Welcome to another episode of the Kronos Fusion
Energy Podcast. I am Priyanka Ford, the founder
of Kronos Fusion Energy, and today we have an
extraordinary guest with us, Carl Wegel. My mentor,
founding partner at Kronos, and the lead designer
of our patented Kronos Smart Fusion Energy Generators.
Carl has an impressive career that spans over
five decades with extensive experience in the
design and development of compact, ultra -high
-field tokamak pathways for commercial fusion
energy. His journey began at MIT, where he worked
closely with Dr. Bruce Montgomery on the 14 Tesla
toroidal field magnet for the groundbreaking
Alcatore C tokamak. This early work laid the
foundation for Carl's deep understanding of high
-field tokamaks and led to his role heading the
magnet division at Inesco, a pioneering fusion
startup based in San Diego. There, he engineered
powerful 30 Tesla, Omnic heating and 16 Tesla
toroidal field magnets, designs that with sufficient
funding could have been among the first power
-generating tokamaks in the world. Carl's influence
didn't stop there. In 2020, he became the senior
magnet designer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems,
a role that further solidified his status as
the leader in the fusion energy community. Today,
As the primary architect of Kronos' smart fusion
generators, Carl is guiding our team towards
commercial fusion energy. In this episode, we
dwell into Carl's extensive experience and learn
about the challenges and rewards of working in
fusion energy. we'll explore how Carl's journey
led him to Kronos and the innovative work he's
doing with our smart generators. We'll discuss
the importance of superconductors in modern technology,
the challenges of fusion energy commercialization,
and Carl's vision for the future. This conversation
is a unique opportunity. to understand the mind
of a true fusion energy pioneer and his perspective
on the direction of sustainable energy. I could
not have gotten Kronos off the ground if it was
not for Carl. I am forever grateful for his expertise,
guidance, and mentorship in helping me establish
and grow Kronos Fusion Energy. So sit back. and
get ready to be inspired by one of the leading
minds in the fusion energy field. Carl Wegel's
story is one of dedication, innovation, and a
relentless pursuit of a cleaner and more sustainable
world. Here's my co -founder at Kronos Fusion
Energy, Dr. Carl Wegel. Carl, why fusion? Why
bother at all? An idealist, and I've been very
much a climate realist, and I want to find a
solution before man -time burns up the planet.
The inclusion of energy appears to be, I thought,
potentially the most successful, and the one
with the greatest challenge, and I love challenge,
so here I am. Right, yeah, it's definitely fun
doing difficult things. When you got started,
did you get started at MIT or were you somewhere
before that and you went to MIT? I started at
MIT in the summer of my sophomore year in the
same location where my twin brother Bob had started
the year before. That was the best time for me.
He was one of the best inventors in my life.
He was also in my career. I was so enamored with
his work and admired his work and enjoyed helping
him. And he more than simply returned the favor.
So back at the tender age of 13, I was... impressed
with designing all of the magnets of Alcatur
C, which is still the world's record holder for
highest magnetic field. So I was really, really
grateful for the chance to work with Alcatur
C at MIT. Yeah. So Alcatur C, does it still hold
a record? I think it still holds a record. It
still holds the record at the highest central
magnetic field of about 14 Tesla. What was JET
in, do you know? Oh, much, much lower. It was
a far larger machine, but it was scarcely half
that of Dr. Tracy. Dr. Tracy was a small machine,
a toy, but it said... It sent not only the record
high -spec night field, but for a while, health
records showed that the H -mode of plasma was
possible in terms of the scale. It was either
A -squared R or R -squared A, depending on the
detail with which one it sent the plasma results.
That is also the baseline design for our generator
at Kronos, correct? a great proponent of dimensional
analysis, where one selects the variables such
that they are non -dimensional. And once they're
non -dimensional, then you can apply any exponent
you want to, which is the value of non -dimensionalizing
the system. And my dear wish, there were a lot
that was done in terms of non -dimensional. Components.
This is the one that's the first vital application
to artificial intelligence. One of the things
that AI does is you tell it many times. It's
never been deep into a data that humans just
ignore or fail to notice what it's telling you.
And artificial intelligence can take the time
that humans can, because they can do it a million
times faster. And that cooks out the information
we need. And then I'm told that one of the areas
where artificial intelligence is supreme... is
in computer programming and that there are a
lot of computer programming jobs that are in
jeopardy because of that. Yeah and a lot of like
the other jobs like the project management aspects
of it. I remember writing 400 page like functional
design documents when I was at Edison or Disney
where I like wrote the entire design end to end.
And it took me so long. And now I feel like if
I had Chad GPT the way that I use it now, had
I had it back then, man, I don't know where I
would have been. Material science, I think, is
going to be also very impactful for us, like
the advent of AI in quantum computing for coming
up with new materials. Very excited to see that,
especially superconducting materials. It's going
to change the world. You know this. I mean MIT
is on the forefront of all of this. Yeah, Paul
is amazing. Tell me about Inesco, Carl. What,
when you, how far? Inesco was in business from
1980 to 1984 and they were formed on the ideas
of Robert Bouchard who decided that At that time,
there were no high -temperature superconductors,
so we said, well, the field improves performance
by an exponent 4. That is, the performance is
proportional to the field, to the horsepower.
