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Mark Kushner: And so, at the time, I had a mentor who used to call me, and he used to tell me that I needed to figure out how to make

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Mark Kushner: high-gain target designs work with 1 megajoule of energy, and wetted foams, and in polar drive elimination, and all these things, and I really thought it was impossible, mainly because there were some challenges in scaling up the driver energy for conventional glass laser systems.

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Mark Kushner: And so, I'll talk about XMR's approach in a second.

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Mark Kushner: But I want to make a comment that…

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Mark Kushner: There is a lot of science in fusion, so I don't mean to imply that we're not doing science anymore and the science is resolved, but the problem that we have to address is that as fusion shifts from just basic science to systems engineering, you then have to consider what are all the constraints that a fusion power plant puts on the target design, where you don't design the system

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Mark Kushner: only to be convenient for the plasma physics, you have to design a system that actually makes sense for something that will produce energy. So that means you have to manage your interfaces with the driver, think about what is amenable to a low-cost driver, and what is convenient for your nuclear engineers to harness energy from.

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Mark Kushner: So that's what I mean when I talk about shifting from systems engineering, that we're putting all these additional constraints on the plasma physics, and we have to find a solution that works.

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Mark Kushner: So, then… About eczema.

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Mark Kushner: So… And this is also what I mean by a system, so…

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Mark Kushner: There is an IFE concept that was developed in the 1970s at Livermore, and it's called HighLife. So we're pursuing this High Life Chamber concept, but it's not… it's not like we invented this chamber concept originally. This has been around since the 1970s.

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Mark Kushner: And the problem with fusion technology is the first wall problem. So if you put a burning DT plasma next to a wall that's emitting 14 MeVV neutrons, KEV X-rays.

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Mark Kushner: I think even with the best material scientists in the world, it's hard to design a chamber wall that can survive for the lifetime of a plant. So that means that one of the biggest problems about fusion power is the notion that we have to shut down a plant, actually remove a neutron-activated chamber, and replace it.

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Mark Kushner: And this concept of high life was specifically invented just because

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Mark Kushner: to solve that problem. So the idea is that you have a molten salt, and if that molten salt can capture the energy, like the neutrons, so they're significantly moderated by the time they get to the wall, they absorb all, so the X-ray energy that can ablate the wall material, then we have a path to a chamber that can last for 30 to 40 years.

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Mark Kushner: And so, for a fusion concept, the liquid wall was the one that made the most sense to me.

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Mark Kushner: But as you can see, there are some system-level concessions you have to make. Like, if you have a liquid wall, you can't just have a bunch of beams in the chamber.

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Mark Kushner: There were… there were some concepts that had, like, multiple beams coming in, and they had to oscillate the jet back and forth. Engineers really don't like that. So, the easiest thing is that you can actually minimize the number of beams going to target and make a target go off.

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Mark Kushner: That makes the high life concept a lot more viable, and specifically, you get full solid angle coverage here. So, with this… with this scheme, we don't have to enrich lithium, so with natural lithium, we can get a sufficiently high tritium breeding ratio.

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Mark Kushner: Certainly we don't have to replace the first wall. I'll talk about the driver in a second with optics damage, but we'll have a high F-number beam, so we want our final optic to be really far away, like, more than 50 meters.

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Mark Kushner: That mitigates optic damage, and it doesn't require any material breakthroughs with the first wall, so…

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Mark Kushner: when you start with the system-level concept that, what does it take to make the high-life chamber work, and how do we minimize number of beams, then the question is, how do you make two beam implosions work? And this concept was initially abandoned because there wasn't a driver energy that existed that could solve this problem.

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Mark Kushner: So… What Eximer's doing that's new is…

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Mark Kushner: we're essentially… our goal is to build, like, really big lasers, so I…

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Mark Kushner: Eczema's been the world's biggest lasers to put fusion energy on the grid, so what we're really focusing on and delivering that's new is that for this high-life chamber concept, we need to develop a laser that can scale to roughly, like, 10 megajoules of laser energy. And historically, even prior to, like, the initiation of the NIF project.

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Mark Kushner: A 10 megajoule driver was recommended as the amount of energy required to reliably deliver the types of neutron yields that you needed for, like, stockpile stewardship applications, and

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Mark Kushner: But that didn't make sense at the time because, right, with glass lasers, the technology to get to a 10 megajoule laser just didn't exist, especially the supply chains.

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Mark Kushner: So, XMR's approach is to build really big, high-energy lasers

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Mark Kushner: And these are… I… in context, you know, in hindsight, some of these investor-facing slides, I may not be technical enough for a MIPSE audience, but the main idea is that building lasers out of glass is expensive, so the problem with solid-state lasers is that

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Mark Kushner: So there's a couple of problems. So one, like a rough order of magnitude, when you're getting to 10 joules per centimeter squared affluence and the deep UV, with several nanosecond type of pulse links, you start to damage optics, and this is why scaling out

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Mark Kushner: solid-state lasers is a problem, because if you want to reduce the fluence and keep the laser energy the same, then you have to scale up the aperture size, or you have to increase the number of beams, and so… and developing the supply chain of laser glass for the NIF was already a huge undertaking in itself.

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Mark Kushner: And that doesn't even include the optics or the frequency conversion crystals, etc. So…

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Mark Kushner: There are some very real challenges with trying to scale up a solid-state laser to, like, a 10-plus megajoule driver, not just the number of beams, but the supply chain.

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Mark Kushner: And also the cost of diode pumping to get the efficiency up, too.

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Mark Kushner: So, the main… so the main solution that Exmer's pursuing is to replace glass with gas. So, it was… it was cheesy. I think we stopped saying it, but we used to have a model that we

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Mark Kushner: don't break glass, have a guess, but then it became too cheesy and cringe, so I try not to say it, but then I still bring it up. But the idea is that with eczema lasers, so we have, right, we use pulse power technology.

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Mark Kushner: electron beam pumped gases, and when you pump a krypton fluoride gas with electrons, you excite a bunch of transitions.

