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What does it really mean to “build a star on Earth”?
Available on Apple and Spotify.
Imagine if you could create a tiny version of the sun that produces enough energy to power entire towns …
In this episode, cohosts (and mother-daughter duo) Janet Kraus and Ally Giebutowski explore one of the most ambitious clean-energy ideas of our time: fusion power. Joining them is Alex Creely, a plasma physicist and tokamak operations lead at Commonwealth Fusion Systems who has spent nearly a decade working to turn fusion from a scientific breakthrough into a practical energy source.
Ally, who heard Alex speak during a week-long MIT Youth Climate Leadership program with Bluedot Institute, jumped at the opportunity to get to speak with him. Janet, who lived through the nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island and decades-long promises that fusion is “almost here,” came into the conversation as a bit of a skeptic.
During their conversation, Alex breaks down fusion in refreshingly human terms, explains why something that sounds simple is one of the hardest engineering challenges humanity has ever taken on, and talks about why the next decade could be pivotal. Eventually, Janet comes around.
“My conversation with Alex really shifted my perspective on what it means to take a risk,” she says. “In the startup world, we talk about ‘overnight successes’ taking 10 years, but Alex is working on a 50-year overnight success that could change the trajectory of humanity.”
Along the way, the conversation expands beyond science. Listen as they examine fear and misconceptions around nuclear energy, how fusion differs fundamentally from fission, and why big innovations often take decades of quiet progress before they suddenly feel inevitable.
This is a conversation about patience, curiosity, risk-taking, and what it means to work on something that may not pay off immediately, but could change everything.
In This Episode, You’ll Hear:
- What fusion energy actually is, and how it differs from nuclear fission
- Why fusion requires temperatures hotter than the center of the sun
- The challenge of producing more energy than it takes to sustain the reaction
- How powerful magnets act as “insulation” for 100-million-degree plasma
- Why recent breakthroughs have shifted timelines from distant to tangible
- How fusion could complement wind and solar, especially for dense cities
- The infrastructure, cost, and policy challenges of scaling fusion globally
- What everyday people can do to support fusion’s future
- Why the most impactful work always carries uncertainty and risk
About Alex Creely
Alex Creely is a plasma physicist and tokamak operations lead at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. His work focuses on advancing fusion energy from laboratory research to grid-ready infrastructure. Known for his ability to explain complex science in accessible ways, Alex is part of a growing group of scientists working to make clean, firm fusion power a reality.
Meet the Hosts:
- Janet Kraus: I’m Janet, a serial start-up founder and CEO, twin-girl mom, and wife to a fun and funny guy. I am on a mission to build healthier thinking in young people, stop toxic division, spotlight hopeful climate action, and advocate for safe AI.
- Cleo Carney: I am Cleo, a student at Harvard University, and I strongly believe that conversations, businesses, and the private markets can create profound change. I also love to cook nourishing food, work out in nature, and find sustainable swaps for everyday items and habits.
- Victoria Riskin: I am Victoria Riskin. I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
- Ally Giebutowski: I’m Ally, a freshman at Lafayette College. I believe that a sustainable life is a happier life and that human connection is at the heart of it all. Every day, I try to weave greener, more intentional living into every part of my life, whether that’s in the college classroom, in the kitchen, or through meaningful conversations with others.
Transcript
Hosts: Janet Kraus and Ally Giebutowski
Guest: Alex Creely
Alex Creely: Hard things are hard, and just because you're not sure if something's going to work doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Most impactful things that you can do have a chance of failure, and you need to be OK with that. If you really want to make a difference in something big, and that's something that people haven't done before, you need to put the effort in and be OK with taking risks.
Victoria Riskin: Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Bluedot Living podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, the founder of Bluedot Living. On this podcast, we imagine if people were actually making progress on climate change. Well, they are. Every episode we talk to great people in the trenches who are doing really big and small things to make a difference. Every week, because we have such great people to interview, my co-hosts and I duke it out to see which of us will be this week's interviewers. So, who are my co-hosts, you ask? Great question. Ladies, will you please introduce yourselves?
Janet Kraus: Hi, I am Janet Kraus, serial entrepreneur and board member at Bluedot Living.
Ally Giebutowski: Hi everyone. I'm Ally Giebutowski. I'm a freshman at Lafayette College and a Bluedot intern.
Cleo Carney: Hi guys. I'm Cleo Carney, a sophomore at Harvard College and a Bluedot intern and board member for the Bluedot Institute.