And as a consequence, we'll make the hot air
with whatever way we can, which is using... using
copper. So his idea was to build the core center
of the vacuum vessel and surround it with copper
coils and run the copper coils at high temperature
and then run coolant through it and then the
coolant would extract the heat generated in the
copper and convert it back into electricity.
and would also, the copper would be heated primarily
by neutrons flying out from the plasma chamber
and the neutrons would explode not by a wasteful
barrier, a wasteful shielding, but rather use
copper itself as the shielding, the TF coils,
and you could... extract the heat from the neutrons,
run it through a conventional rotating generator
and generate electricity. The team was assembled
in San Diego, Ohio, California. And for four
years, the team designed PF coils that were operating
at 60 Tesla. The only kitting system was operating
at 30 Tesla. And if the full funding had become
available in a timely manner, it probably would
be generating fusion today. And it might well
be worth a near development of that same type,
because... The cost of these machines was quite
low. It was just conventional. I kept the distress
covered. What was the output of this machine?
Is that comparable as well? Like, so low -cost
output? Yeah, it was planned for the 500 MW to
1 EW output. Wow, that's pretty good. Of course,
the problem would be getting a very high queue
out of the machine since the wait for heat generated
in the grid phones was a strong negative. But
it certainly was the best idea at the time. And
I think it's now being supplanted by HTS. Wow,
interesting. But the general ideology of the
machine, I'm sure bits and pieces are being used
in other fusion energy systems. So maybe it was
unnecessary evolutionary stage in fusion. Well,
since it ended up just being a paper study, and
it was sort of an outlier that was in it. to
generate itself animosity so that I doubt that
anyone would really want to get through the glamour
of HTS. Right. Yeah, I understand that. So your
work has consistently pushed boundaries. especially
with magnet technology and fusion. What were
the biggest challenges at this time, like I am
thinking after Inesco, what were the big challenges
for commercial fusion at that point and how much
have we improved our chances now? I think the
biggest challenge in the past has been generating
a very, very high magnetic field. And to many,
much extent, that problem still exists today.
It's been greatly deviated by HDS. A problem
that has now appeared is that with HDS, HDS is
a brittle ceramic, and if one... If one stretches
HTS by more than 0 .4 or 0 .5%, it runs in danger
for the microcracks, and the microcracks copy
current density by half, I'm sorry, by 10%. And
if one tries to... And the system with fire fields,
the strain gets higher, the stress gets higher,
the strain gets higher. You have a losing battle
that your current capacity of HTS gets to plummet.
By about 0 .7 % to 1%, the current density is
up to about half. So a new problem that I think...
Not enough people with the knowledge are unaware.
Materials don't need to be strong. We got that
problem solved. They have to be stiff. And there
are only very, very, very few materials that
are stiff. Tungsten is very stiff. Modules twice
that of steel. But it's... very difficult to
work with, and it too is brittle. You try to
roll it to make it thinner, and it just fumbles,
you know what I'm saying? And in order to keep
it so held together, you have to roll it, not
even at room temperature, but at liquid nitrogen
temperature. And even there, you don't gain a
great deal. The other material is... carbon fiber,
it too has a modulus of heat. It can have a modulus
of heat, at least twice that of steel. And that's
the material that we plan to be using. In the
wings, there's materials like graphene and similar
nanotubes, and those can be developed. have an
affordable cost, they will eventually supplant
that graphene as the safest material known as
far as I know. And we have funding for the Graphene
Council as one of our host consultants. Right,
we spoke to that, yeah. Also, you know, our without
naming the company, our partner that we've been
working with that converts biomass to jet fuel
also would like to convert biomass to carbon
fiber using fusion as the heat source. So there
could be like a cyclical arrangement that we
actually kind of discussed that when we signed
our MOUs where we would buy back the carbon fiber
from that. It's pretty cool. Yeah, and who knows
what other material will come through, you know,
that Google AI designed 380 ,000 material compositions
using quantum computing. So, you never know what's
possible. The companies are generating these
exquisite materials. I mean, not by the old -fashioned
trial and error, but rather by the computer simulation,
the computer codes that tell exactly the orbits
of the electrons as they swirl around the nucleus
and the interaction of the electrons with the
universe towards it, and then tell you which
material has the highest melting point not only
in the world, but probably in the universe, and
a family of other ones that have a melting point
that approaches that, but are perhaps made with
much lower cost materials. But there's the half
the impact of nitrite. Nitrite is the current
and probably be the permanent victor in that
race. And we have collaboration with them. So
we're keeping our eyes open to all of the world's
best materials and the people who are developing
them. Yeah, no, we definitely want those partnerships.
We want, we need to drill it into the heads of
young people that material sciences is like an
exciting thing to get into. I think it's arguably
the most exciting thing. I agree, yes. I think
you should do much, much to the side. Oh my God,
yes. And also, you know, payload is like the,
is a big, big factor in the rocket equation.
