How the NIF Did It: Fusion Ignition with NIF Laser Scientist

hey everybody Neil deGrasse Tyson here we recently posted a short 10 minute maybe explainer video on what nuclear fusion is and why it matters for the future of energy and it basically went viral went viral for us I had a couple of million views and a relatively short amount of time and we read the comments and people said give us more we want to learn more about this than what I could possibly squeeze into 10 minutes so we heeded your advice we do read the comments and we've put together an entire show on that very subject and who do we get for it the operations manager at the national ignitions facility of Lawrence Livermore National Labs he's a physicist and his name is Bruno van Von and we have an entire show with him as our guest telling us about what they achieved how they achieved it and what it means for the future of civilization so I present to you the show that all of you called for on Star Talk [Music] this is Star Talk today we're going to talk about fusion and lasers ooh Coast Chuck Nice how you doing man hey Neil how are you yeah fusion and Laser's been in all the news who would have thought it is the hottest thing going okay oh I see what you did there God I'm so sorry and we did a little explainer video and I I got people comfortable with what was going on at the Lawrence Livermore Labs yeah uh but we thought why don't we just get why don't we just get somebody from the labs I mean okay why not that sounds good so allow me to introduce you and our audience to our special guest uh Dr Bruno Von well to him from the national ignition facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs Bruno welcome to StarTalk all right my pleasure okay excellent excellent and you know you definitely are you have to be Dutch but are you feeling it okay you know what yeah that was such a Dutch answer like you know what I mean all right okay that's how we react to it that's how you do it I'm serious yeah yeah and so right now you are um am I think director of the national ignition facility and uh him also operations manager for the facility so I basically keep my uh pills on everything that is happening in the facility and make sure that the experiments are done well and done effectively and safely and make sure that we get the great results going in America in America we call that boss man yeah that's how everyone thinks about me and the man that's in there in charge yeah I got my hand on everything so yeah in your past you have a PhD in chemical physics from the University of Louisville in Belgium is that correct yes excellent excellent and uh your background isn't basically lasers which is so cool it's always been about lasers and as I started out I mean I was working with some of course much smaller laser so but I got my eyes on what was going on in the world in other Laboratories and so in the 1980s I moved over for a postdoc at the University of California in Irvine again working on lasers and x-ray sources and very interesting projects with respect to laser physics then I moved to work for a couple of years at the Max Planck Institute in gertingen in Germany and just remind me the Max Planck Institute is many different centers that each have an emphasis correct because we have one in astrophysics but that's not the same one you're describing correct that's the music so I was working in the the one of us uh focusing on biophysical chemistry and using lasers I mean to uh develop all kinds of diagnostic techniques and actually it evolved into a laser production Center it was studying I mean extremely high powered eczema lasers the different type of technology that again it was I mean the biggest eczema or the highest power XML laser under development in the world at that point in time when that's how I met a visiting scientists from Livermore explaining about Fusion technology explaining about the uh Nova laser that was in operation at that time at Livermore and basically putting a a picture of a Nova laser beam on the Whiteboard which was about I mean yeah big and that convinced me really they just say well that's the place that's where I belong so um like I said we posted a short 10 minute sort of update after the news hit and in the comments thread of our just little 10-minute update there's a bunch of questions we want to sort of bring into this much more full and fleshed out program and so uh we just there's an unlimited number of these questions we we called them and so I could you just tell us first of all the national ignition facility when we think of ignition we think of turning on our car so what is you when you say ignition what do you mean I think plasma is basically a plasma that Heats itself up higher and higher and so the heat that is generated is larger than the energy losses I mean you lose energy from a reaction I mean through radiation through conduction of energy away from the plasma a bit if you can generate so much heat that you overcome those losses then you keep heating up you keep accelerating the fusion reactions and basically it becomes a runaway reaction and it's uh like a match that you light up when you start slow and suddenly it flares up and it burns up immediately and so an igniting plasma is a plasma that sustains itself and heats itself up higher and higher so you get more Fusion you get more ignition you get more heat production and basically whoosh you basically burn all the fuel that you have collected and compressed around that little hot spot that ignites the plasma so we call that hot spot ignition I'd like your reference to the Striking of a match uh because of course when you start out with a match and a little you know a rough surface uh there is no heat anywhere right and so then you strike it and then you start something and it doesn't need you to keep helping it it just is self-sustained as it continues yes it takes up by itself and it goes faster and faster and it actually is over and