Nuclear fusion within reach | Michel Laberge | TEDxKC

good evening so yesterday I was in the taxi coming back from the airport to my hotel here in Kansas City and over the side of the road I saw huge train yard full of train hundreds of train they were full of coal all the train were just cold so we're still burning that stuff you know and as a matter of fact this planet is using more and more and more energy and most of the energy on the planet is achieved by burning fossil fuel now this is starting to noticeably mess up the atmosphere in the ocean and I think this is probably not such a good idea so we need to find a new source of energy ASAP so over the last 10 years we started working with different other source like internal energy the most popular one being the wind and the Sun and unfocused Lee we find out that is very hard to find something as practical and as cheap as burning dinosaur rotten dinosaur so in my opinion the best solution to all that is nuclear energy nuclear energy is very dense you don't need you surface to collect it it's very solid you know it's reliable you don't need to wait for the good weather to do it and it actually can be cost effective now we can do nuclear energy of two different way the first way is called fission in fission you take a big nucleus usually uranium you throw a neutron at it it breaks in two and it makes energy in a couple of other neutrons that go on to break more nucleus like everybody knows that this is the standard machine that makes the nuclear power plant that we have today they're pretty good but you have a couple of little issues which have prevented the wide use of them now the second way of doing nuclear energy is not very well known for physicists we know it but most of people are not familiar with it and it's fusion now in fusion what you do is you take two small nucleus usually i drogyn and you fuse them together and it makes ileum and a neutron and it makes a lot of energy now this is a lot better than fusion than fission and a nuclear power plant that would work with fusion will not make any meltdown it's impossible for melting down and it would produce only very short live waste so there's not of the big problem that fission have it would be absolutely awesome now the fuel that you need for fusion you can extract it from the ocean so you could extract the fuel from the ocean for one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt hour here in Kansas City the price of electricity I don't know what it is but it's about like ten cents per kilowatt hour or something so one thousandth of a sense of kilowatt are very very cheap fuel and now if the old planet would run on fusion they would be enough fuel in the ocean for two billion years so there's enough fuel and it's nice and it's clean and it's fantastic now how come we don't have it like if it's so great why don't we have fusion power plant left right and center well there's no such thing as a free lunch Fusion is really really hard and the problem with fusion is those little hydrogen that you want to fuse together they both positively charge now you might remember from your high school class that to positive charge repel each other so they don't want to fuse they want to bounce off like this they don't want to go in order to make em fuse they have to have enough speed to go against the repulsion and then touch now speed is the measure of a temperature in a gas the automa wiggling around and the faster they go the hotter it is so the temperature required for fusion is 150 million degrees C this is rather warm so at that temperature the collision are so violent that the atoms have electrons around it the electrons go flying out one way the iron go flying out the other way and you get a big mess of high electron and ion swinging all over the place and this is called a plasma and controlling this superheated plasma is the big deal and this is what I've stumped fusion for quite a few years now I got the fusion bug when I did my PhD in plasma physics in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia and then after that I would needed a real job to make a bit of money so I went in the printing industry and I designed very large printer for the printing industry so was pretty good for ten years but after a while I got a little bit bored I was 40 years old I had a bit of midlife crisis you know what am i doing what should I do in life so I was looking at was doing and I was doing printing so cheap that we could cut all the forests in Canada and burry you all under tons and tons of junk mail so that was the fruit of my labor so I find that not totally satisfactory so I decided in place to single-handedly save the planet from global warming just just that so this is a really ambitious plan but you only live once oh you know go big or go home yo so so the first thing I did is I pull out the book and I look at all the different way that people are doing fusion so the physicists do fusion usually of two main weight so the first way they do fusion with the magnetic field on a machine called a tokamak you can drop that into party you know a tokamak sounds good so you put a bunch of ring of big superconducting magnets all around it makes a big sort of doughnut shaped magnetic field now the plasma is electrically practical charged particle they go around in a circle around the field line and they go around around in the doughnut and they never touch the wall so you can put all sort of heat in there and gets 200 50 million degrees C and it doesn't touch the wall because of the magnetic field and then you can do fusion that way so this ear is the inside of one of those donut on the left it's the machine itself on the right this sort of glowing purple color is the plasma itself now there's a second way of doing it you take a ping-pong ball you put your fusion fuel inside the ping-pong ball then you feel a stadium full of lasers and then you fire all those laser on this little pellet about yay big and you squash it really really hard so when you compress something it gets hot if you compress it fast enough and hard enough it can get fusion hot and it makes the fusion so most people think that those physicists have been in their lab for 40 years and they're getting nowhere and fusion is not in happening thing but that's not quite right because in actual fact oh this is a laser fusion machine so you can see all the beam coming out to the center and on the right the little picture is the pellet that the Beamer focused on so this is the diagram of the fusion progress that we've done in the last 30 years also so in red dot is the fusion performance and you can see that in 30 years between 1970 and 2000 the performance of the fusion machine that those little nerdy physicists are working with when about 10,000 times now this is actually the same growth rate as the number of transistor that we can put on a chip which is the very famous Moore's law now everybody loves the