Fusion Breakthrough

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Jill Hruby: Monday, December 5th, 2022, was an important day in science. Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation.

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. That was National Nuclear Security Administration administrator, how is that for a title, Jill Hruby, announcing what she is calling a huge breakthrough in fusion energy. Why do we care? Well, it's a kind of nuclear energy that is supposed to be safer and cleaner than fission energy, the nuclear technology that's been dominant and always controversial so far.

For the first time, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have created a fusion reaction with what they call a net energy gain as the Financial Times put it. After decades of research on fusion reactions, this new breakthrough marks an important milestone in the development of fusion technology and it has big implications for society.

Arthur Turrell has a PhD in plasma physics from Imperial College London and is author of the book The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet. He's a good person to have with us now to explain how scientists achieved this milestone and what it might mean for the future of energy, for climate, for humanity. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Turrell. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Great to be here, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start with a little 101? Because a lot of people are hearing these excited-sounding headlines and saying, "Oh, great. I'm supposed to be excited about fusion energy now. Well, I never heard of fusion energy." What is it and why should we care about this?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the stars. It's literally star power. You've actually enjoyed it yourself. If you go outside each day and feel the sun's rays fall on your face or if you go outside at night and see those pinpricks of light, all of those stars, that's all powered by nuclear fusion. Essentially, it works by taking quite small atoms and combining them to make bigger atoms. Those bigger atoms have a tiny bit less mass than the smaller atoms that go into the reaction. That difference in mass comes out as energy just as Einstein's famous equation E=mc² says. In some ways, this reaction is all around us in the universe, but it's been very, very difficult to do it on Earth.

Brian Lehrer: It's been very difficult to do it on Earth. Well, why do we call it nuclear energy? We think of nuclear as things with dangerous radiation for people. Is this in that category?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Well, the word "nuclear" just means anything that involves the nucleus of an atom. That's the bit right in the center of an atom. Not the electrons, but the bit where the protons and the neutrons set. When changes happen to the nucleus, what you tend to find is there are much higher energies involved and it changes the structure of the atom itself. It's not a chemical process, it's a nuclear process. Like any reaction, it could be good, it could be bad, could be useful, could not be useful. It just so happens that a small class of those nuclear reactions do create radioactivity that is a problem for humans, but there are lots of other ones that don't.

Brian Lehrer: I realize this is way down the road, but if we were to go to a massive fusion energy economy, would we have anything like the challenge with nuclear energy of the present, which is to say we're worried about accidents and meltdowns at nuclear plants, we're worried about the storage of the byproducts of that nuclear energy underground or wherever and what it can do to the environment or the drinking water, et cetera? How much of that would be obsolete if we were using fusion energy on a widespread basis?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: I think you've really hit the nail on the head of why people are so excited about nuclear fusion here. I should say most fusion scientists are actually pretty keen on fission as well because fission produces carbon-free energy. If you look at the number of deaths per terawatt-hour, so per amount of electricity generated, fission actually looks pretty safe. Of course, it does have problems.

It has image problems and it does have problems like you mentioned like radioactive waste and meltdown. The great thing about nuclear fusion is that there's just no chance of meltdown at all. It's very, very hard to make it go and it's very easy to make it stop, which partly explains why it's taken us so long to get to this point. Also, one of the primary outputs from fission reactions, so the nuclear power plants we have today, is radioactive waste.

In nuclear fusion, you still get some radioactivity. You don't get any radioactive waste from the actual fuel stuff that you put in. What you do get is that the chamber where the nuclear fusion reactions take place, at the end of the lifetime of the plant, we expect that to be radioactive. We expect it to be quite weakly radioactive and safe within about 100 years rather than the thousands of years that some radioactive waste from fission is.