just I mean a tenth of a billionth of a second and that's the amazing thing is you create this enormous amount of energy through the fusion process and it is basically released in I mean from a tiny little spots in an incredibly short amount of time so the amount of power that is generated is just incredible and I mean it shows I mean the power of fusion really wait wait but I from the from the notes I saw you invested is it 300 million joules of energy that that seems like a high starting point it's a lot of blame that's a lot of bling it's a it's a lot of energy but uh what we're comparing or the official definition of Target gain is comparing the energy we put into the target to the energy that came out of the target um right and so even if 300 million is a big number yeah 300 million Jewelers is a lot of energy but we also have to keep in mind that the national ignition facility was never built for efficiency it was built for for cost Effectiveness and so we choose I mean the most inexpensive power supplies the most reliable laser systems and it worked it was cost effective but it wasn't I mean built for efficiency and could have built the system with an efficiency that is 10 to 50 percent or 10 to 50 times higher uh if we would like I mean to do that so so yes I mean it is a big number but it's no surprise and uh okay so look at it over time what you're saying is you you put in 300 million jewels you got out more than 300 million jewels but not much more and what you're telling me if I understand is this was a test of concept now that it works you could go back in and say let's make this laser a little more efficient and this so so you can ignite it in principle with fewer than 300 million jewels in a new design in the future yes so so let's repeat that so we had again we had 300 Mega shoes of electrical energy that's converted to 3 million joules of laser energy which is then oh sorry two million joules of laser energy which was incident on the Target and compressor Target and then the target itself emitted three million joules again so we had a in the from that point of view a one percent return but a 50 relative to the laser energy that was used to I mean push the fuel capsule together and ignite it wait wait wait wait so wait so you you needed energy to power the lasers yes okay but you're not counting that in your in the return on the investment though you're only comparing your laser energy to what came out of your pellet but the fact that you have to plug all this into the wall yeah of course is it fair and effective it that way then it is fair but uh once you start to think about now how can we I mean turn this into a process that the delivers energy and can create or use the fusion process I mean to to drive a power plant then of course that efficiency of the driver becomes very important I mean you need to start working on higher gain targets you need to start working on higher efficiency laser drivers and I think these two in combination I mean can basically deliver to amid feasible inertial Fusion Energy plant okay so it's engineering at that point you can hand it over the engineers and say make this work so can I can I can I ask you this so you said that it's like striking a match and that is self-sustaining is there a process where we don't have to worry about how much energy it took to start it because it is self-perpetuating afterwards good question there you go you solved it okay now go home actually uh the inertial confinement Fusion which is the process that we're using uh takes a finite amount of fuel in a little Target and compresses it and then creates Fusion in the center to light off the little fuel match around it but it's a finite amount of fuel and so once that fuel is burned we need to start that process over again so we bring in a new Target we again hit it with the laser compress it create the hot spot that ignites it have the ignition burn up the fuel and do it over and over and over again and uh so we believe that for a neutral Fusion Energy plant you need to do that about 10 times per second right instead of once a day and so it's a process that you repeat over and over again so it it's not that we have a gigantic amount of fuel that we can compress it's a small amount but it also makes it inherently safe there is no runaway condition there's nothing I mean that basically can melt down or become unsafe from that point of view the best thing that can happen is that all the fuel burns up and that's it right so I'm unlike that that's current unlike our current nuclear power plants where you know the the actual uh Chain Reaction can run away and we can't stop it yes you can have meltdown conditions you can have all kinds of uh undesirable effects and very unsafe conditions that can be created but that is not the case for inertial Fusion Energy so before we go to our first break could you explain why you need such high temperatures in like the tens or even did I read 100 million degrees what is the temperature doing for you so the temperature is needed actually to overcome the repulsive forces that normally prevent uh the nuclei in atoms from basically uh basically combining with each other there's no positive charge yeah they're all positive charges so the closer you bring them they start to repel each other vehemently which is a good thing because otherwise the whole world would collapse immediately so Jason so there's an incredible force that prevents you from molecules from abusing and in order to actually then overcome those forces and then have denuclear Force which is the force that actually pulls the charges together in a in a Decor of an atom uh you need to have incredible temperatures in order to start uh creating I mean violence I mean collisions between the atoms so you can relate the temperatures to kinetic energy of the atoms moving around and if you want to increase that temperature increase the velocity at which they collide with each other you need