Tag: EC Food Climate and Sustainability

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7 founders and CEOs discuss fusion power’s most pressing challenges

The hype around fusion power is real. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility achieved net-positive controlled nuclear fusion in December 2022, a milestone that’s been decades in the making. Then, earlier this month, they did it again, proving that it wasn’t just a fluke.

But that’s not the only thing reshaping the industry. Once the exclusive domain of university and government researchers, the center of gravity around fusion power has begun to shift as founders bring fusion out of the lab. So to better understand the state of the industry and the opportunity in fusion power today, TechCrunch+ caught up with seven founders and CEOs.

It’s no secret that the sector has a troubled history. “There is a graveyard littered with over-promises, missed milestones and false starts,” said Benj Conway, co-founder and president of Zap Energy. “The basic physics of fusion is real, the potential upside is real, but to shed its baggage, the industry needs to deliver more than promises and concepts.”

Fortunately, changes are happening fast, several founders said. As government money has dried up, investors have stepped in, funding startups across the sector to the tune of more than $6 billion so far, according to the Fusion Industry Association. “The shift from government-led [funding] to a mix of public and private efforts, with venture capital strategies akin to those used in the electric vehicle and private space industries, brings not just resources but also a greater tolerance for risk and urgency,” said Taka Nagao, co-founder and CEO of Kyoto Fusioneering.

That capital is pouring into the sector at an opportune time, as fusion power startups can now make rapid gains thanks to a convergence of factors.

With $10T on the line, 6 fusion investors explain why they’re all in

For many fusion power startups, high-temperature superconducting magnets sparked their journey. Without them, many fusion reactor designs simply wouldn’t be economical or even possible.

Another factor that shouldn’t be overlooked is the growth in computing power. Cheaper, more advanced processors have helped bring plasma simulation techniques down to earth, said Avalanche Energy co-founder and CEO Robin Langtry. “This is starting to pay off, as we can now use powerful GPUs to simulate many approaches to fusion and explore different ideas, a reality that was not possible even 20 years ago,” he said.

Advances in computing and magnet design have been occurring alongside, and sometimes in coordination with, developments in fusion science. It’s all coalesced over the last few years to create fertile conditions for startups to thrive.

“Now, more than ever, the long-term tailwinds supporting fusion’s commercialization are growing,” said Greg Twinney, CEO of General Fusion.

Read on to find out if things are actually different this time, how the fundraising environment is looking, what founders are doing to tackle this industry’s specific challenges, and more.

We spoke with:

(Note: The following interviews have been edited for length and clarity.)

Benj Conway, co-founder and CEO, Zap Energy

Fusion has broken a lot of promises in the past. What’s different this time?

It may not be the answer you expect, but in my assessment, almost nothing is different: Fusion developers continue to over-promise and understate risk — I’m not aware of any fusion concept that lacks serious science and engineering challenges.

Advances in material science and computational techniques are, in my view, exaggerated. The diversity you see in the fusion startup landscape definitely won’t translate into a diversity of commercial approaches later. Fusion developers still focus principally on plasma physics and not enough on all the other technologies required to make fusion commercial.

Fusion investment is down significantly this year after a blockbuster 2021 and a quieter 2022. What does that tell us about the industry?

2021 was a huge outlier skewed by a couple of mega raises. If you remove that datapoint, there has been a steady increase year on year.

What challenges do founders face that are specific to the fusion industry?

Fusion has a reputation problem. There is a graveyard littered with over-promises, missed milestones and false starts. If you call something the Holy Grail, you are setting yourself up to disappoint. Investors are cognizant and wary of this track record.

To compound this, investors find it difficult to distinguish between fusion approaches, and there are countless approaches that stand very little chance of becoming a commercial product. The basic physics of fusion is real, the potential upside is real, but to shed its baggage, the industry needs to deliver more than promises and concepts.

Fusion is famous for its deep technical challenges and long time horizons. How does that affect how you approach investors?

Fusion is still too early for most large institutional investors, which is why most investments come from deep tech, early-stage VC, high-net-worth individuals or strategic corporates. Investors are rightly skeptical of the timelines presented by fusion companies, but it’s usually reasonably binary: Investors either do or do not have a long-enough term investment horizon, and they all have a strong sense of how much timeline risk is acceptable.

Regardless of who the investor is, it’s imperative to be fully open about the risks. The more due diligence an investor does, the better. I do think it is possible to invest in fusion today and exit with strong returns before fusion is fully commercialized.