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Mark Kushner: Some fraction of them result in the emission of a 248 nanometer photon that you care about. So you have a laser, and we're using gas optics to reflect and focus laser light, and I'll describe those in detail in a second. So, like, our projections, and we've published some white papers on this online in collaboration with

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Mark Kushner: like, the Trump Laser Company, they did some productions for…

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Mark Kushner: Dioplum solid state lasers, and we're projecting that we can get an order of magnitude cost savings

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Mark Kushner: compared to Diet Pump South State lasers for dollars per joule. And so this, this really matters, because if you want to build something that can go to 4 to 10 megajoules of energy, and it's going to cost tens of billions of dollars, that's already a non-starter. So, having an architecture that

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Mark Kushner: can…

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Mark Kushner: At least, like, if you can build, like, a 4 megajou laser with a few billion, that's actually a good place to be in.

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Mark Kushner: And we're developing gas optics, which I will explain in a second when I talk about Phoenix.

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Mark Kushner: And so, some of you might know this, but for context on eczema,

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Mark Kushner: For example, the NIF became operational in the early, you know, 2010 or so.

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Mark Kushner: So I was actually a student here when NIF became operational, and I won't say any names, but I attended the MIPSE seminar where someone for NIF came, and they said that we are ready to ignite this year, and, you know, we are subjecting to get to ignition, and we are already designing, an IFV power plant system called LIFE, and we believe that solid-state lasers are going to be really inexpensive with diodes, and we can put it on the back of a semi-truck.

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Mark Kushner: And I was like, wow! So I, you know, I didn't realize we were so close to laser fusion. And, it technically took 10 years to get to ignition.

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Mark Kushner: So we're… right? And then here, you know, they produced, higher yields.

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Mark Kushner: 2021 is the first ignition shot, so by ignition, that really means, gain… that means loss in criterion. So you've created a plasma where the self-heating rate has exceeded the rate at which the plasma disassembles.

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Mark Kushner: So, that was a really big deal, and right after that happened is when I met the specific founders of eczemer.

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Mark Kushner: Because again, I had this mentor who kept telling me, I need to make it work with 1 megajoule of laser energy, polar drive, wetted foams, and I just didn't see it happening. And so then…

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Mark Kushner: when I met the founders, they were living in a home together in Foster City at the time, but they had this novel laser architecture based on gas optics, and they're talking about

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Mark Kushner: Right? Orders of magnitude, lower cost for…

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Mark Kushner: a krypton fluoride driver, and that caught my attention. And so that was, like, a real opportunity to get funding, and then NIF got to break even, so actually gained bigger than one the next year, and then they've been… they've made some progress since then.

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Mark Kushner: I'm not up to date. I think they… they had to dial back on their high-energy shots because they were breaking optics again, which is what we're trying not to do at Exmer.

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Mark Kushner: And so for context, and this is already even out to date, I think we're at 200 employees now, but we were founded in 2021, we collected some seed money, and we used that seed money to apply to the DOE Milestone program. So it's a program by the Department of Energy, private companies apply to it.

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Mark Kushner: We have a… we give them our roadmap, we propose a set of milestones, and a review committee approves it. And when we participate in that milestone, what happens is that

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Mark Kushner: Each milestone that we meet is reviewed by committee, and if we hit it, then we get reimbursed. And being accepted into the DOE milestone program was a really big deal.

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Mark Kushner: Because that allowed us to raise, right off the bat, $100 million in venture capital.

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Mark Kushner: So, right, these are some of our investors, and we also use the INFUSE program. We receive money from ARPA-E, and we're mainly based in Denver right now with a manufacturing facility in Tucson with our capacitors.

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Mark Kushner: And, that's a picture of our headquarters.

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Mark Kushner: Okay, so Phoenix is really important. So, with respect to our laser architecture.

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Mark Kushner: I mean, I'm talking about gas optics, and for some of you plasma physicists, you might be familiar with stimulated brilliant scattering, or stimulated Raman scattering. And in a plasma, that's a very complicated and very difficult to predict process. It is different in a neutral gas, and I…

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Mark Kushner: I know, I regret I didn't have a slide on this, but a lot of research was done in the 1980s for the Star Wars program, and specifically for directed energy, and where you can develop, like, Raman beam combiners, where you have a seed beam, multiple beams coming in.

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Mark Kushner: If the frequency offset is just right, you get a residence, and you can combine the beams. That's a little bit more mature than stimulated Brillo 1 pulse compression.

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Mark Kushner: Which is what we're proving on Phoenix.

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Mark Kushner: So, with our krypton fluoride amplifiers, we're generating, like, microsecond pulse links, and with these microsecond pulses, we have to compress it down to, like, 10 nanoseconds.

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Mark Kushner: And we need to not only compress it, but do it in a process that preserves the phase of the beam, so that we can control the beam profile and control the pole shape.

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Mark Kushner: And so we're proving this technology out on Phoenix.

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Mark Kushner: So, right here is what we call long pulse kinetics.

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Mark Kushner: That is the very first thing we built. So, like, we moved into our building in Denver, spring 2024, and we built this thing in, by December 2024, and that was our very first DOE milestone. This is called LPK for Long Coast Kinetics, but this is a…

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Mark Kushner: Facility, it delivers approximately 50 joules between 1 to 3 microseconds.

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Mark Kushner: And this is a scientific facility, because one of the risks of gas lasers is the laser efficiency. So, like, for us, 7% would be a great number for our power plant.

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Mark Kushner: Maybe we'll have to deal with it being a little bit lower, but there's still a lot that has not been done for optimizing krypton fluoride amplifiers, and we have to learn about it, especially krypton fluoride kinetics, which is an interesting science, as Mark knows.

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Mark Kushner: So we're routinely… we've been routinely doing experiments on this for the last couple of years, and we're using that to inform the design of our next generation Krypton Floyd amplifiers, right? And as… as Mark, as a member of our Science and Technology Advisory Board, has reviewed the data.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, and we do a lot of materials testing experiments, things like that.