Victoria Riskin: So, I am excited to be bringing today's guest to the table for our discussion and debate. Guys, if we're going to move away from carbon-emitting power, coal, and fossil fuels and move to renewable energy, we're going to need an array of choices in addition to solar and wind. We've accomplished a lot, but it's just beginning.
One of the great sources of power for us earthlings is the sun. Imagine if you could create a tiny version of the sun that produces enough energy to power, say, whole towns. Well, a small group of brilliant young scientists from MIT asked themselves that question: What might happen if a small amount of nuclear material could do that through fusion technology?
What is fusion technology, you ask? How would this work, and what's the potential? Is it safe? What are the challenges? Today, I'm thrilled to bring to the table Alex Creely, who leads the tokamak operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He is a young plasma physicist who also has the remarkable ability to explain fusion and what their team is doing so that even I can understand. It's really exciting, so who's going to do it?
Ally Giebutowski: I think I'd love to start. I will say I have met this young man. He is incredible. He's a really, really interesting guy and he somehow makes fusion technology comprehensible for any person, whether you're in STEM or whether you're not. So I really want to talk to him again.
Janet Kraus: I will say, just for what it's worth, Ally, who did the summer program at the Bluedot Institute, came home after her week at MIT and literally was raving about this guy. She was like, “Oh my gosh, he may have created the most hope of all the people I met.”
Ally Giebutowski: He was insane. He was so cool.
Cleo Carney: I think Ally would definitely be a great person to interview him because she's so excited about it and knows him a bit. I think we should also have another person interviewing him, maybe not another young person. I want someone who maybe has slightly different viewpoints on the whole nuclear world because they've lived through other times.
Victoria Riskin: That is a good point because I grew up being terrified of nuclear power and the dangers of it. We grew up scared of nuclear crises Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, all that kind of thing. But also I'm coming to see that maybe we need to rethink it and learn what the new technologies are. An entire country, France, is 75% powered by nuclear power.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, it's a good one and I can appreciate it. I'm going to make a similar case. The nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island was a very scary thing when I was a child. I remember being like, “Whoa.” The other thing I'm interested in is that fusion, as long as I've been alive, is “almost here.” Like, it's literally tomorrow. You're like, “Really? Is it tomorrow?” I don't want to say I'm a skeptic, but I really want to push him to be like: Is it really tomorrow? Or is it 10 years tomorrow or 30 years tomorrow? I feel like I want to pressure-test a little.
Cleo Carney: That's interesting. Would Janet be more of a hard-line skeptic? While Ally is such a puppy dog fan in this case, I might be the more…
Ally Giebutowski: Like a good cop, bad cop situation.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. Or a tough questioner and fan girl.
Cleo Carney: Fan girl and skeptic.
Janet Kraus: Fan girl and skeptic. I like that setup, Cleo.
Victoria Riskin: I am now thinking I might vote for you two, even though I really want to do this myself.
Janet Kraus: Well, you brought him to the table, so we know you think he's pretty amazing. So should we take it to a vote?
Cleo Carney: All those in favor of Janet and Ally?
Janet Kraus: I'll go with that this time.
Ally Giebutowski: I like it. I love it.
Victoria Riskin: Yay. Great.
Ally Giebutowski: Can't wait.
Janet Kraus: …wait to interview him.
Ally Giebutowski: See you soon.
The Interview
Ally Giebutowski: Welcome, Alex. I've been a fan of Alex since he came to speak at an MIT Youth Climate Leadership program that I attended at Bluedot two years ago. So we are excited to speak to you as we imagine if the power of the sun could be harnessed here on Earth to create an alternative energy source far more powerful, sustainable, and honestly way cooler than fossil fuels.
Alex Creely: I'm glad people are excited about fusion. Well, thank you for having me. It is good to be here. Good to see you guys again and to be involved in this. I'm always happy to talk about fusion, so you'll have to stop me from talking at some point. I am a scientist and an engineer on a quest for clean energy. I work at a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. We are about eight years old; I've been here about seven years. We are trying to build a fusion power plant — trying to build a star here on Earth — and use it to make electricity.
Janet Kraus: Well, that is a compelling way to begin. “We're making a star here on Earth.” For our listeners, can you unpack for us what it actually means to bring a star here on Planet Earth to be an energy source?
Ally Giebutowski: Because I was also telling my mom when I came back from MIT, “Wow, he really explained that whole thing in normal people's terms.”
