First Light Fusion: The Future of Electricity Generation and a Clean Base Load? | Fully Charged

[Music] welcome to fully charged we've got a fantastic episode for you today all about a really interesting potential future energy source as everything becomes more electrified all that electricity has to come from somewhere and because we're interested in a zero carbon future we hear a lot about renewables about solar and wind and waves but there's another possibility a shadowy partner that we don't hear so much about and that is fusion there's two ways of getting energy out of atoms you can take really big atoms like uranium and split them apart that's efficient that powers our existing nuclear reactors and as we know it's got quite a lot of downsides but you can also take quite small atoms like hydrogen and helium and fuse them together and that gives out energy that's what powers the Sun the fuel is simple it's an amazing potential energy source it would be absolutely brilliant if we could power our civilization using that [Music] so if fusion is that useful why aren't we doing it already well as a technical challenge its impressive if you need fabulously high temperatures and pressures and that's why I've come here today to first like Fusion because they think the solution might lie in little things like this [Music] let's just start with the basics what is beauty so Fusion is the joining of light elements together so it's the opposite to nuclear power which is splitting heavy elements and because of the way the physics works both of those processes release energy but with with fusion you have none of the high-level waste and none of the risk of meltdown and all of the negative parts of fission power and this has been in that this ideas been around for a long time has it was this joke that fusion was always 40 years away and what you're doing is it still for just very quickly so what is it still 40 years away so a lot a lot of the early history of fusion maybe it says something about the ambition of physicists you know a year after it was actually discovered that the Sun was powered by fusion people were proposing fusion power so of course it was a long time away away them even even know what the reactions were let alone leave any detail physics now a lot of the detailed physics is done and there's a lot of different ways of kind of making that reaction happen and no one sort of got over the the milestone of energy gained yet so the basic game here is that you take these very small elements so these are things like hydrogen and lithium they're very a super small atom and you have to get them close enough together to make all this happen why why is that hard it's hard because they don't want to be close together so they're both you have two ions because of the temperatures for fusion there's no atoms left all the electrons are going to move so the ions and they're both positively charged so they want to repel and you need to get them close enough if you can get them close enough they have a chance to diffuse so that so this is the mental image here is that you've got these little things and they're all it's almost like pinball gone mad there's lots of little things bouncing around and the hotter you make it the faster they go and the more you squish it all together the more often they collide so what sort of temperatures and pressures are we talking about because it all of that sounds very nice lieutenant temperature is an immutable constant for all fusion processes regardless of the technology because it's set by the ions having to come together and you have to be a hundred million degrees Kelvin we're not supposed to say that casually yes Kelvin that's actually part of from the Sun so the Sun fuses hydrogen where as we use isotopes of hydrogen because it's an easy reaction so my like fun fact about the Sun is and per unit volume its heat output is actually less than the metabolic keep output of a person so because hydrogen is really hard to fuse the Sun is actually kind of rubbish at it it's just huge so we need a more efficient reaction and an alternative higher temperature as well getting to have these high temperatures and densities that's energy intensive all by itself so you need to put a lot of energy in so you did mention this word energy gain and you want to get more back just go through that a little bit yeah so and you have to pay a certain amount of energy to heat the ions to give them enough energy to actually over enough velocity to overcome the repulsion and then when they fuse they release a certain amount of energy you look at the ratio of those two it's something like 300 so that's that's how much energy you can kind of get back out in principle from the reaction so what's your first like fusion what what's your solution to this problem so we have a new approach to inertial food which we call a projectile fusion basically we launch a high velocity projectile and that flies and then it hits into a fuel pellet which we call the target and then the target is the hard physics problem of what we're doing it has to effectively focus some energy of that projectile into the fusion fuel and it has to concentrate the energy which is being delivered by the projectile so for the project I'll the most important thing is its velocity Machinery update shop procedure for shop 97 is commencing when you're ready to start [Music] but voltage criteria okay why why is everything these massive great big boxes yes they look a bit odd these big grey boxes so we have two of them we have all our machine diagnostics it's sort of 200 current probe and then our enclosure we have all our experimental optical Diagnostics and we go through the care for less see your door right seriously yeah so the idea here is that because what you're doing is so incredibly fast yeah you need very short you need pulse lasers yeah very short bursts of light to work out what's happening so you imagine the kind of first high speed photography was a horse running over the finishing line is that very classic photo and I used a very high speed a bright flash lamp to do that as all photographers use as you go faster and faster flash lamp doesn't cut the mustard so what you have to use instead is really bright lasers to backlight what you're doing and as well as doing that what we use our gated cameras they do a very very short exposure so this white camera here is a allows you to take a three nanosecond exposure that's like that's amazing it's just stopped on that because 3 nanoseconds but in that time light which is the fastest thing in the universe will travel 15 meters and I got myself yeah yeah the point is not very far off yeah and so in the time light takes to cross this table that that will have opened the shutter and closer