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Mark Kushner: So then, this is kilojoule class amplifier. So this thing puts on a full kilojoule of energy, and that was a milestone we also hit on December 2025. And so, it's a next-generation scale-up. It produces a full kilojoule of energy, right, within 500 nanoseconds.

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Mark Kushner: And this is our seed beam, and this is our pump beam. So, Phoenix is operational right now, and this is a pulse compression experiment.

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Mark Kushner: So the goal is to amplify

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Mark Kushner: right, like a 10 nanosecond seed beam by approximately 1,000 times, while preserving the seed, the phase of the beam. So what that means is we need to demonstrate that we can transfer energy from this beam to that beam,

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Mark Kushner: At the amount that we are predicting, and we need to show that the beam quality is preserved. Because with a seed beam going to target, you can imagine that this is where all of our beam shaping and pole shaping happens.

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Mark Kushner: And this can be operating at very low fluence, so fluids of, like, 0.2 joules per centimeter squared, that would be amenable to a rep-rated laser driver system for our power plant. So what we need to show to really de-risk our architecture is that when we take a pump beam.

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Mark Kushner: It transfers its energy to the seed, the seed goes out, and we need to demonstrate that the beam quality is still acceptable.

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Mark Kushner: So this is what we are proving out right now. And, I believe, like, in terms of where we are at right now, I believe the team is,

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Mark Kushner: We're preparing for testing, hopefully at the end of the month, and so they're developing the infrastructure needed to hit our entry criterion for the test.

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Mark Kushner: So, right, so this is where we are at right now with our laser system.

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Mark Kushner: So that's the first one that we're building.

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Mark Kushner: And I guess, I suppose I already mentioned this, but in April 2024, that's what our building looked like.

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Mark Kushner: In December 2024, that was the first Phoenix milestone. That was the long… that's the 50-joule long pulse kinetics testbed. So it is… it is really amazing, right, when… when you give engineers a time and schedule, how quickly they, they build things.

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Mark Kushner: And this… these… and this is already even out of date, I think, but these are some pictures of hardware, so this is what the floor looks like right now, so… right, these are our…

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Mark Kushner: Right, we have our MOX tanks, we have our east… our north and south tanks right here. That's the inside of the chamber. That's oil.

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Mark Kushner: So we have a… so Phoenix is real, it does exist. Sorry, I'm not making it up.

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Mark Kushner: And then… Yes. Okay, so I'll talk about our roadmap.

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Mark Kushner: So right now, that's the Phoenix laser, but we're not just…

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, most of our resources are on the laser, but we have also been maturing the target design and the chamber and plant design. So, we do have a published paper.

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Mark Kushner: And there are probably going to be multiple different concepts that can satisfy a two-beam architecture, but we do have one that's been published, and it was a collaboration between all the different NNSA national labs and General Atomics.

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Mark Kushner: So, the idea is to have a hybrid drive where we take the best of indirect drive and direct drive.

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Mark Kushner: And this does… that actually does mitigate the laser beam imprinting problem.

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Mark Kushner: So you might wonder, well, if hybrid drive works so well, where you can do an X-ray-driven first shock and get the energy coupling benefits of direct drive spin, why didn't LLE do it, right? So why is this still, like, not completely mature?

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Mark Kushner: And interesting enough, I think it's because of the geometry. So if you try to do a spherical implosion with multiple beams, the hybrid drive targets are actually really, really painful to manufacture, and it's not…

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Mark Kushner: actually that trivial of how you would do hybrid drive and spherical geometry, but when you just have two beams coming in, it's pretty straightforward to imagine a whole round design, and then you can have two beams coming in.

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Mark Kushner: But with that being said, you need to have a very special laser system, so this design has been setting some of the initial requirements on it that we've been maturing. With simulated Belimon pulse compression, we have the ability to do

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Mark Kushner: beam zooming. So that means that it's not just going to be, like, one Brittle one compression shell with one pump beam and one seed beam.

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Mark Kushner: When you have the pump, you can have multiple different seed beams. Each of them can have a different faceplate, so you can make the beam spot zoom and match the size of the target.

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Mark Kushner: And so that's really important, so we actually have physically different beam spots, and the profile has a higher intensity at the edge, because you want it to have, like, roughly spherical compression. And so, like, 2D radiation hydrodynamic simulations were performed, and we have a path to, like, a very… a high-energy target design, but at

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Mark Kushner: like, a reasonably low compression ratio that is consistent with what is needed for stability on omega.

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Mark Kushner: So this is one concept we're pursuing, but we have a couple of others we're working on.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, and this is interesting, because just a little bit of context on how the laser architecture works. So the zooming is really important, because you can have physically different pop beams.

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Mark Kushner: Physically different seed beams. You have gas here at one atmosphere, completely windowless operation.

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Mark Kushner: Right? And here, the technology, like, the fluence will be at, like, 0.2 joules per centimeter squared. That's very important because higher fluence will not scale to a reparated driver. And then you have the pump beams here. Like, these are at, like, a kilojoule per centimeter squared. When you're at a kilojoule per centimeter squared, everything gets destroyed.

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Mark Kushner: So it transfers its energy, but then you have an atmosphere, right? So before it gets to target, this is a vacuum, this is an atmosphere. You have to have a gas-to-vacuum transition, so we're working on that design.

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Mark Kushner: But, yeah, zooming is pretty critical to making this architecture work.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, and when I talk about the profiles, for example, so…

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Mark Kushner: One context about solid-state lasers is that with the solid-state medium, you get something called a B integral, where, like.