Alex Creely: Sure. I think it is actually much less esoteric than it's often made out to be. Fusion is what powers the stars. In the sun or any star, you take small atoms like hydrogen, you smash them together really hard, they combine, and they fuse to form a bigger atom like helium. That gives off a bunch of energy. Our goal is, rather than happening in stars, to build a machine here on Earth that will do that same fusion process. Take hydrogen, smash it together, make helium, make a bunch of energy with that, and then use that energy to make electricity. Then you can power your house or your car whatever you need rather than burning coal or natural gas. Rather than having giant solar farms, it would be a little fusion box that you put a tiny amount of hydrogen into and clean electricity comes out.
Janet Kraus: That was easy. Now I have a feeling, given that this is a very long-term project, that even though that sounds easy, it's really hard. So we're going to get back to that in a minute, helping us understand how that happens. But before we go there, I think we want to just get a little bit on how you even became interested in this.
Ally Giebutowski: Yeah, I wanted to ask about you. I was wondering what your personal experience with getting into fusion energy was because it's such a unique field of study. I'm curious if you got into it more because of an environmental concern lens, or if it was coming from your passion for scientific curiosity, or both? What was the origin of excitement for such a unique interest?
Alex Creely: Sure. Growing up, I liked to spend a lot of time outside. I was in the Scouts, I went camping a whole bunch, and generally liked to be outside. I also really liked building stuff. I had an early interest in Legos and all these kinds of things. By the time I was going to college, I knew I wanted to do something in engineering broadly, and probably something like clean energy. It's very important for the environment and keeping nature accessible and beautiful, keeping our planet habitable.
I wasn't sure exactly what that was going to be, but completely by chance during my freshman year of college, I was walking around campus and saw a poster for this plasma physics lab. I thought, “Oh, that sounds kind of cool. I'll go see what that is.” I took a tour and learned about fusion. I can talk about why plasmas and fusion are connected here in a second, but I became really interested. The more I learned about it, the more I thought, “OK, this seems like kind of a big deal.” I did an internship in fusion after my sophomore year of college and another after my junior year. By that point, I knew this was what I wanted to do.
There are a lot of ways to make energy in the world. Fusion doesn't quite work yet, but the potential is so huge that it's worth me digging into and spending my time on. I went to grad school for fusion at MIT. By the time I was finishing up there, this company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, was just getting started. It came out of the lab I was in. I felt like CFS was the best place to go to take fusion, the next step from a really cool science experiment, to something that can be on the electrical grid and power the future. So, a couple of steps to get to where I am now, but connected by the fact that I like building stuff and I want to do something in energy to support nature and keep the world clean.
Janet Kraus: OK. So it's clear that fusion is huge. We want you to break down how this happens, but I always get the sense that when you say fusion to people, there are misconceptions or fears. Do you find that to be true? Can you talk a little bit about what people think it is and what they're worried about when they talk about fusion?
Alex Creely: Yeah. I think one of the interesting things people often bring up is that they get it mixed up with nuclear fission. Today, all nuclear power plants are fission, which is taking a big atom, like uranium, and splitting it apart into smaller atoms. That also releases a bunch of energy. The closest nuclear power plant to Boston is Seabrook in New Hampshire; that's a fission power plant. Statistically, fission is very safe and is a very good carbon-free energy source, but there are risks involved. There are events where you can get a meltdown where you release material. Fusion has a lot of the same advantages of fission — it doesn't release carbon — but it doesn't have the same risk profile. You can't have a meltdown event. It's an inherently safe way of making energy.
Janet Kraus: OK. All right. I'm older than Ally; she wouldn't remember Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, though she's heard about it. I can understand why people could easily make that distinction or confusion between fission and fusion. But I do want to ask: You've said it right at the beginning — this has huge potential. It sounds simple. Why is it so hard? What is the mission that you're on here?
Alex Creely: Yeah. People have been working on fusion since the 1950s. The central challenge of fusion is to get your hydrogen hot and keep it hot without spending so much energy keeping it hot that it's not worth it. That's because the step of smashing them together really hard means heating your fuel to like a hundred million degrees.
Janet Kraus: What?
Alex Creely: It is very hot.
Ally Giebutowski: Genuinely, like a hundred million?
Alex Creely: Yeah. Actually, the very center of the machine is like 250 million, but on average it's like a hundred million.
Janet Kraus: That's really hard to get your head around.
Alex Creely: It's a number that's so large it's kind of meaningless.
Ally Giebutowski: It feels comical.
