(techno music) (audience applauding) - Well, hello, everyone. Welcome. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. I'm Dr. Melanie Windridge. I'm the founder and CEO
of Fusion Energy Insights. We help people keep up-to-date with developments in the
growing fusion industry, and that's what we're here
to talk about tonight. Developments in fusion energy. And when we talk about fusion energy, what it really comes down
to is this question here, how do we recreate the
power of the stars on earth? And why do we want to do that? Well, we have a huge
challenge in that we need to completely transform our energy system. We have rising global temperatures. We're on a current trajectory to deliver warming of 2.4 degrees, but the problem is only
getting more difficult because we also have
increasing energy demands. It's predicted that
we'll have a 50% increase in energy demand by 2050. And it's not just about climate change. We also have the issue of energy security. We need a safe, secure energy
supply that's not threatened by geopolitics and intermittency. So we need a long-term
sustainable energy source. And fusion holds great promise. It could be that transformative, that transformational
solution that the world needs. It produces no greenhouse gases, no long-lived radioactive waste, has abundant fuel supply, and
it would be on demand energy. Fusion is moving out of the lab and a private industry is growing up now. This chart here is from the
Fusion Industry Association and it shows the increase in the amount of private fusion
companies in recent years. You can see there's been
quite a spike after 2017. In total, we've had
over $6 billion invested in private fusion companies. Where's that investment coming from? It's no longer just from
high net worth individuals. We're also seeing strategic capital such as breakthrough energy
ventures, legal in general. Energy companies like Chevron, Equinor, any sovereign wealth funds
as well like Temasek, GIC. So it's no longer a niche investment. It's actually really broadening
in the investment space. And that's because we've been seeing a lot of progress in recent years. As I said, moving fusion
out of the lab progress such as public labs
breaking fusion records. We've been seeing private companies validating their approaches. And governments are taking notice. We've seen fusion strategies or commitments to fusion
now from the UK, the US, Japan and Germany. They're putting together
regulatory frameworks and discussing how
fusion will be regulated or the technologies licenced. And another thing that we've
been seeing increasingly is partnerships, both
public-private partnerships between the private fusion
companies and working with public or national labs where
there's a lot of expertise and great facilities, but also partnerships between
private fusion companies and big corporations like the partnership between Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the energy company, NE or
Tokamak Energy and Sumitomo. And we're also seeing partnerships on the national level as well. Just last year, the UK and
the US announced a partnership to work together to accelerate
the development of fusion. But now, all of this progress
is built on the foundation of scientific research that's been happening in the
public labs over decades. And that's been
culminating in the advances that we're going to be
hearing about tonight. So tonight, we have three great speakers. We'll be starting off with Fernanda Rimini from the UK Atomic Energy Authority, who'll be talking about Jet. Then we have Pietro Barabaschi the director general of ITER
who'll be telling us about ITA. And then Tammy Ma, who's a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. So I'm gonna get straight into it and hand over to Fernanda Rimini. Thank you. (audience applauding) - Good evening. It's a pleasure and an honour to be here and it's also very, very scary. I will spend about the next
20 minutes talking about and sort of describing
some of the latest results that we have obtained on the
Joint European Torus, JET, and trying to explain
what they mean for fusion. But first, I'm sure that
you all know about fusion and what it is, but I will
just give you a brief reminder. So fusion is a process that produces energy in
the stars like the sun. And as Melanie said, the
scientists have been working to develop fusion as a
viable energy source. Although the conditions that we are doing on
earth are very different from those in the stars. We're talking about some of the reactions, again in the stars are different on Earth. We are using a very easy reaction that has the fuses deuterium and tritium. They're isotopes of hydrogen. And produce a neutron
and a nucleus of helium and alpha particle. And in particular, I
and the director of ITER we will be talking about
magnetic confinement fusion, which is that branch where we take an ion a gas, we ionise
it, so it becomes a plasma, and then we it to very,
very high temperatures. 150 million degrees or
thereabout is the sweet spot where we want to be. And this is 10 times
hotter than in the sun. And then we confine it
using magnetic fields, because when you have a magnetic field and you have charged particles, they stick like around the
lines of force of the field. And if you close the field around itself, you have a confinement. So this is basically the principle. So we have very powerful magnetic fields that contain a very hot plasma. and what I will be talking
about is a tokamak. Tokamak is one of these
magnetic confinement machines and is a lot more complicated than just a little coil
with some plasma inside There. The first plasma on JET was produced on the 25th of June, 1983. And it lasted 50 milliseconds. It was really blink and you miss it. What you're seeing there is
one of the plasmas that we did, one of the last ones that we did and it lasts a minute. This alone gives you
