Unlocking the Fusion Industry Supply Chain, with Kyoto Fusioneering’s Richard Pearson

Good Clean Energy is a podcast that tackles one of the most existential questions of our time: how to build a world with abundant, affordable, carbon-free electricity. Every episode, we’ll unpack all the things that TAE is working on to make fusion energy a reality.

In this episode, Kyoto Fusioneering co-founder Dr. Richard Pearson shares how his company is supplying the essential technology components others need to succeed. Rather than building reactors, Kyoto focuses on the “picks and shovels” of fusion, including systems such as: 

• Gyrotrons: High-frequency microwave devices to heat plasma in magnetic fusion reactors. 
• Fuel Cycle Systems: Enabling closed-loop fuel recycling, especially critical for companies pursuing deuterium-tritium fusion, which requires rare tritium.
• Liquid Breeding Blankets: Systems that use lithium to breed tritium and absorb neutron energy.

Regardless of the fusion method, every reactor needs a robust system to contain, fuel and extract energy from plasma. As fusion inches closer to commercialization, Kyoto Fusioneering is addressing these universal engineering needs by positioning itself not as a competitor in the race to build reactors, but as the key supplier helping everyone win that race.

Jim McNiel: Today, we’re going on a history lesson in a future vision. Think about this. At the turn of the century, 1908, there were 243 auto manufacturers in the world. 20 years later, 1929, there’s only 44. What’s that got to do with fusion? I mean, today there are around 50 private fusion companies around the world. What do they have in common with the early days of the automotive industry? They were creating soup to nuts, everything they needed to get a car rolling off the assembly line, if they had an assembly line. 

So today we’re going to explore what can be done to help make fusion scale faster. I’m joined today by the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Kyoto Fusioneering, which is a company focused on building the key components.that can help every fusion company get to market faster. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Richard Pearson. 

Richard Pearson: Hi Jim, good to see you. Thanks for having me on. 

McNiel: So I thought we could start by kind of just laying out the landscape of the three major approaches to fusion. Let’s define magnetic confinement fusion to start with.

Pearson: Okay, so there are three things that are important in a fusion reaction. So let’s take a step back and look at the physics. So when we try to do fusion, we have to first create something called plasma. Now plasma is the fourth state of matter. This is what happens when you heat up a gas. So when you heat up a gas, the atoms dissociate into the nucleus. So the positively charged nucleus of protons and neutrons and the electrons. And what you can do is you can basically make the ions and the elements in that plasma hit together and fuse to produce new elements. This is how the process works in the sun and the stars. And from this, you also produce energy.

So that’s the sort of the basic physics out of the way. What we can do with this is you’ve got a sea of charged ions. Now that can be magnetically confined. And in fusion, we can use large magnets to produce or sort of mimic the same conditions on Earth that you see in stars using magnetic fields. 

So there are three things that are important here. You have to get the right temperature of that plasma, so you have to heat the plasma up. You have to get the right densities. You have to squeeze the plasma really hard, and you also have to hold it there for a really long time. And in magnetic confinement fusion, you actually have quite low density, so we don’t actually need to squeeze it that much, we’ve just got to try and hold it in place long enough, and have a reasonable amount of temperature to get past a certain limit. So those three things — temperature, density, and time — make up something called the fusion triple product. 

McNiel: Long enough so it gets hot enough so you overcome the resistant property of atoms so that they can actually fuse. 

Pearson: That’s right. And in a magnetic confinement fusion reactor, you basically use magnets to squeeze this.

McNiel: Yeah, in magnetic confinement fusion, it’s kind of interesting to think about, you’re basically mimicking the sun. Because the sun’s operating in a vacuum. It’s got a tremendous amount of mass, which allows it to push these atoms together. And in so doing, it creates that heat because energy equals mass. We’re going to convert that mass into energy. And what we’re seeing shooting out from the sun in terms of solar flares, that’s plasma, right? 

Pearson: Indeed. And the conditions in the sun are very easy to do because we have huge gravity, but actually the reaction rate in the sun is quite low or in a star is quite low. But to recreate it on Earth we have to make these reactions happen in simulated conditions. So it is a sort of a different story when we’re actually trying to recreate fusion on Earth. 

