Building Green - Sun on Earth

[Music] every second the Sun's core produces enough energy to fuel our world for a million years we could create our own Sun here on earth we'd have a source of energy that's safe clean and endless without the risk of meltdowns or radioactive wastes that process is called fusion and fusion were possible I think it would ease the suffering of many people it would allow many more people to be prosperous it would allow the environment to be cleaner fusion is is the Holy Grail like the quest for the Grail itself the path to fusion is an epic journey [Music] but this Grail actually lies within our grasp in a world running out of fuel the world's best engineers are figuring out how to power our cities using some ingenious methods solar wind steam and in this episode nuclear fusion in this lab scientists are playing God trying to create another Sun yeah it's a passion that's just taken hold of me I can't explain why it's just this the thought of recreating a star in the laboratory excites me it occupies my work life and at night I have ideas on how to do it better good thing John stays awake thinking about power because our planet is guzzling energy in 40 years the world's population should grow by 50% to reach 9 billion people but energy demand will triple as the 3rd world industrial eise's more people will compete for the same amount of water and the shortage will require huge desalination plants consuming even more power we have to do something different we know that we know consumption in Western countries is much higher than it is in the developing world by factors of hundred in some cases today eighty percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels and they're running out before they do they'll fuel global warming the next generation will need fuels that are clean and abundant but renewable energy alone costs too much and does too little replacing one power plant would require sixty square miles of solar panels or 2,500 giant wind turbines without a viable source of energy we're heading toward catastrophe nuclear fusion is part of the answer as well it's something that's clean it's safe it's something that's got essentially unlimited fuel source so we think it's got to be part of the long-term answer [Music] if scientist succeed we'll have a source of power that's heaven-sent safe clean and abundant fusion is after all the if you will God's economy of scale for powering the universe it's the way stars work to grasp what they're doing you have to step back 14 billion years little by little gravity captured the hydrogen in the early universe and gathered it into clouds then stars the immense pressure in the heart of a star crushes hydrogen atoms against each other they heat up and merge to form helium in a process called fusion in the core of our Sun fusion has been happening for four billion years every second 600 million tons of hydrogen are turned into helium enough to power the whole earth for a million years to [Music] create their own Sun in the laboratory scientists will use machines out of science fiction access to these sites is a real privilege and their world makes your head spin here numbers never have fewer than six figures to top it off there's more than one way to achieve fusion so which way is the best around the world teams of scientists are competing in a fusion marathon first contender the Z machine which uses powerful electrical pulses to ignite a fusion reaction the facility was built to create these extreme states of matter for nuclear weapons research but now we're doing a lot of experiments to create fusion in the laboratory that is a miniature star in the lab second team the laser mega Joule whose beams will smash hydrogen like hammers until it explodes the fuel for fusion will come from seawater which is an almost inexhaustible source and last but not least eater a futuristic boiler that will house a continuous fusion combustion within a magnetic cage shaped like a ring millions of times more than what you get on commercial chemical reactions who will be the first to harness the energy of nuclear fusion the winner will be the team that develops a fusion technology that produces more energy than it uses the key to a working reactor one team begins by building its own lab in the South of France and they start with a bang an entire Hill is leveled to make room for eater the next generation of experimental reactor oh this is the heater site and this is where the either fusion reactors going to be located eater will be a lab for scientists to perfect fusion if they succeed they'll design a prototype reactor to produce electricity the budget is as huge as the site seventeen billion dollars governments representing half the population of the world are collaborating the European Union the US Russia China India Japan and South Korea each partner will construct a certain number of parts manufactured by their top high tech companies once the site is complete scientists from all over the world will converge here to reach their goal to produce 10 times more energy than is consumed by the reactor for at least six minutes six minutes is long enough to prove