TAE's History of Innovation, developing environmentally sustainable fusion energy

[Music] ta technologies got started over 20 years ago with a singular goal in mind that is to enable clean sustainable economically viable power from clean fusion we started this quite distinct from the rest of people working in the field of fusion from an end in my own perspective and that laid us down a very distinctly different path than anybody else for instance first choice is fuel cycle it's a very big deal what are your burning is going to affect what comes out and what ta decided on was hydrogen boron why because boron is ubiquitous it's found all over the planet so there is scalability inherent there's very little impact on the environment we can filter this out of sea water we can grab it out of the earth's surface it's a light element it's about 100 000 years of fuel available there's no isolated source of boron in only one unique area of the world it's found everywhere from a national security perspective a very beautiful distribution of available fuel it doesn't cause any radioactivity on the input side it's an inert element it's used in soaps and detergent products and on the output you get helium doesn't combine with anything doesn't cause greenhouse gas emissions doesn't leave particulates behind the atmosphere it's truly clean fusion another critical facet of course is placement can you put this into a dense population center which is ultimately where energy gets consumed if you look at renewables those are produced somewhere where the sun shines or the wind blows then we have to transmit it to the location where you need it they're also not very energy dense so it covers lots of surface area which is negative impact on the environment fusion and particularly hydrogen boron fusion because of its safety aspect can be placed truly where you need it another element we were focused on was cost competitiveness why because in the end of the day it has to fit with the rest of the utility infrastructure and the generation technologies that are already out there it's compete favorably in terms of its maintenance but it also requires in the end the price point where all these things come together hydrogen boron checks all of that it allows you to create something that has high energy density so you can make it compact it's easy to scale it fits the logistic systems of the world because you can centrally manufacture it and bring it out to where you need it on site so they're cost reductions from economy of scale you have a location independence and so you can truly bring it in the most cost effective way as close to the consumption with none of the inefficiencies that come with long transmission lines and things of that nature so you have sustainability you've got scalability and they have clean and that's where we begin from and with that foundation it required now to create infrastructure technology science and engineering to come together to evolve from that concept in the early 90s to where we are today so tae has built a very disciplined 20 plus year program on milestone critical elements taking away risk and innovating on the science and the technology to get to that stage so let's talk a little bit about fusion fusion is in fact what happens in the stars and what is the energy that drives the universe it gives us our ability to live here it also makes all the materials we're made up from it's clearly nature's preferred source of power what it requires is to use plasma what is a plasma a plasma is really referred to as the fourth state of matter if you think about your high school physics and chemistry you will know there are solids liquids and gases but it turns out if you add more energy to a gas you get to a point where you can actually dissociate the atoms into the atomic course which are free-floating positive particles and the electrons which are the negative particles and that soup is referred to as a plasma what happens in stars or in a terrestrial fusion reactor you're going to keep heating that to extremely high temperatures so that you get very strong collisions between particles that ultimately then create the fusion process and as everybody knows from einstein's famous formula equals mc squared even though we're changing mass a little bit we're releasing by the fact that this is multiplied by the speed of light squared which is an enormous number humongous amounts of energy in fact to compare that if you combust a molecule of hydrocarbon see gasoline you get a unit of energy let's call it one in the case of fusion you get 10 million times that and so if you think about why don't we have fusion today there's a critical hurdle there it is very difficult to do because while we can heat things very quickly to these esoterically high temperatures we can't hold it there very long so the world has struggled for about 50 60 years now in in not the heating process but once you have it hot to keep it hot and this is where tae comes in with a very novel idea in fact we looked outside and said where is humanity utilized high energetic states successfully in tools that are mature and developed and that brings into mind accelerators in accelerators like cern the big machine that's been operating for decades in switzerland they accelerate particles to incredibly high energies in fact if you look at this in temperature units be a trillion degrees and they're holding it at that level and then they do their experiments and so what we decided to do was utilize that technology that science and bring it into the realm of fusion and combine conventional plasma physics and fusion work with accelerator technology to enable a much more perfected state of confinement of holding things together and keeping him hot at the will of the operator and ultimately get to the state where we can do this in a continuous state sustained and get net energy from the process so we started actually from something you see right here she called the sewer pipe so the first machine we built this was by the way still done transitioning from the university of california at irvine where all this started this machine in principle had all the componentry from a scientific perspective to begin testing this idea of marriage between accelerator physics and plasma physics and then we transition from there into larger scale of course higher energy states and sort of incrementally moving towards the reactor scale so next machine that we build of substance was called c2 this came about in the later 2000s so machine a bit smaller than the one behind me right now about two double decker bus is in size it actually sat in this very same machine hull that was the machine that for the first time really showed the wonderful effects that occur when you bring accelerated physics truly at the relevant energy scale together with plasma physics that ended up in about 2011 2012 in a set of experiments that still give me goosebumps thinking about them today that really showed us that when we do that right we can get to a different level of holding the plasma together for longer periods of time in a more predictable way and that in a way was a proof of the fundamental tenet of the entire idea we