And if we can make lighter materials, which is
what a lot of material companies are after, we
can make space travel, multi -planetary civilizations,
we can make all that possible. All of that is
engineering and materials right now. It's a collaboration.
The carbon fiber that we plan to use was in fact
developed as an aircraft of use. Oh, okay. That's
so awesome. It was developed not merely for its
lightweight and structural properties, but also
that it could survive a lightning strike much
better than the available carbon fibers. Carl,
in all of these projects that you worked on building
various fusion energy generators out there. How
many people is too many people in a team? When
does it become bureaucratic and cumbersome? have
too much interplay between people that you can't
make much further progress. Plus, well, you begin
to get all down and you begin to get overly cautious
and you run the risk of... not being able, that
you're unwilling to take any risks at all. And
when you build a machine, you've got to be taking
some risks or you're not at the level of performance
the fusion seems to demand that you be. Yeah.
I see where you're going with this. It basically
becomes cumbersome and bureaucratic after like
a 500 person point where decisions are slowed
down and progress is almost slowed down because
there are too many hinds in the pot. That makes
sense to me. Nine people is low. That is shockingly
low. Shockingly low. smaller than nine. And even
Kamua Fusion, it was just a small team assembled
from survivors of Alcatraz -Simon. When you have
a team of nine, your idea is to have the top
nine people in the world. And when you have a
team of 40, You can want a team of the top 40
people in the world, either people who are at
the pinnacle of knowledge, or having passionate
young people who devote all of their energies
to working on it. And when you assemble a 40
to 80 reset, and when you get a team beyond 80,
you're beginning There are no more top -level
people in the world. You've got to be one of
the ones who are willing to join you. And if
you start adding people who are not top -level
people, they may very well not contribute to
the design. So why are they there? That you could
have lackeys that you hire somebody because there's
great computers. programming and they program
whatever you tell them to, but they don't really
fully understand what it is they're working on.
And that's the whole level. Second level people,
you need to sort of question their work because
they may not know quite what they're doing and
they need guidance. I understand. Okay, there's
also the aspect of you may desperately need certain
people for a certain span, but then are you obligated
to keep the people when they've chucked one lot
of their expertise and that's... This is kind
of why I picked the general business model that
we've been working on, Carl. We literally have...
our ignition system that's being built by another
company. We have our heat capture system on the
other end built by another company. We have the
magnet systems built by another startup that's
coming out of Brookhaven National Labs. We have
our red coat tape being built in Houston. So
it's almost as if we just are the people that
put the Lego pieces together and we're enabling
an infrastructure of about 200 companies that
would work with us in order to do these things
because then not only do you have that flexibility
of your contractual agreement, you also enable
a large infrastructure, like an economic infrastructure,
where the best people who do the best things,
you just buy it from them, rather than having
to build everything in -house. Yeah, sorry, go
ahead. Anyway, moving on from that. What, what
are you, what are you, what was like the big
accomplishment in your life that, that like,
you know, your parents would be proud of and
like, what was that moment for you? Again, with
my twin brother, we saved my mother $53 million
that they had built a laboratory for integrated
science and engineering, a BSAT building, which
was almost $200 million. And they needed to magnetically
shield the building because the building... Intelligently,
or no, I'm not sure, had decided that the two
were going to do all of their nanotechnology
in this one building. And that meant using the
two major tools of nanotechnology, one of which
is very high magnetic field magnets, superconducting
magnets with four dimensions or four inches is
something that generated 814 Tesla. And in the
room, they call them cells, in the cell next
door, they might have an electron microscope,
which are sensitive to a field of billions of
that field generated by the high -field magnets.
And they needed to use a magnetic field called
new metal to... magnetize in such a way that
it gets outside of the cell that had the high
field magnet field. The field would plummet and
be low enough that they could put an electron
microscope in the room next to it. And to do
so, it would require taking everything off the
walls of the building, putting on layers of this
new metal, and then putting the features on the
wall again. The previous company had come up
with an estimate of $54 million to do this in,
I think, about 18 months. And we came in to co
-operate the results to see whether we could
do better. And after doing analysis with a...
a code from Integrated Engineering Software,
we were able to cut the amount of new metal required
by 102 and therefore cut the cost from $54 million
to $27 million. But, meanwhile, Bob and I were
saying over and over again that using new metal
was not the cheapest way to go. That the cheapest
way was to replace all of their high -field magnets
with replacement new magnets that were designed
in a way that they generated nine to zero fringe
field. Instead of the fringe field dropping off
as R1 over R2 or R1 over R to the fifth, it to
drop it over as one of them. over R to the 11th
or one over R to the 23rd power such that the
magnetic field in adjacent cells was well below
that tolerable by the microscope. And we didn't
get a whole lot of acceptance by the physicists.
did get acceptance by the woman who was the founder
of the project. So she listened to us and decided
that that would be the way we go. But there was
all this climber that would take too darn long.
But they went to cryomagnetics in Tennessee and
got a quote. million dollars for all of the mag