Nuclear Fusion and Clean Energy

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech podcast where we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I Danny' Fmorten out here in Silicon Valley . Katie isn't here this week, but stepping in is another brilliant member of the tech team here. My colleague Mark Selman, technology correspondent for the Times . Hello , it's good to be back. It's great to have you. Good, sir. Today we have a few light subjects. We're talking about the partnership in the world of check between anthropic and the Catholic Church. That's right. This week, Pope Leo presented a major statement on AI at the Vatican alongside one of the co founders of the AI company Anthropic, and we'll be digging into what was said and why it matters. Plus, we'll be talking about why social media is as dangerous to your kids, apparently , as smoking or not wearing a seatbelt. And later on we'll be hearing from the CEO of Pro xima Fusion , a German startup trying to provide limitless, clean energy by recreating the very same reaction that powers the sun. We'll find out how they do it and how far away this technology is from being a reality . But first, let's talk about that strange partnership between Silicon Valley and the Vatican. Yes, this does gives you a real sense of like truth is stranger than fiction . So Pope Leo, who is the first head of the Catholic Church from America , has become the latest voice to join the debate over AI and he's just released the first encyclical of his papacy , which is a major teaching document in which he has warned about the dangers of AI and what it poses to humanity if left unchecked. And speaking at a Vatican conference, he warn ed the AI risks becoming, in his words, a quote instrument of domination, exclusion , and death in the hands of big tech. Okay, so it's about forty two thousand word s . Yes. It's about half a book and you've got to sum it up for our listeners in about ten seconds long. Yeah, we had about ten minutes to do all that. No problem. First of all, Mark, I want you to be honest, have you read it? No, AI helped me read it for everyone. But I have to say, you know, I didn't really have time to read forty two thousand words and this is exactly what AI was created for Shirley. Indeed, there's almost an irony in that in what you just said. The framing he puts out is there's two examples. There's the Tower of Babel and then the book of Nehemia about the rebuilding of the wall in Jerusale m . And the tower of Babel is in his estimation what we don't want. It's this thing that was driven by Hubris, where all of these humans got together , tried to build this tower to the heavens and basically push ed God to one side and wanted to kind of show how kind of amazing and supreme humans were. Nahemia in this and his other example is walls destroyed and it is rebuilt by the community. Everybody coming together , taking a piece and together they build this thing that benefits everyone. And he's like, these are our two options , right? And I think And I think it's really interesting that he lays out these are two options with this very, very powerful new technology and how we going to go about it. And I will say living here out here in Silicon Valley on the west coast . It feels very babelish out here, but he also had an odd kind of bedfellow in rolling us out to the world, did he not? Yeah, you've always got to have a tech founder beside you when you start essentially destroying the technology. But yeah, it was a very strange thing to have a co founder of the AI company Anthropic there at the same time as denouncing the technology essentially and the way it's been built by a few companies. Yeah, so the person who was there is a guy called Christopher Ola , who's the co founder of the AI company Anthropic. And he was at this event kind of sitting just a few seats down from the Pope . And where the Pope is talking about like, look , this technology is being driven by effectively a handful of companies that are what he called, I think transnational was the world word he used, that are basically more powerful than governments , which feels right and he's kind of just raising all of the potential issues that comes along with that. And it was just quite extraordinary to, you know, these are strange times in which we live where you have a San Franc isco AI developer , one of the founders sitting three seats away from the Pope as he releases a book length warning about the technology that they're building. And I think it's worth saying that the pope doesn't come off as like anti technology. He does lay out like this is can do amazing things , but he's also really warns about a few different things, one of them being like , this is not human . This is built to imitate humanity, but humanity is separate apart and beautiful and should not be kind of shunted aside by this technology. In other words, don't effectively don't put this technology that is built in our image above humanity itself. I mean, you hear that this criticism from people very much in the camp of criticizing social media and they've moved on to AI and the way they position AI as a technology that is essentially antihuman. It is there to replace humans . And they and many others are very concerned about it and where it's leading us. He does