then migrate from there by upgrading that machine to something we called c2u and it became the machine that was intended to show that we can actually sustain we can actually take plasma and run it at operator will that's a huge step and tae did that with a beautiful set of milestone experiments around august of 2015 and that machine allowed us for the first time to hold plasma for about 5 000 of a second now you may think that that is an infinitesimally short amount of time in a human perspective it is but in the world of fusion science it's half an eternity the processes that determine success and failure they play out on millions of a second time skills maybe 10 to 100 millions maximum so running for thousands of a second you've outlived those time skills by a considerable margin and that gave us a very very solid confidence building proof point that you've got a tool and a technology base that you can now scale towards the reactor regime frankly that's exactly what we did we followed c2u with the machine you see behind me now used to call it c2w and then renamed it norman in honor of my phd mentor and the brilliant mastermind behind most of the technology we've created here norman rostocker and norman actually took all those incremental learnings into a brand new larger scale machine with higher energetics capability it was intended to get us into the realm of the reactor physics where you're now within a striking distance of making that energy and the goal was to get to about 30 35 million degrees and study the confinement again improve on the ability to hold it together and sustain and we did all that in fact we achieved that in august of 2019 and from there over the last couple of years through a lot of innovations around better perfected operations using more machine learning and tools on the feedback side of the system scaled that up to where today now this machine behind me operates on a daily basis about 70 plus million degrees for that perspective the sun operates about 15 million degrees this is almost five times the core of the sun by the way nothing melts it's very very safe as i said earlier and this gives us the launching pad to go from here to a net energy demonstration in fact what is following on the footsteps of norman is a machine that we're now deep in the process of building it's called copernicus copernicus is going to come alive in about two to two and a half years from now and its goal is to get to net energy out the first machine in the fusion race to get to net energy out we think we're gonna hit that by mid decade exceed 100 million degrees on that machine we're going to begin cooking fuel at a copious level so you can actually see that you can harvest more energy than you had to put in and once we do that then there's just one more step left and that's the end of the decade roughly we're going to bring a machine up in a life called da vinci and that is the launching pad of fusion commercialization that machine in contrast to copernicus doesn't just make net energy it makes net electrons and it makes net electrons in a way conducive to ultimately getting to what we discussed earlier which is efficient enough and sustainable enough that we can make reliable economic clean power the dawn of fusion age in terms of commercialization you're out now and building commercial machines with industrial partners and you're beginning to hopefully make a dent against the massive needs of energy so we can meet up with the challenges that are driven by climate change on one hand the excessive need for more energy the equalizing on the social justice level with more energy available to us all those kinds of critical dimensions to sustain humanity well into the next centuries having discussed now the sequence of machines we build the question is are we really ready and the answer is a resounding yes we are and what's important to realize that for our approach to clean fusion our approach to it we really have the technology components now and the know-how and the operational mastery to bring these things together from power supplies to magnet designs to machine learning to now additive manufacturing designing parts that are otherworldly that humans wouldn't even think to conceive because we think in cylinders and spheres and simple geometric shapes there's so much technology available today that allows us to go that last mile that gives us the buoyance to actually get there that is very different than 10 15 years ago where we were innovating on some of these things and others were innovating on things but now it's coming together and so the golden age of fusion is definitely upon us for a very simple reason the technological challenge is now met and it's a question of integration now you take those various innovative things that are now available you combine them in the right way you add the operational mastery and the maturity that ta has developed over 20 plus years in harvesting these steps and going this journey and bringing it together now in the next machine copernicus and then ultimately in da vinci and then in the commercial setting and just like when nasa went to the moon at the end of the 60s and had to develop a lot of technology to get there we've done similar here we're talking earlier about some of those feed technologies they're now perfected and as those became perfected and mature and reached levels of performance didn't exist before driven by this quest for fusion we have an enormous opportunity to utilize those innovations in other areas for instance tae spun a company off in the life sciences a few years ago that is now perfecting targeted radiation oncology at a level that will bring new opportunities and hope and life to people that are dealing with brain cancers head and neck cancer and things that heretofore were untreatable another element where we've made major progress you see this surrounding these blue aggregates here all these power supply systems we've developed technology there for buffering and distributing to the 80 000 electrified parts that make up norman can now be transplanted into the electric car sector into the infrastructure around transportation electrification the backdrop of the grid off-grid applications and all those kinds of things where we have to make massive steps both on the infrastructure side and on a technical innovation site and in doing this innovative work now and bringing this into commercialization we want to create a lot of clean green jobs for the united states and the world in allowing humanity to power forward into this new era and as you think about this ecosystem of interconnected parts coming together it really shapes the path to perfect power clean fusion our hydrogen boron non-radioactive sustainable scalable economic clean fusion in the center surrounded by an ecosystem of components that are going to drive great reliability scalability meeting the challenges of the electrification of transportation and all the other innovative things and ultimately better quality of life for all of mankind

Channel: TAE Technologies

Views: 9,796

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Id: blUsX_f7Twk

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022