Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough; Powering Electric Vehicles; Carbon Capture | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

last month the nearest star to the Earth was in California in a laboratory for the first time the world's largest lasers forced atoms of hydrogen to fuse together in the same kind of energy producing reaction that fires the sun it lasted less than a billionth of a second but after six Decades of toil and failure the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proved it could be done effusion becomes commercial power one day it would be endless and carbon free in other words it would change human destiny as you'll see there's far to go but after December's breakthrough we were invited to tour the lab and meet the team that brought star power down to earth uncontrolled Fusion is easy mastered so long ago the films are in black and white Fusion is what a hydrogen bomb does releasing energy by forcing atoms of hydrogen to fuse together what's been impossible is harnessing the fires of Armageddon into something useful the U.S department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helps maintain nuclear weapons and experiments with high energy physics an hour east of San Francisco we met livermore's director Kim budell in the lab that made history the national ignition facility the national ignition facility is the world's largest most energetic laser it was built starting in the 1990s to create conditions in the laboratory that had previously only been accessible in the most extreme objects in the universe like the center of giant planets or the Sun or in operating nuclear weapons and the goal was to really be able to study that kind of very high energy high density condition in a lot of detail the national ignition facility or nif was built for three and a half billion dollars to ignite self-sustaining Fusion they tried nearly 200 times over 13 years but like a car with a weak battery the atomic engine would never turn over nif drew some nicknames it did for many years the not ignition facility the never ignition facility uh more recently than nearly ignition facility so this recent event has really put the ignition in the Neff ignition means igniting a fusion reaction that puts out more energy than the lasers put in so if you can get it hot enough dense enough fast enough and hold it together long enough the fusion reactions start to self-sustain and that's really what happened here on December 5th main laser operation will begin in approximately one minute last month the laser shot fired from this control room put two units of energy into the experiment atoms began fusing and about three units of energy came out Tammy ma who leads the lab's laser Fusion research initiatives got the call while waiting for a plane and I burst into tears it was just tears of joy and I actually physically started shaking and jumping up and down in in you know at the gate before everybody bored so everybody was like what is that crazy woman doing Tammy ma is crazy about engineering and that's another one of our sensors she showed us why the problem of fusion would bring anyone to tears first there's the energy required which is delivered by lasers in these tubes that are longer than a football field and how many are there altogether 192 each one of these lasers is one of the most energetic in the world and you have 192 of them that's pretty cool right well pretty hot actually millions of degrees which is why they use keys to lock up the lasers the beams strike with the power 1 000 times greater than the entire National power grid three one your lights don't go out at home when they take a shot because these capacitors store the electricity in the tubes the laser beams amplify by racing back and forth and the Flash is a fraction of a second we have to get to these incredible conditions officer than the center of the Sun all of that like very high energy densities all that Wallop vaporizes a Target nearly too small to see can I hold this thing absolutely let's go there we go unbelievable absolutely amazing Michael staderman's team builds the hollow Target shells that are loaded with hydrogen at 430 degrees below zero the Precision that we need for making these shells is Extreme the shells are almost perfectly round they have a roughness that is 100 times better than a mirror you think about that if it wasn't smoother than a mirror imperfections would make the implosion of atoms uneven causing a fusion fizzle so these need to be as close to perfect as humanly possible that's right this way and we do think there are among the most perfect items that we have on Earth staterman's lab pursues Perfection by vaporizing carbon and forming the shell out of diamond they build fifteen hundred a year to make 150 nearly perfect all the components are brought together under the microscope itself and then the assembler uses electromechanical stages to put the parts where they're supposed to go move them together and then we apply glue using a hair a hair yeah usually something like an eyelash or a similar or cat whisker you apply glue with a cat whisker this way why does it have to be so small the laser gives us only a finite amount of energy and to drive a bigger capsule we would need more energy so it's a constraint of the facility that you've seen that is very large and despite its big size this is about what we can drive with it the target could be larger but then the laser would have to be larger on December 5th they used a thicker Target so it would hold its shape longer and they figured out how to boost the power of the laser shot without damaging the lasers so this is an example of a Target before the shot Tammy ma showed us an intact Target assembly that diamond shell you saw is inside that silver colored cylinder this assembly goes into a blue vacuum chamber three stories tall it's hard to see here because it's bristling with lasers and instruments this instrument they call Dante because they told us it measures the fires of hell one physicist said you should see the target we blasted December 5th which made us ask could we have you seen this before this is the first time I'm seeing it for Tammy Ma and for the world this is the first