talk also about jobs, which again, this it's almost like it's a theological document, but it's also almost like a policy document around like what does this leave human work? Human dignity and those two are very linked, right? And it made me think of when Eric Schmidt from Google was giving his commencement address at a big university here in the U. S. and got off he didn't get booed off stage. He got heavily booed as soon as he brought up the two words that everybody hates, artificial intelligence because you have a bunch of twenty one , twenty two year olds getting out to the world in this world where Anthropic who was sitting three weeks three seats away from the pope has been saying, Oh, we're going to eliminate fifty percent of entry level white collar work very, very soon. This is going to completely upend society get ready. If you go through that document, it is like a shopping list of all the worries about AI from power concentration, accountability , regulation, etc . And I think that's why obviously Anthropic were there who have always been front footed when it comes to arguing for regulation, which obviously some say is good and some say is very self serving and that argument will always continue when it comes to tech companies. But it also is part of this interesting part of the soap opera between the Pope and the Trump administration who have obviously been at odds and then you've got anthropic who's at odds with the Trump administration and then suddenly Anthropic turns up at the Vatican and it's a very neat circle. The last thing this made me think of is I spent close to three weeks in the court room in Oakland in this past month listening to Sam Altman and Elon Musk Duke out over the founding of OpenAI . And when Elon Musk was testifying . He talked about the origin of the story, right? Like how opening I came to be and it was at his birthday party. He was talking to Larry Page from Google . And they got into this argument because Larry Page was like basically insultingly referred to Elon Musk as a speciesist . In other words, you're too worried about humans. They were talking about AI and how AI is going to be the greatest thing ever and it's going to surpass us in every way possible . And Elon said basically like that's a little worrying that vision of the world and your kind of values at the heart of that is you kind of don't care what that means for humans. That was his view of what Larry Page was saying and Page in response apparently said, well, you're just a speciesist. And he was like, yeah, I'm team human . But it just struck me that kind of story about the founding of open air, which of course has kicked off this whole revolution struck me as reading through this encyclical called magnific a humanitas about the kind of let's not forget the humans here because out here there is this sense almost religious that we are entering this new age where the machines are smarter than all of us , where we are going to be effectively become pets to the machines . And this is the Pope being like, whoa , even if these machines are truly capable , we have to really think hard about what we value here and how this is going to play out because this could go very badly. Yeah. I mean, look, the industry really does have to start really grappling this potential backlash because Pope is obviously extremely influential of more than a billion people. And it's it's, you know, if he's standing up and putting into an intellectually coherent way , you know, all the fears of, you know, all the critics across the world . That's not going to stop this backlash. That's just going to keep it going. And I think that , you know, the industry has not really come out with a coherent way to deal with the backlash because obviously, you know, most of the time it's like, yes, but we've got to save cancer. We are going to, you know, create new materials. We are going to have great leap s forward in science, but that's a promise. And I think we are starting to see that the problems emerge whether they're geopolitical or economic in the labour market . And that comes before the promises. I mean, the marketing has been a masterclass in how not to do it . It's been stunningly bad . Silicon Valley tech companies are just like, Don't worry, guys. It's all going to be wonderful. We're all heading toward this incredible age of abundance . But to get there, it's gonna be really messy and you're all gonna be put out of a job and it's going to completely upend society and it's going to make a whole small class of trillion aires and all this economic value is going to be funneled to the controllers of these models, et cetera . But just like that, just to put a fine point on it, I think the four hyperscalers are set to spend something like a trillion dollars this year on data centers . So Anthropics co founder can sit next to the Pope , but they're not slowing down . Right? They are accelerating at a pace that is unprecedented in the history of capitalism, if you look at what's happening with their sales . And so this train is gaining steam, not losing steam . Yeah, and the stakes feel like they're getting higher and Silicon Valley's just doing such a poor job of taking responsibility and from my view being thoughtful about how this is what this is going to mean out there in