What’s driving the pace of progress in the fusion industry?

If progress means moving towards a commercial product on a time frame that matters, the pace will depend on two interrelated things: fundraising, the ability of a handful of fusion companies to continue to capitalize themselves; and technology, the rate at which these fusion companies can continue to advance their results and hit milestones.

Ultimately, the pace of progress of the industry will depend on whether fusion economics can compete with other sources of energy.

Robin Langtry, co-founder and CEO, Avalanche Energy

Fusion has broken a lot of promises in the past. What’s different this time?

First, the government funding of fusion science peaked in the late 1970s at $1 billion and then declined to a level that pretty much guaranteed slow progress (chart, for reference). In that environment, the fusion science community responded by focusing on two approaches to Q>1: tokamaks and laser inertial fusion.

Funding for those two approaches from 1980 until recently has averaged about a few hundred millions. Given the scale and size needed for those approaches (and the laser and magnet technology available at the time), the result was very slow but steady progress (see, for example, the recent NIF Q plasma >1 results at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). The focus on tokamaks and laser inertial approaches to fusion also meant that many alternative concepts that could have been smaller or faster routes to net energy were never really explored at the national labs due to the lack of resources.

The second point is the urgency of solving the climate change problem and the emergence of private venture capital, which kickstarted a private “fusion industry” around 2018. Since then, over $3 billion has gone into private tokamak and laser fusion approaches that utilize newer technology (high-temp superconducting magnets, high-power lasers) that can shrink the scale of the fusion machines and lower the capital required to build Q>1 demonstrators. In addition, alternative approaches to fusion have also received significant private capital (estimated around $2 billion), including field-reversed configurations (Helion, TAE, General Fusion), Z-pinches (Zap) and now electrostatic fusion (Avalanche Energy).

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One company’s quest to eliminate battery fires

Battery fires are bad. Just ask LG, GM, Tesla, Volkswagen or any of the hundreds of people whose e-bikes have caught fire. While fires caused by EVs are a relative rarity compared with fossil fuel vehicles, that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.

But there’s something that batteries have that fossil fuels don’t: the ability to monitor themselves.

“Every lithium-ion battery is an IoT device,” Accure co-founder and CEO Kai-Philipp Kairies told TechCrunch+. “All of these batteries are generating heaps of data.”

Batteries are going to be everywhere in the next couple decades, reshaping everything from cars and trucks to toys, home furnishings and more, all things that people interact with on a daily basis. The potential for fires could increase as adoption grows, but it doesn’t have to. All that data that batteries are generating gives us a window into how they’re operating. It also gives us a chance to predict when they’ll go haywire.

Kairies and his co-founders started Accure with an eye toward minimizing battery fires, taking problematic cells out of service before they pose a hazard. The team creates a digital twin of the batteries it monitors, starting with models based on the physical properties of the specific chemistry and construction and blending in artificial intelligence to aid in predictions.

“We’re using the sensors and we’re dissecting the signals into what are the underlying properties causing the signals. Then we use prediction mechanisms for the underlying behaviors. And from there, we can use a model again to say, what is this leading toward?” he said.

“As far as I know, we’re the only company that has consistently been able to correctly predict thermal runaway in a battery days and weeks before it happens,” he said. “We can guarantee 100%. That’s just not possible. But we can substantially reduce the fire risk of a battery.”

The company announced Tuesday that it has raised 7.2 million euros in a Series A2 led by Blue Bear Capital and HSBC Asset Management with participation from Riverstone Holdings and Capnamic Ventures.

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Is JPMorgan turning a corner on climate finance?

Let’s get this out of the way: JPMorgan Chase doesn’t have the best reputation in the climate sector. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2016, the bank has financed more than $430 billion worth of fossil fuel projects, according to the most recent Banking on Climate Chaos report, far exceeding its peers.

But there’s some evidence to suggest the bank is turning a corner. In 2021, JPMorgan said it would lend and underwrite $2.5 trillion by the end of the decade “to advance long-term solutions that address climate change and contribute to sustainable development.” Of that, it’s earmarking $1 trillion specifically for climate investments.

Part of JPMorgan’s focus on sustainability is undoubtedly a reaction to changing political and consumer sentiment around the climate and the adverse impact on people. Just in the U.S., the past few years have seen people suffering unavoidable and unprecedented heat waves, with fires raging through towns and forests, not to mention the extreme floods and snow storms ravaging some areas.

At first, ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing felt like a supplemental action at many investment firms. It is clear that can no longer be the case.