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Mark Kushner: If you have perturbations in the beam profile, those perturbations can self-focus, and so your beam can get very distorted. And so…

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Mark Kushner: And so you have to have, like, these random faceplates on NIF or Omega-scale beams. So actually, like, without any beam smoothing, if you look at a NIF or a mega beam, it looks like this. You just have a bunch of speckles, and…

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Mark Kushner: If you have, like, 60 beams coming in, then they can, like, overlap on average to create something more uniform. You still need smoothing, but…

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Mark Kushner: It doesn't really matter that much in a multi-beam system, but when you have a two-beam system, you do need very precise control over the beam spot profile, and you want to be very intentional with it. So, the laser architecture that we have based off of gas amplifiers and not gas has a lower

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Mark Kushner: Right now, linear index, so we're projecting that maybe we'll have some partially developed speckles, but

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Mark Kushner: we'll be able to have more precise control over our beam profiles. So, when we talk about

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Mark Kushner: like, target shooter experiments and how we can de-risk the target design. This is something where we can do some experiments on Omega or NIF, potentially, but

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Mark Kushner: Until we build our own specific target shooter experience facility, and we can test our own beam profiles, we won't really be able to de-risk this.

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Mark Kushner: And so, building our own intermediate-scale target shooter facilities to show that two beam implosions are possible, this is very important. And so, this is our roadmap to fusion on the grid. So, right now, we're working on Phoenix. This is the system I showed you, where the goal is to demonstrate an amplification of a seed beam by 1000x, and to demonstrate that we can preserve the beam spot profile

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Mark Kushner: That's very important.

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Mark Kushner: We're also demonstrating scalable pulse power, so, right, like, just learning as a team to build laser amplifiers and just keep scaling them up and up in energy.

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Mark Kushner: And yeah, verifying the physics of long pulse kinetics on our long pulse kinetics system.

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Mark Kushner: So here's the next thing. So the next thing is a module we call Argos, right? Microsecond pulse, 160 kilojoules.

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Mark Kushner: And the goal is to develop this amplifier, but also fully develop out the beamline, so that includes all of the nonlinear compression stages.

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Mark Kushner: And the gas-to-vacuum transition, and final beam delivery to target, and confirmation of, that we're demonstrating the beam profile that we expect.

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Mark Kushner: So, we will be… not only will this be the world's largest amplifier, but we'll be compressing it to 100 kilojoule for target coupling experiments.

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Mark Kushner: And so… and that's Anvil.

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Mark Kushner: And we might even do a minimum viable product for a little bit less energy. But this is the next part of our roadmap, and with Anvil, we are envisioning also an upgrade to a two-sided target shooter, so that it would be 200 kilojoules, so that we can validate that two beam implosions

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Mark Kushner: like, the energy coupling from two beam implosions, that's probably the biggest risk in our architecture, because that's the one really novel thing that has never been done before. So we want to prove that we… the laser actually absorbs where we think it's supposed to absorb, and that we understand energy absorption, refraction, etc.

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Mark Kushner: But that would not be a break-even facility, that would be a laser demonstration facility and some laser target interaction physics.

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Mark Kushner: But then we have a break-even facility. Aggressive timelines, of course.

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Mark Kushner: I'm not going to defend them, but this is to demonstrate break-even. So this would be a full nuclear facility, 4 megajoules. They requested

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Mark Kushner: initially 4 megajoules, but with an upgrade to 12 megajoules. However, I… we are not designing the chamber to, we're designing the chamber to accommodate 400 megajoules of maximum yield.

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Mark Kushner: We're not designing a chamber that can do gigajoules, but you can… you can still, like, de-risk implosions at, like, a 12 megajoule scale without having to do high-yield DT shots.

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Mark Kushner: So, this will be to demonstrate wall plug gain, to actually de-risk real implosion physics, and it's obviously an… it's a national security asset. And then this would be the power plant. We call it Athena, but the goal is an 8 megajoule driver, a quarter hertz operation. So, the quarter hertz operation is very important. Like.

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Mark Kushner: we're essentially depending on the fact that we can generate gains larger than 150, because we can scale out the laser energy. If you're limited in gain, then you have to increase the repetition rate, but in terms of getting to, like, a low cost of electricity, you ideally want to be at low repetition rate and high gain as much as possible.

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Mark Kushner: So, if we have to scale the driver energy, that would probably… that's what we would do.

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Mark Kushner: Of course, this is integration with the blanket, so that's a drive chamber facility. This would be a liquid wall facility, so it would have the actual molten salt loop for tritium breeding, and obviously it's the coolant of the power plant.

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Mark Kushner: So… And that'll be… That'll be, like, the National Academy of Sciences definition of a fusion power plant.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, and just a few more comments on, like, specifically really what's next. So, like, as I mentioned, we have our krypton fluoride modules and envelope beamlines, so we're going to be building out this facility in Denver,

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Mark Kushner: upgrading this to two-sided for 200 kilojoules, that is on our roadmap. And also, DOE put it in their fusion energy roadmap, so they… they put it in their roadmap that the two-sided 200 kilojoule amplif facility is a priority, so I guess we have to do it.

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Mark Kushner: But I… I was… I was pushing for that to be two-sided, just because

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Mark Kushner: We have to validate that the laser goes where it's supposed to, and if it doesn't, then we need to be able to iterate on that before we commit to a really capital-intensive facility.

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Mark Kushner: And I won't mention that this will have maybe two stages of zooming per pulse.

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Mark Kushner: So Anvil is not intended to be a full implosion facility, it is to de-risk energy coupling. Vulcan will have all stages of zooming, it will have cryogenic operations, it'll be tritium, nuclear.

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Mark Kushner: So…

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Mark Kushner: That's our roadmap in a nutshell. We are planning to have, like, two target shooter facilities before we move on to a power plant, with increasing complexity.

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Mark Kushner: So… And again, we're a startup, we're 200 employees, we're just starting to hire, like, nuclear scientists and engineers. We're not ready to do a nuclear facility right now.

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Mark Kushner: That's a… that's a picture of our Anvil experimental chamber that we're designing. So it'll be, like, fully equipped with a full suite of diagnostics.

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Mark Kushner: And, two beam lines.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, and so this is important for reprated.

