How close are we to clean fusion energy? I Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS)

hello it's good to be here today and I'm talking about energy and it's actually really fitting that this is the talk between the environment and the energy track because really the way that we've produced our energy today has always had a trade-off between those two different things I'm gonna talk about fusion energy anyone here know anything about fusion back to the future iron man that sort of thing so I'm a PhD plasma physicist which is what you do if you want to do fusion from MIT I'm the CEO of a company that does fusion it's one of the the main ones out there there's now about 17 companies that do fusion but I'm actually not going to talk about my company very much today instead I'm going to talk about where we are as a field what to look for where we come from and where are we going so this can actually go back to about 1940 1945 which a lot of the energy and environmental technologies all can be traced back there that was of course after World War 2 when our modern industrialized society started to occur we started to use oil and very very large amounts we invented nuclear power and at that same time we also started to ask questions and understand how the Stars worked and it all came sort of honor onrush all at once and one of the things that happened after that is we chose to build our modern society on energy from fossil fuels and in hindsight maybe that wasn't a good thing and it's led to what we see today as needing an entirely new energy infrastructure and whether that it develops from innovation or from continuation we're still fighting that out right now but certainly what we do know is that we're not going to stop using energy that on the left here shows the energy use per person and the Human Development Index and it is monotonically increasing that the last basically 400 years of human existence have been defined by finding energy using energy and making people's lives better and on the right is the other side of that equation on the environment where so far our choices to do that have been to emit lots of co2 and this has been linked pretty much since we found coal and Wales and then oil in Texas in the Middle East but there's another energy source out there that we've known about since this the 1940s and that's fusion energy fusion energy is basically the opposite of nuclear power so when you have a big heavy uranium nucleus it wants to fall apart and if you can get it to fall apart it converts a tiny little bit of its mass into energy that's equals MC squared C squared is a very big number Einstein's right that comes out as a whole lot of power but it also comes out as pieces of daughter atoms of nuclear waste it's the transionic sits the cesium's and a museums and the things that we don't want to release into the environment at the complete other end of the mass scale is the hydrogen's and when you take hydrogen isotopes of hydrogen and you combine them together you get not big heavy radioactive things you get helium and in that process you release enormous amounts of energy you release 200 million times more energy per reaction there than you do if say taking a hydrocarbon and breaking its bonds and that is how the Stars work so in fact that's actually how all of the matter that's in us and in this building was created was from building up from some small building blocks of of the hydrogen's all the way up to the carbon all the way up to lead and inside these big huge engines that are the Stars but we obviously can't do fusion on earth the same way a star does you could see some obvious problems there star does it through gravity it needs to have enough mass to make a star it's not something we're gonna put in a building but we have to recreate the conditions inside there and we were able to do that we would be able to make an energy source it would be pretty unique in the world because here it would have no emissions its fuel would be just isotopes of hydrogen that are everywhere they're in seawater some lithium which is in the crust that we'd have enough of that fuel to power our entire society today longer than we expect the Sun to live so you know becomes a problem of intergalactic inter solar problem not a problem of the next decade and out of that there's no meltdown there's no chain reaction there's no of the long-lived nuclear waste and this is something that we would say is a globally scalable energy source so it's something that fits into modern grids a machine that you put somewhere that makes a lot of power sounds great right like to put it in sort of really big perspective here's how we get most our energy today here's an oil tanker that oil tanker has got about a half a billion euros worth of oil in it if you were to filter the water that's displaced by that oil tanker and only a fraction of that you would get a little bit of deuterium be like this big and it would if you were to fuse it would make as much energy as burning all that oil so you've taken a problem and you've changed it by about somewhere around seven orders of magnitude and that's a profound change in our current way of getting energy of finding places to extract it either from the ground the air the the solar radiation and then concentrate it this shows up as concentrated and how how do we envision fusion energy working so obviously we I've alluded to how the stars operate basically put the star inside a machine produce heat and make power conversion anyone see a major problem with this like stars stars are pretty hot you need