Co-founder & CEO @borealisfusion
San Francisco
Joined March 2007
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Ian, Elijah, Tal, Alex and I founded Borealis Fusion to make fusion the lowest-cost source of firm electricity. We are building it now.
pB11 is the hardest fusion fuel. This is the best team in the world to make it work.
damienscott.org/cofounding-b…
Introducing Borealis Fusion.
Our goal is the lowest-cost firm electricity from any source.
Our fuel is proton-boron-11 because it allows the simplest and cheapest plant.
Our architecture derives from the tandem mirror, adapted to the fuel.
borealisfusion.com/introduci…
“We can probably get to fusion, but the real trick is can we get to fusion you can afford the electricity from? [...] First electricity and the first time somebody makes money from fusion, they’re different things.” - Sir Steven Cowley, Director of PPPL
This was the central question at @1cfenergy
Making the answer unambiguously yes is the objective at @borealisfusion
Brushed up on my physics for this live @CleaningUpPod recording with Professor Sir Steven Cowley, Director of Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (@PPPLab). Huge progress on plasma physics, and AI is helping - so why is he worried about fusion's Theranos moment? youtu.be/UV30cDZcSfs?si=P3OA…
If you want to work on a challenge this consequential, join us.
Hiring a Senior Experimental Physicist to design our first experimental campaign: borealisfusion.com/join/seni…
We want to hear from capable people in this domain for future roles: borealisfusion.com/join/futu…
Damien Scott retweeted
Today we come out of stealth.
We are Apex Ultra, a frontier AI lab building Engineering Superintelligence (ESI): AI that can design, simulate, test, and build the world's most complex machines.
ESI cannot be trained on the open internet. It has to learn where engineering actually happens — against real problems, real physics, and real consequences.
Today we can say where one of those places is.
@AlpineF1Team has named Apex Ultra its official AI for Engineering Partner. We will train and evaluate ESI against some of the hardest engineering problems in the world, at the pace of Formula One — where every race weekend is a definitive result.
The race for ESI is on. 🏁
apexultra.com/alpinef1
My 1cFE residency at @AsteraInstitute has concluded
we spent a year asking what would need to be true for fusion electricity to cost 1¢/kWh
I leave more convinced that we should pursue that goal, and clearer about how difficult it will be
The 1cFE initiative has finished
We set out to ask what would need to be true for fusion electricity to cost 1¢/kWh, and whether it could happen within a decade
Our answer: unlikely but not impossible, and vanishingly unlikely within ten years
1cf.energy/1cfe-completed/
Thank you to @AsteraInstitute and @elidourado for supporting the work and giving us the freedom to pursue this question.
And to my colleagues Tal Rubin, Mallory Snowden and Reid Westwood for their superb work
Damien Scott retweeted
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
Astera keeps finding brilliant people to do hard science in the open
welcome to the new residents!
Damien Scott retweeted
Investors have committed more than $17B of equity into fusion companies since 2010. ~60% of it arrived since the start of 2024.
We just launched interactive fusion funding charts: filter by country or company, always up to date.
fusionenergybase.com/equity-…
The open-source engine behind 1cFE's numbers. 17 fusion concepts, four fuels, full cost breakdown, autodiff sensitivities in one call
An automated pipeline to research, model, and cost 38 fusion concepts under a single framework. Open source. New from the 1cFE team.
the new space: fusion analogy is useful right up until the customer problem
thoughtful analysis from my colleague Mallory Snowden, drawing on 14 years in aerospace
Is direct energy conversion a key technology for low cost fusion? Turns out it's complicated
Mars Terraforming. Fusion.
Making the Expanse a little more plausible at @AsteraInstitute
Superb work from my fellow resident @edwinkite and colleagues.
Exploring the fusion cost floor
What does a fusion plant cost if the core is free?
For D-T: $29/MWh. Nearly 3x the 1c/kWh target we're chasing.
The cost uncertainty isn't in the turbines or the buildings. It's in the core. So we removed
it.
New dispatch by Tal Rubin 1cfe.substack.com/p/fusions-…
Damien Scott retweeted
What does a fusion plant cost if the core is free?
For D-T: $29/MWh. Nearly 3x the 1c/kWh target we're chasing.
The cost uncertainty isn't in the turbines or the buildings. It's in the core. So we removed
it.
New dispatch by Tal Rubin 1cfe.substack.com/p/fusions-…
Fusion progress is measured in plasma milestones
Cost will be determined by what happens between the plasma and the grid
Damien Scott retweeted
Apr 19 is nearing...please apply to become an Astera Resident if you are excited by the prospect of spending 12-18 months diving deep & building at the frontier of neuroscience/AI/robotics and meta science. Within the realm of neuro, we welcome all ideas from tools to theory. Crazy ambitious is good. I guarantee you will find Astera a one-of-a-kind ecosystem--it's paradise for a certain kind of person.
Damien Scott retweeted
In fusion, starting with technoeconomic analysis is not the norm, resulting in concepts that won't be transformative even if they work.
Really appreciate the work @damienscott is doing to create open source TEAs for a huge class of concepts. asterainstitute.substack.com…