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Mark Kushner: These were… this was me asking ChatGPT to put down an image of a laser, right? That's obviously not what our laser looks like, but I was amused by it. But yeah, so with Anvil, like, assuming that we fully de-risk two-sided implosions.

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Mark Kushner: Then a critical upgrade that has to be matured as soon as possible is the injection system. So, like, you know, on a single-shot target shooter facility, you can insert your target on a stalk.

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Mark Kushner: Sometimes it's actually annoying because your target wiggles, and sometimes it even falls off of the stalk. Hate when that happens. But for a rep-rated operation, you need to… you need to have some sort of an injector coil gun, an injector cue, so you need to start demonstrating as soon as possible that you can reliably inject, track, and shoot targets.

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Mark Kushner: So we're planning to mature this technology also in parallel with Anvil.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, so, and… And I'm… yeah, I…

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Mark Kushner: we're not showing publicly the quantitative milestones yet, but Anvil is really important, and that's really, like, the next really big step for Exmer, because this is the very first target shooter facility that we're building, and it, like, these are really complex facilities to design, build, and operate. So, certainly.

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Mark Kushner: Well, actually, the first entry criterion before any of this is, like, when we build a laser and it's delivering a kilojou per centimeter squared of energy on target, the first thing you need to do is measure your beam profile and actually know what you're delivering to target. So that's the critical entry criterion.

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Mark Kushner: that we have prior to experiments, because if we want to look at laser plasma instabilities, we're not going to be able to make meaningful conclusions if you don't know what's coming in. So, that'll… I already believe that's a huge, huge success if we do that, but…

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Mark Kushner: Right, there's a lot of operational things. We have to demonstrate that we demonstrate pulse shaping, we have to demonstrate, like, beam pointing, right? All of the calibration and timing of diagnostics, right? These are, you know, maybe it's boring, but it's really important.

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Mark Kushner: And then we have our physics… physics studies, right? So we want to demonstrate control over what we call filamentation. So it's kind of… it's actually self-focusing, but just in the plasma. You have to mitigate that as much as possible. Self-focusing and an ICF target is bad, and so we believe that we can have really good

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Mark Kushner: We have a bunch of methods for controlling, and ideas for how to control the beam spot profile to make sure it's smooth enough

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Mark Kushner: For filamentation to not be a problem, but you have to confirm that in the experiment, so that is one of our priorities.

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Mark Kushner: Then there's laser plasma instabilities, so…

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Mark Kushner: Stimulated Raman scattering and Brelomon scattering are great in a neutral gas for gas optics, horrible in a plasma.

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Mark Kushner: And for context, when the… when NIF early light experiments were happening, and they started to do integrated experiments in some of their inner beams, they were getting… 40% of the light was being backscattered, which is horrible, because you cannot control symmetry or…

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Mark Kushner: really predict what your implosion is going to do if you have so much light being scattered out. And so with shorter wavelength, you actually do win. Shorter wavelength historically has been a mitigation for this problem, but again, it's a new target shooter facility. We're talking about new types of plasmas, new scale lengths, we have to confirm it.

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Mark Kushner: And same with two beams, right? Like, when you have two beams coming in the facility, just making sure that the power and energy are the same, that they're pointed at the same place, that the timing is…

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Mark Kushner: is within specs, and then we can start moving on to demonstrating that the whole run performs as we expect, and especially this one, if we can validate laser refraction and absorption modeling in the two-beam geometry. So.

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Mark Kushner: For me, this would probably be, like, the biggest physics risk, where if we demonstrate that, we can check it off.

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Mark Kushner: So this will be a huge relief to demonstrate.

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Mark Kushner: And then, yes, the integrated performance of target tracking and injection, so those are XMR's near-term roadmap goals, so…

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Mark Kushner: And I think we're… we're at time now, right?

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Mark Kushner: Not 5 minutes. 5 minutes.

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Mark Kushner: I think, I think that's almost the end.

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Mark Kushner: I think that's nearly the end of my talk. Let me see here. That's a schematic of our target.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, I have a few more comments about rep-rated target designs. So, I made a comment to you all about wetted foams very briefly, but I did not describe to you why wetted foams are important.

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Mark Kushner: So this is another target design concession that we have to make for the good of the system, and for a deuterium and tritium fusion power plant.

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Mark Kushner: the worst case nuclear accident that can happen is a tritium leak, right? If you build a power plant and you have a tritium leak, like, going into the public water supply, that's probably the worst thing that could happen, and that would…

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Mark Kushner: kill the industry. Well, I hope it wouldn't kill the industry, but we all know it wouldn't be good. And so, one very critical factor for licensing a plant is, what is your tritium inventory?

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Mark Kushner: So…

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Mark Kushner: So it's important to minimize it as much as you can, and one thing that drives that inventory is the target filling rate. So right now, on NIF and Omega, if you want to grow a very nice monocrystalline DT ice layer, this process takes about 5 days.

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Mark Kushner: And that means that if you scale that to a power plant, you would need to have 5 days worth of targets on-site at one time.

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Mark Kushner: So that's not… that's not good. That's going to scale to, like, kilograms of tritium on-site at one time. We don't want that. So you have to develop a process that is amenable to rapid filling.

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Mark Kushner: And so, like, one of the concepts that we have is… and this is being pursued by the broader IFE community, our wedded foams.

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Mark Kushner: So, because that takes 5 days per target, we don't want to do that. You can use a liquid wetted foam-filled target, right, with capillary fill, or there's a few other ideas, and the idea is to get the filling time down to…

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Mark Kushner: hopefully less than minutes, but even if it's a few minutes, I would still say that's a big win. However, there is a big problem, so for those of you plasma physicists.

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Mark Kushner: You'll notice that, well.