Alex Creely: It is hotter than the center of the sun. The sun is a few tens of millions of degrees, and this is a hundred million degrees. So it's hotter than the center of the sun.
Janet Kraus: You have to make it hotter than the center of the sun to do this here on Earth. OK.
Alex Creely: And the crazy thing is, people do this literally every day. It's not like no one's ever made something a hundred million degrees. We had our machine at MIT that we ran and it would do this regularly; it would make plasma fuel this hot. There are different kinds of fusion machines around the world that do this regularly. But right now, it takes more energy to keep it hot — to keep the fuel at a hundred million degrees — than you get out from the fusion. You can make fusion happen, but it's not quite worth it yet as a power source.
Janet Kraus: Oh, that's interesting. So you're actually spending more energy to make energy. OK. That's a hard problem to solve. So talk a little bit more about how you're solving that problem and why you believe it's possible.
Alex Creely: I like to think of it like insulation. It's cold in Boston in the winter. Earlier this week it was really cold. I want to keep my apartment or your house warm without spending too much on the energy bill. You want insulation around your house. The key challenge in fusion is: How can you have really good insulation so that the fuel is really hot, but you don't have to spend a bunch of money putting heat in to keep it hot?
There are a bunch of ways to do that. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, CFS, is doing it using magnets. Basically, you use a bunch of electromagnets to hold your fuel so it doesn't touch anything, because if it touches anything, it cools off. That way you can get it really, really hot without spending too much energy keeping it hot.
Janet Kraus: How far along in solving this problem are you? We've heard this has been worked on since the ’50s. Ally, you have something from science that you talk about.
Ally Giebutowski: Yeah, so we're hearing from you that there are so many great things leading up to this since the 1950s, but still fusion is “almost there” but not quite. In studying environmental studies and science, I've learned about a concept called psychological distance from an issue. It’s like how climate deniers say the issue is not here, it’s in the future. Even though we clearly see it’s here, fusion technology feels far away. How do you, as a scientist, make people understand that even though the solution isn't available today, it is still crucial to be working on? How do you deal with that psychological distance?
Alex Creely: It’s a great question. Big things sometimes take a long time, and it always feels so far in the future that you think, “If something’s going to take 10 years, why should I work on it?” But if you look back in history, any big technological advance took a long time. Take powered flight. It’s not like people decided to work on it and a year later the Wright brothers had an airplane. People were working on this for literally centuries. Even a week before the Wright brothers flew, there were articles saying this is a waste of time, it’s going to take a hundred years, please spend your time doing something more productive.
A lot of these things feel far away for a long time, but in the background, things are quietly advancing. Then all of a sudden, it crosses a threshold where it goes from “that's taking forever” to “oh my god, this actually works.”
Janet Kraus: Right.
Alex Creely: That was true of powered flight, and it’s true of microprocessors. For a long time they weren't very useful, and all of a sudden you have laptops. It’s true of fission power too. Turning that into a power plant happened pretty quickly when you finally got to the later stages of development. Fusion has been quietly advancing outside of most people's knowledge for decades.
A couple of years ago at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, they did a different kind of fusion using lasers on a pellet of fuel. For the first time ever, they produced more energy out from that compression than went into the fuel. That was a big deal. It proves the science works and the concept is for sure possible. In parallel, other technologies have continued to advance, like our magnet technology. That’s our key innovation that brings us from a science experiment to a power plant. We didn't invent the material; it was discovered in the 1980s and won a Nobel Prize. It's called a high-temperature superconductor. But you couldn't make it in any quantity until fairly recently. Our innovation built on top of that to build this whole machine out of it. It’s layers upon layers of innovation.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, we were actually talking ahead of time. I bet there are small scientific breakthroughs that the general public doesn't quite get the significance of, and maybe they don't make the New York Times because they aren't the final stage. In entrepreneurship, we talk about 10-year overnight successes, but in science, these can be 50 or 75-year overnight successes. So where are we on this journey? Are we another 50 years away or closer to five or 10?
Alex Creely: I think we're close. From CFS's perspective, we are building a demonstration facility. It's not yet a full power plant, but it shows that everything works and makes heat. Our facility in Devens, Massachusetts, about 45 minutes west of Boston, should be done and operating in 2027. So two years from now.
Ally Giebutowski: Wow, that's really, really close. I am curious, comparing how you feel about how close we are now to where you were standing two years ago in 2024 when we first met. Between that conversation and today, you've had the same exciting energy. Where are we in the timeline? How much has changed in those two years?