the technology will work the reactor chamber will be 10 times bigger than any experimental fusion device yet built eater means the way in Latin if it succeeds it will pave the way for a full-scale fusion reactor and make today's nuclear plants the plants of the past nuclear energy literally means the energy of nuclei today's nuclear plants generate power using a process called fission fission breaks up the unstable nucleus of large uranium atoms the energy release spins turbines that generate electricity but fission has its hazards more than two decades after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant people continue to die and we still have no long term solution to nuclear waste Fusion is the opposite of fission and by its very nature fusion is safe and clean you know the fusion reaction is one that involves two light nuclei putting them together fusing them together to form a heavier nucleus and in the process according to Einstein's equation equals MC squared a large amount of energy is given off one gram of fusion fuel equals the energy of eight tons of gasoline enough power for an average car to drive around the world three times but there's a catch fusion occurs only at high temperatures very high at 200 million degrees Fahrenheit the matter is heated to the state of plasma ten times hotter than the Sun hot enough to overcome the nuclei zhn a chiral repulsion and for the atoms to fuse the ideal atoms come from two kinds of hydrogen deuterium and tritium deuterium is endless it's found in seawater tritium comes from lithium a metal found in the Earth's crust and the oceans and we have enough to last for hundreds of thousands of years the fuel is very available you know the analogy we like to talk about the comparison is if you take the deuterium in a bathtub full of water and combined with that the lithium in a laptop computer battery there's enough energy there to provide the you know energy needs for an average person for 30 years tsunami it's very safe and we have a plasma that's contained in a magnetic field and if this plasma gets just a little off of ideal conditions the process stops so having some unsafe runaway condition is impossible the fusion reaction itself doesn't produce dangerous waste but the neutrons bombard in off the chamber wall will make it slightly radioactive tritium used in the reactor has a 13-year half-life after 20 to 30 years of operation eater will be dismantled within a century or so most of the radioactive parts will be too weak to pose a threat eater has these high sides clean you know safe available fuel essentially unlimited fuel source so that's the reason I'm here it's a reason I've got 300 colleagues in the office building a Commodore behind you are working to make this happen next to the construction site for eater is the Tor super tokamak Eaters forerunner what happens here will happen inside eater but on a much bigger scale tokamak is shorthand for a Russian phrase meaning toroidal chamber with magnetic coils that allows us to get up the temperatures of 200 million degrees Fahrenheit that's what we need to reach the conditions for fusion as in all tokamaks in the world the tour super team spends a lot of time taking apart evaluating and improving the parts fusion requires perfection today the team is replacing a microwave heating antenna a crucial part for reaching high temperatures Philippe is the machines operator the design for eater is not completely locked down we're in the middle of installing a hybrid heating antenna which will allow either new options for heating the plasma and for lengthening the time of the discharge Serge has been using the machine for over 20 years he witnessed its construction and knows every detail to supervise this delicate move he is rehearsed with his team all morning you're bumping the slide see all the space is completely used up if there was an empty spot we would have installed something a measuring system or anything anyway there is very little space to install the systems it all fits in by millimeters six tons six meters long and bristling with metal parts each piece is custom made and the result of years of research one misstep could leave a very expensive scratch it's okay it's okay I am something in the pipes below yes I'm no longer hanging on to it he can't see he's seeing less and less we should turn the back but which way don't tell me what to do tell me where it's touching I'm telling you a fool Oh to push it in the ball joints [Music] in just the PQ a supporting part needs to be brie machined abyss and will lose two hours the risks with systems as complex as this one to fit in each part every millimeter counts when we have a problem will Rima Sheen the part in the workshop before reinstalling it they modified the part that guides the antenna by shaving a few slivers of metal these everyday problems are a part of the quest for fusion add up all the problems and you have months of setbacks let's try it like that there it's going on its own see great it's going in great everyone can breathe now but some jobs are beyond this team radiation extreme vacuums and high temperatures make a tokamak impossible to enter