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Mark Kushner: It's on a carbon foam, that means you're going to have carbon in the hot spot, so…

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Mark Kushner: I don't know how many of you know this, but having high zine materials in a plasma is very bad. I know John Foster taught me this in my Plasma one-on-one class, so you get radiation losses, right? So, if you want to ignite a wetifilm target design, that means

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Mark Kushner: I, I think… actually, I did these calculations at Livermore. You need an order of magnitude more energy

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Mark Kushner: So it's… it's possible, you can certainly ignite wetted foams, you just need more energy to do it, to overcome the radiation losses.

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Mark Kushner: There's another backup option. You could do a polycrystalline ice layer, which takes an hour, so not ideal, but…

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Mark Kushner: But I do think if we can make wetted foam targets work, they'll be critical for reducing plant inventory and tritium, the tritium plant inventory. And I think this is only possible to do if you have a lot of energy.

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Mark Kushner: So, we're working on, like, a very rapid filling target process, so also, like, in, target fabrication and filling engineering. So, like, one of the priorities in the target program is actually developing a test stand to demonstrate that. Like, this concept is basically TRL 1-2. It requires focused development.

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Mark Kushner: TRO means Technology Readiness Level.

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Mark Kushner: I… for context.

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Mark Kushner: I apologize for not spelling out the acronym. So, it goes between, like, 1 and 9. If something is TRL9, that means the technology is so mature that it is routinely deployed in a wide variety of commercial applications. TRL1 means that you have a concept that maybe somebody put down on a piece of paper, and it's never been tested, and you have everything in between. So, like, a TRL of 3 would mean that you've done a benchtop experiment to at least

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Mark Kushner: prove out some proof of concept, right? A TRL of 7 means that it's mature enough to begin deploying it.

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Mark Kushner: So, when I talk about low TRL technologies, and a lot of fusion technology is very low TRL, because people have been developing concepts for a long time, and just haven't had the funding to really pursue them. So this is one of the very low TRL technologies that requires focused development. So, like, one of the high priority milestones that

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Mark Kushner: like, we'll be working out for targets at eczemer is to demonstrate that we can do, like, capillary fill experiments.

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Mark Kushner: This is…

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Mark Kushner: This… okay, yeah, this is another one, and then I will end my talk. This… this is not a real engineering drawing, I was getting creative again with ChatGBT, but we will have to do a target survivability test facility.

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Mark Kushner: I'm mentioning this because this is a critical difference between a single-shot target shooter and what that facility will look like for a power plant. So, in a power plant, you have a few…

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Mark Kushner: A lot of constraints. One is reprated.

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Mark Kushner: injection, which means that your target has to survive so many Gs of acceleration, maybe between 10 up to 1,000 Gs. Two, you have a chamber, right? It's gonna be, like, 600-ish degrees Celsius, order of magnitude, so it might undergo some heating, it has to survive that.

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Mark Kushner: If you do rapid filling, you have to make sure that the field doesn't leak out, and certainly we have a tent. So, in our target concept, right, the tent is the thing that holds the capsule in the whole room.

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Mark Kushner: That tent can induce a perturbation, that can reduce compression, so if you need a thick tent to make this thing survive, you have to make sure that your target design overcomes that.

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Mark Kushner: So, I'm essentially saying we need a test facility to really lock down these requirements, because target survivability, that's a requirement. You can't have a power plant if your target doesn't survive, and you have to demonstrate it with a cryogenic target.

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Mark Kushner: But… and that's why I believe more driver energy is the solution, because there's a lot of these concessions where you can't just optimize for what's convenient for the plasma, you have to optimize for something that can work in the power plant, and

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Mark Kushner: And ultimately, we have to make these concessions, and so energy is the way to overcome them, so…

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Mark Kushner: just a… just a remark. So, on that end, yes.

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Mark Kushner: So… Yeah, in a nutshell, our… the ultimate goal would be a power plant that has $40 to $75 per megawatt hour. I believe that's our parent requirement. Well, the parent requirement might be up to a gigawatt.

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Mark Kushner: The pilot plant can be 50 megawatts to meet the National Academy of Sciences definition of a minimum viable product for a power plant. But ideally, if you don't have a product that can scale to a reasonable cost of electricity, then you don't really have a product, so…

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Mark Kushner: at the end of the day, that's… that's our goal, and so we're targeting for a commercial system, target gains of about 200, and a laser efficiency of 7%. So, in a nutshell, that's what Eximer's trying to do.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, and again, thank you all for coming to my seminar. I, it's really exciting to be back here.

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Mark Kushner: Thank you very much for that great seminar. Are there questions?

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Mark Kushner: Oh, start at the back and move forward. I just… earlier, you were talking about the liquid wall, was it Flyb, or was it something else? Yes, it's Flyb, so…

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Mark Kushner: I think the fluorine is there for chemistry, the beryllium is there for neutron multiplication, right, and the lithium is there for the braiding of tritium.

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Mark Kushner: So, it's a magical material.

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Mark Kushner: Do you guys have a research program in the fly?

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Mark Kushner: Yes, we're starting one.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, well, actually, one of our high priority things that we're doing with Flyb right now, we don't have to do it with Flyb, we're starting with Flinax salts, but we have to… so, in the chamber… well, I guess you can't really see it here, but…

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Mark Kushner: You do vaporize flybe, and in the chamber and plant design team, they have to calculate how it vaporizes, and how it recondenses, and what is the chamber clearing time. There will be residual Flyb vapor, and so one of our research priorities is quantifying how much vapor we expect.

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Mark Kushner: And whether the beam propagates into it without any significant distortions. And if it does, what are the requirements to modify the reprite or the system to prevent that from happening?

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Mark Kushner: Yeah.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah. Can you talk a bit more about some of the design challenges in the injector part? That's always been something I've been curious about, for getting ICF fusions to be, like, a commercial power line.

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Mark Kushner: So, I think with the… with the injector.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, so there's… there's two categories of, technical challenges. So, one of them is aligning the laser and the target itself. And, like, again, like, there's systems at ASML that have been developed that, like, seem like they're very mature, where they can hit targets routinely at, like, 50 kilohertz rates, but…

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Mark Kushner: So, I'm actually pretty optimistic that we will be able to, like, inject and track the target and reliably shoot it.