to go to temperatures of about 150 million degrees in order for deuterium and tritium basically to fuse together and for some other systems I mean it can go up to billions of degrees before you can actually reach conditions where the the nuclei can overcome I mean the forces that normally uh hold prevent them from collapsing so presumably this has been some of the decades-long challenge that this process has encountered uh yeah okay and from the initial idea that the lab I mean developed soon after the invention of the laser in 1960s yeah it has taken us about 60 years basically to learn how to do this and learn how to achieve ignition and and that's why the December experiment was such a spectacular event because it basically I mean shows us that whatever was deemed impossible for so many years by so many people was basically overcome using just a continuous development of technological and scientific developments in the laboratory where we I mean develop new codes new computers new and bigger laser systems over 60 years to finally come up with a laser and a Target design that actually did the tree can work and you know you're talking about rooms full of smart people just say it I mean it is a campus full of smart people smart people because even one campus is multiple campuses across the country yeah across the world that I've participated in this of course Bruno in the center of the Sun um it's actually not hot enough to fuse the hydrogen outright and when we run the calculations because the center of the sun is like 10 million degrees around there that it's mostly driven through tunneling Quantum tunneling of the protons to come together and so you can get the tunneling at the lower temperature are you saying that your process going up to 100 million degrees The Brute Force slamming together of the protons that you're not taking advantage of any quantum mechanical tunneling that might be available to you there is some amount of tunneling involved but I think we want to basically I mean speed up the process and uh that's where we try to reach the highest temperatures because if you look at the fusion energy production in the sun it's actually really small it's on the old of a few hundreds what's per cubic meters which is I mean almost like the level of a compost pile so the enormous amount of energy from the Sun really comes from the gigantic just happens damn that's I've never heard anyone have shade on the sun before yeah you just did you did you put you you threw shade at the sun it's just like you're not so hot oh you're not so you're about as hot as a you know a pile of garbage under some dirt sun when I was steaming manure yeah there you go and it's a good thing actually because if it if the sun was igniting I mean that would be that wouldn't be a good day for us so yeah of course nice and study process all right got it right whereas when you yeah when you go to the full up temperature that physically gets the protons together without relying on the tunneling which is a kind of an effect happening in the edges of the of the process if you go full up then you're gonna get the full Hammer of your Fusion okay what great like villain story for a Bond movie like because Bond movies love lasers right yeah they do yeah so it's like a an evil genius who comes up with a laser that he's going to use to ignite the plasma of the Sun and destroy the whole solar system forget the one where he's just like I'm going to destroy a city he's like I'm gonna wipe out the whole solar system okay that's why I don't have a job at Lawrence Livermore Labs job all right we're gonna take a break when we come back we're gonna get into lasers and what are they and how do they work and why are they useful for this and I want to get into a little bit of dare I say the chemistry of what's going on in the nuclear reactions like what are the nuclei that are actually coming together and where do you start and where do you end so we'll get into that when we return on this edition of StarTalk we're talking about lasers and fusion we'll be right back we're back start talks we're talking about lasers and fusion and of course the person powering this conversation is Bruno then Balto him who is the acting director of the national ignition facility at Lawrence Livermore National Labs at Bruno so before we get on to just what lasers are and how they work and why uh just remind me how what what particles are you putting together in what sequence before you declare that you have completed your Fusion paths so the fusion reaction that we are pursuing is deuterium and territium being fused together to form a helium atom and a neuteron so the neuteron runs away with a good fraction of the energy of the fusion reaction while the helium is a massive particle that is actually used to heat up the remaining Fusion fuel all and in the process of fusion we convert mass into energy and based upon Einstein's equation E equals m c squared c squared being gigantic number a little bit of mass is actually converted into a lot of energy and you create a more I mean stable a little bit less mass and a lot of energy and that is what we're trying to harvest in this process wait wait so how about the runaway a neutron where does that go into witness protection witness protection it just goes and scatters around in concrete until it basically finally stops but it can be harvested using the correct or the appropriate technology and turned into useful energy or turned into electricity or something that that's what I was wondering because you can't electrically trap it because it's neutral so it actually so all this energy has to just sort of slam into something and then and that energy then becomes heat I guess correct yes so yeah there there's a collector what would it be I'm so fascinated by this right now I don't know what to do my head is swimming so you know the byproduct the neutron so here it is scattering are you saying that you could some sort of