Those are some reasons why people are excited, but there are many others as well. One of which is that the fuel supply is very plentiful. You can find it in seawater and there's enough for at least thousands, but probably millions of years of energy for everyone on the planet to have the same energy consumption as people enjoy in the US and the UK.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you've been seeing and hearing the headlines about this fusion energy breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore Lab and we can take questions about it. Anything you always wanted to ask about fusion energy but you never had a PhD in plasma physics over for dinner to ask? Now, you do, at least through the radio, Arthur Turrell from Imperial College London and author of the book The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said during the press conference that President Biden has a goal of creating a commercial fusion reactor within 10 years. How feasible is that?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Wow, that is an astonishing and ambitious and welcome target. I think that the timeline to do that is tight. That will be a big engineering and economics challenge, but these things are never about time, are they? They're always about investment, innovation, and how much we as a society commit to doing something. If Joe Biden says that the might of US industry and science are going to get behind trying to do this in 10 years, then I think there is a chance of doing it.

There are some big technical challenges to overcome on the way to that. This was a single experiment and a single shot of the world's most energetic laser. If you're trying to commercialize fusion using this particular approach to fusion, there are others, then you would have to have that laser going 10 times a second instead. Instead of a gain in energy of one and a half times what was put in, you'd need a gain in energy of 30 times what was put in to make it commercially and economically viable too. Big challenges, but I definitely wouldn't say it can't be done.

Brian Lehrer: Look at our phone lines. You would think we were giving away free Christmas gifts as many people have questions about fusion energy. Let's take the first one from Jim in Glen Head on Long Island. You're on WNYC. Hi, Jim.

Jim: Hi, Brian. How are you? It's great to be on today. I've been in this industry for 20-plus years. I'm a member of the executive team at TAE Technologies. We're the largest private fusion operator in the world. To your expert's comment, this is something that is going to be driven by capital.

It's very, very expensive to build large nuclear reactors that are safe and can prove out fusion is operating, but today's event removes a really incredibly important milestone or a roadblock, I should say, which is everyone always says we can't do it on Earth. Today, Lawrence Livermore Labs announced that they've achieved it and that hopefully will open up some floodgates in terms of increasing the amount of capital that could come into the private fusion industry, which I am confident is going to get there a lot faster than any major governmental programs.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Jim. Thank you very much. On the science and on what was really achieved that's being officially announced today, the scientists, as I understand it, were only able to create a little bit of energy surplus from this resource-intensive reaction. What did it cost to even produce a little bit of net-positive energy and what would it take to have it affordable on a commercial basis?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: This reaction, this experiment, only produced about 3 megajoules of energy. That's about enough energy to boil three kettles, so it's not very much energy in absolute terms. Of course, as I said before, if you really wanted to commercialize this, you'd have to do it 10 times a second. There are lots of other problems as well. Once you've generated that heat, you have to take it away. The end of the power plant is pretty much like how we do power generation in lots of other contexts.

We heat up water, turn it into steam, and then have that steam drive the turbine. The connection between the heat coming from the fusion and the turbine, people haven't done that yet. As Jim said, ultimately, the design that was used to achieve this stunning result, historic result is very big, very capital-intensive. I think whether it's public, whether it's private, one of the really big things that is going to have to happen is miniaturizing all of this technology, making it modular, making it scalable, and then we can learn how to do it much better, much faster too.

Brian Lehrer: Do you agree with the caller, who, I guess, works in a private-sector fusion energy development company, that the private sector is likely to race ahead of government in developing this?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: I think it depends what part of the process we're talking about. I would never say never. If you look at the scientific metrics to date, the two leading approaches to fusion are the National Ignition Facility and magnetic confinement fusion, so using magnets as championed by some people in Europe. The Joint European Torus, a big experiment in the UK, uses that approach. Those two experiments have made the most progress in terms of scientific metrics.

As we move away from science to engineering and economics, I think the private sector has a really important role to play. At some point, there's going to be this handover. By this time, electricity from fusion is on the grid. Of course, there's going to be a huge, huge role for the private sector there. When and where that kind of handover takes place and maybe it's more of a partnership actually than working together, a bit more like the SpaceX model, I don't know, but I think both are going to be crucial.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, because I imagine government would have a huge role to play in the coming years if the public officials were to decide that it was in the public interest to invest in development of fusion energy science because they did see it as a massive cleaner energy source of the future. It sounds like it's such a long way from profitability that it would take public resources, it would take government money to continue to develop the scientific basis on which some companies might make money in the future. That's what it looks like. Steve in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Steve.

