The People Behind the Work

No one builds a fusion company alone, and no one should pretend to. The physics in this book is the product of many hands and many decades — several of them careers that were well underway before I was born. When I first wrote this book I named almost no one, out of an instinct toward privacy and the quiet habits of the field. I have since changed my mind. The people below gave this work its shape, and they have earned the right to be named for it. What follows is a portrait of the senior collaborators; the fuller human story is told in the chapter How This Was Built.

The founder

I am Priyanca Iyengar Ford, founder and chief executive of Kronos Fusion Energy, and the author of these pages. The longer story — the companies I built and sold before this one, and the five years at Edison International that first made me wonder what computing could do for fusion — is told in About the Author and in How This Was Built. Here it is enough to say that I hold the pen but not the whole of the knowledge.

Founding partners

Dr. Carl Weggel — Chief Scientist. More than fifty years in superconducting-magnet design, and a veteran of MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, where he designed the Alcator series of tokamaks — one of which still holds a Guinness world record for the strongest steady-state magnetic field ever produced. He led ultra-high-field magnet work for the RIGGATRON program and invented the internally supported ohmic-heating coil. He is the design mind behind the compact, high-field spherical breeder, and, more than anyone, the person who taught me fusion as it is actually practiced.

Dr. Robert J. Weggel — Magnetic Field Design. Carl's twin brother, and fifty years a designer of record-setting magnets — co-designer of the Alcator C magnets at MIT and, at Brookhaven National Laboratory, of 20-tesla hybrid and cryogenic superconducting systems. He holds a Guinness world record of his own for sustained field. Quiet in a meeting and relentless on paper, he is the most exacting reader this book had: every equation in it passed under his eye first.

Dr. Gerald Kulcinski — Helium-3 Fusion. Former director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Grainger Professor of Nuclear Engineering Emeritus, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In his laboratory he achieved the first steady-state fusion using helium-3 fuel in an inertial-electrostatic device — the low-neutron pathway most of the field had written off — and he has argued for half a century that the clean fuel this book depends on is waiting on the surface of the Moon. The two-machine architecture at the heart of this company — the breeder that makes the fuel, the burner that burns it — emerged mostly from him, pressed alongside Dr. Glenzer and Dr. Hammer until the founder conceded. He is the reason Kronos builds two machines and not one.

Advisors — the science

Dr. Konstantin Batygin — Chief Mathematician. Professor of planetary science at Caltech, the youngest in its modern history, and co-author of the Planet Nine hypothesis. He brings celestial mechanics and dynamical-systems theory to the problem of confining a plasma.

Dr. Patrick Diamond — Plasma Turbulence & Transport. A distinguished professor at UC San Diego, winner of the Hannes Alfvén Prize — plasma physics' highest honor — and co-author of the field's definitive text on transport. If you want to know why confinement is hard, you ask him. He has read, challenged, and blessed every design proposal Kronos currently stands on; the coherence of our physics case is, more than anyone's, his doing.

Dr. David Hammer — Pulsed-Power Fusion. The J. Carlton Ward Professor of Nuclear Energy Engineering at Cornell and director of its Laboratory of Plasma Studies. With Dr. Kulcinski and Dr. Glenzer, he pressed us toward the two-machine design before I was ready to hear it — and he has been generous with his time and judgment ever since.

Dr. Nasr Ghoniem — Chief Materials Scientist. A UC Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCLA, four decades studying how matter behaves under intense radiation. He keeps us honest about the difference between a material that works in a simulation and one that survives inside a reactor.

Dr. Siegfried Glenzer — Plasma Physics & Laser Fusion. A veteran of SLAC and Lawrence Livermore and a winner of the DOE's E.O. Lawrence Award, he carries the inertial-fusion perspective from the National Ignition Facility, where laboratory ignition was first achieved — and his hard-won realism about fuels and architectures was one of the voices that pushed us to the two-machine design.