collector and what and you would be able to gather that yes it's something like a molten salt mantle around the target chamber that kinetically absorb the neutrons and get heat to them Jesus Christ you could heat that could heat up and that could be you to actually do the the traditional way we make energy right now which is heat water turned into the Steam and turn the turbine except that you're not burning anything to to create that steam that is do you know that the oil companies are going to kill you man what are you doing they like it you should not be in public all right all right I'm sorry we'll embargo this this workout right so but let me get back to this I know that you can find deuterium in just regular water supply it was one out of whatever a thousand Watermark tools has a whatever the number maybe one out of 100 I think has of the hydrogen in the H2O is actually deuterium where are you getting your hydrogen that has two neutrons which is the tritium sorry sorry I'm sorry your two physicists talking to each other regular person here okay let's you let's get back rewind I got this i got this I got it okay so hydrogen minding its own business yes one proton right that's normal hydrogen right you can give it a neutron it's still hydrogen that's right except it's a little heavier when we call it heavy hydrogen okay deuterium so that's two okay okay you can get it second Neutron cramming in there now it has three nuclear particles and that's tritium okay but it's still hydrogen it's still hydrogen okay so now that's what's going on here that's what's going on so now the other thing is one in every what molecules now is uh tell me Bruno is it 100 or one in a thousand somewhere around there uh one in five thousand uh atoms in normal like uh or seawater is actually a heavy uh hydrogen or a deuterium atom so it can be extracted I mean through chemical techniques through distillation and plus it's combining it's making the same molecule as a regular H2O because it's right chemistry is the same it's just a heavier hydrogen right man I'm telling you right now if I had just known all this crap when I was in school I might not be a comedian right now amazing no it's fun it's fun stuff so Bruno where are you getting now the territory is a much more complicated story because it doesn't occur in a natural process except that at extremely lower balances like 10 minus 18 which is physically non-existent so our current supply of tritium release generated as a byproduct in traditional nuclear reactors for example one way that it's generated is by you take a deuterium atom and you bombard it with neutrons like what happens in a nuclear reactor if it heavy water is used to cool then it creates once in a while at a tritium atom and you can extract that and make it available for use technically then it takes energy to make the the tritium that's in your reaction is that part of your energy budget so that's the current process uh the process that we would like to pursue for inertial Fusion Energy is to use a much use the neutrons that are generated in the fusion process to create your own territum and you can do that for example by bombarding lithium or molten lithium or lithium salt with neutrons and that creates tritium that can then be extracted from the process so you once you have enough fuel to start you can start creating I mean you your own fuel right so once again self-perpetual you're eating the whole carcass there's nothing left over using it all yes yes okay so now you get to your so you do that they come together in your high temperature now you have helium three right so now we have two protons which is helium and normally it wants two neutrons but now it only has one Neutron so that's helium three and you're still not done correct yeah okay I guess what I'm asking is I happen to know you surely know also that uh the solar wind is very rich in helium-3 and helium three is heavily embedded in the surface of the Moon and there's been talk of mining surface mining the helium-3 from the Moon and then injecting that directly into your nuclear fusion so you don't have to go through the the the the the deuterium trading process before you land on helium-4 the full uh red blooded helium so what any thoughts about that uh yeah there is an alternative fusion reaction the D plus helium-3 can easily also form helium 4. uh and but it's threshold of the temperature that is needed in order to start a reaction is is higher almost twice as high as the theory matritium and not as effective so we still have a more efficient process with DT than the D helium tree did not know that okay all right yeah so the the deuterium tritium I mean fusion reaction is really the most effective way of achieving I mean ignition and operating the system although many others are pursued I mean they are much less efficient and much harder to achieve so you're saying you don't actually make helium 4 you you stop at the helium-3 and you get enough energy and you're happy with that yeah okay now let me pivot now to lasers because all this is in enabled empowered by lasers and this is your bailiwick here so so let's let's get on the same page here what's the difference between my PowerPoint laser at 192 lasers you blasted your target with the amount of power generated by a typical uh pointing source is about a few milliwatts the nif can generate 500 trillion Watts 500 petawatts on a Target and with an energy of uh two megajoules two million jewels yeah so yeah which is I mean billions and billions times more than what's typically obtained from a small laser so it is the world's largest highest energy and highest powered laser uh it's uh contains 192 individual laser beams each of these laser beams can go up to I mean uh 10 or a little bit more than 10 kilojoules of UV radiation which is uh each by itself I mean the world's largest laser and so it is a tremendous uh departure from the typical and the previously used lasers in Fusion ignition