As a child, I spent recesses with my nose in a book reading everything I could about humanity’s next high-tech frontiers, like high-energy particle physics, energy generation and space travel, among others. One of the most exciting things was nuclear fusion: technology that could massively improve our access to energy. I learned there was enough deuterium in the Earth’s oceans to power our world with carbon free energy for tens of billions of years and dreamed of helping realize this potential.
My fascination became a mission when, at my university, I watched trains haul mountains of coal every few days into a heating plant that only provided enough energy to keep just a part of the university warm. I imagined this process at a global scale; at the cost and consequence of all the mining, transportation, and carbon released to fuel our way of life. I remembered what I had learned years ago, that the fusion fuel needed to power the entire United States for a year could fit in a fraction of that one train. It was at that moment I decided to spend my life building a fusion-powered future and enrolled in the fusion technology program at UW-Madison.
The program focused on engineering and operations: what would it take to move fusion from a science experiment to a competitive power source? The takeaway for me was daunting; fusion required some of the most exotic systems ever made to be placed in the harshest conditions ever created while being cost competitive with existing energy sources like windmills. While theoretically possible, it was clear it would take a phenomenal investment of money and scale to get there.
That led me to the question that would ultimately shape SHINE.
What if, instead of chasing a series of major breakthroughs in a moonshot effort, we could grow organically toward a fusion-powered future while creating value for society as we learned? And what if the fastest way to master complex problems is through real-world application?