Alex Creely: We've built a lot of stuff. Two years ago, we had just started making the first little pieces of our full-sized magnets. Now we're nearly done producing those; we stood up an entire manufacturing facility and made all the parts. In the last two years, we've finished all the buildings for the facility. We've started putting the actual fusion machine together. It's a very complicated 3D jigsaw puzzle, but there are actual pieces being assembled. We are targeting our first real power plant, something that sits on the electrical grid and makes electricity, in the early 2030s. We're intentionally a little vague on the date because we don't want to promise it until we're sure we can hit it. It will be in Virginia. We've already picked a site, and we're full steam ahead on designing it.
Janet Kraus: It must be so thrilling to you, a kid who loved Legos, to be actually putting these pieces together. But I'm also thinking, my gosh, this is — obviously, the payoff will be enormous — but like, how much investment has to go into something of this, of this size?
Alex Creely: It’s definitely very exciting. Seeing stuff go from boxes on PowerPoint to actual hardware is really cool. A sketch on a piece of paper becomes a piece of steel that does everything you need it to do. Fusion power plants are large infrastructure projects. In today's world, people don't think building a bridge is the most exciting activity, but we need bridges.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, true.
Alex Creely: Building a new power plant to power a city, when you go to your house and turn the lights on, like, typically, that's not the most exciting thing. Also, we do need those so that when you flip a switch, your lights turn on. And so I think a lot of those things are big and take a while and are quite expensive. And so fusion's an infrastructure project.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, it is. It's like those lines we see outside transmitting electricity, but at the very beginning.
Alex Creely: Exactly. It's capital-intensive. It's much more expensive to develop new hardware than new software because you need to buy the hardware. CFS has raised about $3 billion in venture capital, private capital, from a variety of sources. That has largely gone into building our demonstration machine, SPARC, but also pays salaries and keeps the lights on. These are multi-billion dollar efforts. That's just the scale of large infrastructure.
Janet Kraus: While that feels like a big number, if this works, you are literally transforming the energy supply of the world. Help us understand the potential of fusion relative to wind, solar, harness the sun, or fossil fuels. And if you could comment on what this does to the geopolitical landscape? Everyone has equal access to the sun, but maybe not the capital to create these solutions. I'm just curious about helping pick the picture.
Alex Creely: That’s a great question. I'll take it in two parts: energy changes and societal changes. Fusion transitions energy from a thing you have to dig out of the ground or collect from the sky to a manufactured product. You make a box, you put the box somewhere, and that box just makes electricity for decades. You do some maintenance, but you're not extracting a thing from somewhere. You can put the box anywhere. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about the energy as a thing that you try to get.
Why is fusion advantageous? There are no carbon emissions. The only byproduct is helium, which you can use to make your voice sound funny. It's completely inert. It's not a greenhouse gas and it's non-toxic. The world actually wants more helium right now, so we can make some more of it. It's firm, so it's on when you want it and off when you don't.
So, wind and solar are great. They have some challenges around storage. You need a lot of storage, like if it stops being windy for a couple days, or if it's cloudy for a week. It's a lot of storage. They're secure in the sense that you don't need to continually import something from somewhere, so you don't need to import oil or gas or some resource that you put in and burn.
Wind and solar are great for areas that have a lot of space. But for a large city like Boston or New York or San Francisco or for a large industrial center that's manufacturing something, wind or solar are pretty tough. Just because you need so much space to get the electricity you need, you need to transmit it. And so fusion fits a good, complimentary aspect, where you can put it in a relatively small amount of space. So in some ways, it looks a lot like a coal power plant or a combined cycle natural gas power plant, except there's no train loads of coal going into it.
Janet Kraus: Not the climate problems associated.
Alex Creely: Yeah, from a technology perspective, it looks like a huge amount of energy as a manufactured product. From a societal perspective, there are concerns about energy security both in the U.S. and in many countries. You want to have some amount of independence on where you get your energy from. So fusion hopefully fits that box so that you don't need to import things like people fight wars over. You know, oil and natural gas. And fusion lets you kind of just deliver this product. I mean, you said that people have equal access to the sun. That's kind of true, but like it's pretty geography dependent. Like solar in the U.K. is not a great technology option because it's just not sunny.
Janet Kraus: It rains a lot.
Alex Creely: It rains a lot. Depending on where you are in the world, wind or solar can be great. They can also not work very well. Hydro works, again, if you have rivers and mountains, but like, if it's a big flat area, it’s not particularly helpful.