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Mark Kushner: Where I think there's going to be huge challenges is doing it in a cryogenic targeted environment, making sure that the field doesn't leak out, and making sure that with the injection time, that the acceleration the target has to tolerate is acceptable, that the layer quality is intact, and the field doesn't heat up.

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Mark Kushner: So, I think it's definitely the integration of the cryo-target and the hot chamber that will require a lot of focused attention in research.

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Mark Kushner: One quick question on your simulations you're talking about for your 2B drivers. Super, I was curious.

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Mark Kushner: what you're using as your targets there, and if you had any sort of, like, asymmetries or, anisotropies in the target itself, like, if there's something high, higher Z inclusions, a couple moments here or there, and…

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Mark Kushner: if you think that if there are… what's the level of inclusions that is reasonable you can have, and still be confident that your simulations that show you can still compress it, will work? I'm curious if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so for context, this is for the power plant, actually. Those simulations were for a 4 megajoule break-even facility design.

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Mark Kushner: So this is our target concept. We have, this could be Flyib, although I think…

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Mark Kushner: I've been asking our blanket designers if I can make a flinac, or if they care if there's, like, some Flinac mixed into the fly, so that we don't have to deal with the hassle of machining beryllium.

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Mark Kushner: But essentially, you want to have some material where the blanket designers don't care if it ends up in the waste stream. And then we have the whole rung where there's metal here, so there's a metal coating, like copper baffles.

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Mark Kushner: And then this is the capsule itself, so we'll have a wetted foam, and then we'll have a CD layer. It'll actually be not CD, not CH, because our isotope separation experts, they don't like it when there's proteome. Apparently, it's really expensive to separate out proteum.

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Mark Kushner: On the topic of capsule and target quality, that's not something that is routinely simulated by designers, or it's only done in very targeted instances because it requires such high resolutions.

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Mark Kushner: And, and my…

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Mark Kushner: I do know… I do believe the high zoom inclusions do matter, and on NIF, we have

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Mark Kushner: I would say it's anecdotal evidence that when you have a lot of those inclusions into the ablator, that

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Mark Kushner: target performance goes down, but we don't have… like, I've never… with enough data, I've never seen a plot that's, like, very conclusive that we have these trends, and when we have these target defects, they definitely degrade yield, because we've also gotten some good performance with targets that had some inclusions.

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Mark Kushner: So the story has always been confu- confusing.

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Mark Kushner: And…

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Mark Kushner: like, and I don't think any target designer can very confidently say what the spec is, but we just know that when we see them, we want TargetFact to remove them, and if it's not a big deal for them to remove it, then we won't do it. On NIF, they are doing high-density carbon ablators, which we're not anticipating we will need. We want to do,

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Mark Kushner: CD, so that does also change, like, the structure of the ablator, so…

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Mark Kushner: The defects in CD are not as bad, but you can get oxygen.

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Mark Kushner: So, I… if there's a, like, I guess the short answer to that question is you have to do experiments and have… again, with NIF, you can only do, like, a high-energy shot once every month, and a dump… and they're doing multiple campaigns, but you need to have a dedicated program where you can actually make correlations between what you measure in metrology to the yield.

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Mark Kushner: Before we take next questions, for those people online, will you please put your questions in the chat?

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Mark Kushner: Go ahead.

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Mark Kushner: pink shirt. Oh, yeah, thank you. Nice talk. Can you comment on how, like, the fact that your geometry is, like, the drive is not symmetric, at least when the laser comes in? Does that complicate the modeling any? You can't rely on symmetry as much?

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Mark Kushner: So, yeah, with symmetry control, we have a few options, and I… so…

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Mark Kushner: For one, on modeling, I mean, these… the modeling was done with a code called Draco, and that is the most mature direct-drive modeling code that exists. With that being said, Draco was also optimized for omega experiments, and it is… so, for example, if there were some uncertainties in refraction or the plasma density profile.

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Mark Kushner: That might not actually impact how well they… you know, that might have a very small impact on how they predict

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Mark Kushner: the fraction of energy coupled to their capsule. But if there's nuances in refraction that the code is not getting right, that could actually… that could matter a lot for our two-beam system, right? The laser's refracting to a different place, or your density conditions… your density profiles are different than what you anticipated.

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Mark Kushner: So, I do anticipate that the initial model is probably not going to be right, because there's no reason to assume, because it's never been validated with a facility like this before.

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Mark Kushner: So, like, some of the backup options we have are, one, we plan, like.

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Mark Kushner: When we set requirements for the laser system, we are planning on having to change the beam profile and to change it a lot and tune it, so that if we have to add more energy to the waste, we can.

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Mark Kushner: And Target Fab doesn't love this, but I am requiring them to develop shimmed capsules so that if… that we are limited in how much energy we get at the equator, we can at least make the target a little bit thinner at the equator so it can implode at the same speed as the rest of the field. So we have… and you can even control the concentration of dopants, so there are some things we can do to control symmetry, even if the first model doesn't come in correct.

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Mark Kushner: Thank you.

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Mark Kushner: In the back.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, great talk. I think maybe two related questions.

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Mark Kushner: One is, and I think maybe you mentioned this, are you… which codes are you using for your hydrodynamic simulations? Like, I know a lot of people… Pacific Fusion has their own, like, branch of flash. Are you using something like that, or are you using one of the codes from the partner labs? That's a great question. So…

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Mark Kushner: Like, our initial target design was done in Draco from the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and that was through… we don't have access to that code. We… what happened is we had an infused contract where, through that award grant, LLE researchers could run that code for eczemer and publish a design.

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Mark Kushner: We have a similar arrangement with Los Alamos, where they prefer to use X-Rage, but they also use Hydra, and they have been doing simulation work for us, in the last couple of years to mature the whole ROM design. So I didn't show those results, but we've been pursuing whole ROM, like, trying to mature whole Rao modeling and design efforts.

