The Energy Crisis is Over! | Derek Sutherland | TEDxUofW

today I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to present a vision for the future of energy I'll talk about an energy source that's been around for over the past thirteen billion years and it is the fundamental energy source of the universe this energy source I'm referring to is nuclear fusion and so to start this discussion and I think I'll start at the very beginning because after at all it is a very good place to start so towards the beginning of the universe we're talking about hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang so you know what's a couple hundred million million years between friends there are only very very light elements present the majority of those elements were hydrogen and helium the first two on the periodic table those elements started combining into bigger and bigger clumps and eventually those clumps became large enough and the temperatures in the core became high enough that fusion started and you saw that the birth of the very first stars in our universe so this is a picture of our Sun which is just one example of a fusion engine running in space but all of the stars that you see throughout the cosmos have fusion happening at its heart but what is this process of how does it actually work and so all of nuclear energy both fusion and fission which I'll talk about here in a moment is based on the principle that in nuclear physics 1+1 no longer equals 2 when you have subatomic particles so I'm going to throw a lot of lingo at you but I think it's important to understand it protons and neutrons and nuclei that make up the hearts of atoms that we know are actually a little bit heavier when they're separate away from each other then when you put them together and so there's an ever so slight difference in the mass of these particles when they're separate and when they're together and via Einstein's famous equation e equals MC squared we know that mass is equivalent to energy and so that energy difference is fundamentally where all of nuclear energy from there's two different types of nuclear energy that we focus on one is fusion which I refer to before and one is fission so fusion as the name suggests is taking these very very light elements like hydrogen helium and beryllium combining them together at very very high temperatures and pressures and producing slightly heavier ones releasing a lot of energy in the process fission is the opposite of fusion in which you actually fission or split things apart really really heavy nuclei like thorium and uranium and plutonium when you split those apart you make lighter things and you release energy as well we know fission works they work in a myriad of different nuclear reactors around the world today but we know that there are some drawbacks to fission which I'll talk about in a bit in fusion we know works in the Sun so is there a way that we can replicate the fusion process on earth and why on earth literally would we even think about doing such a thing so the number one reason that guides our motivations is that both fission and fusion have no greenhouse gas emissions some of the largest carbon reductions in all Western world in all a lot of the eastern world as well comes from the use of fission energy if we didn't use fission that would have otherwise been coal and natural gas producing carbon dioxide but what about fusion compared to fission and this is something I really want to point out because it's really important there's no long live radioactive waste with fusion and there's no risk of a meltdown it's physically impossible to have a meltdown in a fusion reactor so instantly you remove some of the major risks dealing with fission power and all of the nasty radioactive waste that you produce and the risk of a runaway reaction those just don't exist in fusion which is one of my primary motivations for pursuing it what about the fuel source so who in here has a water bottle I have one right here and anyone here has a smartphone with a lithium ion battery in it if you possess those two things right now you have nuclear fuel so I'm going to call the Department of Homeland Security and we're going to get that sorted out so in fact hydrogen is the main fuel source for fusion one part in 7,000 of the water molecules in this bottle is deuterium and that's the main source of fuel that we use for fusion on earth and so it's a whole different game when you consider holding a kilogram of uranium that would probably alarm some of you but having a kilogram of water it looks a lot safer and indeed it is and because our fuel source is in water there's millions if not billions of years of energy available on the planet because it literally is just from the ocean and the nice thing about oceans is that nearly every single country in the world has access to some source of water and so what happens when you change the entire conversation and have an energy source that is no longer based on scarcity and where it's located start dreaming about moving past geopolitical issues that have plagued us since the Industrial Revolution began so now I want to compare it to renewable energy and before ice to that I want to make the point that I am absolutely for renewable energy in fact fusion enables all of the renewable energy sources to be renewable in the first place solar power where does that come from the Sun which is fusion wind power it's driven by convection which is from energy input from the Sun on earth but there's something very different doing those types of energy sources in fusion fusion is able to be a base load energy source which means that it's an energy source that's on 24/7 whenever you want it at the flip of a switch you don't have to worry about the Sun going down every day you just make your own you don't have to worry about the wind not blowing because you control the you also don't require energy storage instead of implementing this new grid in which you have a lot of transient sources working together having to put up all of these power walls it's a great idea for doing it but I think a much much quicker way is to implement a new base load