an idea of the progress that we have done in those 40 years. And the other thing that you will notice is that it's very boring
and we like it boring. Nothing happens for a minute. We like it. Because that's what a fusion
power plant should be. It should be nice and
boring and steady state. The initial design of JET
was started in about 1975. And the objectives, these
are verbatim, their objective is to obtain and study
a plasma in conditions and dimensions approaching those needed in a thermal nuclear reactor. So JET was never designed to ignite, but it was designed to approach it. And what that means is
that JET was built big and on the x-axis, you have the size, sort of the volume of the machine. And on the y-axis, you
have the magnetic fields, the size of the magnetic
fields, and the combination of those two gives you performance. And if you notice in the 1980s, but even in the 1990s, you had
this cluster of green points and they were all fairly small machines. And then you have JET
up there in a corner. So it's much bigger than anything else and much more performant
than anything else. But it also had a couple more things. One, it had the capability of operating with deuterium and tritium,
so producing real fusion. And the other one was to use
the idea of using robotics to do maintenance. So not just sending people in, using real robots and mascots. And that added the level of
engineering complexity that none of the other machines had. And when I talk about machines, this is when I describe an experiment, sometimes, I talk about experiments, sometimes, I talk about token and sometimes, I talk about machines. They are the same thing. So let's get to the D-T experiments. The first D-T experiments on JET were done as a preliminary tritium
experiment in 1991. And this was really groundbreaking because it was the world
first controlled production of fusion power and the
demonstration of the safe use of the tritium, the isotope. And even if it produced a
tiny little bit of power, sort of two megawatts for
less than a couple of seconds, it was really major In 1994, '96, we had competition because at that point, there
was another tokamak in the US, it was called the FTR, and
they did -DT experiments and they produced 10 megawatts. And okay, so we took them on. And in 1997, we produced two records over two or three months
of campaign of D-T. Two records. One is the transient record,
the peak of about 16 megawatt, and the other one which is more
interesting, is more steady for five seconds at about four megawatts. Then that is DTE1. In 2021, we did DTE2 and we beat that record
by lot of factor two. So we produced a significant amount of fusion power over a significant time. And we've repeated these
experiments in 2023, just few months ago. And we've repeated them happily and we've gone a little bit further. So if you notice, why the big
wait between DTE1 and DTE2? It's all about finding what is the best material for the wall of the inside of the donut. Because at the time, and
initially, all the machines used graphite-based components. Graphite is very good thermally. If you remember the space shuttle, the little tiles underneath, the little black tile, graphite, because they take the heat very well. Unfortunately, graphite
and carbon components act like a sponge for
the isotopes of hydrogen. So your very precious fuel
remains embedded in the wall, which is really not what you want. So there have been studies of saying, can we use metal for the wall? Can you use some metals for
the wall instead of graphite? And in 2009, a whole new
metal wall was installed. And this was in particular,
in preparation for ITER for this new international machine that was being built
in the south of France, to see whether we could
use that instead of carbon. And the other thing that this
is during the installation of the wall, and you notice
the little robot there, that's the mascot. And the whole installation was done without sending people in the machine. It was all done by mascot. Since 2011, so with the metal wall, JET has shown that yes,
this effect of retaining the fuel in the wall is greatly
reduced with the metal wall. So that's all fine. However, the way the
plasma behaves when faced with a metal wall is
also slightly different. So it's taken us some time to learn how to reoptimize the plasma and get back to the temperatures and the density that we
had with the graphite. But this is not wasted time. This is time that has
been very, very useful because it has taught us
a lot about the physics and is the physics that
we can use then in ITER. And then we were ready to
bring it all together in DTE2, D-T and a metal wall,
which is really in small what could happen in ITER. And this is kind of the progress. So the PTE, the little bit,
this is the fusion energy, so the power over time, DTE1 and DTE2. That up there. And what you can see is that
there is a real progression and really shows that we know what to do. We can repeat experiments when we want to. Of course, we are not just doing record breaking experiments, we're also doing more
general physics experiment, physics of plasma,
physics of fusion plasmas that don't produce as much power. That's why you have the
variations of power. So what does it mean the record? What is it telling us? It's telling us that the
mathematical modelling that we have based on our
physics understanding is solid. The curves that you see, the
curves in pink are curves that were done in 2019. And the points are the points
from the 2021 experiments. So this gives us the points match the curves that were done before. So this gives us confidence
for the extrapolation to ITER and to fusion power plants. Again, one of the important things is this fuel, this question
of the fuel retention. And there is still a little bit, it's very little, a few percent that stays in the wall