it's almost a factor of 60 larger than the Nova laser and similar than others or the similar factors compared to other lasers in the world and so it is one of the first lasers that is really engineered instead of being a tabletop large scientific laser it's a laser that is really designed to be compact cost effective I mean high energy high power and it is really set up I mean to meet ignition and rear worked uh almost 20 years to bring that laser from initial design in the early 90s to starting the building at the end of the night is starting the laser begin beginning of the 2000s and completing the lasers in 2009 when we started to do actual experiments so it took us 20 years I mean to build and put these lasers together and it it wasn't incredible I mean it's it's a laser that was just engineered so well that when we brought it up it all worked and it all met it actually it's a design requirements that very quickly it exceeded its design requirements in the way that we currently operated and the way that we achieved the ignition experiment just to be clear did I hear you say that each of the 192 lasers is itself the most powerful laser in the world did you say wow yes so this is the laser that cats actually hate you can't say no yeah they don't just like look at that we lost another cat guys yeah no yeah they have no recourse against it [Laughter] so so but just to be clear my low power presentation laser which you dissed um I presume makes a laser beam in in the same using the same physics as your lasers isn't that great that's correct so tell us what that physics is so the the physics is based upon uh light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation forward I mean to describe I mean the process by which you can actually store energy in molecules and use radiation to actually stimulate or trigger the emission of photons so that when you do that in a coherent way in a way where a beam of photons that goes in the same direction with the same wavelength uh basically creates more photons or more copies of itself and creates a brighter and brighter beam that goes One Direction that has one color and that is the difference I mean between a normal ordinary incandescent bulb where you have light it goes all directions over a wide spectrum of wavelengths the laser beams are now it's a way of means of extracting energy from a medium that you have excited using another energy source and that could be another laser there could be a flash lamp to provide a medium that then can undergo light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation and that's the mechanism that is being used to generate the laser beams so as you said and the design of Any Given laser only can generate one wavelength of light that comes out so there's no you can't tune a laser I guess it's only good for that one kind of light that comes out is that correct that's correct though some laser some gain Media or methods I mean allow some a little bit of tunability around the a certain wavelength but the laser itself is always I mean it's it's basically characterized by its coherence and that's it basically means a narrow spectrum and a narrow spatial distribution of the energies all right so so the lasers we're all familiar with use visible light the red lasers and Green Lasers and now we have some blue lasers but I heard you refer to ultraviolet uh so are these UV lasers instead uh the laser itself the solid state lasers that are used uh to add to create the beams and amplify the beams largely use neodymium in a glass media because we need to be able to handle very high energies and be very efficient at the same time and they tend to operate in the infrared so basically it's a wavelength just above the visible region uh it's just the wavelength around one micron now the targets don't like the infrared light because they basically create a plasma and stand the laser beam right back towards the laser which is not a good thing to happen and so we learned in our previous laser systems that you need to have a shorter wavelength and we first started to double the frequency of the laser so we turn the infrared to Green and finally we found that actually converting the latest infrared to ultraviolet was even much more efficient because the ultraviolet light can penetrate deeper into the plasma that you're forming and so it's much better much more of the energy is absorbed and used for uh heating the plasma that then can start your Fusion reactions yeah you guys are being very efficient about everything just move you know and and I'm just trying to add up all the smarts that that takes and I'm just very impressed just listening to you talk about this and you're in your in your laser Dome that you have there these are dumb I like it we're going to take a quick break when we come back we're going to talk to our special guest this acting director of the national ignition facility of the Lawrence Livermore National Labs we're going to ask him about the future of lasers and and what's next in line and and when are we going to have Mr home Fusion to power our cars like in the movie Back to the Future we're gonna learn all of that when we return on StarTalk we're back start talk we're talking about lasers and fusion with the acting director of the national ignition facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab I think I nailed that one that time yes okay you get you get it so Bruno I've heard people joke about Lawrence Livermore Labs that those Three L's really stand for lasers lasers and lasers is that so I I remember you know looking at the Guinness Book of World Records tracking who had the most powerful laser in the world and it always landed at Livermore so what why yes you did something great with these most powerful lasers but over time why the why the the is it just bragging rights that you have the most powerful laser or is there some real scientific objective for it it was a scientific and Technology