Steve: Hi. Like your guest says, this has incredible potential and to give the whole world the same standards that we in the US and Great Britain enjoy in terms of energy, but that's going to bring with it a huge amount of geopolitical, I would guess, turmoil. I suppose hand in hand with this great development, some women or many people are going to have to be watching and planning for the future vis-à-vis the geopolitical aspects of this.

Brian Lehrer: You mean like Joe Manchin will say, "No, we still need coal. Let's not throw government money at fusion energy research." You're talking about that kind of thing?

Steve: No, [laughs] not exactly. I'm talking about more like lunatics like Vladimir Putin or smaller countries with access to tremendous amounts of unbridled power. How will they use it for better or for worse? This has to go hand in hand with increase in democracy, I would imagine, because we're unleashing a lot of power to give to people and to a world that may or may not be able to deal with it properly.

Brian Lehrer: Steve, thank you very much. Dr. Turrell, does your thinking as a plasma physics expert go all the way there to the geopolitical?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Well, it's something I talked about a little bit in the book and it's quite interesting that Steve's raised this concern. I would ask, where do the majority of our fossil fuels across the world sit today? Sometimes they are in states that have used their power to try and get what they want. Those aren't particularly democratic. We can look at what Russia is trying to do with Europe and Ukraine. They already have the power and they're using it in geopolitical machinations.

One of the benefits, I think, of nuclear fusion is that the fuel is something that you can just find in regular old seawater. That kind of democratizes access to, at least, the fuel stuff. It's a kind of technology that you could build anywhere. You don't have to have an oil field. You don't have to have a coal field or a gas field. I think it will reduce the kind of national security, energy reliance on some of these states that perhaps aren't as democratic as we would ideally want.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk a little bit more about the science of that? You've said twice now that we find the elements or I'm forgetting the exact word that you used, but the resources to make fusion energy in seawater, which, of course, is very abundant. Fusion energy is supposed to be the kind of energy that's produced by the sun that we're supposed to learn how to produce here on Earth. If this is the kind of energy that the sun makes on its own, what exactly is in the seawater?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: In the sun, the precise fusion reaction is a slightly different one, different input materials to the one on Earth. The one that people are trying to do on Earth uses hydrogen actually, but it's two special types of hydrogen. You have to filter out the seawater to find those. One of these special types of hydrogen is called deuterium and the other one is called tritium. Deuterium is out outrageously common. In every briny bathtub of seawater, there's about 5 grams of deuterium.

We know how to extract that as well. The upper ingredient is something called tritium. It's, again, a special type of hydrogen. That's a little bit more difficult because it's very, very mildly radioactive. Probably the safest radioactive thing that is radioactive. Because it decays over time, it doesn't exist in significant quantities on Earth. What you can do is make it from an element that is plentiful, which is lithium, which is found in ores and, of course, found in seawater as well.

Brian Lehrer: Listener Adelia tweets this question, "Nuclear fusion energy sounds too good to be true. Can your guest be more specific about possible drawbacks?"

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Absolutely, yes. Look, I think it's important to say that every energy source has pros and cons, right? The best situation in the world is to have a portfolio of energy sources. I think one of the problems with fusion and perhaps its greatest one, apart from the fact that we don't quite know how to commercialize it yet, is the very large capital costs. I think this is the point that Jim was raising earlier. It's the point that's raised by other firms.

Not just TAE Technologies, but First Light Fusion, Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. There are a few of these firms now. Even for fission power plants today, they sometimes struggle to raise financing even when energy is at all-time high prices because of the uncertainty of building something that is going to take a long time to build and take a long time. It needs a lot of upfront capital investment. I think that's one of the problems that could potentially be tackled by miniaturization.