even with the metal. So one of the last things that was installed in JET in 2023 was a new laser-based
system that shines a light from the top of basically, it's way from a lab above the machine. It shines it and it
shines it through a window into the machine, into the tokamak and it kind of fires this little laser and it absorbs so it takes
the tritium out of the tiles. So it demonstrates in situ fuel removal. In situ means that you
can remove the fuel, you can remove the tritium
from the wall without having to open the machine, without
having to stop fully operation. And the precision of this laser
is such that on the last day of JET, they could basically engrave JET and the little heart on this tile. A couple of things that
are aside from D-T. I will talk about something
that is more difficult. So far, everything is every sort of easy, but controlling a plasma is very difficult and sometimes, you can lose the control and this is called the disruption. And disruptions are rare fortunately, but the effect can be very serious and can drive damage to the wall. So we have installed a
shutter pallet injection, which is basically something that fires a cube of ice into the plasma that helps cooling down the
whole plasma suddenly if we know that there is a disruption going. But on the last day of campaign, just to make sure that our
predictions were correct, we did experiments where we
deliberately damaged the wall with this disruption. So we didn't mitigate the disruption and what you see are
microscopic, this is a inside the Torus in the infrared. And what you see are microscopic
fragments of the walls that have been dislodged by the strength of the disruption. Finally, I would like to
talk about AI applications. So because mitigating the fact that the disruptions is a good thing, but it would be even
better if we can predict it in real time and it'd be even
better if we can avoid it. So this is really an area where
about in the last 10 years, we've made progress and we are hoping to make even
more progress with the data that we have collected in JET. And this would be using
AI and machine learning. I have to describe this and I hope I'll describe it properly. This is a 2D representation of
disruptions based on JET data and basically, you take five,
this is a five dimensional. So you take five parameters during a pulse and you collapse it on a 2D space and then you represent each point or sort of a time point in
your plasma can be a point in the space and if
it's in the green area, then everything is fine. You're happy, your plasma is going to survive, it's not going to disrupt. If it approaches the
red area, then you know that a disruption is possibly incoming. So there are two trajectories
there of two plasmas that go towards a disruption. The interesting thing is that the diagram has
been built using JET data. The two lines are lines
from another tokamak. Something that is called D3D in the US. So basically we can
demonstrate that we can port what we can learn from the data of JET in terms of disruptions to another machine and that means also that we
can port it to future machines. So this is where I finished. This is a picture of
the first pulse of JET and this is a picture of
the last shift of JET. I'm not in there, I was away. That didn't feel, it was too much. But what I would like to say
is that the success of JET is not just the engineering
is not just the physics, but it's the people. And it's this bunch of people that over 40 years, have worked. And these are people with
very different background, very different expertise and they've worked
towards a common purpose. And I hope some of you will
be inspired by everything that is happening in Fusion to, you know, take on for the next generation because we still need a lot
of people working in fusion. Thank you. (audience applauding) - Anyone? Yeah, thank you, Fernanda, wonderful talk. It was a great pleasure
for me of course to be here but also to be here. Yeah, the talk from Fernanda on JET, I was myself a lucky boy when
I started working in Fusion to be a JET when we started to see the first preliminary
experiment with tritium, the first nuclear
reactions happening in JET. And already at that time, we knew that JET would be able to come to up to a certain point in term
of nuclear performance. And that would've not been enough. So already then, different states and you see the seven
flex that represent either realised that we had to make it bigger. We knew that we had to increase the energy confinement time. Fernanda spoke about, yeah,
10, maybe 15 megawatts produced for a few seconds and that's not enough. But what is also maybe, I
wouldn't say disappointing, but the fact of the matter in JET or in machines of that sort
of size is that in order to get this 15 megawatts
out of the plasma, you have to inject even more into it. So it's a bit like getting a fire started but needing a big torch
there to get power out, which doesn't make much sense when you want to produce energy. So we knew already then that we had to increase the confinement, what it's called the confinement. The confinement allows to
reach higher temperature and do so for a sufficiently long time so that you can get ignition. And ignition, it's what happens when you put a torch on
fire, on wood and it starts. And then you remove the
torch and it can keep going. And you know that when a piece of wood, a small piece of wood may be wet, you try to light it up, it doesn't go. But you know that you can
get this done with a bonfire for example, the temperature
in a bonfire is much higher. It's because the blanket around it, it's such so that at the core, yes the temperature can get to the level where what Fernanda said, it's easy, it's not that easy feat to have a deuterium
tritium reaction going. It's easier than the ones that go on in the centre of the sun, that's for sure, but it is still very complicated. So at that time, the members, different states in particular, the founding members of ITER, which is the European
