The Holy Grail of Energy: Why Fusion is Finally Having Its Wright Brothers Moment | Henry Gould (Daedal Systems)

Henry Gould (0:01)

2022 was the first time in history that out of the plasma, out of the superheated gas itself, more energy came out than was put into it. And that was sort of the Wright Brothers' moment for field and for the industry saying, oh, wow, this is working.

Matt Cohen (0:16)

Welcome back to Tank Talks. I'm your host, Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures. And this week's episode is with Henry Gould, the founder of Daedal Systems, a Toronto-based company tackling one of the most important bottlenecks on the path to commercial fusion, that's plasma diagnostics and reliable measurement.

Henry spent years at General Fusion as an engineer, physical lead, and technical project manager, delivering a suite of diagnostics on their large-scale machines. What he kept seeing was a structural problem. Though diagnostics are non-core IP, every fusion company is still building and maintaining these systems in-house. So he left to found Daedal Systems around a different model, where measurement was the service. Industrial-grade hardware, full integration, and ongoing operation support, so that fusion teams can stay focused on making the reactors work. Today, we're taking a deep dive into the science, the risk, and what it would actually take to generate trustworthy data as the industry pushes towards commercial machines. Now, let's jump into the tank for this week's episode with Henry from Daedal.

Thanks for joining us on the tank today, Henry.

Henry Gould (1:20)

Thank you for having me.

Matt Cohen (1:21)

This is going to be probably the most technical and in-depth conversation we've ever had in the tank, talking about fusion, nuclear fusion, not fission. Maybe for our listeners who are not very familiar with this space, take us back to your early childhood, what you were doing as a kid a little bit before you started tinkering in and around the energy space.

Henry Gould (1:43)

Sure. I'm from here in Toronto, grew up just up this up Yonge Street, Lawrence Park, went up for Canada College, and physics is what drew me in. That was the first course or discipline in school that just awakened something.

Matt Cohen (1:57)

Okay.

Henry Gould (1:57)

There's this underlying fabric to all of us, small, the big, and it worked and I kept going with it. University, I went to Queen's Engineering following, physics is what drew me there, but at Queen's I found engineering physics as a program.

Matt Cohen (2:13)

Do you have family in engineering at all? No.

Henry Gould (2:16)

My parents both in finance.

Matt Cohen (2:17)

Okay.

Henry Gould (2:18)

Just the physics was alluring and I followed that through the university and engineering physics.

Matt Cohen (2:23)

Did you want to go in academia for a while or did you know you wanted to be in the field?

Henry Gould (2:27)

There was not a draw to academia per se. It was just drawn by this field of study that I found captivating, that I was good at, that I wanted to keep learning about, keep pushing what I could understand.

Matt Cohen (2:40)

What drew you to the fusion world originally?

Henry Gould (2:43)

Going back to high school, I'm watching all sorts of physics videos on YouTube as cool teenagers do, and Michio Kaku and various others. One of those was a Ted Talk by Michelle LaPierre, the founder of General Fusion. This is back 2013 or so.

Learning about fusion, it's like immense potential, being abundant, clean, energy, on demand, no long-lived radioactive waste. There's a reason it's called The Holy Grail of Energy.

Matt Cohen (3:13)

Yeah. Tell our listeners exactly why fusion and general fusion, which is based in Vancouver, BC, which is so cool, is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, focused fusion companies in the world, and why it has been such an alluring problem to solve for the last what feels like 60 plus years, but talked about for the last 20

Henry Gould (3:33)

Yeah. So fusion, it's a nuclear reaction, right? So everyone's familiar with nuclear fission, the splitting of big atoms like uranium.

Matt Cohen (3:40)

Yeah.

Henry Gould (3:40)

Fusion is a nuclear process, but the opposite, the fusing of small atoms.

Matt Cohen (3:44)

Smashing things together, like the sun.

Henry Gould (3:46)

Which happens in the sun, it's the process that powers every star in the universe. That fusing process of light atoms like hydrogen releases energy that can be captured. Notably, there's no long-lived radioactive waste. There's abundant fuel on earth from seawater and from lithium, abundant. It's on demand, you can turn it dispatchable, you can turn it off and on again. There's not like a chain reaction like you get in fission.

Since basically they discovered that the sun was powered by fusion, humanity has been looking into how to make this an energy source.