In 2022, the bank hired Osei van Horne and Tanya Barnes to oversee its climate investments, and added Alex Bell to the team earlier this year. The team has been working to implement the bank’s ambitious plans, focusing on growth-stage investments.

The bank has made two investments so far: it led a $42 million Series E in MineSense Technologies, which focuses on critical minerals, and a $200 million Series E in Arcadia, a renewable energy platform for consumers and businesses.

JPMorgan’s stamp of approval shows that the sector is both one of the most urgent and most promising investment opportunities of this generation. So far this year, climate companies have raised $8.3 billion. In 2021, such companies raised $17.85 billion, and the total fell only slightly in 2022. All of these sums are substantially higher than what the sector received in 2019 — just $3.2 billion.

“This is an extraordinarily large and attractive place to deploy capital,” van Horne, a managing partner at JPMorgan, told TechCrunch+. “It’s also a great opportunity for startup founders.”

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It’s official: LK-99 isn’t a room-temperature superconductor

If there was any hope remaining that LK-99 might be a room-temperature superconductor, it’s pretty much dead now.

In fact, it’s worse than that. Pure samples of the substance show that it is an insulator — the opposite of a superconductor. The glimmers of hope that kept the story in the news for weeks appear to be the result of impurities in the original samples.

Dozens of studies published in the last week or two have coalesced around the conclusion, less than a month after a sensational preprint paper was published by a team at the Quantum Energy Research Centre, a small company housed in the basement of a modest apartment building in Seoul, South Korea.

The Korean team made waves when it published preprints on July 22, claiming to have created a material that exhibited superconductor-like properties at ambient temperature and pressure. What’s more, the material was made of plebeian ingredients: lead, copper, phosphorus and oxygen. It flew in the face of decades of research into superconductors.

And yet it appeared to possess some of the same qualities that define superconductors. A video released by the team showed it partially levitating above a magnet, and when probing it for electrical resistance, they noticed a sharp drop around 104.8°C. Both the levitation and the resistance drop are hallmarks of superconductors.

Early warnings

There were warnings early on that the claims might be bunk. For one, the team published to a preprint server first. This isn’t necessarily a red flag, though preprints are far from the gold standard. There’s no peer review of preprints, and the bar for submission is pretty low. In most cases, that’s not a problem; preprints have allowed many fields to move more quickly than the traditional peer-review process allows, and most scientists aren’t making outlandish claims in their preprints. Still, the fact that LK-99 appeared first in a preprint wasn’t promising.

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Soil can store gigatons of carbon, and Yard Stick wants to measure it all

When it comes to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one of the first questions is often: What should we do with it? Making new things is an obvious answer, though it’s still an expensive proposition. Stashing it underground is another, cheaper option; it usually involves compressing and injecting the gas into underground rock formations, kind of like oil drilling in reverse.

But when it comes to storing carbon underground, there’s another choice that’s even more straightforward: agricultural soils. Farming and ranching has the potential to store from 2 billion to 4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year for between $45 and $100 per metric ton, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As carbon-removal schemes go, that’s pretty cheap.

“Soil science, for the last 20 years, has been banging their drum to say there’s an enormous opportunity here,” Yard Stick CEO Chris Tolles told TechCrunch+.

But how much carbon is held by soils — and how much they capture over time — is not an easy thing to measure. Most soil sampling is done by hand-digging cores out of the ground and sending the samples to a lab. It’s labor- and time-intensive, which means it’s not cheap.

As a soil scientist, Yard Stick scientific adviser and research collaborator Cristine Morgan was intimately familiar with it all. For years, she researched how to use probes to characterize soils, reducing the entire process down to one step. By the time Tolles contacted her, the technology was pretty well developed. In the fall of 2020, she, Tolles and chief engineer Kevin Meissner founded Yard Stick to commercialize it.

It works something like this: The probe part sits near the tip of what’s essentially a foot-and-a-half-long drill bit. It uses spectroscopy to determine how much carbon is locked in the soil. That basically means it shines a light on the soil through a sapphire lens and measures what gets reflected. The device samples hundreds of spectral bands, from visible violet light all the way up to near-infrared. The smarts of the unit sit in a case atop the drill bit; it’s a little bit bigger than a rugby ball. The whole thing is then attached to an off-the-shelf cordless drill, and a sample takes less than a minute to complete.

Tolles said this version is just the first of many, a proof of concept that will be further refined. Next year, the company plans to build a version that can be attached to the back of a truck, allowing the operator to drive up to a sample site, press a button, and let the rig do the rest of the work.