Union, United States, at that time was the Soviet Union in fact turning into Russia, and Japan, they decided
that they would join forces in order to build, you know, a new machine that would be bigger
would be superconducting. Why superconducting? Because superconductivity allows to keep the current in the
magnets without spending energy. That's another thing which happens in JET. In order to get one of
the experiments going, you have to inject a lot of energy. So to get maybe few 10
megawatts out for a few seconds, the magnets consume 100
megawatts, 200 megawatts of electricity, which is
okay for an experiment but not for a power reactor. So it has to be big, it
has to be superconducting and it has to last for longer
time, not a few seconds. The length of the parts
in ITER, it's supposed to last say several minutes. Why not hours? Because we know that for several minutes, several minutes are enough to stabilise the plasma
conditions to levels where we know that they
could continue thereafter. And I think in terms of
economy, we knew that already, ITER, it's such a big step from JET. The power in ITER will be 500 megawatts. When say about 10 times less
will be injected inside. So that is Q equal 10, means the ratio between the output and the input energy. Now these seven flags are also
important from my standpoint. You see that India and China and South Korea also joined
the project in the early '90s. Because ITER complexities, it is also complex in some sense because it's let's say,
not only a science project but maybe a political science project or a science politics project, whichever way you want to put it. But it is something
which is good, I think. It costs in terms of complexity,
management complexity, I'll tell you it brings
some complexity for sure. Brings some pride for us. But it is I think important
particular at this time. So the mission of ITER will be to reach thermonuclear
burning plasma conditions and it'll also combine
a number of technologies which are instrumental to
develop fusion further. Remote handling, superconductivity,
tritium breeding. Tritium is we say abundant fuel but we don't find tritium. Tritium, you don't find it around. You find deuterium, tritium,
you have to produce. And one of the objectives of ITER will be to test technologies
which will allow to produce as much tritium as the
one we will consume. It won't really happen
at that scale in ITER, but the technology necessary
will be tested in ITER. So it's a bit of a mix of technology and physics put together. It gives you a size. I spoke about size matters. You see the coils, this is a comparison of the toroidal field
coils, the ones that create this donut magnetic field that
stabilise the plasma of JET. They are in copper in the JET coils and compare with JT-60SA, which is a brand new tokamak that started operation a
few months ago in Japan. It's a European-Japanese
collaboration that was decided and started along with ITER. And ITER itself. And you see that the
staggering difference in size, which is also part of the
complexity of the project. So this is a view of GT-60SA, which you can see, it's pretty complex. When you speak about superconductivity, the magnets have to be
encased in a big cryostat. You cannot keep them as I will
describe a little bit later, that you cannot keep them in conditions which are atmospheric pressure. It has to be under vacuum
with thermal shields, otherwise, you wouldn't
be able to keep them cold. Now where we stand with
ITER is here is a view of the work site, of the platform where we are building the facility. And we have done great
strides in the development of the overall say construction site. I will show you a movie
a little bit later. I mean, it's a little bit
complex here to understand what everything is for. I want to show you a movie because ideally, I would
really like you all to come and visit ITER and see how it is. I think it would be very
interesting for all of you. We have by the way, open
days, a few times a year and you're all invited to come and you will not be disappointed if you do because it's very interesting to see what I will show you later in a movie. This is a view of the assembly
oil in September, 2023. What we do is that we
assemble the TF coils, the toroidal field coils
with the vacuum vessel and the thermal shields. They are built in slices in sectors. We have nine of them which
then are inserted in a pit where everything gets mounted together. So that's a view a few months
ago in the assembly hall. And that's a view of a coil. Maybe you can see the little
men underneath the coils. These are not dwarfs really. (audience laughing) They are real men and it gives you, yeah, a real idea on the size. We have 18 of such coils. The energy of the magnetic field is 41 gigajoule. 41 gigajoule, you need 41 seconds of one gigawatt to energise them. It's a tremendous amount
of energy in this magnet. The magnetic field reaches
roundabout 13 Tesla at the conductor, which is
pretty much the limit of the type of conductor that we are using. And the stress conditions, the mechanical stress
conditions are enormous. Still at cryogenic temperature
become very, very hard, becomes very strong. About five times as strong
as it is at room temperature, which is very good. That's also one advantage
of superconductivity. Each coil weights about 400 tonnes. So that's, you know, an
impressive amount of weight when you have to handle these components. The sector itself, when it's put together, is reaching the limit
of the overall crane. The overall crane, okay,
standard technology, not so much. The crane is able to lift 1,500 tonnes and position its load with