Moore's law everybody's in awe of the Moore's law and nobody know at all about fusion so I think that's not quite fair so this dot here is the jet is the joint European torus this is the picture I show a bit earlier this is in England it's a big tokamak magnetic machine in 1997 this machine produce 16 megawatt of fusion energy but it requires 17 megawatt of heating to do that so that's not quite there but as you can see we improve the fusion by ten thousand so we almost there we're pretty close to this sort of big square on the top that is enough to do energy now this other point here is the Nith the national initiative acidity is a football field full of laser in Livermore California ready fire on those little pellet and about five months ago they announced that they managed to make more fusion energy than the fusion they managed to couple inside the little pallet that's pretty good but not quite good enough because the football field words of laser was having way more energy than that because you know you lose at all stage so the energy in the plasma was less than the energy but they're doing good progress now in the South of France presently they're building a very big machine called eat air it's an international collaboration there's about 10 country that are working on that including the US and they're building a big doughnut one of those tokamak machine and this machine when it comes online will produce 500 megawatt of power with only 50 megawatt of heating so this one will really make power now Fusion is often criticized as being too expensive yeah it did cost you know a couple of billions every year to do this progress here and that looks like a lot of money but the amount of money spent to do the mosula is way more and at the end of the Molalla what they managed to produce is this cell phone here one trillion dollar worth of research to do the cell phone and as far as I can tell when they look at my kid playing with it the only thing you do is they do some selfie and then they put that on the internet and text that to each other so I'm not so sure that fusion is sure is too expensive actually I think fusion have been shortchanged considering we can fix our energy problem forever for the next couple of billion year I think it had been so change so I can say that but I'm a little biased you know I started my own fusion company so so when I decide to start my fusion company in 2002 I knew that I couldn't compete with the big guy like the big lab with the laser and the magnetic fusion that was too much money and those machine are pretty good they awesome beautiful piece of technology they all sort of high-tech gizmos in there every physicists are very excited and they just love them but as a power plant they are not that great they are way too complicated they way too expensive and really they don't have a really good way of catching the energy the energy of the fusion comes out as Neutron and there is Neutron when they hit the wall of the Machine it breaks the wall so that's not very good and also you have to turn that into electricity somehow so I decide okay I'm going to make fusion but I'm not going to make it this way I'm going to try to find a better way of making fusion so I look into the literature and I find quite a few different way of doing fusion and there's one one method in particular that I found quite interesting and it's magnetized target fusion or MTF now that was worked on a little bit in the 1970s so in MTF what we want to achieve is we have a big bucket full of liquid metal and you spin the liquid metal like this and it apparent a big hole in the center like a vortex bit like in toilet you know it goes and then in there you put a lukewarm plasma not too too hot and then you use steam to push them some piston and you compress the plasma and as you compress it it gets even hotter so it's a bit of a mix between a magnetic thing and the laser guy but it's a bit slower and I think it's much more practical it saved a couple of big problem the neutron can hit the wall and they don't hit the wall because they hit the liquid and that you can make steam with that thing and make some energy so this was a very good solution except it didn't work and it's always a little little hick some there so the problem the problem was what when you compress it it was a little too slow and the plasma cool down and evaporate before you have time to compress it so I say I we need to fix this fix the solution so I decide that we could do an impact so if we do an impact we accelerate the piston with a steam just before but the bang we hit another piston and we see all the energy get down low very very fast and it compressed the plasma to fusion temperature so let's say you know calculate that and I say hey this could matter this could work this could work so I didn't wait too much and I rented this nice garage here which was near where I work and I built a small machine about this big that produce a couple of fusion Neutron not very much but there was my marketing Neutron and with those marketing Neutron I managed to raise 50 million dollar and we hire 65 people this is my crew here and we are trying to make big machines so this is the machine we want to build it's going to be a big tree meter bucket of liquid metal spinning around and all those Pistons going to hit on the side and make the process and TF and the neutron will be absorbed by the liquid metal make some steam make some turbine spin and the way you go so we didn't normally do a nice little video like that we also started to make some hardware so this is one of the big plasma injector that inject the plasma in the center at the lukewarm temperature of 2 million degrees C still need to compress it to 150 though so that's not quite a done deal and this is a small tank about 1 meter in diameter with 14 piston the real machine will be tree meter with 200 Pistons so that's not quite quite the done deal so right now we're building all those machine at like at scale and in the next five year we hope to manage to make this big machine all together and demonstrate that fusion will work so most people think about fusion as the energy in the future you know the jet song is going to roller confusion but actually this is not quite true Fusion is coming then it's coming much sooner than we take like the big lab with the laser and the token acting almost there they can almost make fusion so now the thinking is a little changing its changing from can we do it - can we do it cost effectively and it's a small bunch of little company like our company that are starting to look into that and joining the race to make fusion because we can all see that is a big jackpot at the end so somebody somewhere is going to crack that not pretty soon and with a bit of chance it's going to be a general fusion thank you

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Id: b-LCfx9v4YQ

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 28 2014