McNiel: Yeah, the hard part is we don’t have the mass, we don’t have the gravity, so we have to make it up in some other way. So what’s inertial confinement fusion? 

Pearson: So inertial confinement fusion, it’s a different approach to achieve the same thing, which is to get past that threshold I mentioned earlier with that fusion triple product. But this time, rather than having it last for a really long time, you actually try and hit it with a laser or other form of driver and you’re having the density being super, super high for a very brief moment. So what you do is you say, we’re going to heat up a capsule containing fusion fuels and you’re going to make that ultra-dense for a very brief moment of time and that’s going to create the fusion reaction.

So unlike magnetic confinement, when you’re trying to hold it for a long time, it’s not very dense, but you’re still getting it hot. In inertial confinement, you’re just pulling different levers. That’s all it is. 

McNiel: Yeah. So it’s a pulsed process where you have some sort of collision, which is done by a laser or by a piston, or maybe even by a magnetic pinch. And that creates instantaneously higher energy levels that can overcome the barrier. 

Pearson: That’s right. And then you’ve sort of hinted there at the third of these approaches, which is the magneto inertial confinement or magneto or magnetized target fusion as well. There are various names for it, but the point is that between this super-high density on the inertial side and between the low density super-long confinement time on the magnetic side, you’ve got a big wide open space there where a number of concepts can exist with a variety of magnetic and inertial approaches.

So some things sort of try and implode a plasma for a relatively long period of time compared with an inertial confinement device, but then they hold it with a magnetic field, something like the magLIF, for example. 

McNiel: So when we think about magnetic versus inertial, tell me if I’m right, magnetic feels like steady state. You get a plasma superhot and you have fusion actions going on and on, which is similar to a star or the sun. But in inertial, it’s a pulsed system. You have to fire, fire, fire to get power out of your interactions. Is that correct? 

Pearson: Yeah, that’s right. 

McNiel: So the Lawrence Livermore laboratory experiment where they got a net energy output Q greater than one is an inertial confinement process, right?

Pearson: Yeah, that’s right. And if I remember correctly, the first result of what we call net power gain — so when you get more power from the fusion reaction than you actually put into it — that happened in December 2022. I think they’ve since done it several times further and increased the gain every time.

That was a one-off shot in a single shot for an inertial confinement machine that is an experiment. It’s a test experiment. If you’re going to go to a commercial power plant, you need to be running these probably ten hertz, maybe as low as one hertz. So one a second to actually repeat this reaction, because otherwise you cannot have a reactor producing fusion power if you’re only going to have one shot every day, which is essentially the sort of rate that that machine can do at the moment.

McNiel: Richard, before we jump into what Kyoto does, I guess the first obvious question is, how does a proper Englishman end up working for a Japanese engineering firm? 

Pearson: Well, that’s an interesting story involving a quite literal elevator pitch. I happened to be at a conference called Tritium 2016, which was held in Charleston, South Carolina. And I got into the elevator at this conference to go down to a drinks mixer or a poster session or something, I forget. And there was a young Japanese gentleman in the elevator with me and me being a slightly gregarious British person said, I think I’m going to say hello to this person. So I did and I said hi and we had a really great conversation. It turned out we were doing something very similar in our research and we got on like a house on fire. 

McNiel: Well, so the moral of that story is people get your face out of your screens and start interacting with other people because you might find yourself a career, right? 

Pearson: Absolutely. That was my Sliding Doors moment.

McNiel: There you go. So let’s go back. We’ve kind of defined the three major approaches to fusion. Now you guys are going to build components and systems and provide services to help this happen. How do you do that across these three sectors? What do they all have in common? 

Pearson: So if you think about the experiment at [Lawrence Livermore’s] NIF that was mentioned earlier, or you think about a plasma and a magnetic confinement device, and let’s just chuck a couple of examples out there. So Commonwealth Fusion Systems is developing their high field tokamak device. TAE are obviously developing an FRC. If you look at JET in the UK, that’s an old age now, but a tokamak device again, and the ITER experiment will hopefully eventually yield a tokamak device as well. So these are all magnetic devices.

