Solid State Fusion needs

Investors

Investors play a pivotal role in the success of Solid State Fusion. By providing capital, this field could lead to the safest, cheapest, suitably power-dense energy source ever developed by humans.

Society's Energy Challenges

The following four challenges related to generating energy for powering society should be the focus and concern of every policymaker, government bureaucrat, investor, and consumer.
Climate Disruption
Climate disruption arising from high-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources will continue to generate catastrophic disasters.
Environmental Pollution
Environmental pollution arising from dirty energy sources will continue to sicken and kill, especially in poorer countries and neighborhoods.
Energy Security
Energy will continue to become a vulnerability in war-time situations such as the current situation in Ukraine.
Sustainable and just economic growth
Economic growth will stall and/or continue on paths of unequal wealth distributions. For example, global south countries will find it difficult to escape their poverty trap.
Only nuclear energy solves all four challenges: It produces no greenhouse gas emissions, has minimal environmental pollution, provides energy security, and facilitates sustainable, just economic growth. All other energy choices, including wind and solar, must trade off across these dimensions.

Up until the past 10 years, the portfolio allocation for energy-generation has not changed much and has been heavily skewed towards fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are particularly problematic along the dimensions of climate disruption and environmental pollution. For those countries lucky enough to have fossil fuels readily available in their geographies, fossil fuels provide energy security and can lead to just economic growth if a country’s political system does not lead to concentrated control of fossil fuel resources. This growth, however, is not sustainable given that the resource is non-renewable.

The world energy source portfolio impacts each one of the challenges outlined above.

While renewables are starting to become a more noticeable part of this portfolio mix, we are still far away from substantively changing how we generate energy. Without a change to the energy investing portfolio, we will be unable to find an optimal path and will likely end up with suboptimal outcomes.

Re-balancing the global energy portfolio

While developing, improving, maintaining, and managing both energy supply and demand are critical to achieving an optimal balance across the above challenges, modifying the portfolio allocation of energy supplies is more likely to lead to optimal outcomes.

Current energy portfolio across the world

Source: Our World in Data 2019
Fossil Fuels
84.4%
Renewable Energy
11.4%
Nuclear Energy
4.3%
Solid State Fusion
0%

We need to find a way to massively re-balance this allocation.

Otherwise, the world will eventually sink into intractable problems that will most likely lead to an uninhabitable planet.

Current portfolio allocation is more a result of historical chance than clear thinking about optimal outcomes. The current outcome has created well-funded companies that lobby to keep the energy portfolio allocation more or less the same, regardless of consequences.

Most stakeholders and decision-makers in the energy space do not have the right information and/or their incentives are not aligned with climate outcomes.

We should be more aggressively working to change the energy source portfolio allocation

Given the superiority of all kinds of nuclear energy sources (fission, hot fusion, and cold fusion/LENR) in producing a better balance across the challenging energy landscape, society at large has materially under-allocated investment to the nuclear space while massively increasing allocation to certain renewables like solar and wind.

Within the nuclear energy category, certain types of massively high-return —and high investment risk —energy types are particularly under-invested.

Cold fusion/LENR/LANR is an area that needs much more investment. To start, we refer to this category as Solid State Fusion (SSF) as it better represents the range of possibilities and is easier for non-experts to remember and eventually understand.

While competing optimization methodologies would generate different target allocations, we can start with the fact that many countries at COP 28 signed up to tripling nuclear energy allocation. With a few assumptions, we should see at least 1 to 2% of the overall energy portfolio allocation focused on SSF.

We are working with and looking for like-minded individuals to harness resources so that we materially increase the investment allocation to nuclear energy and SSF among the many energy sources available today.

Increase Focus & Funding

SSF could lead to the safest, cheapest, suitably power-dense energy source humans have ever developed. Commercialized, scalable SSF could be the ultimate solution to the energy dilemma, leading to social stability and economic growth never seen before. The result would be a genuinely abundant society.

Capital has generally been diverted from nuclear energy projects, and SSF projects specifically because solar and wind developers have persuaded governments to massively underwrite their initiatives.

Non-profits have followed suit and tend to anchor-invest only in solar and wind without understanding that regardless of how cheap or ubiquitous solar and wind become, they cannot resolve, in an optimal way, the energy dilemma. In fact, the more allocation to solar and wind, the more entrenched oil and gas will remain as many industrial processes, such as steel production, cement production, and chemical production can never fully switch to renewables due to reliance on process heat and the need for firm baseload power.

In this case, the primary high-density energy source needed to power modern economies will always be fossil fuels, except where nuclear energy is deployed and the few geographically blessed locations with sufficient hydropower or geothermal energy.

Thus, we are left with the challenge of material under-investment in some of the most promising energy sources like SSF and small-modular-reactors (SMRs) and over-investment in good, but inadequate energy sources like solar and wind. Note that in some arenas such as microchips and satellites, early investment was almost entirely from governments and these industries would likely not have developed as quickly or as profitably as they later became without that substantial anchor investment. The modern world would be quite different had microchips and satellites followed a much slower development path.

Reasons to Invest in Solid State Fusion

Given the investment under-allocation to SSF and other new nuclear technologies such as SMRs and the difficult risk/return assessment due to deep uncertainty related to SSF, we are looking for ways to do the following.

Reason 01

Attract new public and non-profit-sponsored money into this space via prizes.

Institut de l'Anthropocène is planning to sponsor the Schwinger Prize, named for the physicist Julian Schwinger, to motivate new work in the SSF space. We are looking both for individuals and institutions willing to contribute to the prize and for researchers interested in competing for the prize. See the following for more information.
What do prizes Accomplish?
  • Prizes are good ways for governments and non-profit organizations to catalyze research and development in areas with very high return potential, but deep uncertainty as to commercializability, scalability, and sustainable profitability.
  • Prizes can create more publicity and other secondary effects that can be a good use of philanthropic funds in that the results could have a positive multiplier effect for addressing the energy dilemma that reflects the most challenging problems and risks facing society today.

 

Reason 02

Attract new investment into the SSF space.

While the investment thesis continues to be unpersuasive to angel and venture investors, more publicity, more research funding, more prizes, and more education can ultimately overcome psychological and analytical challenges related to investing in an area as speculative, but potentially world-changing as SSF.

Reason 03

Attract new researchers into the SSF space

Much of our discussion on this website focuses on generating more funding via prizes, grants, and investment. This said, we want more students, analysts, researchers, and academics focused on the SSF space.
How can researchers be incentivized?
  • Anthropocene Institute makes occasional research grants to promising researchers in this space.
  • Eventually, we plan to incentivize research and development in other ways as the Anthropocene Institute gains more traction among relevant government departments, non-profits, and investors.
  • This site has links to a wealth of information related to SSF. Please access these resources to improve your understanding of this promising but mostly ignored and misunderstood energy source.

Get Involved

Get Advisory Services
from Institut de l'Anthropocène

Our parent organization, Anthropocene Institute, can provide advisory services on investing in the nuclear energy space (broadly,) and supporting the supply chain.

Contribute to
The Schwinger Prize Fund

Anthropocene Institute is sponsoring a Schwinger Prize, seeking individuals and institutions willing to contribute to the prize and for researchers interested in competing for the prize.
Learn more about Prizes
Contact SSF.org about
The Schwinger Prize

Apply for
a Research Grant

The Anthropocene Institute is connecting funding sources with researchers and scientists exploring Solid-State Fusion (SSF).
Apply for a Research Grant

SolidStateFusion.org

©2023 | Fusion à l'état solide | Un projet de l'Institut Anthropocène
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