shots from taking off with that that's yeah it's normally quick and it's really interesting technology and all these cameras which is probably why they're so expensive of course I think this white camera here cost calls for a million pounds there's one company in the world this whole thing is a kind of speedometer done exactly but a projectile which is it can be many things in this case it's a flying thing both of this and up getting in something and you ought to know that speed and because it's so fast this is what it takes exactly yeah so tell me about how machine three launches the projector so it's it's what we call an electromagnetic launcher so basically it's like a railgun because because velocity is most important well that takes us to is a a very low-mass projectile maybe one gram but going extremely extremely fast so what's extremely fast so machinery should get to between twenty and thirty kilometres per second so to put that in context it will accelerate the projectile to twice the escape velocity of earth in about five millimeters betrayer tell me about the target so inside the target there's a little pocket that's got fuel tell me a little bit better yeah so so this on the screen shows and one of our simulations it's rendered so it looks like nice CGI / this is actually an accurate simulation so what you have is is a plastic cube and inside that cube there's a little spherical cavity and that's where the fuel is and this is the same thing but in real life so so it's as if there was a penny hitting the back exactly yeah so the thing which is looks like copper is a copper projectile that's ten millimeters in diameter one millimeter thick that's hitting this front face and then the cavity inside what happens when the projectile hits is it creates an enormous pressure and you perform at a pressure wave shock wave and the pressure wave moves through the target as it moves over the top of the cavity the gas inside has no choice it can't it can't just disappear and escape that pressure wave so the cavity gets collapsed and the gas inside gets really strongly heated so for a brief fraction of a second we have something which is hotter than the Sun and dense than LED inside this thing something which I like to point out is if you look at the back of the target in this simulation it's not moved at all right right so that the pressure wave is the fastest signal going through this system so this is faster than the speed of sound that's nothing it until it gets hit by the shockwave there is no way of knowing it's coming yeah exactly the batteries I don't know doesn't even know that it's been hit until the shock wave gets there and the fusion event happens halfway through that time so the fusion is done finished the back the target hasn't even moved yet so we people expect when you hit this know that it's like a billiard ball right it's not it's so fast that our normal physical intuition doesn't apply it behaves more like liquid in fact it does accurately behave like a liquid the material strength is basically zero but so this this illustrates what inertial confinement is because it's kind of conceptually more difficult than magnetic fusion magnetic fusion is just a big magnetic bottle which holds fastened together here nothing is holding this in place it's just in vacuum by itself and but the gas when it's compressed being compressed it pushes on the plastic and the plastic takes time to start moving it has inertia so it's it's held together simply by its own mass its own weight for that fraction of a settlement and that's long enough that you can get the triple product to meet a lot of criteria but there's a crucial piece to this which is that this is the target from 10 years ago basically so most of our work is what is on what we call advanced target design so it's how do you get more fusion performance at the same projectile and the way we do that is by changing what's inside this 15 millimeter cube of material and I kind of think of it a bit like Minecraft you can put whatever you like whatever material you like wherever you like as long as you can actually machine it or manufacture it somehow yeah and to get better performance and it turns out you can get a lot better performance so how much energy would one of those believes each one of these will release the same amount of energy as a barrel of oil [Music] so welcome to machine 3 [Music] it's a big thing isn't it so this is where the magic happens yeah there's very regular sound in the background there is so that's the heartbeat of machine 3 so that is the cryogenic pumps that we use to pull the vacuum that we need within the vacuum chamber here this is the important bit that's it this is where all of the current converges so the current converges down these wide transmission lines inside to what we call pizza slices so some triangular transmission lines which go to a load section in the middle top half of the machine is charged positively the negative half negatively and the currents flow around this system this is where the two halves of the machine are joined through a bolt in the middle here now you get huge currents up to 14 million amps that generates huge magnetic pressures and that magnetic pressure forces the small piece in the middle which is the size of a 5 BP no that is it it breaks out of the of the platform breaks it breaks out it pushes up and flows up the the chimney both sides and that's our projectile so we impact that into our target in the middle of the chamber and then that's where the shock physics take over that the trick really is getting all of that energy to flow into the center section here it wants to go everywhere else basically so you're hanging out the cats that you're hurting our electrical charge you produce this dirty and it genuinely is spectacular speed getting your jets out to movement our speeders yeah it's no mean feat ya know the fields between those two plates are extremely light we're talking a thousand Tesla or something like that so where does it all mean [Music] so this is a consumable item and that's our business model in fact is to make them sell these and so the projectile comes in it hits this it creates that pulse of diffusion each each individual target projectile every single one has to be positive energy gain and then the way you get to a power plant is you have to repeat this at some repetition rate so we want to in our in our point design it's once every five seconds you have to ping ping ping except a bit part one suppressing yeah and so that produces heat does it then what happens that produces the best way of thinking about that is it produces the pulse of neutrons and because of the reaction which is deuterium tritium four-fifth that the energy goes with the neutron so you