the world. Well, that does bring us on to the next story quite beautifully . Did anyone say social media ? Yes , exactly. Yeah, because, you know, we're still dealing with with the previous technology that looks like it's got out of hand and that's really the conversation that we've been having in the UK this week. So what's been happening? I hear there is a report . Yeah, so this is the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. They brou ght out a report that claims that medical professionals view the use of smartphones as on a par with not wearing a seatbelt in the car . And that report was essentially submitted to a government consultation on what to do with social media and that finished this week. And it's really all part of the pressure on the Prime Minister and the government to act and deal with effects and impacts of social media on kids. If you would have wind this back about six months, six to eight months ago , this government didn't really want to do, the Prime Minister was not really in fav or of banning or a blanket ban on social media, but lots happened since then. Obviously , his authority has weakened. We've had a blanket ban introduced in Australia . And there's been a very effective campaign both within Parliament and outside of Parliament for something to be done regulatory wise to deal with social media and kids. And so that's where we are. And in three weeks, two to three weeks' time, we're expecting an announcement from the government explaining what they're going to do next. And we're expecting some kind of ban. Is this report part of that consultation process. In other words, in the two to three weeks when we hear the final thumbs up thumbs down from the government , this is part of that kind of what's going into that process. Yeah, so the government, when it has a planning on big laws like this, they have a public consultation . Now whether or not that is a genuine process or whether they just have to go through that is a matter of debate. But yeah , they have this national conversation is sort of up to eight y thousand submissions. It's just a massive project . But obviously, politically, they kind of have an idea of what they want to do. But this process is, you know, all the stakeholders so to speak, you know, try to get their Tupany Haynes worth and this was the medics doing it. I'm curious to get your sense of the of the vibes , so to speak in the UK , but certainly out here it does feel like we had Ban Kidron on , I think last month or two months ago talking about this as well. And she's been right on the forefront of it in the UK like a it's like a switch has been flip where it's like, you know, after years and years and years of like being like , it's not conclusive, there's not enough evidence, et cetera. Like it feels like one , the evidence is piling up . So that argument has been harder to make . And also , lawmakers around the world have decided to like not wait around anymore for social media to effectively police itself in a real way. And so as you mentioned, you have what's happening in Australia. And we've talked about it before the in pod. I covered the first big social media trial in LA that was found against meta and YouTube where they were found to, yes, you did create these addictive products. So after that L. c Aase., you then you had this new federal case coming up where you had a school district in Kentucky saying look, you ruined our kids. We've had to divert our very limited resources to mental health services and other things to deal with this kind of the fallout of social media , all four social media companies that were defendants in that case have all settled as well. So that snowball is very much rolling down the mountain. A lot of this actually you can trace back to J onathan Hates' book. He's the social psychologist who wrote The Anxious Generation . You cannot underestimate the impact of that book on policymakers, on parents. And once that happens, the politics changes. When this becomes a popular measure then guess what? Politicians sort of there is prick up and they realize they've got to do something because hey what is popular it's a vote winner and that's that's what happened in Australia. It was the wife of a premier in southern Australia read that book. She, you know, she tapped her husband on the shoulder, said you got to do something. He brought in a law that was popular and then the Prime Minister of the whole country acted. And guess what was done? It very quickly . So that is the dynamic at play here. And here we're talking, you know, we're slightly dancing on the head of a pin as to, you know, what kind of ban . Is it an Australia style ban , is it a ban, a conditional ban basically that says, Hey, guess what companies unless you make that product safe and get rid of all these algorithms and auto scroll, etc. You ain't be able to serve it to children and you won't be able to offer it to children. So that kind of banner. We think it's the latter, but we're not obviously one hundred percent sure we wait to hear. But whether or not they're going to act the same way with AI, we don't know. But actually interestingly , I think that some of the proposals that come out in a few weeks be dealing with AR chatbots because the government's been very worried as a lot of people