once it's running to maintain this chamber we'll take a robot this robot can sneak it's ten meters of titanium and steel through a shutter only 25 centimeters wide in a few hours it can inspect the walls and even fix small problems and the experiments can continue without losing precious time another day at tor Supra and another experiment on the road to fusion today testing the new hybrid antenna a key to starting a fusion reaction this kind of antenna could be ideal for eater to start the experiment they have to turn on the tokamak but they don't just flip a switch every morning we put it in service and in the evening we put it on security settings so that people can enter the hall each circuit breaker gives access to a key to open the next breaker it takes a while but you can't play around with sixty three thousand volts Anika can we proceed no we can't a safety door won't close so the tokamak can't start the plasma emits ionizing radiation for safety reasons no one can remain in the experiment otherwise they would suffer a serious sunburn and could receive a fatal dose of radiation we take safety seriously here first step we make sure the heavy door functions all the tokamak subsystems are used to their limits so it's no surprise to see small defects appearing once in a while and we have to make repairs quickly so we can continue the experiments this is something we won't be able to do once we have the reactor we don't want to stop the reactor to repair the system the company that maintains the doors won't be able to repair it for several hours so the staff scrambles to find a solution each day has the potential for a few hours of delay which together could add years to the timetable so what are they doing they've gone down into the bowels of the lab to track the bug along miles of electrical wiring seems a sensor thought the door was closed so it wouldn't budge [Music] turns out the jammed door works fine it just needed a nudge the main door closes with no trouble the team can now work safely protected by concrete walls two feet thick good-good heavy doors okay through all the think of plasma is a very hot soup of atoms nuclei positively charged and electrons negatively charged scientists will reconfigure the cooking methods thousands of ways before finding the ideal recipe first they switch on the magnetic field to maintain the plasma at the center of the vacuum chamber a tiny path of deuterium and tritium mix is injected in the experiment chamber the central coil of the tokamak is activated it heats the fuel by resistance like a toaster the fuel is heated to the stage of plasma [Music] no physical container could retain this hot plasma of atoms so the scientists had the ingenious idea of confining it within a magnetic cage hence the name magnetic confinement in a vacuum the plasma is now protected from any substance that could cool it down and snuff it out good we have everything that all of it great one run one plasma run on the entire program of the day so let's use the hybrid antenna now we can start another experiment and test the antenna beyond 20 million degrees this method runs out of steam they have to raise the temperature by using another tool antennas now emit microwaves the equivalent of tens of thousands of microwave ovens to heat the plasma the hybrid microwave antenna directs heat at precise areas in the plasma but it's still not enough reaching fusion requires even more heat deuterium atoms are fired at 700 millions of miles per hour causing collisions that heat the plasma take a look at the hybrid very very good an infrared camera lets the team watch to make sure no parts on the wall of the chamber overheats today's machines can create only sparse fusion reactions to make it work we need a reactor ten times bigger thus the need for eater within 2 decades scientists at eater hope to perfect the recipe for fusion and produce more energy than is consumed then they can build the first industrial fusion reactor that can actually produce electricity heat emitted by the reactor will produce steam and steam turbines will generate electricity with the prospect of eater progress on magnetic confinement fusion has accelerated but elsewhere other teams are pursuing fusion with other methods including the world's biggest lasers amid the vineyards of Bordeaux French military research plays a key role in the race for fusion vans since 1996 nuclear testing has been replaced by computer simulation for developing new generations of nuclear warheads let's go weapons engineering and energy production share the same field of research fusion a National Laboratory working for the military will open its high-intensity laser the laser megajoule to civilian researchers here a team of physicists is working on a completely different method to achieve fusion inertial confinement no magnets needed to confine the reaction it happened so fast that the nuclei fuse before they can scatter a vast array of lasers will compress a mix of deuterium and tritium enclosed in a tiny capsule until they superheat and fuse together Francois shoki a supervises the installation of the experiment hall now in the target area of the