about .5 millimetre precision. This is a view of another important plant, a piece of the plant. It's the cryogenic plant. There is only one in the world which is more powerful than this in CERN. CERN, there are four large units, I think it's about 25 kilowatt each. And the one in ITER is one
unit reaching 75 kilowatts. So it's the biggest unit in the world. It is able to cool down
helium to four kelvin, which is minus 269 centigrade. And at this temperature is a temperature where niobium 13, which is
an alloy of niobium and tin becomes superconducting. Superconducting means that
the resistance is zero. Zero. It's seems magic. It means that the current can be sustained in the magnet without
any effort whatsoever. But you need this big refrigerator and it's a hell of a refrigerator because it's 75 kilowatt
is actually not much. But when you look at the power that it's needed in order
to produce the cooling power at four Kelvin is about 100 megawatts. So it's a tremendous amount
of power which is needed in order to be able to
cool down and keep cold, the magnet itself Now, about one year ago, which is pretty much when
I joined the project, I did work in the '90s by
the way in the data project then left, worked on JD-60SA and now I'm back in this project. We found that there were some problems in the vacuum vessel sectors. We have to weld them together
in very challenging conditions and the vacuum vessel sectors are part of the primary boundary. It's subject to nuclear
regulatory constraints. And we realised that we were getting ourself
into a difficult situation because we had some
nonconformities, meaning that these sectors had some
deviations in their shape, which I think it's not
surprising because of the size and the difficulties that
we had during welding. And we thought it would've
been too risky to try to weld them in the pit
together as they were. So we decided to repair them. It's not actually a big deal. It's something that we can
do and we are doing that. It requires some buildup of material and realignment of the
phases that will need to be welded precisely in the pit. So that's a job that we are
doing now on the sectors that we have on site. Another thing that happened simultaneously is that we found some
cracks in a couple of pipes needed to cool the thermal shield. So look in thermonuclear fusion,
we have 150 million degrees and then a few say half a
metre far away from the plasma. We have the blanket and the vessel which operates
about 150 centigrade. And then you go another half a metre away and you go to four kelvin. So you go to very hot through. So more or less say, normal
temperatures all the way to cryogenic temperatures. That is pretty difficult to deal. And we need a thermal
shield between the vessel and the magnet, otherwise, the power to the magnet would be excessive. So we need to keep it cool. And so that's why we have this shield and we found there were some mini cracks in some of the pipes which
we didn't really want to deal with, and so we
decided to start and fix them. Now I move on and show you a
movie, which I hope will start. Did it start? Yes it does. So it's maybe a little bit boring. It last four minutes. And this is a view,
it's done with a drone. I don't know, it's a very big drone. I would love to pilot one of them one day. It gives you a view around the site and the big building that you
see there in the background is where the assembly all hill is where we put together the components. And this is an area which is where we have the magnet conversion, the
power conversion system. So we need to feed the
magnet with the high currents and it's a system which
is about 300 megawatts. So about 1 million times
your home Hi-Fi system. And that is literally yes, modulating the current in the magnet. Now we move to the cryogenic system that I've shown you before. The bridge there, it's the one that brings the helium lines. Now this is a view through this bridge. The helium lines are not yet
installed but soon to be. And this is a view of the
heat rejection system. So we will have the 500
megawatts of thermonuclear power that will be produced and
what do we do with it? We have unfortunately just
to waste it in the atmosphere because we will not produce
any electricity with it. But we need the heat rejection
system at our system. So here you see one of
the big green coils. You have seen the D-shaped coils before, but we also have very
large D-shaped coils. This, we couldn't transport and so we had to manufacture
them in a dedicated facility. Now all the magnets are in fact done. And for me it's very impressive because I thought when
I started working in it that this would've been
the last components to arrive the most difficult. But in fact, they're all done. Done and dusted. These are say they, part of the 18 coils that we all have on site,
ready to be assembled. Here, we have the central solenoid, which is a 13 Tesla magnet
that goes inside the core of the tokamak. It serves the purpose of
creating the plasma current. It's also see half done being
built in the United States. Another view approaching the assembly hall is a building which is almost completed that will host beam heating system. It's one of the three
systems that will help heat up the plasma to
the require temperature in order to achieve the
necessary condition. And what you see here is
the top of the cryostat. It's a big lead. It's about 30 metres in the diameter. I said before that we have
to keep the magnets entirely into a big tank. And this is say, the top
that we will put at the end. A view here is on the repair works that we are doing on the thermal shields. This is just a few weeks old,
this movie, three weeks old. So we are in the process of
repairing, as I said before, the thermal shield. And now you see a few days
old image of the assembly hall where we are taking apart some of the components
for the further repair. So that's a vacuum vessel sector, again. I think we will now go and see what's inside the
pit, which you see above. Okay, here, you see the