bootstrapping process where every time we come up with the design for and igniting Target or an igniting experiment we build the lasers we try to Target and we figured out well there was something missing your understanding we needed more laser energy and power there were more energy losses in the process there were different conditions and so it took us five six of those Cycles since the 70s to figure out the design like the national ignition facility were with high confidence he said we now have the right recipe the right number of lasers the right symmetry the right Precision in the laser to achieve all the conditions that are required to make ignition happen and it's not all about the size of the lasers to equally important is just the quality the accuracy and the Precision of where you point the beams where you time the beams how the power is distributed because uh you take a capsule and you compress it 30 fold so you take a basketball and you turn it into a p and if you don't have I mean Exquisite symmetry I mean you don't get a peak you get some something that just I mean comes out through your head that's the sounds the sound effects as well yes yes very good so you need extremely I mean high energy high power but also extremely precise uh it's extremely stable extremely well controlled lasers you're creating a perfect implosion right yes from all directions out of this sphere the only value of your lasers is to get the right temperature plasma when you're done we've also heard of a magnetically contained infusion I guess the Tokamak is a whole other possible approach to Fusion how do they get their plasma because their plasma is also millions of degrees right yeah but the plasma are lowers temperature and densities and they are basically held together using magnet magnets in a large vacuum chamber so it's a very large plasma that is uh contained and heated up using uh an induction process so it's quite different so it's they don't use lasers and lasers are only used for Diagnostics but not to derive the process so and forgive me for some of our our viewers and and listeners could you just tell us what a plasma is because I think we were just using it like it's of course we know what a plasma is typically most people's understanding of the word comes from blood plasma right to remove the I gives it the platelets or whatever and what's left is plasma so this medical plasma so what is the physical plasma astrophysical plant physical plasma is basically a collection of a medium of atoms that has been energized or to such a level that it starts to lose its electrons and so the electrons and the nuclei start to form a Continuum and start to uh float around each other so you have free electrons so that means that means it could respond to magnetic fields whereas a normal gas would not have the reason to yeah okay and and and why why did they think this was a good idea for televisions class for televisions yeah it's it but now you have lasers television too this is true which is awesome yeah which is sharper sharper than the yeah wait isn't isn't the gas inside of neon tubes a plasma and in fluorescent tubes isn't that all plants because it's very easily ionized and so it's it usually forms a plasma without having to go to very high temperatures it's just right and that and that little you don't see it anymore but that that glow ball yeah that's put your hands on you put your hand on and you see it's just like glowing gas Bruno have you seen these I don't know how they let you out you know so we have seen those we use those balls you know in gift shops yeah yeah but they're all applications of it but the the plasma also allows to uh to be heated further and further and so you can create I mean interesting conditions and you can start to experiment and have uh have atoms I mean do interesting I mean physics for you and most of the universe is plasma I mean all stars are plasma and so we're we're kind of we live with it when we study that I just want to ask because you know as you were talking about the refinement of these lasers over a period of time but it's always been in service to finding a better way to achieve Fusion in that process has there been advancements in lasers that we benefit like maybe you guys didn't benefit but we did you mean spin-offs on roof spin-offs yeah yeah we have had a number of uh spin-offs that are not uh directly I mean coming to your home although I mean there were a technique that is being used for example to harden turbine blades for jet engines using lasers that's important now that has been commercialized and is used on a relatively wide scale uh there are applications of diagnostic systems that were developed for laser Fusion facilities I just wondered how the turbine blames are harder maybe they'll just slice up those ducts well and then we can collect them on the back end and make lunch so now when a plane flies into flocks of geese or whatever like uh Sully did in landing but some River um I don't know it helps it helps with that but it also makes you feel better when you're flying that you know the engine is going to survive the flight and not basically start to disassemble somewhere on Route so when that happens yeah ladies and gentlemen this is your captain as you can see we just threw uh flew through a flock of geese and I want to let you know that our in-flight meal today will be duck all around [Laughter] so Bruno tell me again do you think what you have achieved here is scalable whatever that word means as I'm using it I don't know but scalable so that it can be ported to power stations or maybe I can have one of these in my garage or or but yeah where does this go after what you've done yeah so this concept can lead to uh uh the design of inertial Fusion Energy based power plants uh those are fairly large plants because the laser system we're needing is is it's not a small laser system it is a large facility I mean we stuck in stadiums sized lasers we