The Dawn of the Fusion Age | Mark Henderson | TEDxVicenza

I think the most impressive transition for me is when a person realizes that they can make a change that they can improve the world now for me that happened when I was a kid fifty years ago I was watching the Apollo 11 moon shot where three astronauts were blasted off the earth in a Saturn rocket and we're venturing toward the moon as a child I just saw all of the impressiveness of Technology of science of humans capability and I watched the moon as it left the Earth's orbit went around the orbit around the moon and in the lunar lander separated and then landed safely on the moon and then two astronauts came out first Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong said his famous quote one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind while the third astronaut another guy sorry Vint it's you just in GT [Music] this kid see only very few people know his name but he played an important role he he brought Neil and Buzz back to the earth safely and as a child they just mesmerized me that we could do this as she meant as humans the capacity that human had to be able to put a man on the moon and another fact for me it was really important was this this teat seal his name was Michael Collins he was actually my father's roommate in college and as a kid I looked at my father and I said okay my father is just some teat CEO it was just a normal guy and I had to be a normal guy and Michael Collins therefore had to be just a normal person and therefore that Michael could actually impact the world him as a normal person could change the world by allowing Neil and Buzz to land on the earth and so on one side of me I looked at this and I thought this is fantastic humanity could do anything seven years later I was 14 and I realized that humanity can actually do anything and it could actually be in a negative sense in the sense that humanity can do global warming humanity can do tons of billions of tons of plastic into the ocean and they can do deforestation and I can go on with the list so humanity has this capacity to do terrible things and to do good things and as a 14-year old I wanted to change that and at that time humanity seemed to me to be represented vest by pizza dough okay so how you make pizza dough well actually it's really ironic to have an American on stage full of Italian audience and I'm gonna explain to you how to make pizza dough so what you take a bowl you put flour you put water you put salt you put a little bit of olive oil and put yeast into the bulb and you mix it all up and then something happens the yeast see the sugar in the flower and they start eating the sugar and then they multiply and then they eat multiply eat multiply and then suddenly you'll see that the dough starts to rise and this process continues of eating multiplying eating and multiplying up to the point where it stops and what's happened is that there's nothing else for the yeast to eat they've eaten all the sugar and all you're left with is what the yeast could not eat dead yeast and the excrement of the yeast now to me Humanity is very much like that we have a finite surface on the earth we have a finite set of resources and all we are doing is eating multiplying eating and multiplying with no regard for the future and for all of our creativity and all of our intelligence on this side that could put a man on the moon on this side we're only really as intelligent as yeast which is pretty embarrassing so at the age of 14 I wanted to find an escape route I wanted to be able to join other scientists to be able to find a solution to provide us an energy source that would go on for not just 110 50 nor a thousand but millions of generations and that's this the Sun if you think about it the Sun has been alive burning for 4.7 billion years and it has another estimated 5 billion years of life to go that's roughly 10 billion years and is generating 10 to the 24th kilowatts every moment that Dwarfs any number that we can imagine and the Sun doesn't change its size it just keeps burning and burning and burning and so about a hundred years ago the scientists of the day around 1920 there started to realize what's actually happening here and they said if we could do this on earth we've solved our energy problems so since 1920 we've been trying to make a Sun on earth what's the process it's called actually nuclear fusion and the idea is if I take if I go out to the ocean took a liter of water I take a little bit of hydrate a special hydrogen isotope out of that water put the other leader back into the ocean so I don't damage the ocean and I take those two isotopes and I want to put them together I want to fuse them together but the trick is they're positively charged positives repel and so I have to force these together so I have to have some way of combining fusing these atoms together that's the trick okay to do that you have three parameters temperature density and confinement time you guys didn't know it but you're getting the physics lessons so for the temperature first for a physicist to temperature and velocity are the same thing it gets warm because gas mark polical particles are moving faster so what we want to do is have a high temperature fast velocity so they can come up and they can Clyde they can overcome this positive force and the temperature to do that is a hundred and fifty million degrees Celsius okay so that's ten times hotter than the Sun so you can see the challenge next is density so if I'm sitting over on one side of the stage and I have a friend on the other side and we're trying to throw atoms at each other the probability that those atoms will collide is zero no chance but if we throw more atoms at each other the more they are the greater