cranes that are overhanging and now we go inside the pit. This is where we will instal eventually, pretty soon, all the sector modules again. And you see in the
bottom the lower PF coils that have already been installed. Okay, we are now in the process after this hiccups say, of repair work. And I like to explain what
goes wrong in projects. We should not just say the successes, but it's very important to
explain to our colleagues and to everybody that we also have hiccups and we have now to prepare a new baseline. So we are in the process of preparing it and we will submit it to the ITER council, which is our governance in a few months, hoping that they will accept it. And we will also now we are
conscious that, you know, ITER has been the result
of so much research around the world by the seven members. And we are very happy that
there are so many yes, interest in fusion across the
board in the private sector. And we would like to
collaborate and cooperate and try also to help. Yes, many of the private sectors, we have a lot of knowledge
in ITER, I believe. a lot of it has been accumulated through R&D and preparation. And as was said before, we
have so many new initiatives. I just list a few here because there are literally
almost 100 now around the world. Some in the UK, in Germany,
in the United States. So an important point in general
for ITER will be to support yes, some of these initiatives
for them to succeed. So I come to the end of my
talk, thank you very much again for your attention. I hope it was not too boring. And okay. (audience applauding) - Thank you Fernanda and Pietro and Melanie for a wonderful intro. Good evening. It is a pleasure to be here with you today and get to share some of
our latest developments in a different kind of fusion,
inertial fusion energy. You may or may not have
heard, on December 5th, 2022, fusion ignition was finally realised at the National Ignition Facility. And for us, this was a pretty big deal. We got to do a press conference, which for a scientist, pretty awesome day. What does that mean? Well, in that experiment, we were able to generate more energy out
of our target than was put in. And this was a goal that had been over 60 years in the making and required a team of
thousands over those decades. The plot on the right that you see there is our fusion yield. So the energy that was
produced on that y-axis, the vertical axis, versus year, time since we turned on our machine, which came on right around 2010. And that pink line that you
see was the laser energy we were able to put out. And each of those bars in that histogram is
a different experiment where the goal every
single time was to exceed that pink horizontal line. And you see it took
over 10 years of effort. It was tough. For a long time, we were far, far away. But finally, in 2022, we
surpassed that pink line. That was ignition. Now inertial confinement
fusion, what does that mean? Well, what we are trying
to do is achieve fusion by creating a plasma of very high density, very high temperature for
very small amounts of time. So this is a different parameter space than a conventional fusion
that everybody knows well. Gravitational confinement like the sun. Different from magnetic
confinement like JET or ITER, we're doing inertial confinement. So you see here, we've laid
out the density, temperature and confinement time. The sun, very, very dense, right? 10,000 times solid density,. Pretty hot, 15 million degrees Celsius and has a very long confinement time. The sun is able to hold
itself together with gravity for over 100,000 years. That's the amount of
time it takes radiation to escape from the centre of
the sun out to the outside. Now with magnetic confinement
like in JET or ITER, we're talking about a plasmas,
a very low density right? Very hot, 150 million degrees Celsius. And they get to hold themselves
together for seconds. That gives the plasma enough time to try to make fusion happen. Inertial confinement on the
other hand is different. 1,000 times solid. So very dense, very hot,
150 million degrees Celsius. And what happens when you are
hot and dense together, right? Your pressures are enormous. So we can only hold ourselves together for tens of picoseconds. And to do this, let me introduce you to the National Ignition Facility or NIF. We are located at Lawrence
Livermore National Lab in Northern California about
50 miles east of San Francisco. And here, we are building
our own miniature sun. So this is the outside of the building. And from a bird's eye view,
you can see it's about the size of three American football
fields side by side and 10 stories tall. We are the world's largest and most energetic
laser enabling the study of extreme conditions for what we call high
energy density science. Now we're not just one laser beam, we're actually 192 separate laser beams. Each one alone is one of the
most energetic in the world, and we're combining nearly
200 of them for a total energy of two megajoules and a
power of 500 terawatts. Now just for reference,
that is about 1,000 times the power of the entire
US electrical grid. However, what is power? It's energy per unit time, right? So we're taking a huge amount of energy and compressing it down
into just nanoseconds. Now for you laser aficionados out there, it is frequency triple neodymium glass, meaning we are putting out a
wavelength of 351 nanometers. It is a UV laser. And if I take the roof off of the building to give you a look inside, you can see that mostly, this building is
taken up by enormous optics where we amplify the laser up, we make it more and more energetic, and we concentrate all of the energy of those 192 laser beams
onto a tiny target. And I brought an example here today. You can see actually on the
top right, it is a target that is inside what we call a freiraum It's a German word for empty space. It's a little canister that we're gonna shine the lasers into and there's a little fuel