energy source that takes over from coal natural gas and fission as soon as possible and fusion can do that another part is high energy density and so energy density is exactly what it sounds like if the amount of energy stored per kilogram and a particular thing that you're using for fuel so for example in this water bottle or if I had this filled with gasoline you can say how much energy can I get out if I were to use that for fuel let's draw some comparisons if you look at chemical energy density so all that means is that the type of energy you would realize if you are burning coal natural gas gasoline any of this combustion based processes and even if you want to look on the same order solar power and wind power are this energy dense if not a little bit less than this if you were to represent that by a six-foot person just use the number the equivalent nuclear energy density is over 40 million feet which is the diameter of the planet and so what that means is that you have to use about 10 million times less fuel to produce the same amount of energy from fusion and so it looks at how let's say for Seattle how much coal would it take to power us for the entire year well it would fill up a sports stadium effectively but if you were to look at how much fusion fuel is required it would fit on the back of a pickup truck with enough space left to put in other things that's the power of energy density and it also means that the actual size of your power plants are much much smaller instead of having the entire area of Seattle covered with solar panels to meet our energy demands you can meet all of Seattle's energy demands with a building this size times about two or three that is the power of energy density and it's one of the major reasons why fusion I see working in concert riveted with renewables in the future to provide a complete green energy solution for our planet so how do we actually pull this off it sounds great so the being the very very lazy nuclear engineers that we are we actually pursue the easiest type of fusion possible first because let's solve the easy problem first deuterium and tritium fusion is the main type of fusion process we pursue for the first generation power plants deuterium and tritium are both heavy isotopes of hydrogen which means they're just heavy water you know the one part in 7,000 I mentioned before and then what is the lithium come in we actually make tritium from lithium using the products from fusion itself and so fusion makes helium four which is the same type of healing you fill up party balloons with so if anything bad goes with the reactor it opens up then you walk out of the lab with a high-pitched voice a lot less scarier than a nuclear meltdown I would say the other thing that's produced our neutrons and these neutrons carry over 80% of the energy from this reaction and those neutrons are slowed down in a surrounding structure that we typically call the reactor blanket and their motion their kinetic energy of motion is transformed into thermal energy and then we can spin our turbines and make electricity so you can think that the first generation nuclear power or fusion power plants are going to be very very high-tech heat engines just like an internal combustion engine though we're doing something a little bit more clever than that so I didn't I kind of glossed over it because I didn't want to throw big numbers at you right off the bat but what are the temperatures required for this process you might ask so DC fusion requires temperatures between a hundred and fifty million to two hundred million degrees and sometimes I get the thing this they asked me a question of well is that centigrade or Kelvin what does it really matter at that point how our earth literally are you going to contain a plasma which is this very very hot gas that we're making at a hundred fifty million degrees in anything you got to put in an old box I mean it's gonna melt instantly so what do you do well you have to use something that's not made of anything to hold the plasma in place and so we use magnetic fields magnetic fields have these this amazing process that it's able to react and feedback off of the plasma and actually make the plasma do what we want it to do you can see on the left side here just some pictures on the top left you see that there's no magnetic field and there's this plasma with all these particles moving and every which way just like a bunch of angry bees in a tube but then as soon as we put in this magnetic field you can see that some order arises and that the magnetic field lines actually allow for the particles to be confined across the magnetic field but not along the cylinder along the long way so you might say well how are we going to make sure that the plasma doesn't squirt out the ends while it's fusing well the solution is along with a lot of things in life doughnuts because doughnuts are delicious and so being the first reactor designers were like well let's wrap it into a doughnut though that should solve it and so on the right here you see one of the leading candidates for a fusion power plant called a tokamak which is actually a Russian acronym back in the Cold War there was a bit of a competition between the US and the Soviet Union and one of those was on the fusion front as well so the tokamak was the Soviet idea and there was other ideas that the Americans were working on but right now the tokamak is the best-performing device out there and so that's the cartoon and this is actually what we're building right now so Fusion is not theory it's not something that we're not sure if we can to work or are we not sure it happens it happens in the Sun every day and it happens in hundreds of reactors on planet Earth around the world every day what we haven't done yet is we haven't shown that we can make more energy than we put into it to keep it going and that's what's required to actually make a reactor work you have to have excess energy to make electricity otherwise it's a pretty terrible reactor if you just put in energy it generates entropy and then it puts out the same amount that's a terrible reactor you need to make more energy than you