need to absorb the neutrons and then you've captured the energy so in our reactor we use a liquid lithium coolant which will absorb the neutrons it will also protect all of the structural steel from those neutrons and that becomes the primary coolant so you take that away and then you make make steam and then you make power because that is the most brilliant thing this is the thing I love more than anything about fusion technology and I'm sorry it's not your target that's second on the list it's that behind all this clever physics and this thing that happens in the middle of a sudden there's a steam engine yes indeed yeah yeah and I I specifically I want to keep it as theme engine because it's tear on line completely known technology I want one unproven thing in my reactor which is this everything else I wanted to be completely proven technology so the idea of the reactor is that when this once you demonstrate the physics here and then you build something that can kind of feed these things through and then you've almost got conventional power plants on the back end of it you create steam you run a terrifying you electricity goes into the grid it's it's thermal power it's thermal power plant and yeah I don't think fusion is actually a disruptive technology it's a it's a revolutionary technology but it's business as usual it's centralized generation its base load the disruptive technology is solar and wind but we've done a little work on this as you might imagine because we bout spend another five years of my life on this topic we don't think that we can get everything we need from just noodles we need clean bass note as well it's fusion still 40 years when you said nope well we're aiming to demonstrate fusion this year 2019 and then it'll be a five year effort to build and execute a gain experiment which is where you get more out be getting more out and so it's a bigger machine a bigger machine if we knew it's gonna work we would have to do the experiment right so we have to do the experiment and in parallel we've started proper work on the reactor engineering now we are still looking what we have to do there but everything it's going to take us between five and eight years [Music] here [Music] [Music] I'm very serious I'm keeping quiet [Music] Spencer it's amazing imagining what's happening tirelessly a few little buttons pressed here what's happening over there [Music] sixteen in Malaga collage religious bigots forward into those passages now is amazing we're about to let it all go fully charged awaiting trigger let it be see all the charging numbers going up at the bottom creeping towards this line or do you just realize I'm actually holding my breath 60 I wasn't expecting it to be that loud I can see why they want everyone to wear these what happened when it all went bang what happened at that point so when it went bang the machine was actually discharging so that is a shot itself happening within a period of a couple of microseconds but what sort of things are you measuring when we're measuring in principle voltage and current but we're measuring in a very large number of places and we're also having to measure it quite accurately and quickly and during the discharge so what you see on the screen is all about the machine itself so the health and how well the Machine performed this is as distinct from the experimental diagnostics right which I obviously have most interest to there for this for the science of the experiment the reason for this clobber is that they're about to take the lid off this and all the smushed up everything that happens a lot of the experiments about to come out so we need a bit of protective gear [Music] lots of studies asking the question can we have a hundred percent renewables grid we can argue about it but the answer is yes and seems well it's the right answer to the wrong question question is when we actually going to get to that and there's there's a deployment rate issue there's a simple manufacturing capacity issue so and the Tesla Giga Factory it produces enough batteries in one year to power the US for three minutes okay right tiny little fraction that's the problem and it's that deployment rate problem which leads us to think that there is a need for a clean baseload it's important to say that I'm a huge supporter of renewable yeah we every every watt of renewable generation that we build reduces climate change right and it there'll be different mixes in different places so actually California is not a good example for fusion and I think this is a lot of the thought leadership comes from California you're never gonna build a fusion power plant in California they compare themselves completely from solar and batteries done the UK however Solar results not very good we have great offshore wind resource but offshore wind does cost more and and again if you look at the deployment rates there's a big gap left at the end and the benefit is it's about I mean the nice thing are all these technologies they've all got they work best in different places at different time so if you mix them all together you can always create an ecosystem that works yeah but our view is that that ecosystem will have to include a clean base mode sit-ins where we get to see the mess all of that fantastically careful precision engineering has just been shot to smithereens and whatever is left is in that [Music] well you want this thing looking like it's had a hard life this bit of metal these metal pieces here we call pizza slicer spades survived between each shot typically they do sometimes sustain damage and it'll be repaired but generally they will survive and all parts outboard from that slide between shots they come off they get all cleaned up and redone but they do survive the orange plastic you start this captain installation or use up again within the inner circle got a load assembly itself you can see the yellow in plastic which is actually a large shape filling their home the old vacuum chamber that's my life type of plastic insulation it's a little less high-performance that will say get effectively destroyed then damn easy on you very expensive optical bench until you lot blew it apart [Music] I've been so impressed by what I've seen here today first light fusion are clearly a company to watch and do keep an eye out later this year for news of fusion because it does seem like they're going to do it on time just like they've done everything else on time and it's amazing that all of that technology is hiding behind this not very distinctive front in a business park in Oxford if you enjoyed this do subscribe to patreon and have a look at the fully charged so website and if you have been thank you for watching [Music] you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 954,396