The different versions will help the company characterize soils in a range of different environments, but for now, Yard Stick is focusing on farms and ranches.

The startup recently closed a $10.6 million Series A round, TechCrunch+ has exclusively learned. The round was led by Toyota Ventures with participation from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, the Nature Conservancy, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Pillar VC.

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The White House’s efforts to combat climate change have sparked a tech arms race with the EU

For years, the U.S. lagged behind much of the rest of the world when it came to climate action. The European Union and its members were particularly critical, calling the U.S. out for its repeated refusals to sign the Kyoto Protocol and then for pulling out of the Paris Agreement under the Trump administration.

Then last year, the EU’s arguments changed seemingly overnight, from criticizing American intransigence to claiming that the country had gone too far.

The transformation was catalyzed when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law on August 16, 2022. The law didn’t just catapult the U.S. into a leading position on climate action, but it also added another sticking point to the increasingly fraught relationship between the U.S. and the EU.

The bill’s surprise passage ushered in $369 billion worth of stimulus and incentives aimed at boosting the country’s climate tech sector and its industrial base. In the process, it could help slash carbon pollution in the U.S. by about 40% — below 2005 levels — by 2030.

This should have brought cheers from Brussels. Instead, the bloc seethed with not-so-quiet frustration over “buy American” provisions. Within a month, the bloc said it would investigate whether the provisions of the law violated World Trade Organization rules.

Role of markets

For the last couple decades, the European approach to climate change has been heavily reliant on sticks over carrots. The centerpiece of EU climate policy has been emissions reduction targets supported by a carbon market, a blend of government regulation and liberal economics that have formed the backbone of many climate proposals.

Emissions trading is a concept cooked up in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when air pollution was spiraling out of control. Over the years, the U.S. has embraced emissions trading for specific pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Carbon cap-and-trade never really caught on here, though. There are various regional markets, but a nationwide carbon market proposed in 2009 never made it past the House of Representatives thanks to the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

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Fun while it lasted: The room-temperature superconductor claim is probably bunk

It’s been a fun few weeks.

The internet — and more than a few scientists — got their hopes up a couple weeks ago when a team of physicists from South Korea announced that they had created a room-temperature superconductor from a slew of common yet unlikely materials.

LK-99, as they called the material, could be made from things like lead, phosphorus and copper, and the procedure didn’t even require particularly exotic equipment.

Claims of discovering a room-temperature superconductor have almost become a cliché in the physics and materials science spaces at this point. (How many clichés can you count in this article?) LK-99 is the second high-profile claim of room-temperature superconductivity this year, and we’re not even halfway through August!

As candidate superconductors go, the team behind LK-99 was really thinking outside the box. Lead isn’t typically on the short list of materials that researchers in the field turn to. Still, hope springs eternal, which is probably why the internet got all fired up when reports surfaced of an unusual paper on the arXiv preprint server.

Why even care about room-temperature superconductors? Superconductors have two properties that make them attractive: They repel magnetic fields, and they exhibit zero resistance to electric current.

There’s a hitch, though: Today’s superconducting materials have to be chilled well below freezing before they do anything special. A room-temperature superconductor would eliminate the need for cooling equipment and the electricity required to power it.

Without the costly overhead that other superconductors require, room-temp versions would solve a number of challenges. They would bring down the cost of MRI machines, lower the barrier to fusion power, and speed the development and construction of maglev trains, among other things. That is exactly why certain corners of the internet got all hot and bothered about LK-99.

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Can Mill’s tech-heavy food waste bin find its way into kitchens?

Feeding table scraps to chickens isn’t a new idea. But then again, neither were smoke detectors when Matt Rogers co-founded Nest in 2010, and that worked out pretty well.

Rogers is back at it, this time with fellow Nest alumnus Harry Tannenbaum. The duo and their team at Mill have cooked up what is probably the world’s heaviest, most expensive, and most sophisticated kitchen waste bin.

Mill’s aim is to eliminate carbon emissions that result from the decomposition of food waste. The startup isn’t the first company to tackle the problem, but it does have a unique approach. Where most other companies focus on large sources like grocery stores or restaurants, Mill is for people’s homes. Its bin grinds and dehydrates food, which the company then collects via the U.S. Postal Service and sells to farmers as chicken feed. As circular economy companies go, this one is pretty clever.