have to do a significant amount of engineering development because we need to run them at 10 times per second instead of one time a day we need to have targets that can be I mean produced I mean at the rate of 10 times per second we need to develop I mean a system I mean to capture the energy uh hmm produce the tritium fuel that is needed to run it and then convert the energy I mean basically to electricity but it's just that's just engineering at this point it's not physics there's a lot of engineering there is no you got the physics down if you get the physics done I mean we still want more higher gain than what we achieved on the December experiment but we have ways to do that we understand how we can achieve that and so yes we believe that I mean within a few a decade two decades we may have I mean a working model of an inertial Fusion Energy plant and so how about one for my car where I have a Mr Fusion home device you just put stuff in the top and then close it down and then I run that's my day's fuel is that would be like a portable version of it right so that is a little bit I mean uh further or far-fetched from this because I mean right now the scale of the lasers or the scale up that is required I mean doesn't lend itself easily I mean to a very a compact system so but it doesn't mean that we'll or there may be ideas to do this computers used to be the size of entire rooms factories just to do simple calculations and now you know we carried around on our hip so do you think lasers might not be shrinkable in that way uh they're also definitely materials that can be made more efficient and it can be drivers that are more efficient so yes they will scale um not sure though that they will scale large enough to be a tabletop type of device but then again I'd never I don't want to say no because again what do we see I mean like in the development of the cell phone I mean that was inconceivable 50 years ago right to have something in your pocket that tells you where to walk right and how to drive I remember I my my first GPS device was this large it was handheld but it was huge and its only job was to give me my coordinates as I walked it was a fun sort of Novel and it didn't work no no yeah and now it's some chip inside of something that one-tenth the size of what the whole thing did and it does a hundred other things including make a phone call wow so so what's in the future at your at your facility yeah can we have guns that go you want laser you want laser guns yeah yeah well there's actually a significant effort on uh laser-based domain or directed energy weapons I mean besides I mean Fusion applications uh that the in terms of the fusion applications and work that will be done in the National ignition facility you want to achieve I mean significantly higher gains I mean we this time we obtained three Mega Joule I mean we would like to obtain 10 mega Joule 50 Mega Joule 100 Mega joule and basically improve I mean the process improve the physics improve the quality of the targets and investigate what needs to be done and make it then the fusion yield I mean uh useful I mean for our stockpile stewardship goals so uh in the mission statement of Lawrence Livermore lab if I remember it correctly it's you are the Nations repository and intellectual Center for everything nuke right nuclear energy is you right so uh if you once you're done doing the fusion thing and then it gets mass produced or whatever is there a next project that's still within that mission statement that you'll continue to do well the next uh challenge that we're looking at is even higher yields or yields around 500 megajoule or even a giga joule which was always I mean the goal of what we call the Laser microfusion or the laboratory microfusion facility uh which would have significant implications and significant benefits in our goal of achieving the safety and reliability of the stockpile and so that would be I mean our next step in the in the laboratory well of course I mean we will be participating and helping out and working together with Private Industry developing inertial Fusion Energy wow okay so Chuck just so you're on the same page as what he just said okay did you hear him say gigajoules yes I did okay so Joule is a unit of energy right and one joule per second is by definition a watt right so if he gets to 1.22 gigawatts then you can travel through time no that's it yeah yeah this game that is the secret energy level in Back to the Future that's amazing um no this has been a delightful conversation Bruno and uh we have not met before thank you for uh taking our call and if we can put you on speed dial if you have any new new developments we'll put you back on and we'll see uh what else because our we have a very eager curious and interested following yes and our listeners are smart okay all right no I'm I'm definitely interested in uh in coming back because there's a lot more to talk about we will totally make that happen all right uh again great to have you uh we our guest has been Bruno van [Music] um yes the national ignition facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs and uh he's in charge there what do you call them Chuck Boss Man Boss Man okay I get that all right put that on your on your business card and then people will treat you a whole other way when you do that Chuck always good to have you man always a pleasure Neil deGrasse Tyson here this has been star talk as always I bid you to keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 186,008

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Bruno Van Wonterghem, Lawrence Livermore, NIF, National Ignition Facility, fusion, thermonuclear fusion, nuclear power, lasers, laser, jules, watts, ignition, the sun, tunneling, quantum tunneling, neutrons, nucleus, kinetic energy, heavy hydrogen, Helium 3, deuterium, tritium, DOE, energy, plasma

Id: MgJLvwYHMX8

Length: 53min 14sec (3194 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023