pellet held up to a human eye there for comparison about
two millimetres in diameter. And an example is here, and
you're welcome to come up after the show and have a
closer look at this now. Now, what we are doing is using
inertial confinement fusion to bring star power to earth. But where is the sun is
a million miles across, the star that we are
generating in the laboratory is only about two one
thousandths of an inch. That's about half the
diameter of a human hair. And I know this is very
difficult to conceptualise. So I'm going to play a little video and explain how this all comes together. So we start in the NIF control room and this is where I,
as a plasma physicist, spend my time when it's
going to be my experiments, - [Announcer] Five, four,
three, two, one, shot. - So first, the laser is going to be born in the master oscillator room. It is a fibre laser at a nanojoule level. So it's about 1,000 times less energy than a typical laser pointer. The laser is going to be
split 48 ways getting sent into the pre-amplifier
module where it bounces close to 100 times getting amplified
up to the millijoule level. So now about a laser pointer. Now each laser is going to
be split another four ways and goes into the main
amplifier bouncing four times back and forth across
the enormous facility. And at this point in
the video, we're going to start following one single laser beam. And these beams are not a
little laser pointer anymore, they're each about 40 by
40 centimetres squared. So why is the laser so big? Well, it's because each one
contains so much energy, we actually have to spread
that energy out over the optic as a laser is travelling through so as not to damage the optic itself. Now you're gonna see all beams
approach the target chamber, that blue ball that is
10 metres in diameter. Half of our laser beams get sent up, half gets sent downwards, and they're all going
to watch this sync up. We're gonna frequency convert
from red from infrared to green to blue to the UV, and then our lasers are
incident on that tiny target. Now half of our laser
beams are gonna come in through the top laser entrance
hole half through the bottom. They're gonna irradiate the inside wall of this little canister
generating a very energetic flux of X-rays, about 300 EV plank in. And those X-rays start
compressing our little capsule and at the same time, heating the fuel that sits on the inside. And if we do it right, ignition. More energy out than we
put in with the laser. (audience applauding) And so I know it looks easy (audience laughing)
from this video, but this really was built on
six decades of innovation. The first laser was invented in 1960 and is legend goes, John
Nuckolls, who was later on, one of our directors at
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, two days later came up with the idea of, "Hey, we can use lasers to do fusion." Which is just crazy because at that time, a laser wasn't even the
laser that you know today. It was just a couple of photons, right? And just imagine the audacity, right? The boldness to say, "Hey,
let's just build enormous lasers and build stars." Right? But anyways, from 1960 and
decades on, we built larger and larger lasers at Livermore
to try to make fusion happen. And the NIF, in fact is the
ninth in this series of lasers. And during this time, just like with JET, we were doing all of
this foundational science and technology to try to
understand plasma physics and make fusion happen. So the NIF, we started
construction in 1997. It was completed in about 2009, 2010, and that's when we
started our experiments. And continuously, our
facility runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we were
trying to do experiments. It took 12 years of experimentation before we got to ignition. Again, more energy out than
we put in with that laser. Now here's a really exciting thing. We've now achieved ignition
four times on the NIF. Most recently in July of last year, 2023, we actually got almost
twice as much energy out as we put in with the laser. So ignition, no more a question. We are robust, we are repeatable. It was not a fluke. Now, we have a better
understanding of the physics behind fusion than we
have ever had before. Okay, but the NIF itself
is not a power plant. How do we take this idea
and turn it into something that can produce electricity on the grid? IFE power plants will be
quite a bit more complicated and they will consist of four main parts. So on the NIF right now, we
are a science facility, right? Every experiment as we do is different. Every experiment is super complex. To make enough energy that it
would be commercially viable to have enough energy to
keep your power plant running and send energy out to the grid, you need gains of 50 to 100. So like I just mentioned, we've achieved gains of two so far, right? Energy out over energy in. That's one big challenge. Another big challenge is it's
expected that we would need to shoot a target 10 times a second, and about 10 hertz at
those gains of 50 to 100 in order to make this power plant work. So some of the challenges are listed here. We would need a target factor
that can produce those targets at low cost because again, fusion needs to be commercially viable
competitive with other types of technology out there, it's
about 25 cents a target or so. We need a laser driver that is
more efficient than the NIF. Now, keep in mind, the
technology in the NIF is over 20 years old today. There are new laser
architectures out there that have much higher, what
we call wall plug efficiency, taking the energy that
we draw from the grid and turning it into laser energy, right? Nonetheless, that driver has
to be, eh, 10 to 15% efficient. We also have to be able
to focus those lasers into the target chamber