look at what's left of the target assembly That Changed History an artifact like Belle's first phone or Edison's light bulb this thing is going to end up in the Smithsonian the target cylinder was blasted to Oblivion the Copper support that held it was peeled backward the explosion on the end of this was hotter than the sun it was hotter than the center of the sun we were able to achieve temperatures that were the hottest in the entire solar system which would make an astronomical change in Electric Power unlike today's nuclear plants which split atoms apart fusing them is many times more powerful with little long-term radiation and it's easy to turn off so no meltdowns but getting from the first ignition to a power plant will be hard how many shots do you take in a day we take on average a little more than one shot per day if this was theoretically a commercial power plant how many shots a day would be required approximately 10 shots per second would be required and the other big challenge of course is not just increasing the repetition rate but also getting the gain out of the targets to go up to about a factor of a hundred Not only would the reactions have to produce 100 times more energy but a power plant would need 900 000 perfect diamond shells a day also the lasers would have to be much more efficient remember December's breakthrough put two units of energy in and got three out well it took 300 units of power to fire the lasers by that standard it was 300 in three out that detail was not front and center at the department of Energy's December news conference which fused the advance with an unlikely timeline today's announcement is a huge step forward to the president's goal of achieving achieving commercial Fusion within a decade when you heard that President Biden's goal was commercial fusion power in a decade you thought what I thought it was nonsense Charles seif is a trained mathematician science author and professor at New York University who wrote a 2008 book on the hyping of fusion power I don't want to diminish the fact that this is a real achievement ignition is a milestone that people have been trying for to do for years I'm afraid that there's so many technical hurdles even after this great achievement that 10 years is a pipe dream those hurdles Sipe says include scaling up livermore's achievement the December shot generated about enough Excess power to boil two pots of coffee the hurdles might be overcome seif says but not soon I have a running bet going that we're not going to have it by 2050. still betting against Charles sipe's prophecy are more than 30 private companies designing various approaches to fusion power including using magnets not lasers three billion dollars in private money flowed into those companies in the last 13 months including bets by Bill Gates and Google amid all this speculation Lawrence livermore's director Kim budell is certain of one thing can you do it again absolutely they're going to try again next month budell agrees the obstacles are enormous but she told us commercial fusion power could be demonstrated in 20 years or so with enough funding and dedication we likened the first ignition to the first Wright brothers flight which covered only 120 feet it's one thing to believe that the science is possible that the conditions can be created it's another to see it in action and it really is a remarkable feeling after working for 60 years to get to this point um to have first taken that first flight it was 44 years from a puddle jump to supersonic flight whether fusion power is 10 or 50 years away is now mainly an engineering problem Lawrence Livermore has proven that from a machine A Star is Born the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable electric power has gone mainstream most visibly in the Auto industry the major car companies are chasing Tesla with ambitious plans for fleets of electric vehicles those cars and trucks run on lithium batteries the U.S has massive quantities of lithium but has been slow to invest in the mining and extraction of the metal that's about to change lithium operations powered by Clean energy are being developed in a long neglected impoverished part of California by the Salton Sea not far from the Mexican border the region is being called lithium Valley and just like the 1849 Gold Rush companies are racing to strike it rich east of San Diego and south of Palm Springs lies the Salton Sea California's largest inland body of water spreading East from the sea is a giant underground mineral-rich geothermal field boiling with potassium sodium and lithium it is a world-class lithium resource this is when you hear estimates of how big this resource could be it's usually measured on annual tons produced and we're confident that this is a in excess of 300 000 tons a year right now that's way more than half of the world supply of lithium Eric spomer is CEO of energy source minerals a company based by the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley it's steaming ahead with plans to recover lithium using an existing Electric Plant powered by the vast underground geothermal field we're moving into an era of Green Technology especially with our cars where does this fit in are more conservative projection would support seven and a half million electric vehicles a year which is half of the total U.S Car Sales cars and trucks coming from the Salton Sea area correct what about this plant this plant will be 20 000 tons per year which is equivalent to about 500 000 vehicles per year once up and running the tons of lithium generated here will be shipped refined and processed into millions of rechargeable electric car batteries over 50 percent of our lineup and our retail sales will be from Battery electric vehicles by the end of the decade Mark Stewart is head of stalantis North America a global car maker that owns some of America's Best Known Brands including Chrysler Jeep and Ram trucks it really is quote unquote the Industrial Revolution the next phase right this is the most interesting and exciting time to be a part of our industry stalantis is investing 35 billion dollars in an ambitious historic transformation we're reimagining our factories on our assembly plants they're already