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Mark Kushner: Internally, but the national labs, they don't share their codes, so we are internally developing our own radiation hydrodynamics codes, so we can take target design fully internally, so that we can hire our own target designers, develop our own design culture, and really be in control of that workflow.

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Mark Kushner: We do use flash code, so, like, flash is not ideal for spherical target simulations, but for planar target simulations to study laser target interactions, it's perfect. It works perfectly fine, so we use Flash for that.

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Mark Kushner: We use Flash for some targeted… there are some targeted whole round problems where you're not smelling the whole thing, but you can look at one part of it, and we also use Helios.

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Mark Kushner: So, Tom Mehlhorn dialed in. So, he's one of our consultants, and he has been working to mature our modeling capabilities in Helios.

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Mark Kushner: And, like, taking target simulations, post-processing them with diagnostics so that we can set the right requirements on our facility. Sure, and we're going to have to clear the room for a class in a few minutes, so let's take one more question from the,

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Mark Kushner: Inline… the live audience, then we have a few online, and things, that'll have to be it. Okay.

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Mark Kushner: So, at least we have one more question here. I'm curious about the low-density foam. I've heard of the idea before, but has anyone actually done it yet? Like, are they plans to do it at the NEF, or anything? So, they have been done before,

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Mark Kushner: In 2015?

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Mark Kushner: Wow, was it already 10 years ago? Los Alamos did a series of experiments on NIF with high-density carbon ablators, and they did wetted foam experiments, and…

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Mark Kushner: They got some interesting results. They have been recently doing CH-focused targets where you have CD with foams, and people are looking at two-photon polymerization for manufacturing foams.

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Mark Kushner: There's also chemical aerogel type of processes, so you can test different manufacturing techniques and different densities.

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Mark Kushner: And so, some experiments are happening on NIF, led by a guy named Elijah Kemp for high-yield neutron source development.

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Mark Kushner: Omega can do planar experiments of foams. They don't have the capability to do spherical field tube.

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Mark Kushner: filling yet, but although Exmer and LLV are collaborating on a proposal to develop those capabilities so that Omega can do implosion experiments, because on Omega, you can get, like, up to 10 shots in a day, right? Versus on NIF, you can get maybe a couple shots a year, so…

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Mark Kushner: I hope we can mature that on Omega and understand how the wetted foam penalty impacts target performance compared to ice layers.

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Mark Kushner: Hi, Daniel online, would you like to ask your question?

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Daniel Peters: Yes, am I audible, Dr. Christopher?

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Daniel Peters: Can you hear me?

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Mark Kushner: Oh, yes, I hear you.

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Daniel Peters: Excellent, thank you. Question I have is maybe just a little bit of a quibble with the,

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Daniel Peters: declaration that the fusion is just an engineering problem now, based on the prior results, because I look back in history, because I think it's useful… it's so useful to learn from, or to make predictions based on history. Orville Wright's first powered flight took place in 1903.

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Daniel Peters: thousands of PhDs.

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Daniel Peters: Tens of thousands of engineers and two world wars were required before the Boeing 707 could enter service in 1958.

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Daniel Peters: 55 years later. So, I love the optimism, and I very much look forward to Fusion, but even Helion Energy, which is contractually obligated to provide 50 megawatts of power to Microsoft in 2028, they're going gas turbine.

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Daniel Peters: Natural gas.

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Daniel Peters: this is, I don't… I want to burst any bubbles or anything like that, and interfere with anybody's financial plans, but it's, you know, there's a reason that Fusion's only been 20 years away for the last 50 years.

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Daniel Peters: And is there… do you have any reason… I mean, you've got a lot of plans…

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Daniel Peters: But is there really any hope?

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Mark Kushner: Okay, so, yeah, so there's a lot. So, yeah, so first, and when I… the context about shifting to systems engineering, I don't intend to apply that we don't need science. We are actively hiring PhDs. I… the context of what I meant was that the system engineering constraints have to be

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Mark Kushner: considered as soon as possible so that we're developing some plasma solution that actually meets the needs. And we have a lot of science also just in designing the laser and the blanket itself that… in my view, a lot of these things have never been matured because there hasn't been funding opportunities for it. I…

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Mark Kushner: I'm not going to, you know, lie to you all and say that, do I really believe that we're going to have a fusion power plant in the early 2030s? I mean…

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Mark Kushner: I mean, I think it would be a miracle, but I, yeah, I…

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Mark Kushner: I have my private opinions on what schedule I think is credible that I don't share publicly, but I…

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Mark Kushner: you know, there is a lot of pressure from investors. They don't want to hear that your product is going to take more than 10 years to develop and dig to market. So, one of XMR's strategies is that we announced last week that we're partnering with Raytheon to develop

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Mark Kushner: laser amplifiers for directed energy applications, so we do have a customer for our laser outside of Fusion.

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Mark Kushner: That we are delivering systems for. And so part of our company's strategy is that

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Mark Kushner: We want to have commercial applications of our technology outside of just fusion, so that we can, even if we don't raise, like, the billions of capital that we need right away to move forward with these very, right, these expensive nuclear facilities, that we have a path for long-term sustainability.

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Mark Kushner: So I think it is important for fusion companies to also find other ways to pivot and bring in revenue. So… but I… I do agree that I think it is a long road. I can't tell you what I predict that road will be, but…

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Daniel Peters: Might I make a suggestion?

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Mark Kushner: to finish with, the answer to finish with. Allison, thank you so much for your presentation.

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Mark Kushner: Thanks for an enthusiastic audience.

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Mark Kushner: And thank you, those of you online.

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Mark Kushner: Yeah, thank you all. Our comms team wants a photo. No, we should take one. He even asked me for one.

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Mark Kushner: I know, I hate it when people ask me about the schedule.

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Mark Kushner: Even though you don't say it, I don't know.

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Mark Kushner: Oh, but, but we, we also have a case for this, right? Yes, there's a little, oh, that's… Yeah, I think it cleans up.