Rating: 4.8887086 out of 5

Keywords: clean base load, future of electricity generation, green energy comment, clean electricity generation, renewable energy electric vehicles, renewable energy for home, base load electricity, first light fusion, pulsed power accelerator, gigawatt, electricity generation, inertial fusion, fully charged show, pulsed power, projectile fusion, base load, robert llewellyn, energy gain, fusion, nuclear fusion, renewable energy, fully charged

Id: M1RsHQCMRTw

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/andyfrance]

It's an interesting video as they open up machine 3 after the "shot" has been made. They are not testing with D-T yet though suggest that they will attempt to generate neutrons later this year. My impression was that even if it does work it's massively far away from a design that could fire repeatedly, extract the shot debris, maintain the vacuum needed for the shot and be surrounded by the lithium blanket required to extract the energy from the neutrons. The researcher does make a very interesting point: you wouldn't ever build a fusion plant in a sunny place like California as solar and batteries is going to be cheaper. Fusion is for places where renewables aren't good or reliable enough.
I'm in the UK and despite it being government policy renewables aren't enough. As I write this our wind power generation capacity is > 21Gw, but at this instant it is generating 1.572Gw. This isn't unusual. Here we need nuclear be it fission or fusion to generate our base load.

[u/eternalfrost]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

[u/maurymarkowitz]

Finally got a chance to watch it.

This is easily the best vlog entry on the topic of fusion I have seen. It is detailed without being boring, relatively complete, and even exciting.

Well done!