individually about the impact of AR chatbots on kids and even adults. So that's where we're going. Anyway, should we move on to our guest today? He is the CEO of Proxima Fusion, a German company attempting to provide Earth with limitless, clean energy . The process they're trying to recreate is called nuclear fusion and it's the same reaction that powers the sun. It involves heating plasma to more than a hundred million degrees . And that sounds very hard, but in this moment where we hear Elon Musk talking about putting data centers in space to solve this problem, perhaps this does actually make sense, but scientists all over the world have been trying to crack this problem for decades . And they hope it could eventually provide huge quantities of clean energy for the world because it doesn't rely on fossil fuels and produces no harmful greenhouse gases and very little nuclear waste and it has nothing. It's very different from what you would expect or comes out of nuclear fission . But anyway, Proxima recently secured four hundred million euros from the state of Bavaria and is seeking further investment of more than a billion dollars as Europe tries to compete with the US and China in the race for fusion technology . Francesco Shortino, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the pod. Very happy to be here. So I have many questions for you. I don't know if there's a if you've heard there's this thing called artificial intelligence. It needs lots and lots and lots and lots of power. Tell me about it . And fusion is one of these things. It's like it's like the energy white whale, right? It's like it produces tons of continuous clean power. The only exhaust, if you will, is water , I believe, or something like that. Could you just explain what nuclear fusion is? I know this is basic, but can you explain what nuclear fusion is and where we are? Because this feels like this is a thing that we've been talking about and hoping for decades and just trying to understand where we are here in twenty twenty six. As you said, it's the ultimate source of clean energy and the right tense there is it will be fantastic because we make fusion energy quite not at the scales that are useful for commercial fusion production. The fusion concept, the fusion physical process is nothing new. We've known it for more than one hundred years. We can do it in the lab , but doing a little bit of it and making instead copious amounts of clean energy is a different level. So we've been chasing fusion for commercial civil energy production for sixty seventy years and the UK has actually had a really big role in the history of fusion . There has been pretty significant acceleration in the field in the last twenty years or so. And I think that has been really on the exponential side in the last two years , especially in the domain where Proxima operates, there's been more progress than in the previous twenty years mind objectively. And this is happening across a number of topics in fusion because of computation, better electronics, much stronger magnets . So there are a number of tailwinds. Artificial intelligence is one of those. So in some sense, there is a coupling of AI and fusion where AI is helping us to get the fusion much faster , but you also need fusion, supposedly to feed the AI at some point. It's pretty hard to imagine a future of humanity where there is growth in the sense that we want to see it that does not involve clean baseload energy from fusion. Of course, fusion needs to be not just clean, but also commercially viable. And that's the ultimate challenge of fusion which every private fusion company is pursuing. There is a zoo of concepts in fusion of concepts. I love that. Yeah, you could say so. Yeah. So fusion is, you know, it's not a technology. Fusion is a physical process. And how you implement that process and you make a power plant out of it is a wide field. So just people understand, I think , and you can correct me when I'm wrong because I'm not a science reporter . You're effectively recreating the process of the sun on Earth and doing it in a kind of enclosed environment. So you're creating a reaction that will generate something like one hundred fifty million, two hundred million degrees as it fahrenheit or Celsius We're talking about Celsius or Kelvin. At the end of the day, what's important is that they're really high temperatures. We're looking at ten times the center of the sun. Yes, exactly. It reminds me of my kids when they ever say like, what would happen if whatever? You fired a rocket into the sun, you'd be like, it would melt. It was like it would melt everything , right? So it feels like the kind of the challenge is creating something that's two hundred million degrees or whatever the number is in a way that doesn't destroy everything around it. Is that basically how to sum it up? Yeah Yeah., in some of the ways in which we are targeting to make commercial fusion, we are trying to confine the whole ionized matter in a cage of some sort. That's what Proxima does. We create a magnetic field cage and that cage basically suspending this hot meter away from any material. We use magnetic fields to confine and hold this hot stuff in a stable way for as long as we want it. Using the very powerful magnets to effectively suspend it. That's