Fusion power: how close are we? | FT Film
all the stars that shine at night are driven by Fusion Energy it's what powers the universe the challenge is how do we take that enormous object and that enormous power and recreate those conditions here on Earth if we can do that we can supply civilization with the energy it needs to develop in a way that it removes the scarcity of energy as a factor in how we develop this Human Society hello I'm Simon Mundy I'm a journalist at the ft and I recently spent two years traveling through 26 countries exploring the race to respond to climate change all over the world in this film we dig into one of the hottest and most controversial topics within the push for cleaner energy one that has received a burst of fresh publicity in the last few months fusion power [Music] let's begin in the south of France with what is by many measures the biggest and most expensive scientific experiments in human history [Music] this is ITA or to give it its full name the international thermonuclear experimental reactor ETA is a joint project among the world's superpowers trying to harness the awesome power of nuclear fusion to usher in a new age of safe clean and massively abundant energy [Music] together the EU us Russia China India Japan and South Korea have contributed tens of billions of dollars and thousands of scientists to the project its Origins date back to 1985 with a historic meeting between U.S presidents Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev since the 1940s scientists from their countries and others had been developing enormously powerful bombs using Fusion Energy which were many times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Japan in 1945. in Geneva the two leaders set out a vision to collaborate on fusion power for peaceful purposes sweet particularly here is it took years to gather the full International Coalition behind the ETA project which was formally launched in 2007. in the 15 years since then vast sums have gone into building a fusion reactor in the French region of Provence a huge structure that will be taller than paris's Arc de Triomphe covering the area of 60 football pitchers progress has been slower and more difficult than anticipated the idea when it was formed was to bring you know cultures and Nations that have been the past sometimes at odds with each other together in fact it was born between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev and and then more parties more members joined so it is a place of Peace in some sense this being said of course there is also some complexity coming with an international collaboration with having as a some degree of politics Associated okay some compromises must be made so it is not say the most efficient of the organizations that you can imagine to create an object of the kind but it is part of its purpose projects like this where you do sort of Frontier research go through moments of Crisis sometimes the moments of Crisis are of managerial nature organizational nature sometimes out of technical nature you know building a device like this always comes with big technical problems even in creation of This research infrastructure so this is my priority now it is to resolve these technical problems this is a problem that came because companies that were engaged in the production of some components that they never did before but hold on a minute what exactly is nuclear fusion well first of all let's be clear about what it's not this is different from nuclear fission which involves splitting atoms apart that's the reaction triggered in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and also the reaction that powers all the nuclear reactors operating in the world today instead nuclear fusion involves smashing atoms into each other with such force that they fuse releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process first we know it works because it's what powers the universe all the stars that shine at night are driven by Fusion Energy and fusion is a process by its very name you can sort of guess you take two small objects and you push them together they fuse into a bigger object and then the equation most people maybe don't know physics equations but they've heard E equals m c squared which is energy is equal to mass times the speed of light times itself that speed of light's a big number so if you make a little change in mass you get a big amount of energy so when you fuse these two small objects together to make a heavier one there's a little bit of mass difference and that shows up as energy from the reaction projects and that's what we need to make heat to move durbins to make electricity or to make hydrogen for transportation Fuel and that's the basic idea we use this Mass change and it's a nuclear force that we're using to make a large amount of energy from a very small amount of mass following the first Fusion experiments in the 1930s Fusion Laboratories were established in nearly every industrialized Nation a major breakthrough occurred in 1968 in the Soviet Union physicists Igor Tam and Andre sakarov inspired by an original idea from Oleg lavrantev introduced to toroidal Magnetic confinement device that they called a Tokamak to make energy from all this we need a machine a machine that can reproduce the incredible power of the process that powers the sun within a single building here on Earth the most popular model being developed by scientists at ETA and elsewhere is the Tokamak a term dreamed up by Soviet scientists in the 1950s it describes a donut-shaped structure with very powerful magnets known as superconductors in the middle and around the outside the idea used in most Tokamak projects is to take two different types of hydrogen and mix them together in an extremely hot plasma that's the fourth state of matter in which charged particles float around in a kind of soup one of those