put in and this is the first experiment that's designed to actually do that this is called the eater tokamak and it's being built in the South of France right now and it's slated to start up for the first time in 2025 it's going to be the first netgain fusion reactor and it will make ten times out the energy than you put into it it will make 500 megawatts of fusion power it'll be the first demonstration of a fusion plasma that's making the majority of its energy to keep itself hot so this is a big step for Humanity and we're gonna see it next decade and so you might say well we have this all sorted out when are we going to actually see it on the grid that's always the million-dollar question we're depending on your research project the billion dollar question and the there are merit of different technical issues we still have to sort out but we've made huge strides over the past decades towards the point where we can actually build one but one big issue that we haven't really solved is the economics of fusion and so when we have a tough problem let's look to nature for inspiration as good scientists and so on the Sun there's some sort of activity a dynamo that gives rise to magnetic fields and you don't have to worry about up what a dynamo is but effectively it's just some methane in the Sun where a moving conducting fluid basically gives rise to magnetic fields and so if dynamos give rise to magnetic fields maybe we can use cleverly applied magnetic fields in order to drive dynamos to keep this plasma going and that's what we think we've discovered here at the University of Washington so we have a device here that's a prototype that's a 1/10 scale and we have evidence that supports our belief that we have demonstrated the sustainment of a stable plasma with a type of sustainment called imposed dynamo crown drive which sounds big mouthful but it's got the Dynamo word in it which is all that's important if we scale this up by a factor of 10 you get a commercial scale power plant which is called the dynamic again lots of dynamos going around and this reactor is estimated to be cost-competitive with coal-fired power plants and to make electricity competitive with conventional energy sources if not cheaper than that and so we're overcoming a major issue of mainline fusion like the tokamak in which it's very very expensive tens of billions of dollars but if you actually want to change the energy grid now or now being like the next few decades and you want to start solving the issue of global climate change the best way to do that is to beat other energy sources at their own game and that means you need to beat them economically fusion can do that if you pursue the right type of fusion and so we got so excited about this reactor vision being cost competitive that we formed a separate company and spun out from the University of Washington called CT fusion which I'm the CEO of we founded it in Seattle in August 2015 and we're currently finishing the design of our next prototype which goes from 1/10 scale up to 1/5 scale we're beginning to share our vision of our vision with potential investors and we're very excited about it so that's what I do and that's what I focus on but how can you be part of this Fusion story so unless any of you want to go out and pursue a PhD in plasma physics why I encourage all of you to do if you like but if you don't want that level of commitment the majority of fusion funding in the US and across the world is by government being a very expensive endeavor and all of the funding comes from the DOA office of fusion energy science a little bit from the National Science Foundation and also from subcommittees within the DOA itself if you contact your representatives and your president about needing a few fun fusion more generously we might actually be able to get it on the grid faster I know it says give us more money and we'll get there but it honestly is a financial issue because we're having to make very tough choices between the all these alternative ideas that can lead to cost effective fusion and between the mainline ideas which are the best chance of pursuing it but are very expensive we need to have all options on the table until we have a working solution that's cheap enough also besides talking to government officials which I know we all love to do may take the DMV for example tell your friends family and even your dog about fusion and keep in mind if you can get your dog to run out Eagles MC squared and their cables and bits give me a call because we can write another paper that would just be off the wall it'll be awesome but on all seriousness it's very important to communicate how awesome an energy source fusion truly is and how it's very very different than fission and it solves a lot of fission's issues sometimes I go in to give talks like this and I say nuclear fusion and instantly when they hear nuclear mushroom clouds I see them going off with people's foreheads in the back row but it really is not like that a fusion reactor does not have meltdowns and they do not have long live radioactive waste they are fundamentally a different animal I'll be at a hard one to pull off on earth but it's incredibly worth our while to go for it and remember this is just this is not just about you know converting Western world countries on to fusion to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels this about changing the geopolitical landscape of the entire planet and transitioning from a fuel source based on scarcity like fossil fuels to a fuel source that is easily available to everyone plentiful and if we do solve it we'll have millions of years worth of energy on our disposal we can move on from the age of the Industrial Revolution and pursue the next stage which I'm very excited to see what that is and so a new era of clay nearly limitless energy is coming and in my view it's looking very very bright thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 191,609

Rating: 4.4272518 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Science (hard), Energy, Future, Innovation, Science

Id: rAODrTHZSI8

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016