the probability these atoms will collide so we play with this concept of density we try to increase the number of atoms that way we increase the probability of a collision and we get more energy and the third is confinement time so if my friend and I get into a box and then we throw our atoms at each other and they bounce off the walls there's a greater chance that either on the first path second path or third pass the balls will or the atoms will collide and give off energy so confinement is our ability to hold these atoms that are really hot in place the only problem is we need a box that can handle 150 million degrees Celsius ten times hotter than the Sun so what we do is we use a magnetic field okay so we've learned that a charged particle will oscillate around a magnetic field this is pretty much how the Northern Lights work you have charged particles coming from the Sun they interact with the magnetic field of the earth and they either go to the northern or southern Paul to create either the Northern Lights or the southern lights we use exactly the same principle but what we do is we create a magnetic field that's in a circular loop this way these atoms are charged they're trapped and they will go around and around and around so we create a magnetic a set of magnets that are kind of D shaped we orientate them around our loop and it forms kind of a doughnut shape or a bagel now that bagel or doughnut uses is our magnetic trap or our magnetic bottle and I want to show you an example of today's magnetic bottle this is a tokamak discharge tokamak is what we call our magnetic bottle and this shows our little miniature Sun and what you see is on the edges where you see the light that's a measly 10,000 degrees Celsius it's called but in the center part of the doughnut word you don't really see anything that's about a hundred million degrees Celsius so we're almost there and what we're trying to do is we have tokamaks built all around the world in Russia China Japan Korea India US and Europe and we're using all this combined knowledge to build a better tokamak and if you've looked in her progress since the beginning we built small tokamaks bigger tokamaks bigger tokamaks and we basically doubled our performance every 1.5 years up to the point of around the year 2000 we were able to create a reaction where the amount of energy we put in equals the amount of energy out I call it breakeven at this point this was achieved by the way in jet the joint European tokamak where the Europeans have pulled together to build this tokamak at this point we've decided to work together in a large environment where all nations are coming together mainly Russia China u.s. Japan North Korea South Korea India and Europe are combining resources to build eater that's where I work it's in the South of France and our goal is to build a machine that performs 10 times better so we have 1 watt going in equals 10 watts out it's an experimental device and then from that we decided we want to build a thing called demo a demonstration reactor that would actually produce electricity now that would be a very large donut about 20 meters in diameter now if you notice on this curve we're going straight up and then suddenly it flats why well as you big builder tokamaks it takes longer it's more complicated it's more sophisticated there's more stronger forces involved and it we need more money but the time is actually the critical one because if you think about it fusion if you look on this graph we would have a demonstration reactor in 2060 so if a politician came up to you and said give me your vote I want to increase your taxes so that I can find a solution so that your grandchildren are great-great grandchildren or a great great great great grandchildren have a solution for energy you're going to say no because you're on the side of the yeast we want our immediate return and so this is inherently blocked us to be able to look long term to be able to find a solution so fortunately what we're doing now is all the parties are pulling in a little bit of taxes a little bit of money to be able to work collectively to build this thing called eater an international tour experimental reactor and then from that we can move forward and what we hope one day is that we will be able to use this technology to build reactors around the world for example in Italy Italy we would build probably around 15 reactors we would take the leader of water from the ocean pull out the hydrogen extra hydrogen atoms put the leader back in each leader would be equivalent to about 200 350 gallons of gas litres of gasoline and with that we'd be able to power all of Italy electricity transportation heat industry everything now this is not tomorrow this is maybe 50 years a hundred years down the road but then from this technology we would have the energy not just for a hundred generations but the energy content stored in the oceans would last humanity for a hundred billion years that's like seven times the age of the universe so it's just a perpetual motion machine of energy source and what's blocking us it's not the technology the technology's challenging but we can achieve that to me what's blocking us is ourselves we have to get past we have to become more educated than the yeast we have to look beyond the moment we have to solve our problems of course for the ocean for the global warming deforestation everything and also look for our future generations as they have the rights that we have thank you very much and welcome to the fusion age you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 17,478

Rating: 4.7412934 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science (hard), Physics, Science

Id: KlxPJ6LnyFc

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019