Geothermal is also super geography dependent. Iceland has tons of geothermal, which is great, but other places don't. So I think there's a lot of advantages to this, and it adds a lot of pieces to a lot of different potential users of the future.
Janet Kraus:It feels like it has the potential to be very equalizing. Yes. In terms of, you know, creating more fairness because of the things that you said, like it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you had access to capital to build the infrastructure. Notwithstanding that, you can put it in Denmark, you can put it in Chile, you can put it in the Philippines. It's kind of an anywhere solution.
Alex Creely: Exactly. That's one of the big advantages. You do need capital to build it. But assuming you can build it, you can put it wherever you need to. And I think that's an important piece, too. I know I don't see fusion as, everyone's gonna have all of our power from fusion.
It's actually probably part of a portfolio of energy. So it's like a very rural area with few people and few energy needs. Building a big fusion power plant probably doesn't make that much sense. So other energy sources like solar are great. Low energy density of people means that you don't need that much energy density, like land density of energy. Whereas big population centers, big industry centers — that's where fusion really fits into this area.
Janet Kraus: At the moment, I'm feeling like this is nirvana if you can make this happen. So what are the risks? What are the things that worry you? What could go wrong? What should we be thinking about from an ethical or safety perspective to make sure we get this right?
Alex Creely: Yeah, it sounds great, so what's the catch? First, it is hard. It has taken many decades of the world's best scientists to get it working, and it's not yet available. We have to actually finish this process to make actual power.
Janet Kraus: It's not actually here yet. We're in the last mile, but the last mile counts.
Alex Creely: Exactly. Another challenge is that, at least initially, it will be expensive. The first of any new technology is almost always much more expensive than by the time you have a lot of them. The first computer was the size of a warehouse and very expensive, and now you have one in your pocket. The same thing with airplanes, like air travel in the 1920s was very expensive. But it's much more accessible now. So early on, one of the challenges is gonna be like, you know, getting it affordable. And so that's important for a couple reasons. Like at one level, you know, we run in a capitalist society, and the market's gonna buy stuff.
And so it needs to be affordable for the market to purchase. Like we need customers that come to us and purchase fusion from us. Even more broadly than that, if you want to widely deploy anything. It needs to be affordable even if it's not really market-driven. Like you can't spend all of the world's resources building a very few things if you want it widely adopted.
So, there's a variety of reasons why the cost is gonna be a challenge. But that's true of any new technology. And so I think — we think abou this a lot — we need to make not only a product that works, but a product that works and is affordable.
Janet Kraus: I want to follow up because, historically, for things to come down in price, either the government has created subsidies or investors have stepped in. We saw this in solar. It was extremely expensive, and now it's cheaper than fossil fuels. What policies or forces are going to be necessary to see that curve come down?And how long do you think that will be? Assuming somewhere in the [2030s] we actually get to start experiencing it?
Alex Creely: It's gonna be a combination of things. So I think, there's some amount of, we have our investors, and there's 50 fusion companies in the world now. So there's a lot of people working on this. I think we've got the best chance, but it's also good for the world that someone figures out fusion. So I’m glad other people are working on it. It's a friendly rivalry we have.
Janet Kraus: Yes, and competition is good.
Ally Giebutowski: Especially when our future lies in the balance. It’s higher stakes than a race.
Janet Kraus: I would feel bad if you told me you were “it.” I would be like, “Oh, we're in trouble.”
Alex Creely: Yeah, there are a lot of people working on it and we've got our investors, but there's investors around the world doing this. All over the world. There's companies now working on fusion.
Even just in the last, I don't know, five years, there's many billions of dollars invested in private fusion. There's also continuing government investment in publicly funded research programs. In the U.S. and Europe and in Asia — all over the world. You know, it's a combination of things. I think continued investment from the private sector is very important.
So, funding companies like us or other companies from private investors to continue to run the company. That helps you deploy a lot of technology and eventually bring the cost down. Government input is also very helpful for either, you know, subsidies or something like that. We don't think it's required to roll out fusion that we get government subsidies, but it probably would make it faster.
If you can get that input. One really important piece is regulation. We're a new industry. You know, we should be appropriately regulated, and we're not gonna argue. There's no regulations that we should have, but they should be regulations that are appropriate to the risks or the type of technology that we're using.
And we've done a lot of work talking to governments in the U.S. and the U.K. and some other countries about making sure that fusion regulation is separate from fission regulation. Basically, they don't want them together as one thing. And so the U.S. and the U.K. have actually codified that in law in both countries that these are separate things.
