TEDxSF - Dr. Edward Moses - Synthetic Stars and the Future of Energy

you Edouard Moses is an American physicist internationally recognized in laser in optical sciences and is the current principal associate director for the National Ignition facility and photon science Directorate the largest experimental science facility in the US and the world's most energetic laser that hopes to demonstrate the first feasible example of usable nuclear fusion he holds several patents in laser technology fusion and fission energy and computational physics dr. Moses is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of spie and the American Association for the Advancement of science he received a BS and PhD both in electrical engineering from Cornell University please welcome dr. Eadie Moses good evening I'm going to talk about something a little bit different I'm going to be talking to you about fusion energy I think it's the coolest form of energy in the universe and I also am going to talk to you about how we do it using lasers and because of that we call a laser fusion energy or life for short and I think you could change everything and hopefully I'm not the only one who thinks that recently Steve Hawking's who's a famous physicist famous thinker philosopher was asked what is the most important scientific or technological advancement that he would like to see in his lifetime and he said he would like to see fusion energy made practical because it's inexhaustible its carbon free and it would change the whole view of global climate warming what more could you ask for but one of the problems is few people know what fusion energy is and we talk about fusion energy we don't mean nuclear fission energy or nuclear energy as we have when uranium at nuclei are split apart you get energy out we get some other stuff we might not like to get out we're talking about nuclear fusion where we actually take the nuclei of hydrogen as in water put them together at high speeds at high temperatures get out all this energy and without having the byproducts that we don't like and the thing that I really like about fusion energy besides that is so clean and cool is here's another view of the Hubble Deep Field Space Telescope that Alex was showing you except when I see it I don't see the universe expanding I don't see dark energy and dark matter I see billions and billions of galaxies that are burning hydrogen in a fusion way and every single photon of light that we get from space whether it's night or day comes from fusion and fusion is the natural source of energy of the universe it powers our universe it's clean it's reliable every day and every way you know the Sun is going to shine and this is what we want to do at our work in our field and the question is if it's so good why don't we have it could we find a way to build a miniature store on the earth one that we can use to power our our civilizations future and the answer is I think we can and I'm going to be talking to you about that in the next 16 15 minutes and 25 seconds and when we get through with it I hope it will change your collective future of the possibilities that we face this is the NIF is that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just east of San Francisco in southeast San Francisco it's the world's most energetic laser this is where we're trying to build a miniature Sun so before we go on to that I want to talk about the energy problem you know when we look at this picture we could see a lot of things you know this is the hydro hydrocarbon world we live in we're looking at a coal-fired power plant splitting out enough energy for a little bit more than San Francisco but the fact of the matter when I look at this I don't see an energy problem there's a lot of coal in the world this is the problem when people talk about energy it's really the threes energy economy and environment you got to put that all together in order to understand the problems we face and the solutions we deal with if you look at coal we have enough to last forever and forever is hundreds of years if you look at it in the context of the environment to changes your view of everything if you look at oil and the context of the economy it changes your view of everything we have to think about this as a troika that we find the common solution to now energy fingerprint of humankind is really shows up in this famous NASA picture but again I think it's slightly misleading when you look at this you see you know the United States and Europe lit up really well you see India looks pretty well lit up so this for certain parts of China but the fact of the matter matter is that the energy intensity of both India and China big population centers over two billion people is probably 10 or 15 percent per capita of what we use when you look at Africa you only feel fear right there's nothing those people are coming on board and want to have a better standard of living and the way they're getting it is building at coal-fired power plants in fact right now about a hundred big power Coal Fired power plants per year or being built worldwide that's a pretty scary thing when you think about it so that's where we're going and what's doing what we're concerned about is the environmental part when we look at this picture you know people talk about the oceans they talk about the ice caps they talk about warming this is sort of a situation that's really reaching a critical tipping point most scientists think that in the next 40 years we have to remove most of the carbon that we now have in fact some people even say we have to go to pre-industrial revolution carbon ke pakore bin' emissions that's a huge problem when you think ahead to 9 billion people what are the solutions that