rolling our plug-in hybrids as well as looking to two new battery joint ventures that are in Full Construction right now the new Industrial Revolution it absolutely is it's really the the biggest technological changes in our industry in nearly 100 years we were down in the Salton Sea region they believe they can supply the lithium needs for All American car manufacturers absolutely that is the case whatever they can produce you guys will be buying it we for sure will take as much as we can get and as much as we have we have already secured early lithium is key to powering electric cars the dense metal helps make batteries rechargeable there's a lot of it around but extracting lithium is dirty business most comes from Rock mines in Australia or as powder evaporated from mineral ponds in South America the U.S has one lithium evaporation plant in Nevada energy source plans to break ground on a clean billion dollar facility here by the Salton Sea in the next few months so the plant will fit in this spot right here correct that's not a big that's not a big footprint no what are these we call them the mud pots and they are CO2 vents hot CO2 with fluid that's bubbling to the surface so this is evidence of the Heat and activity going on underground correct the 600 degree geothermal brine that powers the Region's electric plants comes from more than a mile beneath the Earth the boiling brine produces clean steam which drives turbines to generate enough electricity to power 400 000 homes in the past the mineral-rich brine was simply returned to the earth now energy source plans to extend the process and extract lithium from the brine before re-injecting it underground our process in combination with this resource will be the cleanest most efficient lithium process in the world and how long before the lithium processed here will be in commercial use in the U.S in 2025. a lot of the components that go into the batteries have been coming from um you know anywhere around the world but but America why was that we have a lot of decent resources in North America they've just been undeveloped David Deek worked for Tesla traveling the world to find the best sources of lithium as it was building up production of its electric vehicles or EVS Tesla turned to the lithium ion battery to power its cars the same kind of rechargeable battery Sony first mass-produced for its camcorders there was a new market for Consumer Electronics but the vast majority is for electric vehicles and that was pretty much triggered by Tesla triggered by Tesla also you know there's a lot of UV growth and Eve demand and production in China that's been a big part of a big part of the global lithium demand Story come on in Deke is now energy sources Chief development officer and says he had a Eureka moment when he saw its unique technology at the company's lab Deke showed us the mechanics in miniature the full-size plant will be 100 times larger so what goes on inside this cylinder is it pellets or what what is the The Matrix yeah I think of it as beads in a in a column much like the activated carbon that you would find in a Brita filter it works in a similar concept a Brita filter will filter all impurities out of water this orbitant is something that would only take in lithium and not absorb everything else the system takes just a few hours to turn this orange brine into this clear lithium solution which will be dried into powder and this is what everybody's looking for that's what everyone wants here by the Salton Sea energy source is leading the race for lithium Warren Buffett's bhe Renewables runs 10 geothermal power plants in the region and there's another on the drawing board by an Australian company controlled thermal resources both Ventures are moving to tap the promise bubbling under the Earth CEO Rod Colwell told us controlled thermal resources had been fine-tuning the process at this test facility for 90 days we're producing lithium from live brine here behind us this is our optimization plant based on what it learns here controlled thermal resources plans to build a new plant for recovering lithium which costs about four thousand dollars a ton to extract and currently is selling for six times more the noise is from the machines cooling 600 degree brine rising from the well releasing steam this is a battery grade product from Salton Sea brine this for you is Eureka this is absolutely Eureka yes Rod Colwell told us this bottle of clear lithium chloride is the purest product from this test facility so far this is the first time this has been in my hands this happened last night I might take that home with me that's about ten dollars worth of lithium right there so you know it works we know it works the question here in the Salton Sea Basin is will it work for everyone this Rich lithium resource Lies Beneath one of the poorest sections of California the Salton Sea was created when the Colorado River flooded the Basin in 1905 but for the past 50 years the main source of water has been chemical Laden agricultural runoff and for decades now the sea has been evaporating and shrinking a once thriving tourist industry has been replaced by environmental Decay toxic dust and economic hardship and with unemployment in the region hovering around 16 percent there's a lot riding on turning the Imperial Valley into lithium Valley Governor Newsom called it you know the Saudi Arabia of lithium I think you know it can change the landscape of the region Frank Ruiz the Audubon society's local program director is fighting to include the community in that change he was a commissioner on the state panel studying how the entire region can benefit from the potential Underground you're an environmentalist how do you reconcile the industrialization of this area with saving the wildlife and the communities we need to learn how to balance at tables the lithium industry can be really good you know for these communities it can you know it can provide better pay jobs it can provide more job opportunities especially for the younger folks it can provide the revenues you know to offset the challenges that we have here at the Salton Sea geologists predict once the industry is fully operational the lithium underground should last for Generations before