right. So magnet technology is one of the key enablers and one of the things that has been accelerating massively in the past few years. The other one is really computational simulation and optim ization. So the ability to design these complex donor shaped devices with all these twisty magnets that you know we started using super computing to design stellarators in the eighties nineties but, the comput ing of that time was so and so let's say compared to what we have today. So AI , you know, it's accelerating the way we design because we design also through code and the acceleration of code. You know very well is something spectacular these days. But AI is also helping us explore geometries . If you look at what a stellarator is, so this donor shaped device with twisty shapes , a lot of the complexity is in the integrated geometries , so the design just being very complex for a human brain to really capture in all its consequences. It turns out that NAI is pretty good at doing that If everything goes right with the science of this , can you just explain what the end game benefit will be for everyday people in the UK and in Europe, America, et cet . And when that would happen? So first, the actual objective is to create clean, baseload, safe energy . And I specify the baseload bit because the fact that it's clean and safe, I think everyone understands, but it's important to understand the place of fusion in a complex clean energy system. The target of a company like Proxima is not to do one hundred percent of the energy supply of humanity . That's a silly kind of objective. Reality is a lot more complex in energy. You want systems to balance each other and to complement each other in different geographies, different supply chains, different geopolitical conditions. So fusion, I believe, will take five percent to the grid, evotake . And then the citizen will benefit from fusion not because they have a fusion reactor in the garden, but because the grid has been balanced by that clean baseload, which needs to be cheap enough that the entire energy system overall is balanced at a lower price. So the UK citizens like the European one but more broadly and humanity just generally needs more energy, okay? Humanity , the wealth of the people scales with the amount of energy that they can access . That's well known, increasing efficiency of energy consumption, it's great. It won't really get us to the next era of civilization. Fusion will because fusion can increase the overall amount of energy that humans can access. It's interesting you talk about like how these AI models are actually help ing you move forward in the field. And we're always hearing us in this very strange age of AI in which we find ourselves like, oh, we're going to sort climate change. We're going to cure cancer, we're going to live forever So do you think nuclear fusion is going to when we look back it'll be one of those things that was helped quote unquote get solved by AI ? So for us , AI has to do with figuring out better systems that are manufacturable. It has to do with basically saving time in the R and D process. We cannot build that many stellarators. So we need to advance our modeling tools so that we can iterate in code. You can only iterate in code if your models have been validated in experiment. The truth is that when you go into one of these transformative challenges, you just don't know how long it's going to take. You have a fantastic roadmap and after five years you're like, Ah, little did I know how naive because the challenges you ended up actually dealing with are always somewhat different. But if you have enough tailwinds , every time you discover that something is harder, you happen to also have moved in hopefully the right direction, much faster than you had anticipated. And it's the balance of those two things that I think will bring materials , we'll bring fusion, we'll bring better rockets, quantum computers much faster. Now it's unlikely my opinion that we will get all of those things to humanity within the next decade. Life is a lot more nuanced when you get to hardware rather than just software systems The time to pull concrete and to do steel processing are sort of limits to how fast we can deploy these things . So it does take an intelligent investor and a committed government to understand where these AI tailwinds actually lead . How do we deviate from the narrative of fluff of AI, AI is going to change everything. AGI comes and it's going to be robots all over the streets, all of a sudden. That's not the world as I see it. I think that world is coming, but it's not it's not in three years. It's not in five years. AGI may be, you know, sooner rather than later, but then how will it impact hardware like fusion ? That's for companies like Proxima to determine. Can I ask how old you are, Francesco? Yes, I'm thirty three. Let's say we're still retiring at sixty five. Do you think the world will be awash in nuclear fusion reactors by the time you retire? I will be by mid of my career in a phase where I cannot build fusion reactors fast enough and I will die without being able to build fusion reactors fast enough. We will just not be able to deploy fast enough because we would be limited by the amount of steel. We'll be limited by the speed at which we can pour