and have the optics that do that focusing survive these million shots a day essentially. The fusion chamber, and here's where we have a lot of overlap with magnetic fusion has to be a material that can withstand
those higher radiations. We have to be able to breed tritium, it has to have high availability,
be able to be maintained and can stay running. And then finally, once you
create the neutrons coming out, you would absorb those
neutrons in the blanket in the wall of the reactor,
they would heat up. And then once you have
heat, you create steam. And that steam plant is what you then generate
electricity with. So like I said, the NIF is a scientific exploration facility. It's very different from
what would be needed for an IFE power plant. We say that NIF is single shot. Currently, we do about one
shot every four to eight hours. With that IFE power plant, you need to run at 10
hertz, 10 times a second. However, this is really exciting. Like I explained, we've
now achieved a gain of almost two on the NIF. Imagine if you just wanted a power plant that could run itself. Let's not talk about feeding
energy out to the grid yet, just enough to be self-sustaining. You would only need a
gain of about 15 to 16 to be that self-sustaining plant. Okay, that's a challenge, right? We still have quite a lot of work to do before we get to that gain of 15, 16. However, keep in mind that over the past decade,
we've improved our gains on the NIF already by a factor of 1,000. So maybe, maybe we can get there soon. Now, the point is though,
that the NIF provides a very unique opportunity to
experiment at fusion scale. It is currently the only
burning plasma machine anywhere in the world. So we wanna take advantage of learning everything
that we can from it. However, I wanna be clear that there are still
many, many outstanding technical questions that must be solved to make inertial fusion energy a reality. So I will stay employed for quite a while. I'm hoping some of you would
be interested in coming to work with us as well. Now what's exciting though is that we are at a very pivotal
moment in fusion research with a very well organised
community coming together to take advantage of recent successes. In the US, our Department of Energy, which funds the fusion research in the US, sponsored what we call a
basic research needs workshop. And what that did was bring
together over 120 experts in fusion from across the
world to lay out the gaps, challenges, and what we call
priority research opportunities where we can get the
biggest return on investment if we really tackle particular issues. And so we put out this report, there's a little QR code
there if anybody's interested. It is about a 200-page report. But for anybody that's
interested in pursuing a PhD and seeing the status of the field, this clearly lays it all out. And so this fusion energy
excitement is not just in policy, but also technology development. In 2022, the White House
held a fusion summit announcing a Bold Decadal Vision for fusion commercialisation. So we're seeing huge momentum politically to make fusion happen. There's been over 70 years of research and $30 billion invested
in fusion total as a field. We've now achieved fusion ignition. So we have a better grasp
on some of the physics behind fusion than ever before. And then very exciting, there's incredible creativity
and concept diversity. Tonight, you've only heard about two of the mainline concepts,
tokamaks for magnetic fusion, laser-driven inertial fusion. But there's all kinds of
areas in between as well. Magneto, inertial, all kinds of reverse field
pinch stuff going on. And so what's really exciting for all of us in the field is
seeing everybody come together and really making fusion happen and learning from each other. And governments are paying attention. We're seeing fusion roadmaps and follow on funding around the world. So you see reports coming
out, reports galore. The US, UK, Germany, Japan. In fact, Germany committed
a billion dollars to fusion over the next five years and they have never had an
inertial fusion programme before, and they're open to starting one now. So what's also really exciting is all of our communities
coming together to try to pull our knowledge
to learn from each other and to push the technologies
we need together. So I'll end with this slide that with ignition, we
can accelerate progress toward the long side
dream of fusion energy. There's right now a clear and
compelling international need like Melanie said. Fusion energy strengthens our
energy and climate security. Inertial fusion energy itself
is a game changing technology. It has very different risks and rewards compared with magnetic fusion. And we're seeing governments
start to put up money to pursue it in parallel
to magnetic fusion. And the time is absolutely now. We've demonstrated ignition on the NIF, but we have to caution that fusion is and will be a multi decal endeavour and will require innovation to make this an economical energy source. It's not good enough just to
show that fusion works, right? To be competitive, to
really make a difference, energy needs to be competitive
with other sources. We're also seeing public-private and international
partnerships that are key to realising in the US what we
call the Bold Decadal Vision. The public sector, like Melanie says, has that longstanding expertise
in large scale facilities. But the private sector
now has an opportunity to really leverage what has
been done in the public sector and new investments to push towards these fusion pilot plants. So let me just end with a quote that comes from a study in the US that says, "Fusion energy
offers a step change that could amount to a zero
carbon way of producing energy that upends the longstanding
energy geopolitics, reducing reliance on
foreign energy markets, and advancing a wide
array of other fields, including some that we
cannot yet predict." Thank you. (audience applauding)