You’ve got that NIF as I said, which is the ICF device, the inertial device. And you’ve got a bunch of other private companies now pursuing kind of everything in between, as I said before, between that inertial and magnetic space. Now, all of these are going to approach producing a plasma very differently. So they’re trying to do the star, which needs to go inside a jar. So the very simple way of doing this is to say, well, actually the star might look quite different. It might require things to make that star to be quite different, but the jar, there are a lot of similarities there. 

You’re going to have to deal with the same problems. You’ve got to fuel your star and exhaust the fuel products from your star. And you’ve also got to contain your star in that jar. You’ve got to have materials that are going to be able to do that. You have to be able to transfer the energy away from that star to turn it into useful power, whether that be electricity or something more advanced like hydrogen production or desalination.

And so what my company does is we’re focused on designing those jars. TAE or Commonwealth or the JET team will have designed that system, but we’ve got technologies that will help make up what will be one day an advanced experiment to get towards a first of a kind power plant. 

So maybe if we take a sort of a look at the three key areas in which my company is developing technologies there and sort of how we tend to frame things. The first one is on the magnetic side only, we’re developing something called a gyrotron. 

Now a gyrotron is a high-power high-frequency microwave heating device and what we can do is we can use a gyrotron and basically apply these microwaves to a plasma inside a tokamak or inside an FRC or any other magnetic-type device. And if we hit the right resonant frequency of the electrons in the plasma, we can actually make them excited. And through that excitation, they can transfer their energy to the ions in the plasma to heat the plasma up. And as we said earlier, one of those key three factors in that fusion triple product is temperature.

So we are actually developing the technologies and indeed selling, we’ve sold some of these gyrotrons to the market to produce the temperatures required to make fusion happen in magnetic confinement devices. 

And gyrotrons, they’re not a new technology. They’ve been developed over the last 30, 40 years. Japan had done a lot of research for international public programs to develop gyrotron technology and we sensed a gap that actually there was a commercial opportunity here to improve on the gyrotron, to improve the efficiency.

When you increase the magnetic field on a fusion magnet, a magnetic fusion device, you need to increase the frequency at which you’re heating the plasma. It roughly scales with the frequency of the plasma with the magnetic field. So we are having to go towards higher frequency gyrotrons which are harder to develop and haven’t been 100 percent demonstrated yet. So as some developers are now looking at, for example, HTS magnets, we’re tracking alongside to make sure that we’re developing the enabling technologies they need to actually heat their plasma. 

McNiel: So, we’ve conquered or we’ve addressed heating up the fuel for plasma. What’s next? 

Pearson: So there’s two more and they’re very much interlinked. The first one is the fuel cycle systems. Now what do we mean by this? What we do on a future fusion plant, we won’t have a once through fuel cycle. We won’t put the fuel in and then exhaust it like you do in a car.

So you don’t put your gas or your petrol in the car, ignite it, combust it, drive your drivetrain, and then exhaust it through the gas and say goodbye to the remaining unburned fuel and the gases and so on. However, in a fusion reactor, you have to recycle that. So you close your fuel cycle. So some fusion developers are pursuing advanced fuel cycles, whether that be D helium 3, DD fusion, so deuterium deuterium fusion, or even proton-boron11 fusion. But you say, right, okay, we’re going to put this fuel into the vessel, we’re going to try and fuse it, and actually some of it won’t fuse, some of it will fuse, whatever comes out the back end, the products from the fusion reaction or that unspent fuel, you’ve got to pump out of the vessel, and then you’ve got to recycle them back in again, because you do not want to waste that fuel.

McNiel: One of the things we have to be really careful about in fusion is the only thing you want inside of the machine are the atoms that you want to fuse. So in the case of deuterium and tritium, you’re going to want just to have those two atoms. In the case of boron and hydrogen, if you have other impurities in there, you could end up with fusion reactions that produce stuff that you don’t want.

Pearson: I think the main problem is actually less about side reactions that you don’t want. It’s more about polluting the plasma and reducing the performance because plasmas are very, very hard things to manage. And if you have an impurity in the plasma from the walls that surround the chamber or something that comes in there, but you don’t want it because it’s fallen off, it’s flaked off one of the divertor confinement machine or the first wall on the inertial confinement machine, you end up polluting your plasma and potentially killing the reaction. So you end up saying, we now need to start our plasma again, clean the chamber out and so on.