They should be regulated separately, which is great. But to get even wider deployment, it's important that other countries also do that. So having other countries follow along and decide how you're being regulated, it's like we want to build something, we want to know what the rules are before we build it, rather than just trying to figure it out as we go. And then also to make sure that the rules are appropriate for the technology we're building.
Ally Giebutowski: I would love to pivot for a moment. We’ve talked a lot about technology, but I want to know more about you, Alex, as a scientist. You know, there's all of these breakthroughs that you're getting these, whether they're little breakthroughs, whether they're big breakthroughs, but in those moments where there's a bit of a lull, what pulls you through that gets you to the other side of that?
Alex Creely: It's an exciting time to be in fusion, but these are long-term things. A lot of what you do is just hard work. I mean it's like some analogy to an athlete where it's like, you have competitions, but also you spend a lot of time just in training, which is maybe not the most exciting thing, but you also need to do that to be successful.
So, I think for me it's like a combination of knowing what the long-term goal is — seeing where we're going. The people we work with are super important. Like having a team that you enjoy being with is important. I like learning stuff, so I think I make an effort to engage with different parts of the company.
My official job is much more on the science engineering side, but I try to learn from our finance group, like, how would you finance these types of things from our legal group from our public policy team, from our tech economics of like, how do you, how do you predict the economics of future technologies? So I've learned a lot, and I think continuing to learn and grow in the role is part of this one.
Janet Kraus: Well, I'm going to say that as you bring this product to market, you explain it so well.
Ally Giebutowski: It’s going to be really exciting when fusion technology comes out by CFS and everyone hears the name CFS and Alex Creely. We can say we knew him! But I also want to know — you’ve grown so much in your role, and I know you started in 2019, is that correct?
Alex Creely: Yeah, that sounds right.
Ally Giebutowski: Yeah, that feels like a young place to start, and you've come so far along in your field, and I'm impressed by that. I remember seeing you in Cambridge and being like, he looks way too young to be like in fusion technology of all things.
It's such a daunting thing, and I think a lot of people my age, you know, question their age when they're going into something that feels so big to them, they see it as an obstacle rather than a strength. And I'm wondering what advice you would give to students my age, college students who are looking at the fields that they want to go to and feel, like, I'm too young to start. What would you say to them?
Alex Creely: You should be willing to listen to people who have experience. That's how you download knowledge. But just because someone has experience doesn't mean they're the right person for the whole job. In some cases, new ideas and a willingness to do something differently are super important. That’s not even necessarily a thing of age; some people late in their career are open to new ideas and push out others because they are willing to do things differently. Regardless of how young you are, the willingness to put the effort in is super important. Combine that with listening to those who have gone before. At CFS, our strategy wasn't to ignore everyone else; we would have had a lot of trouble if we tried that.
Janet Kraus: It's the blend. Soaking in everything from those who have gone before, but also listening to your own inner voice about new things you are noticing. I think this question also for me right now is, you know, people like you that are working on really big problems, not little problems. Ones that are gonna matter meaningfully. I think young people are looking for hope that it's worth, you know, putting their shoulder into really tough problems. And so I think one of the reasons it's great to have people like you on our podcast is because, you know, you are demonstrating that you've made a commitment to lean into something that may or may not work, but matters a lot.
Ally Giebutowski: I want to add one more thing. Janet always says to be “relentlessly curious.” Someone who is relentlessly curious will not stop if they have a question in their mind. It feels like you will not stop either. That's something youth need to understand: if there's a question, there's farther to push. I think that the two of you probably connect a lot on that because she is always pushing.
Alex Creely: I agree with two points. Hard things are hard, and just because you're not sure if something's going to work doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Most impactful things that you can do have a chance of failure, and you need to be OK with that. If you really want to make a difference in something big, you need to put the effort in and be OK with taking risks. If it was easy and there was no risk, someone would have done it before. People will say fusion is going to take forever, but it’s definitely going to take forever if no one tries.
Janet Kraus: Yes, that's right. You're certainly going to get a “no” if you don't try.
Alex Creely: Exactly. And as for curiosity, one of the coolest parts of CFS is continually learning from all the different aspects of the company. Doing big, impactful things isn't just one discipline. Fusion is not just an engineering thing, or a policy thing, or a finance thing — you need all of those. We could design the coolest power plant, but if we can't get the money to build it, it won't be useful. If people are scared of it, we won't build it. We need the ability to educate, to finance, and to have the right policies in place.So we need a lot of people who are familiar with that sphere. We need to have a legal team to figure out how to regulate this, to figure out how to do all these contracts. It takes all of these skill sets to make big projects like this successful, so I think being open to bringing in these very different skill sets is super important to get big stuff done.