Dr. Ruben Fair — Magnet Design & ITER Liaison. Thirty years of superconducting-magnet engineering and former Head of US ITER Projects at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He keeps our magnet program tethered to what the world's largest fusion effort has already learned.

Dr. Ray Sedwick — Direct Energy Conversion. Keystone Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland and a NASA advanced-concepts fellow, he works on turning a fusion reaction's charged output into electricity without a steam cycle's losses — the burner's whole economic advantage.

Dr. Steven O. Dean — Fusion Policy & History. Sixty years inside the American fusion program — years directing its confinement-systems work at the AEC and the DOE, and co-founder of Fusion Power Associates. He is the field's institutional memory, and the person who keeps us honest about what has already been tried.

Dr. Jack Dongarra — High-Performance Computing. Creator of LINPACK, LAPACK, and the TOP500 ranking — the numerical foundations beneath virtually all modern scientific computing — and winner of the 2021 ACM Turing Award. His software underpins computational plasma physics worldwide. Since joining he has been the founder's closest mentor — hands on the numerical spine of our simulation stack, generous with his name and his judgment — and the de-risking campaign this book stands on exists because of his conviction that computation, verified relentlessly, is an instrument of truth.

Dr. Don Spong — Plasma Theory & 3-D Magnetic Geometry. A veteran theorist of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's stellarator and confinement tradition, and one of the quiet masters of three-dimensional magnetic geometry. He joined recently and dove straight in — reviewing our three-dimensional machine models and helping set the specifications themselves. When a geometry in this book holds together in 3-D, his eyes have been over it.

Building it in the world

Patrick Schweiger — Fusion-Device Engineering. Chief technology officer of Oklo, and for five years a senior engineering leader at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, where he built the engineering organization from the ground up. He knows the distance between a design that is right and a company that can build it. He taught the founder the honest map of the fusion industry — who is building what, and why — and he, more than any other voice, made the case that Kronos should publish its designs openly. The show-your-work ethos of this book began as his argument.

Rear Admiral (Ret.) David Goggins — Naval Engineering & Power. A career spent designing and running the most demanding power plants humans operate — naval reactors, which must never fail, far from any help. That is the discipline a fusion plant will need.

Major General (Ret.) Robin L. Fontes — Cybersecurity & Defense. A two-star Army general and deputy commander of operations at Army Cyber Command, and the first American general officer posted as Defense Attaché to India in decades.

General (Ret.) Gustave Perna — National-Scale Execution. The four-star who ran the logistics of Operation Warp Speed — the man a nation called when the impossible had a deadline. He joined Kronos in its first week, when there was nothing to join but a conviction and a plan, and he has been, through every hard month since, the steady voice telling the founder he believes. Counsel on building at national scale; belief as a form of fuel.

Marc Strecker — Chief Legal Officer. The founder's family lawyer and the chief legal officer of every company she has built for two decades — the protector. The legal architecture that lets this book show its work safely — open where openness serves the mission, guarded where the mission needs guarding — is his craftsmanship.

Michael Laughlin — Chief Operating Officer. The person who turns all of the above into an organization that actually functions — the schedules, the scale-up, the unglamorous machinery of building. He also drew many of the illustrations in this book.

A note on the machine's mind

The company's artificial-intelligence and simulation work is developed in part through NVIDIA's Inception program, whose accelerated-computing tools underpin the control and digital-twin results in Part III. It is the one outside company named in these pages, because the work is public and the tooling is central to it.

Three generations

There is a line running through this work older than the company. My great-uncle, P.K. Iyengar — my grandfather's brother — directed India's atomic-research program and chaired its atomic-energy commission. He was the first person to tell me, when I was a child, that a machine could hold the fire of the sun, and that it was perhaps fifty years away. My mother carried the same discipline into a different country, working as an engineer and a computing specialist across American industry. I am the third link in that chain — not a physicist by training, but a builder raised among people who thought in decades and measured their ambitions in generations. That is the inheritance behind every page of this book.