McNiel: So one of the biggest challenges that the fusion industry, especially on the magnetic side, has to deal with is, as you said, this very rare fuel source, which is tritium, which doesn’t exist naturally in quantities. It has to be bred. So you guys are developing a lithium blanket that would be used to help breed and capture this tritium?

Pearson: That’s right. What we have to do in fusion is actually surround the plasma with a material that contains something that will capture both the energy and also breed new fuel. So Jim, as you said, tritium doesn’t exist in the environment, at least not in very large quantities, certainly nowhere near what we require for a fusion machine and certainly a fusion industry. What we have to do is produce this using lithium.

So on the DT fusion fuel cycle, deuterium tritium, what we do is we use the neutron produced from the deuterium and tritium reaction. So deuterium and tritium fusion, fuse the two together, you get one helium and one neutron. That neutron flies off and it hits the blanket. The blanket then converts the lithium in the blanket using that neutron into a new tritium and a helium. Those can be separated. The tritium can be taken out and put back into the fuel cycle whilst also that neutron provides its energy to the blanket, so it will heat up that blanket. And you need to also take the heat away from the blanket, so through specially designed heat exchangers and neutron irradiation resistant materials and high temperature materials, you can also make sure you design your blanket to do both. So that’s the goal of what we’re trying to do. 

And we’re developing and designing both the materials, and also the actual systems required to achieve this and demonstrate this is possible. So if you’ve got a solid blanket around, which is sort of the old hat design, then you might need to replace every three to five years. However, most of the new companies around the world are looking at liquid breeder designs. Now you can’t damage a liquid and you can also top up and replenish your liquids. Almost imagine like you’ve got, what’s the best analogy I can use here? Let’s say you’ve got squash, an orange squash in a juice. If you want to increase the concentration because it’s diluted a little bit because the ice melted, you can put in a bit more concentrate and you’re all good to go. So that’s kind of exactly what you can do here. 

McNiel: So in many ways, for the companies that are pursuing DT fusion, you guys are tackling really the biggest challenge, which is how do we produce tritium, capture tritium, continue to manufacture it and protect our machine from neutrons. Do you guys envision a time when you would actually produce tritium as a fuel and sell that? 

Pearson: It’s an interesting question. I think it’s possible. I mean, certainly we will have some of the technologies required to be able to do that. There are big questions around what does a future tritium supply chain look like? How are we going to produce fuel for tens or hundreds of these plants when we start commercial rollout? But I think there’ll be solutions within the industry itself. What we aim to be and what we strive to be is a partner to whoever needs our technologies. I think I’d go a step further in saying that, coming back to the car analogy, if you think about multiple developers, your Fords, your Fiats, your Hondas, and so on, they’re all going to be developing their own version of the same sort of engine. What we will do there is say, if you need an exhaust system, or if you need that drive train system, we can help provide that.

And if someone says, actually, we need you to do the pistons and the ejectors as well. Oh, and by the way, we also need a bit of help on our engine block, then we can provide that because I think there does come an overlapping point where if we then are able to say, we’ve looked at this material and it’s really suitable for your first wall. Someone may be able to say, actually your technology may well be better than ours. In that case, we’d love to twin it with that. We do perceive this to be a sort of a car engine car model where someone has the engine block and we have the auxiliary systems that help provide that engine with the fuel, exhaust, drivetrain, etc.

McNiel: You’re tackling the most difficult components for DT fusion. In the case of companies like TAE, which are pursuing proton boron fusion, which is aneutronic, which does not produce 14 mega electron volts of neutrons every time we have a reaction, you can be helpful in terms of the first thing you talked about filtering and heating. Those are the main components where you could assist someone like TAE. 

Pearson: Absolutely. I think TAE is a good example because whilst you won’t have to do tritium breeding if you’re a TAE or if you’re another company. So Helion is pursuing a D helium 3 cycle, for example, where they won’t be using tritium. Any of these companies though are still using hydrogen isotopes. Those still require pumping, separation and clean up to be able to put back into the reactor, to be able to put back into that machine to actually then run the reaction again. 