laser megajoule at the center is a room that measures 30 feet in diameter in this chamber 240 laser beams will converge towards a tiny target the experiments in this chamber are aimed at achieving thermonuclear combustion this is the first step to achieve what is known as inertial fusion energy producing electricity from an inexhaustible source namely seawater inertial fusion energy is the ultimate field that will enable us to provide electricity from fusion to shelter the laser array and its scientific equipment requires a building that would cover nine football fields the building is strengthened by beehive structures with enough concrete to fill 45 Olympic swimming pools the temperature can't vary by more than one degree Fahrenheit to avoid deformities caused by the equipment expanding and in the middle of that huge building work happens on a microscopic scale accuracy is paramount to be perfectly targeted by the lasers the fuel capsule must be precisely positioned within 50 microns the thickness of a human hair along a 100 kilometer optical fiber network the command computer will have to control 2,000 video cameras and 10,000 motion controllers and synchronize 9000 elements some at 100th of a billionth of a second after working several months even years seeing the first steps achieved well it's a milestone in my physicist career the laser requires certain lenses made of synthetic crystal which engineers must grow themselves in two months they've obtained crystals measuring two feet across so success depends on scientists as well as janitors from construction to operation everything must be spotless one speck of dust can damage the laser equipment after a thorough cleaning this part is about to be installed in the laser Bay like everything that enters the laser megajoule it's moved into an airtight trailer [Music] hey backwards one meter stop [Music] the thousands of parts for the laser megajoule will all go through this procedure while some parts of the building are pressurized to repel dust the experiment Hall is depressurized to contain any tritium leaks the air filtering system is as powerful as the turbines of a Boeing 787 dreamliner it takes up one third of the whole building like eater the laser megajoule has its own forerunner a less powerful prototype and it's right next door equipped with only four laser beams it can't produce a fusion reaction its purpose is to prepare the teams to simultaneously control the 240 lasers of the mega Joule the maintenance team must regularly inspect the lenses used most often despite the clinical cleanliness of the lab microscopic dust sneaks onto the lenses dust spreads on the lenses and is burnt by the laser this damages the lenses given the cost of these lenses it's obvious we try to avoid dust as much as possible that's why we have these different clean rooms here the lenses removed from a laser amplifier are brought to a clean room to be overhaul ready to lift nope I do clean chain is not been broken the amplifier was extremely clean we went through a card which is also very clean and finally we go into a room that is as clean as the plates cassette itself there it will be cleaned and reconditioned [Music] ultraviolet light helps them detect and remove dust [Music] experiments go on by the thousands today an alignment shot to perfect the lasers accuracy securing room d5 and d9 to prepare shot it takes a whole team three hours to wrangle the 350 motion controllers that adjust the alignment of the lasers if the temperature varies by one degree Fahrenheit or someone walks near the lasers the beams will fail to reach their target we're finalizing the alignment we'll start the shot in 15 minutes the shot begins with a tiny infrared laser like the kind in a CD player but which will be amplified eight billion times the laser passes through amplifiers strong flashes illuminate laser plates which in turn transfer their energy to the laser beam passing through the beam makes two return journeys collecting more energy on each pass [Music] evacuation of the switchyard target area to prepare for the shot sequence are you all ready for the shot yes yes okay yes this experiment subsystems ready high voltage okay synchronizing ready diagnostics okay alignment okay computers preamplifier module charging capacitor banks at full level after the fourth amplification the lasers are so strong the scientists must avoid concentrating them on an area less than one square foot or risk breaking the lenses they all converge to hit the target Jacque completed at 11:11 a.m. I repeat shot completed at 11:11 a.m. okay ABCD shots confirm there are the results do they match the requests perfectly we couldn't do any better thanks guys you can leave the control room bull's eye the four lasers hit the target within a hundredth of a billionth of a second in a circle a hundredth of a millimeter wide the diameter of a hair this level of precision is crucial the slightest variation would mean failure the team has proven its ability to master the four beams [Music] when the laser megajoule is at last completed the scientists will have to try and control 240 lasers simultaneously unleashing 60 times more