to be actually hotter than a star to do that you need to be about a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit Kelvin Celsius really matter you got to be really really hot and that means you have to build a machine that sits in a room that's like room temperature that has something that's a hundred million degrees in it that sounds pretty difficult but that's actually done around the world today it's done in laboratories that are funded by the government's it's done in startups it's done in industrial companies just a couple weeks ago there was 12 year old kid in California who made 100 million degrees plasma in a machine that made some fusion reactions so we understand this state of matter well enough to be able to manipulate it but that's not everything that's needed there's other things that have to happen that machine has to be able to have that hot plasma but also has to be able to insulate the plasma from the walls well enough that it can produce more power than it takes to heat it you can imagine if I wanted to make my house very hot I could leave all the doors open I could have a huge furnace and I'd get it hot but it wouldn't be very economical an infusion same rules apply you have to find a way to insulate it so this is can be shown in science space on a plot like this so we think of fusion as how much power out over how much it takes to run we call that number Q and so for the last 60 years that we've been studying this technology it's been a race to higher and higher levels closer and closer to more power out than in that's sort of the threshold where now things become you could see a commercial pathway it's no longer just an experiment it has a pathway to becoming useful and on the right of this plot is the other accommodation of all the things you need in order to get more power out than in more power than in lives in the upper right notice it's a logarithmic plot and both axes so that means this covers a huge amount of physical space I said we had to get the plasma very hot that's on the x-axis the unit of 10 there is a hundred million degrees so the 1 million degrees is so hot that plasma physicist had to invent a smaller unit and then on the the y-axis is the other two things you need confinement so how will you insulate it and density how much stuff you have and all those data points are machines that have been built around the world by National Labs by small companies across the last decades and what you can see is that we've actually gotten pretty close to Q greater than one in fact the blue points that are in the upper right there are at Q of 0.7 there's a machine across the channel in the UK that's gotten to 0.7 there's a machine in Japan that's that lives up there and then there's lots of other things that we have tried and and that's all contributed to this very large body of knowledge of fusion energy plasma physics understanding what we need to make a power source so in some ways you'd say okay we're pretty close on the science but we've we stopped a little short so who's all who's all working on this and what's the trajectory to get past that where is the world putting its effort and why do we think that now is an interesting time infusion so there's basically two different approaches that people are using to do this and they're not just technical approaches they're organizational approaches they're finance approaches they're even have commercial implications so on the left is the machine called eater and it's a machine that's being built in the South of France it's actually cat arash at CEA next to CEA that machine is an international collaboration basically among the world's industrialized company countries so it's the u.s. the EU Japan China India South Korea Russia you can imagine what it takes to pull those people together to go and build a single giant project and it turns out that that's the largest science experiment it will have ever been attempted in the world it's the most expensive thing that's been built on single thing built on earth it's about fifty billion dollars it's halfway through construction and it's the largest science or it's the largest construction project in continental Europe and that machine in the lower-left there if you look really closely there's a guy wearing a tie with a hard hat on a couple pixels tall so that's a very big machine but it's being built it's going to turn on in 2025 and thereafter it's going to make an attempt to get to Q of ten so pass that line where we'd be making five hundred megawatts of thermal power in a single device with a gain of ten and the world's really convinced this is going to work this is a statement of conviction by the science is ready to make such a large investment in it and if you if we go back and we look at the previous plot that's the approach that's in the blue dots so take those blue dots and make them over the line by making it basically larger on the other side of this plot our other approaches where people have said okay if we do the continuation of those blue dots it means that looks like we have to make it really big that maybe doesn't look commercial what if we took all the other things we've learned in the interim things around simulation the tools have gotten that better and better Fusion is actually one of the the main drivers of supercomputer simulation machine learning additive manufacturing control systems what if we took those and we found some white space in plasma physics and built built machines to explore that white space there's now a bunch of about 1.3 billion dollars of private capital backing