Ally Giebutowski: This makes me really excited because I'm at a crossroads in my freshman year, kind of like, just how many skill sets and how many people I want to know and what their skill sets are. So, next semester I decided I want to take an engineering course.
And it's environmental engineering, it's kind of conceptual, but I wanted to take it because I was thinking to myself just how many people I want to know and what their perspective on looking at an environmental issue is and what lens they bring into it. So just hearing what you're saying, like clearly fusion, it's not just, you know, just not the technology, it's just not just the sciences, just technology. It's, it's the finance, it's the ethical concerns, it's the scale. It's building buildings.
Alex Creely: I just want to build on that point. It's so important. People think about wind and solar as just policy things, but no — those are manufacturing problems. In order to do things like that, you need manufacturing. That's so often overlooked.
Ally Giebutowski: People don't think about that. They see the policy, but no one's thinking about how you make those blades for a turbine. They are huge! It is unbelievable.
Janet Kraus: In this moment of time where we are politically you know, it's so important that we continue to remind people and educate people that there are jobs to be created through these new technologies that are actually across the whole spectrum of people. And that we are not just the science, we are the entire system that has lots of jobs that help the economy over the long run and reminding people that the green economy is going to be a huge job creator over time. Already is, some of which we've unfortunately let go to other places, but there is opportunity to bring it here.
Alex Creely: Yeah, CFS is a thousand people now. Fusion has enough potential advantages that it doesn't need to be shoehorned into one type of thinking. It doesn't have carbon emissions, but it is also domestic manufacturing and energy security. We can be more self-sufficient as a country. There are a lot of advantages, and we are trying to have wide support for this rather than pushing it down one specific policy pathway.
Janet Kraus: Our audience at Bluedot is largely individuals who are climate curious that are trying to connect to hopeful stories of what is happening and also what they can do, if anything, as it pertains to pushing anything forward.
So whether it's buying better laundry detergent or whether it's going to your town meeting to push forward policy or resilience plans, tell us in the world of fusion, is there anything that the average human can do to help create them? No pun intended — the energy needed to propel forward the success of this industry, broadly speaking.
Alex Creely: I think more broadly there's a lot of stuff that you can do. I think, honestly, just learning about fusion is good. So I think the more people, you know, worldwide that understand what fusion is and the different aspects of it, the challenges of it, but also the potential benefits.
That's generally a good thing. We want people to be excited about someone coming to build a new infusion power plant near them. Not scared of it. The more people that understand it, the better. Like broadly policy stuff people who are supporting fusion in the policy sphere. Like supporting, government support, fusion regulation as it comes up is really important. I think there's a lot of things to be done. I think a lot of times people don't like any new infrastructure project regardless of what it is.
Janet Kraus: “Not in my backyard.” I love it and it's great but not in my backyard.
Alex Creely: Yeah. People need to understand that sometimes you need to do something that is good for the world, even if it's not good for your backyard. Having a big construction project next to you for several years is not fun, but if no one wants that anywhere, we're not going to make any progress. That kind of compromise of doing something that's good for the world is super important.
Janet Kraus: I love that. OK, so we are coming up to the end. This has been awesome, Alex. But as the name of our podcast suggests, we're always interested in imagining the future, and so we always point to this prompt so that we can start to see the future as imagined through your mind.
And so we give you this final prompt that you can finish the sentence of, which starts with, imagine if.
Alex Creely: Imagine if there is a world powered by clean, firm fusion energy that you can put anywhere, that doesn't produce any kind of emissions, and makes enough energy to power all of civilization's needs.
Janet Kraus: It would be a better world, wouldn't it, Alex?
Alex Creely: It would.
Ally Giebutowski: This was wonderful. Thank you so much, Alex.
Alex Creely: Awesome. Good talking to you guys.
Victoria Riskin: Thank you for joining us on Imagine If from Bluedot Living. If you want to explore our recipes, products for your home and lifestyle, and read interesting stories, you can find us at www.bluedotliving.com. For daily inspiration, you can follow us at Bluedot Living on Instagram. If you enjoyed this conversation, share it and please add your thoughts in the comments on YouTube. I'm Victoria Riskin, and we'll be back next week with more stories from great people doing amazing things in their little corner of the planet.