The other big problem I see has actually to do with skills. We just don't have enough people with a science background to run right now lots and lots of plants using this very, very sophisticated science technology. One of my concerns is that, of course, it'll be fine in the US, it'll be fine in much of Europe. If we really want to democratize access to fusion energy and we want to improve the living standards of people all over the world, then it needs to be able to exist in every country. That means having those skills on the ground there too. That's something that might be a problem right now.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking about the announcement today from US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on what she is calling a huge breakthrough infusion energy. Why do we care? Well, it's a kind of nuclear energy that's supposed to be safer and cleaner than fission energy, the nuclear technology that's been dominant so far. We're learning about it in this conversation with Arthur Turrell, who has a PhD in plasma physics from Imperial College London and is author of the book, The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet. We'll take a few more phone calls before we run out of time. Mary in Fairfield County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mary.

Mary: Hi, this discussion makes me wonder how the funding of developing fission energy is going to impact on government-

Brian Lehrer: Fusion.

Mary: -funding of solar-- sorry, fusion energy. The impact on the government's solar energy, which has been going on now for enough time that we see panels on so many people's roofs, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great question. Are they competitive inevitably?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Yes, of course, fusion doesn't work as a power source. We've just seen scientific feasibility. There's a long road to commercialization, whereas solar works today. Whenever people ask about renewables or fission in the context of fusion, my first thing to say is the scale of increase in energy we need on this planet is so huge that we need to be throwing the kitchen sink at this problem. That means everything. It means fusion, it means solar, it means wind, it means fission. Anything that's carbon-free and can produce reliable energy, we need.

In terms of whether the funding for fusion might affect the funding for solar, I think in the US on a very pragmatic basis, these things are funded through quite different parts, I guess. Of course, always, our elected officials are going to decide what to put the priority on and when industries need support and they don't. I would say that solar is commercially competitive right now. It's able to produce energy at a competitive cost. The technology is quite mature. Right now, it probably needs less support than, say, fusion, which is an emerging technology that could have some benefits in the future.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. All right, Andrew in Manhattan has a question that looks like it's so over my head that I don't even understand the notes from the screener. Let's see if you do. Andrew, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Andrew: Hi, how are you doing, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right.

Andrew: My question is, would they be possibly opening up extradimensional doorways by smashing atoms together?

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean, "extradimensional doorways"?

Andrew: Well, opening up doorways to other dimensions, possibly causing a subspace rift or something like that, just tearing into the fabric of other realities.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Dr. Turrell, is that physics or is that metaphysics?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: No, it's definitely physics. Andrew, thank you so much for your question. I think, look, this reflects the fact that because nuclear things are hard to see and there's so much wild physics at high energies, it's really hard to know exactly what kind of regime we're in and what the kind of extra physics might be opened up as we do this stuff. Well, I think the first thing, Andrew, is that actually fusion is all over the universe.

When we observe it out there, they don't seem to be any of these kinds of effects that you mentioned. Of course, the sun is a big fusion reactor on a huge scale. It seems fine and there's never been anything detected like you mentioned. The other thing I'd say is that although the conditions that you need for triggering fusion on Earth are really, really extreme, we're talking about 300 billion times the pressure on Earth.

We're talking about temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun potentially. Again, they're actually lower in terms of the energy of the colliding particles in these experiments than you would get on something like the Large Hadron Collider, so the big particle smasher that's under Switzerland. They haven't seen any of those extradimensional effects over on that particle smasher with much higher energies but fewer particles. We wouldn't expect to see them necessarily in this reaction either, so I think we're safe.

Brian Lehrer: It probably won't surprise you to hear that a lot of the tweets we're getting are from people who are skeptical in one way or another. One person writes, "What will be the nature of the waste and its storage? No possibility at all of some kind of catastrophe with so much energy?" Someone else writes, "Haven't we thought that most of our energy sources were limitless until they weren't? What if we radically alter the biochemical balance of the seas in, say, 50 to 100 years since you said this comes out of the sea?" Someone else writes, "Has this fusion experiment been independently duplicated? This might be excitement over something that's not real." Pick any of those questions and answer them.