companies that are doing just that some of these companies are trial which is in California general fusions in Canada there is a couple in the UK there's Lockheed Martin large defense contractor who's building fusion systems they're starting from further behind in the plasma physics it's less demonstrated but because they're much smaller scale they're hoping to be able to iterate very quickly and they're proving that you can iterate quickly infusion I think this is one of the major trends that we see in energy technologies in general which is that people are aggregating capital sometimes in groups of ten to one hundred million dollars building teams together and building machines that in the past only governments could ever think about building and certainly these companies have done that so how close are we what should we be looking for and you know when will we see it so one way to think about this is fusions got this long term joke that it's 30 years away and always will be and that really ignores the amount of progress that's been made it's like saying there's a mountain out there and it's never been some innit summited and so no one's ever gonna do it and what was actually seen is people have started to climb that mountain and they've built base camps all the way up so the the EU the US have put about a hundred billion dollars into research of building up that was fusion base camps and it's now just below that first summit and they're making an attempt one of the attempts is to very methodically climb that last peaks that last peak and the other attempts are to basically look for a clearing in the weather find new pieces of technology and a rush at it as fast as possible and over the next about ten years maybe even less maybe like five years we'll see whether anyone gets to that point where we make more power out than in and we have a technology that looks like it could be useful and then the next steps will be how to make that work continuously and cost-effectively and put it into the existing grid sort of looking at the top staying at the top of a mountain and looking out and seeing what's next so for our company the way that we attack this is we use the same physics that's in eater and a lot of the same people that contributed to that the same science but we've looked and said okay there's there's other things that have happened since we decided to take that approach one of those things is a new superconductor completely unrelated to fusion just like machine learning is unrelated to fusion just like additive manufacturing is unrelated to fusion but something that happened in a different field and that's a super nature that allows it to go too much higher magnetic field so bigger badder magnets and we use that superconductor to take the Machine either on the right and try to do the same sort of physics and a scale that's much much smaller by cranking up the magnetic field so that's what Commonwealth fusion systems is doing and like the other startups we're backed by people that really believe in the mission that we need to switch the energy system that we don't we shouldn't have a trade-off between the environment and energy and technology can be the solution for that including basically the last energy technology we would ever need which is the energy technology that the world has already chosen the universe sort of has earned a ordained as the ultimate energy technology and in our pathway we've finished running a machine that's on the left there that was funded by the US Department of Energy we ran that machine we currently hold the record for tokamak plasma pressure basically two of the things you need for huge in and we're designing the machine in the middle and we hope to have that run running in the mid 2020s and thereafter a commercial system would be on the right and that would be a very power dense city powering fusion system at like 200 megawatts electric where you're now out replacing the gas plants and so in closing I like this slide a lot because it sort of sums up the promise of fusion and the current situation this is usually a title slide but if you look at it you see we have the planet and we're looking at the dark side of it but here's all those lights those lights came from the time we chose fossil fuel as our energy source and they've enabled all of that that's human happiness but there's still dark spots those people they want those lights too and they deserve to have them but then there's this thin layer of the atmosphere that is really saying like can we afford to do all that meanwhile out there on the very right is billions and billions uncountable stars that are using an energy source that we have yet to do an energy source that gives us all of our heat and light something that we want to bring to earth bring closer and that's a monumental task but it's a task that's worth doing it's a task that the world's working on right now and it's a task in the next 10 years we should see some major changes in as we sort of reach the penultimate steps so I think that gives a good view of fusion if you you want to talk about it more I'll be over on the right with some colleagues so please come Nass questions thank you [Applause]

Channel: Hello Tomorrow

Views: 131,695

Rating: 4.6695094 out of 5

Keywords: energy, environment, HTSummit, hellotomorrow, deeptech, innovation, fusion

Id: AmDef7AThGk

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/fusion33r]

I'm going to be working at CFS in a few days and could not be more excited. If anyone can get fusion working in the next 10 years, it's them.