people propose now people propose carbon free things like hydroelectric renewable energy nuclear energy some pretty hard things to do carbon sequestration where you actually take carbon out of the atmosphere out of the that we are burning it make it liquid pump it back underground keep it there for a while they also talk about low impact lifestyles energy efficiency the fact of the matter is when you put these all together you know as a scientist as an engineer these don't cut the cake for everyone everything that's going on there'll be a part of the solution but they're not going to be a whole solution so the question is what are we supposed to do now I think our city is a great example the city of San Francisco of the problems that the world faces you know it's a small city it's about a million people fairly an energy intense but it's more and more a typical city you know as people move to cities all over the world populations of one to three million like the Bay Area are growing and growing and you have to realize we're a carbon-based city so the question is we stay here where is it going to go and when I look at this I want to try to try to remove the boundaries of our imaginations of our future and think about another possible solution one in which you know we would power this city for a year a million of us with a hundred and fifty gallons of water as fuel you know most of us spend about 200 gallons a day on water okay what about if the waste product was helium and for the whole city we've made about a thousand toy balloons of helium is our waste product what if this power plant could fit in a building the size of Costco and what if we if we built one of these we could put them everywhere so they could be local they'd be safe they'd be capable of changing sort of the equation in a fundamental way you know this is what we're trying to do with the NIF and this target that I'm hope that I'm showing you here and I don't know if you can see it because it's so small you know that I'm holding up is the miniature Sun that we would like to build that would do everything I just said and we need more than one at a time but I'll show you how how we do that in the law so this is the goal of our thing to get fusion in the laboratory and then make it a part of our commercial world so one of the things I wanted to talk about is what is the NIF look like so this is kind of a different thing you know the NIF is a really big facility you know let's see if this comes up hey let's have a round of applause there so when I go to the nip I always feel small I mean I feel small by the idea and I feel small by the facility you know now I feel small and being in this planetarium but that's what the NIF looks like so this is not a cartoon this is really exists and if you go inside you know this is one of the laser bays and these laser bays are kind of interesting you know if you look over there you can see one end and go wrapping around and see the other you know this is around 400 feet long which is a little bit smaller than this dome and you know we have a hundred and ninety two laser beams and they all go to this target chamber this target chamber is around thirty five feet in diameter and you can see those beams I just think this is so amazing from where I'm standing anyway it's actually better than real life anyway coming coming down into the target chamber and if you go inside the target chamber you know this is what it looks like right and you can see at the end of that arm and you know left and right don't mean a lot in this place you know you can see the you know where that target is held so it's a big facility and that tiny little target that we just looked at is in it and the laser beams all 192 come onto it and they heat this up to very high temperatures and very high pressures and make this happen so let's go back to real life here come back to me how did this all work you know we already talked Alex again beat me to Alex to Albert now Albert told us you know that there's a great equation his most famous equation equals MC squared that energy and mass are sort of the same and you can change one into the other with this little cos thing called the lights a really big number a way to interpret this is small amounts of mass can really result in large amounts of energy so the purpose of a fusion system is that use those lasers that change a little mass into more energy and that way we can get more energy out than we started with and have sort of a neat machine we know it works we go to the Sun you know when we go inside the Sun the Sun is a big ball of hot hydrogen gas we go inside of it we see hydrogen nuclei smashing together fusing making energy putting that photons we call those photons sunlight they come out to earth they provide the source of all power that we have in all life that we have sort of the natural thing as I said so all the time is going on so what can we do to build a miniature Sun on earth and this is how we think about doing it this is actually another view of the target chamber and here we see that target right in the centre of the target chamber big building these targets again sure the size of a tylenol pill and we can hit these targets within a few trillionth of a second and less than half the diameter of your air so this is a really precision machine and even though our ant guy said he can take high-speed motion pictures at tens of thousands of frames a second we literally take them with billions of frames per second because things happen fast and this is sort of how it looks when it lights up and now I'm going to show you a picture you know an animation that brings us all together so this is real life do we have a little sound here now this is real