isotopes of hydrogen is called deuterium which has one proton and one Neutron in its nucleus the other one is called tritium and that has one proton and two neutrons the magnets keep the plasma suspended in a vacuum without touching the walls of the chamber when the plasma is heated to a high enough temperature the deuterium and tritium atoms start fusing with each other to form helium which has two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus that leaves an extra Neutron which gets fired off into the walls of the reactor generating heat and that heat if all goes to plan can be used to generate enormous amounts of electricity [Music] [Music] dozens of tokamaks have been built over the years and many of them have generated Fusion reactions but none has yet given off more energy than it takes in what is referred to in the industry as net energy gain the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory anywhere in the world simply put this is one of the most impressive scientific Feats of the 21st Century in December 2022 scientists at the U.S government facility announced that they had achieved that milestone for the first time in history instead of a tokomak the team at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took a very different approach to Fusion they used a massive laser array to fire two megajoules of energy at a tiny metal sphere containing deuterium and tritium that triggered a fusion reaction that gave off three megajoules of energy that increase meant that a fusion reaction with net energy gain had been achieved but it's far from Clear how we could build on this to create a working Power Station those lasers consumed more than 300 megajoules of energy over a hundred times more than they fired into that metal sphere so while net energy gain was achieved at the fusion stage of the process the system as a whole ate up far more energy than it gave out there are very significant hurdles not just in the science but in technology this is one igniting capsule one time and to realize commercial Fusion Energy you have to do many things you have to be able to produce many many Fusion ignition events per minute scientists like Valentina nicolaiever are hoping that after so many years of work they may yet achieve the elusive goal of net energy gain in a way that would provide a blueprint for fusion power plants that could be built in large numbers generating vast amounts of energy for households and businesses all over the world her decision to work in nuclear physics was inspired by her father who took part in the response to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. my question was
like can we use something different and he mentioned that in principle the three main parameters are sufficiency sustainability and safety we can have something even more sufficient in theory and much safer so it's not efficient of very heavy nuclear but Fusion of very light nuclear so that we don't have a strong radiation we don't have radioactive waste and their Fusion foil can be taken just from the sea water so in this case we would have a safer source of energy that's what we are doing here trying to build this large-scale machine to prove and demonstrate wave to have an efficient Fusion Direction which means that plasma will hit itself so the produced energy will be 10 times more than input energy if something went wrong it stops it just stops there's no there's no potential for it to go out of control so it's and from the reaction itself the byproduct is helium we fill kids party balloons with helium it's safe I mean there's it's really such a wonder you imagine you can't imagine why we haven't done it before well it's really hard and we have to work hard at it and I think we will succeed [Music] in any circumstances unlocking such a powerful new source of energy would be a massive development for human civilization but as we grapple with the worsening climate crisis and the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuel energy the debate around fusion power is gaining new intensity some say that the priority has to be doubling down on the low carbon technologies that are already available to us such as wind and solar and argue that fusion power is a wacky distraction that will always be decades away from becoming a reality but to others Fusion looks like a potentially game-changing long-term answer to the twin problems of climate change and energy security solution to the energy transition is solution to energy security and I think it's within within reach within the next sort of eight to ten years if people pull their fingers out I'm a collaboration now we're starting between the public lab and the private companies and that's going to drive us towards commercialization and that's what I personally find very exciting we will need multiple companies that are successful and I'm very convinced that that it will happen in the industry here when someone gets electricity onto the Grid or even when someone shows that they can get more energy out than the potential Fusion the whole field is it is just going to Blossom um and and it's going to attract more investment while the intergovernmental project at ETA is by far the larger scale Fusion project in the world a growing number of hotly funded private sector startups are betting that they can make faster progress they've been deploying a range of approaches to Fusion from lasers to projectiles fired at enormous speeds but so far the bulk of investment in this space has gone to companies using magnetic forces to create Fusion reactions among them is Tokamak energy a short distance to the southeast of Oxford refraction of a second in early 2022 this machine behind me contained the hottest point of the entire solar system 100 million degrees Celsius that's about five times hotter than the center of the Sun and that was just one step towards the dream that's