In the case of TAE, yes, if you can develop an FRC that’s stable and you require to heat that up to fusion temperatures, then a gyrotron will be a surefire way to get you to those temperatures.

McNiel: So you’re basically a closed loop catalytic converter on the filtering side. 

Pearson: That’s right. Yeah. I was going to say you can take the car analogy and say it’s like looping the exhaust back in, but I don’t think that’s a good idea in terms of a car. But yeah, it’s a catalytic converter where you take all of the unburnt fuel and it somehow ends up back in the fuel tank. It’s probably the best way to say it. 

McNiel: What’s the biggest challenge for Kyoto Fusioneering? 

Pearson: Market evolution is probably the biggest one. We’ve got a huge amount of technology push in what we’re doing and we’re trying to then align that with the market pool.

So we have a real focus on being a business that provides something the market needs. I know that sounds really basic and obvious, but there are a lot of companies going for that kind of moonshot or the Mars shot approach. We’re going to get to fusion by 2030s. As you know, a lot of organizations have their sort of timelines on the decadal timescale.

So what we have to do is say, well, what do they need to help them get to the very next step in the next one, two, three years? And that’s the systems. That’s gyrotrons, certain pumps, certain filters, maybe design services, engineering services, certain materials. So that’s what we’re looking to do now. And I think probably the biggest challenge there is the fact that we have to cultivate demand for what we’re doing and also respond to the demand at the same time. 

More and more we’re finding that developers are coming to us and saying, can you do this? Have you got this? We need this. We have to carefully balance where we want to provide something that the market says, Hey, we need this right now, whilst also preparing and investing in the right things that we know they’re going to need in two, three, five years time. We have a separate branch that’s looking at developing revenue from the technologies that we can sell to market for those that need it right now. So the biggest challenge is that balance.

McNiel: And I guess, another way to think about you, if we leave the auto industry and we talk about what’s happening today, which is the AI industry that’s being powered by Nvidia, right? They manufacture GPUs. You guys are not building the end product. You’re not building a fusion reactor. You’re providing the enabling technology so you can support multiple companies to get to a successful fusion machine faster. 

Pearson: That’s right. That’s exactly right. I like that analogy of NVIDIA for perhaps obvious reasons, but I also like it because it’s a technology that underpins and enables everything else to happen. It doesn’t sit at the front. You know, if you ask an average person, have you heard of Nvidia? Probably the answer will be no. Oh yeah, I heard of it, but I don’t know what they do. Whereas if you ask them what a Google is, Oh yeah, I’ve got a Google phone. I know the Google search engine, same with Apple and so on.

So here we’re in a situation where we’ve got an ability to be able to sort of progress and support the industry as it grows, and then hopefully sit in that position where we’re providing technologies and products and services to everyone that needs it as they grow and when they grow as well. So we want to be integral to the industry.

Now in some cases we may be developing technology and say look the market’s not quite ready for this yet but that’s why we have to invest the capital that we’ve raised into those bits so that in two, three years time we can say we’ve actually got a working prototype and we think this is going to be revolutionary So one example of that would be direct internal recycling.

So in that fuel cycle we mentioned that sort of catalytic exchanger for the car. That would be the thing that almost, if you stretch your imagination a little bit and think about, imagine if you were to be able to teleport your unspent fuel in the exhaust stream straight back into your fuel tank so it can be straight away used again. That’s what direct internal recycling could do for the fuel cycle. Normally that might take a lot of time, a lot more systems and so on. We think that could be a real game changer. That’s gonna take time. 

McNiel: Look, I think it’s really interesting that you guys have chosen to be the supplier, to be the neutral party that is technology forward, that is very, very narrowly focused on a mission, which is obviously to make fusion a reality.

And I predict that you’re going to run into a number of very compelling technologies from a number of different parties and that you may end up becoming the clearinghouse for all the key components that people need to build fusion reactors. 

Pearson: Chance would be a fine thing. Yeah, I think we’ve kind of seen that with the gyrotron. When we started the company, we saw an opportunity and we said, we think we’ve got a technology which happens to be developed by world-class facilities and suppliers in Japan. And we brought that together and we built an elite team that’s able to actually develop these gyrotrons, improve the performance and then sell them to market. And I think to date we’ve sold six gyrotrons to the market, so we are a revenue generating company. 