concrete. But the science is sorted. We have a clear scientific basis. Science is sorted is something that you will never hear a physicist s agreed to it is a meaningless sentence , but having a clear scientific basis, that's a much clearer statement that I can I can stand by. If steel and concrete are the constraints and building is the constraint , it does feel like eventually China will win this race in the sense that they are very good at building plants , railways , etc , etc . Whereas obviously we are a little more constrained in UK , Europe and the West by various factors . We are more constrained, but I think to abandon this idea that Europeans don't know how to manufacture. We do plenty of manufacturing. In fact, we do a whole lot more manufacturing than the United States for sure. And compared to China, China has perfection the art of doing high volume, relatively low cost things. And certainly they have an advantage in large scale manufacturing. Now good news is for the foreseeable future I would love to tell you that we are going to be constrained by high volume of stellarator production . That's not the problem that I have in the next five years, no ten, n fifteen. Let me deal with it when I get there. What I'm concerned about right now is making magnets that are powerful enough and that I can make fast enough. This is stuff that you can do in Europe much better than anywhere else. I believe that there will be a future where fusion is going to be so geopolitical that there will be a fusion champion in the United States, fusion champion in China, and a fusion champion in Europe. So the thought that we give up this to whoever gets there first . Just doesn't hold up to logic So Mark, you're a tech guy . What do you think of our fusion powered future? Well, it does feel like a long way off. I have to say. The thing that really surprised me was that he said endgame twenty five percent of our renewable power needs. And I expected him to say more , not knowing a huge amount about the roadmap of the industry . So I think that was that was interesting to me and obviously given the challenges he talked about with regards to actually construction and all the kind of the building stuff rather than the physics side of things. I think that was also a surprise to me because I thought once you get this once you get through the science then the rest of it will be easy but actually it does collide with the real world. It reminds me of a little bit of like quantum computing and I know quantum computing is apparently much closer than it has ever been, et cetera, but and I've said it before in the bot, it's like that feels like something that's five years away from being five years away. This feels like it's like ten years away from being ten years away. But you know, it's a huge prize if they can figure it out, but it just sounds a hundred million degrees. I don't even know what that I can't even conceptualize that. It's like that amount of heat, I don't understand how you can create anything ever that will control that, right? And obviously it's a very, very hard scientific problem to sort out. I think that is part of the attraction of the story. It is this incredible scientific physics experiment that's playing out before our eyes that's got out of the lab and into semi production, you would call it. Yeah. And what is interesting is that Fusion is having this moment. And we talked about it a little bit with him. But like there's been several startups who've raised billions of dollars, and the one that I knew best and writt neveren about the past in is Helion, which is funded by Sam Altman. Sam Altman has put personally , his own money three hundred seventy five million dollars into it. And Francesco not talking out of school because he said he's said it before. He's a bit skeptical of some of their claims or whatever it may be. It's kind of inside baseball fusion stuff, but it does it is interesting in the Sam Altman angle of just like, you know, you're creating this demand through one invention AI and here's your solution . This other thing you're backing, which is like, you know, endless clean power . But it just feels so, so far away and I know that Francesco's a scientist and he's very excited, but you know, science at this scale, at this type of complexity just takes it a lot. It's interesting to see the models as well playing out again, which is the U. S. venture backed big money, big claims, Europe more institute driven that you get spin outs from that with a bit of government funding and then China, obviously, much more state driven. And you see this replication all over again. But he was pretty bullish about the European and European side. I think it's quite nice to have that. Given where we are in geopolitics, it's like we get to blow the whistle. You know, if we are still following Europe, obviously, Daniel I'm not quite indeed look, so that was I think that's it for this week's episode. Thank you, Mark, as ever, for standing in so ably for Katie I think she must be swaning around somewhere. I don't know what she's doing. But if you did enjoy the show , please drop us a line to let us know. And we'd love to know your thoughts on today's discussion. You can email us at techpod imes .co . uk . Thank you as ever for listening. Bye bye. Bye bye