life and more not that way three okay this is countdown one shot and now we can see animation of what's going on happens in real life here's the voice of NIF it's the master oscillator room where a small amount of energy comes out it has all the information you need to implode a target but not enough power to do it so we go out to our preamplifiers and 192 beans so it actually plays music as it shows and so here we have this chunk of light that's about 6 meters long 20 feet long in your language right and it's going back and forth through the laser beam it actually would look like this if you took a movie of it you know and it's getting more and more powerful and those eight beams which we call a bundle or the Lego block of nit but we need a lot more of them so you watch what happens and that was some cousins are going to come along now we look at a cluster of beams and we have 48 and now another side of the family is going to join up so we now have 96 fiends this is going on on the other side of the facility too we go into this big optical chip mirror machine that makes it from 2d to 3d we got a time all these beams up so watch how they time up there in the infrared now they're timed up now they're turned ultraviolet and now they go on to a target now we're about to build our Sun millionth of a second is gone by 1 million now you watch the billions of a second go by we have this little oven that target we heated up to millions of degrees though that energy is now onto that hydrogen ball it goes up to hundreds of millions of degrees and now we have a Sun on earth I think that's cool ok so the question is you know is this safe is the same as it sound right and the answer is yeah I mean we are burning hydrogen we're burning hydrogen in a in a different way than chemical way about 30 million times more energy it's over in a few trillions of a second once it starts burning few trillions of a second you burn all the fuel it stops so it's kind of thing we like the question is how would you do it commercially that's a one-off machine what's really cool it's always one-off this is a view of the life power plant now here we see a 1 Hertz machine or 1 times a second and you can see that the target comes in the laser hits it just like in the NIF we haven't build this one yet and we get energy out I'll tell you how we capture that in a second now we do it at 10 Hertz does anyone know what 10 Hertz is in normal language 10 times a second or 600 rpm so how what is your car idle at that's 600 to 800 rpm so that's just a one and a half million horsepower engine no carbon right kind of cool the only thing you're burning is the hydrogen in water and when you stop the question is well what do you do now you got all this high-tech highfalutin physics going on but how do you make electricity and the answer is kind of disappointing you know we absorb that energy into this salt blanket that's all blanket we pump past some hot water we make steam we turn a turbine we make electricity it's a little embarrassing at the end but that's a but that's exactly what you want right because now you don't have to invent new grids or new anything you just use what we got right so when you plug in you know your hairdryer or whatever you're going to plug in you know you can tell that it came from fusion it's just normal electricity the only difference is when you go outside you don't have any pollution and you don't have any global climate and you don't have to worry about where your energy is coming from I like that idea so what's our plan for the let me just see something I do this yeah so you know when I think about this I think about what's the future look like you know I'd like to have a planet that had clean air I'd like to have a planet that had clean water I'd like to get rid of those political tensions that come with energy you know I think this could be lived to a world that is happier and you know to quote Sandra Bullock you know and world peace remember that movie and I and I think that this is possible using life and life is the way we'd like to do it we'd like to invent the future together the question is is it possible to do this in the time scale that we talk about in our goal our roadmap is 2010 no into 2012 to get this ignition scientific feasibility I want you to know we're doing experiments everyday that are very very encouraging you know 20 20 ish to do an engineering prototype 20 30 to be commercial now you can't do this on your own we've been talking to the utilities all over the country actually all over the world who are very interested in this they're helping us understand customers needs we're talking to Silicon Valley and heavy industry with the power industry so we make the best business model and we're also talking to a lot of environmental groups who have been extremely encouraging with respect to our future if we get online by 2030 we're just at the time we need to be in order to make this all play together for our challenge you know by 2050 our goal would be to be a significant part of the carbon free future so you want us visit us you have two ways you can go to lasers lol gov we have a lot of information there if you want to come out and see us believe it or not you can pull up our Public Affairs Office we have tours all the time and we'd love to have you there I assure you it's better in 3d than in 2d even up there even though I'm not sure anymore anyway and and you know we'd love to have you and it's been my pleasure giving you this talk thank you so much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 38,134

Keywords: ted, ted x, Moses, tedx talk, ted talks, ted talk, tedx, tedx talks, Ed

Id: Bhh162dsWwU

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2010