driving this British company unlocking the power of Fusion Energy this is a huge milestone for us it's the highest temperature plasma temperature that's been measured in a spherical Taco Mac and it's also the highest temperature that's been achieved by a privately funded Fusion company so yeah we're pretty proud of that and it's just a step on the way to continuing on with our experiments we're trying to create the conditions where Fusion can happen my interest in patients died when I was doing my gcses in school we were lucky enough to have a fusion scientist come and give us a talk so we kind of learned a bit about Fusion in in our science classes but on a very kind of physicsy level whereas this talk showed us the technology and the reactors and this kind of things and just seeing they see a kind of like scale scale of it I really like doing experimental physics and it's a massive experiment to be able to to work on I was like yes I want to work on one of those I wanted to to get into this field and do cool physics but also hopefully make a difference Hannah is one of a large number of young scientists who have been drawn to this field in the UK which has emerged as a significant Hub of activity the UK has invested heavily in Fusion for the last 50 60 years and now we have a regulatory environment that enables commercial development of fusion well I think private investors have become much more interested in Fusion because of technological advances like with the superconducting magnets and also with AI Control Systems and so forth and with Advanced Materials coming through so rather than it being something that's purely The Preserve of the government laboratory it becomes accessible to privately funded innovators and as we know the private Capital will demand very rapid progress very challenging Milestones not all the private Ventures will succeed but those that do will have a a big opportunity as Fusion comes closer to commercialization I think now is the time for Fusion to move essentially from government Laboratories into private companies a bit like space launchers 20 years ago where NASA ended up working with SpaceX to develop the next generation of space launchers because it was basically too slow moving itself to to make the progress necessary and as we followed the large and fast-growing sums of money flowing into the fusion space it took us to Boston a major U.S hub for both technology and financial investment cracking the fusion puzzle would create a brand new commercial offering with a vast potential market and for a growing number of financial investors in cities like Boston that is starting to look like a seriously lucrative opportunity one of the most high profile investors in the green energy space is breakthrough energy Ventures founded by Bill Gates and backed by other billionaires from Jeff Bezos to masayoshi's son Phil larochelle who's been leading breakthroughs investments in this space says that Fusion is one of the most exciting investment opportunities around so we have about two billion dollars under management right now close to 100 companies and we tackle uh the five biggest sectors of emissions which are agriculture buildings electricity manufacturing and transportation Well Fusion I would put on the extreme end of risk and reward um so to talk about the reward um you know I think people have understood for a long time since Eddington kind of explained what was happening in the sun in the 1920s that this was basically the way that the Universe got its energy I mean well over 99 of the useful energy that has ever come out in the universe has come from Fusion people did Fusion in the 1930s you know one of Rutherford's students I think kind of won the Nobel Prize for it um so so doing Fusion is just accelerating one thing into another and with some probability some of them will fuse um the thing that's hard is to get energy positive fusion and so that's what people have been working on for almost a century and so you know the prize for Fusion is if the Industrial Revolution was a thousand-fold increase in energy density then this is a million fold increase in energy density above that and we have so much potential fuel of it that it could basically last forever and then when you do the energy balance it looks like the fuel is basically trivial compared to the amount of energy you get out for it so so the real payoff for Fusion is that the fuel can be infinite uh free accessible to all and potentially has no carbon emissions and so when people ask me you know why is it that you should be excited about Fusion now or specifically the magnetic confinement approach to Fusion I say well it's kind of the same reason why you should have been excited about computers in the 1940s when someone invented transistors at Bell Labs right when you had to make computers out of cranks and then you know vacuum tubes you could only go so far right you were never going to make an iPhone out of vacuum tubes but the people who understood the science of computers and understood the potential for computers understood that if you could replace a vacuum tube which is kind of big kind of clunky breaks a lot is slow generates too much heat with a much better equivalent then all of a sudden the scientific curiosity would kind of change the world the same people are looking at fusion and they're saying hey we understand how these machines work and if we had a much better magnet then all of a sudden maybe this goes from science project to kind of world-changing commercial technology one of Phil's biggest bets to date has been on a massachusetts-based company called Commonwealth Fusion systems which has raised about two billion dollars for its technology using a new class of superconducting magnets this tape has a crystal in it that makes it a superconductor that doesn't care really at all about the magnetic field so this this