Mill sent me one a few months ago to test, and I proceeded to fill it with table scraps, melon rinds, corn cobs, and whatever else was on the extensive list of food waste it said it could devour. I wanted to see if the Mill bin could find its way into our daily routine while reducing the climate impact of our waste stream.

The short answer: it mostly did, with some notable hiccups.

The bin itself and any consumables are free, included in the subscription ($495 annually or $45 monthly, though the monthly plan tacks on a $75 fee to deliver the bin). Boxes and return shipping for the grounds are also included.

Unboxing the Mill food waste bin

The Mill food waste bin isn’t light, but the packaging makes it relatively easy to unbox. Image Credits: Tim De Chant

Mill’s bin looks like a very nicely designed kitchen waste bin. The sides are a matte white, the foot pedal that operates the lid is gray, and the lid itself sports a faux blonde wood finish with some clever shy tech hidden underneath (more on that later). A button on the lid serves to activate or deactivate the kid/pet lock. At the base of the back, there’s a large hidden charcoal filter.

Stepping on the pedal activates a servo that flips open the lid. The actual interior is smaller than the outside suggests. A hefty metal bucket sits within, and inside the bucket is a set of augers that grind the food waste to bits. The setup looks kind of like a giant bread machine.

At the end of each day, the bin weighs any new additions and gets to work. The start time is set via a well-designed companion app. It also asks you to name the bin (I named ours “Munchie”). Our kitchen doesn’t have any room near an outlet for the bin, so it sat around the corner in the family room. Since that’s where we watch TV, I set it to start grinding at 10:30 p.m.

Mill food waste app screenshots

Mill’s app lets you control basic functions like start time and kid/pet lock. It also includes a comprehensive guide of what should and should not go in the bin. Image Credits: Tim De Chant

Once that time arrives, the bin locks with a sudden (and pretty loud) click of a solenoid and grinding commences. Depending on what you’ve scraped in, the process can be relatively quiet or the bin can creak and groan like a 17th century Spanish galleon. At some point, a heater and fan turn on to dehydrate the scraps.

You can keep track of progress in the app or by observing the lights that shine through the faux wood top. It’s a clever bit of tech that tells you when the lid is locked, when the augers are grinding, or when the heaters are drying the grounds.

Mill food waste bin in operation

Hidden icons appear from beneath the faux-wood surface of the lid, displaying the status of the machine. Here, it’s locked and grinding. Image Credits: Tim De Chant

Under ideal conditions, the whole process is done by the time you’re up for breakfast. In most cases, I’d say that’s true. You can open the app at any time to get an estimate for how long the grinding and drying process will last. Usually, it’s accurate. Sometimes, it’s not.

One night, I think I pushed the bin to its limits. With it nearly full of grounds, I added apple peels, an apple core, egg shells, table scraps, and an entire cantaloupe that had been hiding a surprisingly rotten smell inside its rind. I had chopped up the melon as the app suggested. At 10:30 p.m., I was told it would take seven to nine hours to complete the cycle. At 7:30 a.m. the next day, it said it would take another hour and three-quarters. At noon, its estimate hadn’t changed. By 3:30 p.m., the estimate ticked up to 2:10 remaining. Finally, it finished at 6 p.m., 19.5 hours after starting.

This wasn’t the first time it had underestimated the time required. Not the end of the world since you can double click the button on the lid to cancel the cycle and add more scraps, but it does mean that the fan was running literally night and day. It’s not loud, but it’s not quiet, either.

Food waste before Mill bin grinds it

Food waste before the Mill bin has a chance to grind it. Image Credits: Tim De Chant

When the bin is full, it’ll send you a notification on your phone. To empty, just pop the lid, pull the handle to heave the bucket out of the bin, and dump the grounds into the supplied plastic bag. The grounds are shelf stable. Ours actually smelled pretty good, I thought, kind of like soy sauce. When the bag is full, toss it in an included prelabeled box. The boxes even have adhesive on the flaps so you don’t have to tape it yourself. (For some reason, I really appreciated that.) When ready, just tell the app and it arranges for the USPS to pick it up the next day. I put the box on the front porch in the morning, and our mail carrier picked it up that afternoon.

Generally, the process was pretty smooth, with one notable exception. I woke up on Father’s Day morning to a light flashing on the lid. The augers were jammed, though the cause wasn’t immediately obvious. Feeling a bit lazy, I left the bucket in the bin and poked around for about 20 minutes trying to free things up. No luck.