power enough to reach fusion the laser is an extraordinary tool for achieving fusion in the lab offering power and versatility but with its demand for hyper precision and cleanliness is it practical enough for industrial use maybe we need something a little more sturdy in the American West scientists are exploring the frontier of nuclear power not far from area 51 welcome to the mecca of American military research Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque New Mexico here the US Army conducts micro simulations of atomic explosions the terrace is a nice place for coffee [Music] in the race to achieve fusion this is the third approach no lasers here physicists tried to achieve inertial fusion with electric discharges the facility was built to create these extreme states of matter for nuclear weapons research but now we're doing a lot of experiments to create fusion in the laboratory that is a miniature star in the lab [Music] [Applause] over the last year we have again refurbished it basically replacing the entire machine to increase the energy by a factor of two what we hope to do with this is create conditions that are even closer to what's required to create net energy gain in the laboratory [Music] here in the Z facility we want to really understand how the fusion reaction works and what is required to drive the fusion reaction the purpose of the Z machine is to create very extreme states of matter very high temperatures very high pressures of matter the way we do that is store electrical energy and capacitors discharge it on a very short time so at the center of the machine we deliver very high currents at very high voltage to make these very high temperatures and very high pressures we we do that ultimately to make fusion conditions in the laboratory during a thunderstorm static electricity stores up in clouds until it suddenly discharges in the form of lightning the Z machine shot works the same way but delivers 1000 times more energy 20,000 times faster the discharge represents 30 times more electricity than the whole world uses at any given moment and lasts a fraction of a second the Z machine funnels the energy and time and space to create a violent shockwave which compresses a fusion fuel capsule the target is surrounded by a small cage of tungsten wires one-tenth as thick as a human hair when the current passes through the filaments they instantly vaporize forming a hollow column of plasma surrounded by a very powerful magnetic field squeezed by this magnetic field the column of plasma implodes it slams the fuel capsule at the terminal velocity of 500,000 miles per hour the nuclei fuse releasing a huge quantity of energy the tiny fragment of a star to be harvested what I'm showing here is a demonstration of what needs to be achieved to do fusion energy with inertial fusion this represents a compression of a factor of 30 to 1 in diameter from the size of the basketball to this size of this fusion capsule and in doing that you're going to increase the density from by about a factor of a thousand from solid density to a thousand times greater than solid density what's been demonstrated already z-pinch facilities is a compression ratio of 15 or 20 to 1 not enough to start a reaction but the big challenge is achieving perfect compression in order to achieve ignition one has to compress perfectly symmetrically and you can see in fact when I try to do it just with my two hands here that we have some bulges so now we compress the capsule like a pancake this would not work now we compress the capsule like an American football or an egg this would not work the capsule has to be compressed perfectly symmetrically within 1% of a perfect sphere and this is the difficulty there's no computer fast enough to simulate all that's happening in the targets and so we have to make simplifying assumptions and not all those assumptions are right and they can lead to errors and so it's only by gathering data of what's really happening in the Z Machine and comparing it to our simulations can we uncover the truth looking inside the target at the critical moment would help refine their work but the experiment chamber is sealed for safety in the next building Sandia Labs has built a giant camera named the Z beam lit laser it's like trying to look at the Sun and see what's happening on the inside of the Sun without being blinded so we need a very bright source of x-rays and this laser system enables us to create that burst of light to create a shadow of what's happening inside the Z machine and so we use the laser to backlight what's happening in the inside of the Z machine as the shot is being prepared the Z beam lit laser team gets ready to take a picture plenty to go to 986 operations will surely be sweeping the high bay and target vapor pulses from shop or smell the evacuated both dates at this time thinking okay so the reason why we do sweep there's four main reasons one spatial filter implosion in case of spatial filter lenses to crack and the vacuum is to leak it could implode and essentially it hurt somebody who's nearby there's also the high voltage risk which for the amplifiers charging up to 18,000 kV for