material Material Science Innovation meant that if you could take this material which you know it's not a magnet it's a flimsy thing and learn how to build magnets with it and vent magnets on it that those magnets could go to much higher magnetic fields than before and that's what CFS did is we took material like this there were some other innovations that had to happen in this material and then invented a whole class of technologies that turned this into a magnet that's double the magnetic field of what happened before that's generally useful but when applied diffusion that that fact that it goes like the minute I feel to the fourth power that's a factor of 16. so if you change something by a factor of 16 right imagine if you're driving your car and it's about 16 times faster that you know a 20 mile an hour drive slowly turns into 300 mile an hour drive like that is a huge deal and that made these tokamax you know really really attractive to push to that final little Factor that's needed to make more power out than in and to make fusion power plants in a commercial and economic package that you could build a product in that you could scale and that's that's what we're doing foreign to a little place called Devon's Massachusetts about an hour outside Boston to visit a construction project that's all together different from any other that I've visited before this is where Bob mumgard and his team at CFS say that in the next few years they're going to create a fusion power reaction that gives off more power than it absorbs that's something the scientists have been pursuing for decades these guys say they can actually make it happen foreign this is the spark Construction so this all was a year ago a field and now what we're building is we're building the actual spark machine so this is the building that will hold the spark machine and actually standing where there'll be you know power supplies and Transformers that will manage the power in and out of of spark spark is a demonstration right it is an integrated demonstration that we can create the conditions that an essay for Fusion to work meaning we can get the temperature the density and the insulation the confinement all at the same time we do that we get more power out from the plasma than when in Q grade and one net energy Break Even those types of things that's been a huge goal and that is when you actually go from being a science project to being something that is a power plant-like thing and then in 2025 we'll we'll aim to turn it on meaning like bake the first plasmas on the path to net energy soon thereafter so that's a pretty condensed timeline when you think about us buying the site in 2021 and having a working Fusion system making more power at the name in like 2025. so that's like four years this is like what happens when you shrink the scale and you put it into a very very focused startup-like organization so you know this is an impressive scale but like this is a scale that you could build around the world that we build things around the world every day at this scale um and this is you know one tenth the scale of the eater construction site in France which is building a token act to do net energy on the same sort of physics that that we're doing with spark but without that new magnet technology so amid all this excitement how soon could commercial fusion power actually become a reality we're now at a place where the science and component level advances and the capital available now I think for the first time makes it realistic that we might be able to have commercial Fusion reactors knock on wood by uh by the 2030s I think maybe sooner but I think 2030s at least you kind of have a believable story that if we tackle some challenges it might happen if you're talking about making electricity we could make electricity in the presence of fusion power now if you're talking about a plant that generates electricity more than it takes to to run the plant itself you know 2050s probably if you're talking about one percent five percent of the world's electricity capacity by Fusion you need time to develop an industry you know there have to be successive Generations so probably it's I would love for it to be during this Century but probably toward the end of this Century till you could get a real fusion economy going you have to have a robust system of drivers to enable that so you know probably decades we're looking at a Pilot prompt uh delivering power to the grid by 2032 and then scaling up for Global deployment by 2040. so this is a
potential solution to the challenge of deep decarbonization 2035 24 T out to 2050 sort of deployment time I don't think it will happen in my lifetime it's uh it's you know when I started this I thought so I thought we would be able to make it I see that it's it has uh degrees of complexity just by the nature of the process I've started working in order to address the problem of global warming but I don't think that the fusion will contribute in the short term we understand that global warming is a problem now if you want to make a difference on climate change now you're going to have to ask people to make a change in their lifestyle Energy Efficiency likely isn't going to be enough for me Fusion if we do make a choice now to impact climate change there'll be a sacrifice Fusion gives the hope that that sacrifice doesn't need to be forever [Music] fusion power is not going to make a meaningful impact on the climate crisis or on energy Security in the near time but an impressive number of leading scientists entrepreneurs and investors are making serious commitments in search of what could be a major breakthrough for the long-term future of human civilization and that for me makes this one of the most intriguing areas of technology to watch this was the first film in a three-part series please make sure to like comment and share [Music]
2023-01-18 00:43