Dr. Arthur Turrell: All really interesting questions. I really like the one about whether this would affect seawater. It's a really great question. As I mentioned, there's actually a huge amount of fuel for fusion in seawater. The first type of fuel I mentioned, deuterium, that's special type of hydrogen that's just there already in seawater. Chemically, it's exactly the same as regular hydrogen. You have it in your bodies. You drink it in water.

You wouldn't even notice that it's there because, chemically, it makes no difference that it's got something different in the nucleus. Getting rid of deuterium won't make any difference to life in our seas or biodiversity. Getting rid of lithium to make this other type of hydrogen called tritium, that might have an effect eventually, but I think it's important to say that the amount that's available in seawater of that would keep us going at US levels of energy consumption for millions of years potentially.

I don't think it's a big risk. Of course, if we get thousands, millions of years down the line, maybe we need to think again about what we're doing. Of course, that might create problems for the future. I think other elements can do fusion, which we might have tapped into from the moon and other places by then. I don't think it's one that we should worry about now.

Brian Lehrer: Allan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Allan.

Allan: Good morning. Thank you. I'm positive about the possibility of the abstract. My problem is related to what the other woman mentioned earlier. It's not just that it competes as a priority with solar and wind. In real-time, given the composition of our Congress so closely split between Democrats and Republicans, the chance that you're going to get a vast increase of federal money going into fusion without taking away from solar and wind implementation, which is critical to reducing our carbon output, it seems like that competition in real-time implementation is a dangerous thing.

The only way we can avoid it is to ratchet up the pressure for reducing carbon by coupling any additional money for fusion research and engineering with a really strong carbon tax. Otherwise, it's just going to take money away from solar and wind, and those are the resources we know we have available to cut carbon output today.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Turrell?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Yes, thanks for raising this, Allan. I'm not super, super familiar with the US system and the kind of constraints there in terms of budgets. I suspect that the money for solar and things probably comes from a different part from this very much more research grassroots science-type funding.

I think the point you raise about other kind of ways that this could be funded, I've spent time working as an economist as well as a plasma physicist. Economists love a carbon tax because it restores a problem in the market, which is people aren't paying the true price of carbon when they use fossil fuels. That sounds like a really sensible suggestion. Of course, ultimately, it's up to our elective representatives to decide how to allocate the resources.

Brian Lehrer: Allan, you see a political fight ahead as somebody who I know has called the show many times with respect to fighting climate change and imposing carbon taxes and things like that.

Allan: Yes, that's just a practical matter because you still have some climate deniers in the Republican caucus for the transfer. They're going to ratchet up engineering.

Brian Lehrer: Allan, thank you. Thank you very much. As a last question, Dr. Turrell, this was one experiment that produced a net gain in energy at one location, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. You're in the UK. Is there a global network of scientists working on this together, or is this competitive in its own respect of a scientist here, a scientist there, a lab here, a lab there, or is it only Lawrence Livermore in California? What's the scientific groundwork here?

Dr. Arthur Turrell: It's definitely collaborative. In fact, I myself, when I was doing my PhD and working in fusion for a couple of years afterwards, I actually worked on the Lawrence Livermore experiment even though I'm based in the UK. I had many colleagues at Imperial College London who were working on the Livermore experiment as well. Livermore draws in people from all over the world.

There are other approaches to fusion as well, some of which the US is also involved in, which are working on fusion. Perhaps the most famous of those is a machine that's being built in the south of France called ITER. Collectively, the countries that are contributing to that represent over half the world's population. As it should be, this is a project for all humanity and pretty much every society under the sun is working on it.

Brian Lehrer: Well, folks, the headlines are saying, this is at least potentially a really big deal that they've now, for the first time, produced a net energy gain through a process known as fusion energy at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Now, we know more about the science, more about the potential economics, more about some of the potential politics around this too. Thanks to Arthur Turrell, author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet. Thanks so much for joining us today. This was great.

Dr. Arthur Turrell: Thank you for having me, Brian.

 

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