each circuit so we want to make sure nobody's near the circuits with that there's also the the laser-light risk where there's so much light that if anybody's in there they could unintentionally be blinded or burned or damaged in some way if they were managed to get in the beaten path so it's all for personal safety just to keep everybody safe and out of the way of the laser thank you around the Z machine the countdown has started nothing living or electronic could survive the electromagnetic charge that will rush into the Hall any forgotten tool could become a dangerous projectile the shock is equivalent to several sticks of dynamite [Music] the high bay has been cleared everyone is safe inside the electrically insulated bunker waiting for the experiment to start [Music] the beam lit laser must synchronize perfectly with the Z machine to take the picture of the capsule during the shot okay gases are high voltage is on oh it's good to me attention building 983 Z is preparing the fire starting ZB I'll count down to minus 130 please start the shot clock charging the LTS 100 and the Marx's shot clock started how's that look rod banks - charging [Music] 50 Katie charge is complete 75k be charged complete arming to fire the shock wave can be felt across the entire base that looks good thank you guys all right let's go get our data the shot is a success though this picture doesn't look like much it's a veritable mine of information we were able to capture an image of fusion capsule as it was being bombarded by the radiation of the Z machine and being squeezed down we were able to freeze the motion and capture an image of a capsule for the first time in the history of the Z project it's still slow going the machine can fire only once a day obviously not enough for a power plant I've been like I was coming but in his hangar next to his lab Michael Maz Arrakis and his team aim to improve the technology of the Z machine for commercial use they've perfected a simple and reliable Russian invention like a machine gun it can fire repeatedly taking the Z machine a step further towards an operational power plant this is going to be the building block for our future inner-self use of energy power plant it's modular too so you can make any energy you want any size of power plant just by adding more components we are visit the first plant to need about 5000 of these devices that would allow economies of scale in the fabrication of components for the power plant a Russian plane on an American Air Force Base who would have guessed Michael Meza raucous waits impatiently for the delivery of the device to improve the Z machine collaboration between Russian and American scientists actually goes back to the 1960s in the midst of the Cold War while the American and Russian presidents were just a step away from using atomic bombs the scientists were hoping to advance their research and for that they need to present the results to the scrutiny of their peers it's not every day that a leading physicist helps unload a plane but Michael would have carried everything to his lab himself if he had to in the early 90s the Z machine was almost forgotten suddenly it's made a remarkable comeback 20 years ago we were really viewed to be the dark horse in the race for fusion with the successes we've had with the z-pinch implosions and the generation of x-rays we've really gotten a lot more attention in recent years so we now think we have a chance of really competing with the other schemes and it should be a competitive environment where you look at multiple approaches to achieving fusing the laboratory these enormous power plants have their place in the future of energy to meet the demand of cities and industries over time the plants will improve an output while shrinking in size just like computers teams of visionaries competing but also devoting their lives to a common quest scientists using the different schemes to achieve fusion inertial confinement fusion with lasers magnetic confinement fusion and the Z pitch these three paths come together in a conference where people share a lot of information so we can speak of stimulation rather than competition between the teams [Music] fusion will take time not years but decades what if it didn't work well in fact I am very confident it will work question is in which time frame you have to be a true believer to dedicate yourself for 25 years to a project so I've been working on studying fusion since 1981 so almost 25 years so I have a passion for trying to make a little star in the laboratory and I really think we're on the path to achieving that with the Z machine [Music] eater the laser megajoule and the Z machine one of them will cross the finish line industrial reactors will follow and a child born today should witness fusion power by 2070 till then today's generation has a challenge to conserve today's fuel as a bridge to the future [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Best Documentary

Views: 33,693

Rating: 4.7458563 out of 5

Keywords: film, documentary, energy, Nuclear fusion, Iter

Id: lsDKXLEf0b8

Length: 48min 1sec (2881 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018