running out good news for stalantis which ran out of batteries for its plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler last year we sold out what happened the you know if if I could turn back my crystal ball bill I would have secured a little more capacity for uh for last year to prevent that from happening in the future Mark Stewart and stellantis have committed to buying lithium from controlled thermal resources at the Salton Sea knowing it will be years before its product is commercially viable we secured a large Supply from them over a 10-year period because we are very positive on their technology so is car maker General Motors which has invested in controlled thermal resources the department of energy and U.S automakers are eager for domestic lithium the companies were stung when the pandemic disrupted the worldwide supply chain stalling shipments of microchips Parts and batteries still today three quarters of all lithium batteries are processed in Asia current lithium what typically happens right it's mined in one spot it's moved across the world for processing and comes back think of all that additional cost think of all that additional carbon that's being used to do that and at the end someone pays for it and that's a consumer so will having this domestic supply of lithium help keep the cost of electric vehicles down it will certainly help prices for electric cars are coming down and are projected to be on par with gas vehicles within a few years driven in part by the tax incentives in the 2022 inflation reduction Act Eric spomer of energy source told us the tax benefits have also been a catalyst for developing domestic lithium we're starting to see big announcements of Investments to create that domestic demand so it doesn't ever have to go across an ocean this seems like this is a game changer for American industry it's a competitive Advantage it's an opportunity that we can be a leader globally and why not lead last month the world's top climate scientists delivered a sobering warning their Mammoth report to the U.N boiled down to one message act now before the climate breakdown becomes Unstoppable the report says extreme weather has forced millions of people from their homes and devastated Food Supplies oil and gas emissions are at a record high the U.N report calls for drastic Cuts in fossil fuels but if our old Technologies got us into this mess can new ones get us out among politicians corporations and billionaires one new technology is gaining traction it's called direct air capture that vacuums carbon dioxide out of thin air and locks it away underground sound like science fiction we thought so too until we went to Iceland to see the world's first commercial direct air capture plant in operation here on a frigid plane near the Arctic Circle worries about an overheating Planet seemed far away yet tiny Iceland has put itself on the front line with a new kind of machine that will fight climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air this is orca the first commercial direct air capture plant on Earth what are these fans how she the back system by eight of these fans Carlos herrtle is Chief technology officer for climb works the Swiss company that built Orca he told us as the fans draw air in the carbon dioxide is trapped by a special filter inside these giant collectors each the size of a shipping container the captured CO2 is then siphoned off to storage tanks we had to shout over the powerful fans as a bitter wind whipped around us so you didn't come for this wonderful weather no we did not we knew that the windows were harsh but it's a good real life test as well for the plant what you're describing almost sounds like science fiction but what you're saying is that we can actually do this people never doubted the fundamental physics or chemistry of it but realizing it under real life conditions is a whole different matter and that's what this system shows it can be done climb works is now building a new plant in Iceland 10 times the size of orca that will look like this a modular design that Hertel told us can be easily assembled but capturing the CO2 is only half of the story so this is where the magic happens the second half starts here in these metal igloos where the CO2 is sent to be buried in the porous volcanic rock of Iceland so this pipe is actually filled with water Sandra ozke is a geologist with carb fix an Icelandic company that pioneered the groundbreaking injection method here we have the CO2 and the CO2 is actually dissolved in water so it's actually just fizzy water just fizzy water yeah and this fizzy water is being injected here into the injection well this is how far down does it go it actually reaches over a mile a mile down yeah the fizzy water is shot like a SodaStream into Iceland's basaltic rock where it reacts with the minerals and hardens to Stone in less than two years so the fizzy water turns into this yes in just a matter of years so you so you take this gas that you can't see you turn it into fizzy water and then it turns to Stone and you don't have to worry about it turned into stone it's quite amazing carb fix didn't invent the process nature did but nature takes Millennia after years of experimenting in Iceland's grueling outdoor laboratory carb fix figured out how to speed things up aerospace engineer Carlos Herald told us Orca was a milestone now the hard part starts scaling up fast enough to slow climate change whether we are taking the right direction will depend as much on societal things then on technical matters am I optimistic as an engineer I am absolutely as a citizen maybe half half I haven't made my mind yet this goal can be reached technically it's just whether we have the political and social will to do it I think that's the exact right way of looking at it there's been a stampede of investment Microsoft Airbus Insurance giant Swiss re have poured in millions of dollars but it's a stupifying challenge Orca is built to take out the emissions of about 800 cars or 4 000 tons of CO2 a year a tiny fraction of the annual 10 billion tons scientists say we need to remove from the atmosphere it's the problem of Our Generation it's like a moonshot it's going calorie hegelson is an astrophysicist