Food waste after Mill bin grinds it

After a grind and dry cycle, the waste is significantly smaller. After more cycles, it starts looking like a cross between mulch and coffee grounds. Image Credits: Tim De Chant

The next morning, I followed the app’s instructions and removed the bucket and dumped the loose grounds into the mail bag. At first glance, I noticed some of the grounds had been baked into the side of the bucket. I assumed this was the cause and chipped away at it with some disposable chopsticks. After a while, my father-in-law suggested that the jam might have something to do with small strands of fiber that had become wrapped around the augers, so I pulled as much off as I could. After 20 minutes of chipping and yanking, the augers were free once more.

Following the jam, Mill told me that there were a few potential causes. Fibrous material had been causing people more problems than expected, so the team had updated the app’s guidance on what should and shouldn’t go in the bin. Corn husks were removed from the approved list, for example (something we hadn’t added). Adding high sugar content scraps to a nearly full bin was also causing jams. (That full cantaloupe might have been to blame.) Lastly, the company has been refining the software that controls cycle time and temperature, cutting an hour of cycle time on average.

“Right now, we err on the conservative side to ensure there are no smells or potential for bacteria,” Mill’s Suzy Sammons told me. “As we get more data from customers and our field trials, that software gets better and better at predicting minimum length of cycle time and how much heat we need in the bin, and that reduces the likelihood of a jam.” She added that the company monitors the bins remotely, reaching out to customers with jammed bins to help them troubleshoot it, and that software updates have reduced the likelihood of a jam by at least half. Plus, if any of the modular parts are broken, Mill will send a new one for free.

What’s next for Mill?

Mill said that early data suggests that people are getting comfortable with using the bins. Almost all the company’s users had used the bin more than twice a day. In a pilot with the city of Tacoma, Washington, more than half of survey respondents said they hadn’t previously used the city’s curbside organics service, meaning they were likely sending food waste to the landfill.

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Scientists repeat breakthrough fusion experiment, netting more power than before

It wasn’t a fluke: Researchers at a Department of Energy (DOE) lab have repeated their breakthrough fusion power experiment. Only this time, the results are even better.

On July 30, lasers once again converged on a tiny gold cylinder containing a diamond-coated, deuterium-tritium fuel pellet. When the beams — as many as 192 of them — hit the inside of the cylinder, their energy was turned into X-rays. Those X-rays then bombarded the fuel pellet, forcing it to implode.

Last time, the resulting nuclear fusion reaction released 3.15 megajoules of energy. This time, it produced more than 3.5 megajoules, according to the Financial Times. That reportedly exceeds the amount of energy the lasers imparted on the hohlraum, as the cylinder is called, though it’s unclear by how much.

The lab confirmed the successful repetition of the experiment and said it intends to report the details at either a scientific conference or in a peer-reviewed publication (likely both).

While the most recent experiment won’t garner quite as many headlines as the one in December, it’s just as important. A breakthrough is meaningless if it can’t be replicated. The fact that scientists have achieved net-positive fusion power twice should hearten investors, who bet over $4 billion on the industry in 2021 and 2022.

Perhaps most encouraging is the fact that the July 30 shot didn’t simply repeat the December results — it improved on them. We still don’t know what the scientists did to better their numbers, but the bump in energy-out suggests that the new results are not a fluke. Scientists are probably getting better at understanding the quirks of inertial confinement fusion.

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What if room temperature superconductors were real?

Hope springs eternal. For decades, there have been claims that researchers have created room-temperature superconductors. The materials promise to conduct an electric current with zero resistance while throwing off powerful magnetic fields. They’re a holy grail of materials science.

Last week, a team from South Korea claimed to have created one — and not just a material that superconducts at ambient temperature, but one that does so at ambient pressure, too. Oh, and it’s made of relatively common materials including lead, phosphorus and copper. The researchers published their findings on a preprint server. While not the gold standard in scientific publishing, it’s a decent first step that allows other experts to vet the claims.

It’s still too early to tell whether their extraordinary claims will hold up, but some preliminary theoretical work suggests that they’re not out of the realm of possibility. Still, many researchers remain skeptical.

But what if the claims were true? Myriad industries would be ripe for upheaval. Here are a few that would stand the most to gain.

Fusion power

If scientists really have discovered a room-temperature superconductor, then last year’s surprise darling technology would be again catapulted into the headlines. The problem with fusion power hasn’t been whether it can be done, but whether it produces more power than the required equipment consumes. The National Ignition Facility’s experiment last winter proved that net-positive fusion power was more than just theoretically possible.