Now, software really easy to invest a couple of million and you might get a really interesting breakthrough or new products, but in hardware, you have to do the hard graft. It’s expensive to do hardware. It takes more time, but if you invest that money, you might find something interesting. And of course, with TAE, you found two of those interesting avenues. We’re very much on the lookout for spinouts that might come out of the Kyoto Fusioneering program. So, in addition to providing services to the fusion market, we are always thinking about, if we develop this high power microwave technology, where else might that be useful?

And there are a couple of uses for those, and we’re quite excited about some of the other technologies that may lead down similar paths.

McNiel: To be clear, in the fusion marketplace, you know, people are digging for gold and the one that finds it is going to be the company that really establishes the new definition of fusion. So I’m obviously biased. I think it’s going to be magnetic confinement and I think it’s going to be TAE.

But once that happens, I hope that there’s going to be a real consolidation of thinking about how we can all get there faster and build a fusion marketplace. Because the 10,000 machines that we need to distribute around the world is not going to be done by one single company.

Pearson: Yeah, it’s going to take an industry to do it. We’ve been described before as a picks and shovels kind of approach. And I quite like that. We want to help anyone digging for gold with the tools that they need to be able to dig for that gold. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and there is no judgment there on any single organization on how fast they want to do that or how they want to get there. But if we can help them in some way to do that, that’s fantastic. 

However, the sort of longer term view is that we think that we can be in a position where we’ve got key technologies to say to these organizations, that issue that you thought you’d have to solve, don’t worry, we’re on the way to solving it. Or maybe even in some cases we have solved it. Right now there is a tendency, and it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a maturation of the market, but we’re starting to see this change where a lot of people want to vertically integrate. I think we’ve seen that across other industries, certainly in the automotive industry, especially with the emergence of Tesla over recent years.

It’s, oh, let’s build a car, let’s get the best people to redesign the car from scratch and everything is going to be vertically integrated. It’s all going to be Tesla, Tesla, Tesla. In fusion, that’s going to be a lot harder to do. 

Now maybe the Tesla of fusion could exist after the industry’s confirmed everything that can be confirmed and we’re making incremental innovations, but here we’re coming across really radical breakthroughs in a number of technology areas in material science.

I think AI and information technology is going to have a big impact in the next few years across all the way to plasma physics. There’s a lot to do and I think eventually, as you said, that watershed moment that you inferred there, when that happens, there’s going to be a real race to go, right, we’ve done this first thing, we now need to get to a power plant. Actually, do you know what? I think doing a tritium system might be quite challenging, it’s going to take a really long time. Ah, there are developers who’ve done this already. Ah, Kyooto Fusioneering have done this. Let’s go work with them. We’ve got some technology of our own. We’d like to integrate that with theirs, or perhaps we’ve done nothing of our own. We’d like to take theirs and so on and so forth. So as I said, it’s a flexible model. If they want to pick and a shovel, we can do that. If they just want the pick or the shovel or the pair of Levi’s jeans, then we can do that as well.

McNiel: Yeah, you make the Levi’s reference which is really interesting because we can’t think of too many gold miners that have multibillion dollar corporations today, but we know about Levi Strauss and we can’t think of too many American computer companies that exist and there’s Apple and Dell currently building, and HP, building computers today.

When I started there were hundreds, but what we do know is Intel. And we do know Nvidia today in the AI space, and we do know Microsoft. We know the key components for building these things. And so Kyoto has a very good chance of becoming synonymous with the fusion industry. And I applaud the approach you guys are taking to the market. 

Richard, thank you for joining us and good luck to Kyoto Fusioneering. I hope you guys have great success. 

Pearson: Thank you. There’s so much going on and everything’s changing, but all for the positive at the moment. The next few years are exciting and we’ve got a lot to do.

McNiel: Thank you for listening to Good Clean Energy. This season, we’re going to unpack all the things that are going to make fusion a reality. The energy source that’s going to power the planet for the next 100,000 years. I’m pretty excited. I hope you are too. Thanks for listening.