with carb fix he told us studying space helped him to think big we met him on a Barren stretch of rock that could have been Mars but hegelson told us he saw potential we need big Solutions we need to return the carbon back to where it came from which is the Earth tell me what you're doing here this will be a first of a Kind carbon mineral storage terminal which means that we are going to bring in CO2 transported from industrial Point sources in Europe and ship it here and inject it for a full mineral storage thank you it will be the world's first industrial scale underground disposal site for CO2 a bowl of handling 3 million tons a year hegelson sketched out a new world where tankers running on green methanol would transport carbon dioxide from European businesses to Iceland is this going to happen fast enough to help us with climate change I don't know to be perfectly honest we are demonstrating the first mineral storage Hub here at the Megaton scale whether that will happen in time that is not entirely up to us that is up to politicians governance financers societies and quite frankly we are running out of time direct air capture as it now exists is expensive and energy intensive in Iceland that energy is geothermal renewable and green that's not the case elsewhere so governments in Europe and the US have dangled billions of dollars of tax breaks to encourage companies to take the plunge but there's a bigger question than just who writes the check do you fear that that people will think oh well we can now clean the air we can just take the CO2 out of the air so we can carry on with business as usual all the time yeah but that's not how it works we must stop the emissions and wean ourselves off of fossil fuels that's what we need to do right now on top of that we also must take down the carbon that we've already put up in the atmosphere only then will we reach our climate goals so carbon capture can never be an excuse for continuing business as usual but it's that business as usual that critics are warning against as direct air capture expands to the U.S that's because here oil companies are one of the Technology's biggest boosters they have been capturing CO2 to inject into oil wells for decades not to bury it but to flush out more oil for cowrie hegelson of carb fix and many others that's a non-starter we don't see the needs to work with the oil and gas sector if the oil and gas industry could help with the financing of the direct air capture why not team up with them we don't need them for direct air capture and quite frankly we don't want there to be an oil and gas industry and 40 50 years there will still be an all industry in 50 years I have no doubt about that I think our company though will be a different company by 2050. that company is Occidental Petroleum and Vicki Holub is CEO she wants to turn oxy into what she calls a carbon management company it has set aside more than a billion dollars to build what will be the world's largest direct air capture plant in Texas so this would represent the CO2 that's equivalent to taking 200 000 cars off the road hollab showed us the Texas version of how CO2 would be sucked out of the air these are air of contact Towers some of the captured CO2 will be locked away underground just as we saw in Iceland some will still be used to extract more oil but Holub told us using carbon sucked out of the air means the new oil produced is what she calls carbon neutral that was hard to wrap our heads for round but she'll be using carbon that you're capturing and taking out of the air to produce more oil that will then generate more carbon but the the oil will emit less carbon than the CO2 we've injected to get it so we've put more at least the equivalent and sometimes more CO2 in the ground to get that oil then the oil will emit when used Holub told us producing oil this way is essential in the transition to a green economy Airlines and ships for example would need to run on fossil fuels until a sustainable alternative is found that could take years until then holleb argues using CO2 to get that oil helps keep a lid on emissions your critics will say you can't trust an oil company talking about reducing CO2 that your mission here is tantamount to green washing I would first say that we would never spend 1.2 billion dollars for green washing so we've got a Monumental task ahead of us the way that the CO2 enhanced oil recovery process works is that we can reduce more out of the atmosphere than what our products will emit when used and so if that's not a concept that people can get then we we will know we will not have a chance to achieve what we need to achieve Philip told us she knows critics of big oil are suspicious and that many feel industry isn't moving fast enough to avoid a climate catastrophe on that point olub doesn't disagree she told us with the help of tax incentives Occidental plans to build 130 more direct air capture plants by 2035. we know how to make it happen we know how to drill the wells we know how to safely sequester it we were in Iceland and we were talking to some of the direct air capture companies and to be blunt they don't quite believe you we're going to walk the talk that's the only way that does it words will never convince anybody we need to get the direct air capture up and working we need to make it better make it more economical and start having it developed all around the world the next decade will be critical if the direct air capture industry is to grow big enough to make an impact both carb fix and climb Works told us they will be expanding to the U.S neither plans to work with the American oil industry

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 1,504,820

Keywords: nuclear fusion, 60 minutes, fusion energy, clean energy, electric vehicles, climate change, lawrence livermore national laboratory, fusion reactor, carbon capture, fusion power, us news, fusion ignition, national ignition facility, electric vehicles 2023

Id: 7ZejZxjvFng

Length: 39min 28sec (2368 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/kylezo]

🤦🏻‍♂️

[u/FireVet99]

Billions of our dollars for a bullshit program! Let’s suck the co2 out of the air, run it through some filters and then pump it back out!! What a joke.