The World's Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment: RAZOR Full Episode

[Music] this is cgtn china global television network [Music] i'm shini somara in france where they're hoping to recreate the power of the sun here on earth and i'm emma killing in london finding out how a soviet era treatment could cure one of our most aggressive cancers [Music] when we think of nuclear energy we generally think of nuclear fission the splitting of radioactive atoms to generate power and we may also think of some of the disasters that have happened from this process but there is another source of nuclear energy a safe form based on forcing atoms together it's called nuclear fusion and it's basically the same reaction that powers the sun and stars nuclear fusion is considered to be the holy grail of an unlimited supply of clean energy so i've come to the south of france to find out how an international collaboration of scientists is trying to achieve that by recreating the power of the sun right here on earth 35 countries from around the world have come together to create a sustainable fusion reaction designed to produce more energy than it consumes it's called eta which is latin for the way what is the ambition for this project the ambition beside is a research facility in order to demonstrate the feasibility of hydrogen fusion to contribute to the world energy supply not just for a few decades or even a century is for millions of years for a population which will be above 8 billion of inhabited this is essentially one giant demonstration for the world for nuclear fusion never before in the world it has been demonstrated you could have what we call a burning plasma which means a plasma which will be self-eating itself as in the sun as is a star [Music] at its simplest the sun is a huge glowing sphere of hydrogen and helium its extreme temperatures strip hydrogen nuclei of their electrons leaving the protons and electrons moving freely in what's known as plasma plasma is often referred to as the fourth state of matter because protons are all positively charged they normally repel each other but the sun's extreme temperatures and huge gravitational force overcome this repulsion and forces the hydrogen protons together eventually fusing them into helium atoms the new helium atom is slightly less massive than the ones that created it with the missing mass released as energy because plasmas are a massive charged particles they can be influenced by magnetic fields which is key to achieving fusion here on earth and that happens inside a containment vessel known as a tokamak built to hold plasmas hotter than those found in the sun [Music] i'm here at the column centre for fusion energy where they have the world's largest tokamak and i'm hoping that today they're going to generate plasma for real so where are we going we're going to invest training facility total there's so much happening here today we are starting a preparation of very important experiments actually one of the most important experiments we're going to ever carry out the jet [Music] jet is a sort of a proper type of eater it has been built on the success of jet so ether is a scaled up version of the technology and the physics that we discovered and developed with jet so what happens here the concept we use it's called tokamak this was a configuration or a device that was developed in russia in the 60s and in the late 60s the russians were able to demonstrate that this particular shape which is like a donut shape with a very powerful magnetic field can actually create the temperatures we need for fission to occur jet is the largest tokamak in the world although it's been around for over 30 years it's still a very important experiment because it has been continuously upgraded continuously improved so despite being all the experiment is still a new experiment in the sense that we can still do the cutting-edge technologies in the physics experiments that we need for future is it possible to see the world's largest talker back follow me please the tokamak is in constant use and shielded behind thick concrete doors is it safe but there is a scale replica used for training purposes oh incredible [Music] this is the tokamak this is real copy of the actual machine this is a axi to the scale of the jet machine and this is as close as you can be of being inside the real token map what are the basic functionalities of this space so this is a chamber where you can achieve the temperatures that are similar to the ones or actually higher than the ones to achieve the center of the sun 10 times higher to do a fusion experiment the first thing is to remove all the air so we have a vacuum chamber and then you put some it's very tiny amount of gas which is hydrogen and this will be then heated to very high temperatures but in order to keep this very high temperatures in the plasma you need to insulate the plasma itself from the surrounding structures that you can see here to do that we need very powerful magnetic fields because you have such high temperatures i mean hundreds of millions of degrees centigrade and one of the ways or the best way we use to insulate this very high temperature from the surfaces using magnetic fields so the tokamak's magnetic field contains a superheated plasma like an invisible bottle the internal vacuum forms an almost perfect insulating layer so that there's no heat transfer between the contained plasma and the sides of the metal vacuum chamber okay so now that we've seen the replica where are we going next now we're going to where the magic happens we're going to the control room where all the scientists engineers design their experiments and perform their experiments on a daily basis and where you can actually see fusion in real time with your own eyes [Music] so this is a jet experiments control room these are all the scientists that we have it feels like star trek it's like science fiction yeah science fiction spaceship science and all of the scientists here are focused on one thing the pulse where they hope to create a plasma inside the tokamak what's that sound what you've just heard is the loudspeaker indicating that we start a new countdown it's almost like launching a rocket yeah especially with the countdown so all the parameters have been loaded into the computer systems the final countdown will be for the pulse to be triggered experiment is ongoing the plasma has not been launched yet but the magnetic field is increasing and you will see soon in one of the middle screens the value of the magnetic field increasing and then we have the plasma you can see the plasma running now the heating will go and we'll start uh very powerful heating systems and you can see the the fusion reactions occurring in real time and that was it around 10 seconds and all the plan yeah extremely bright and now it's the end of the plasma that lasted all of 10 seconds it's 10 seconds but how was it very precious 10 seconds yeah a lot of information comes out of every 10 second experiment to do here so i guess just in terms of the fact that it even happened is a great sign every piece of information we get is vital to advanced fusion science and this is one of these very important pieces of the puzzle that we need to create the scientific knowledge to run a fusion experiment like it but how will all this work to one day provide power an atom of hydrogen is made up of one positively charged proton and one negative electron it also has two variants or isotopes deuterium has one proton and one neutral neutron tritium has two neutrons in a fusion reaction deuterium and tritium fuse to form a helium atom and a high speed neutron in a fusion reactor the high speed neutrons will be slowed down by a denser metal wall surrounding the reaction this slowing will release heat which in turn will produce steam which will then drive turbines ita plans to begin its fusion experiments in 2025. surprised to say we're going down to the first basement and then the second baseman right now it's a giant construction project so here we come into the tokamak pit and this is where you appreciate the scale of the tokamak this entire space will be full from ground to ceiling with the tokamak it would be a stainless steel vessel called the cryostat which will completely fill the space on the outside and then inside it will be super cooled down to 80 kelvin so nearly minus 200 degrees and the entire tokamak will sit inside this space so you will never be able to come here so here exactly where we'll be standing will be extremely cold and then just a little bit yeah below absolutely yeah almost absolute zero and then as you just go up there in the middle imagine it'll be 100 million degrees so the temperature gradient between almost my hand and where we are would be is that part of the challenge of making a tokamak work one of the other things about fusion is though that making the plasma bigger makes it easier to control and easier to make the reaction because if you imagine you have a volume of plasma you're trying to heat then the bigger you make it then the better the surface area so you lose less heat wasted so the bigger you can make your tokamak the easier it is to do fusion so that's why the scale of eaten the efficiency and performance of the tokamak is key and that depends on how the plasma is created so how do you get a plasma in this giant space so as we see here there's a central column that's called a central solenoid that's like a transformer so basically that's a big magnet with a coil yes around yes and you see this whole chamber as we see here it will be filled with gas then we will uh kind of power up our central solenoid and then it will generate an electric field in this kind of a donut shaped electric field let's say so you have a gas you give some energy to it the electrons will start to separate from this gas and once these electrons separate they will further gain more energy and you know they will ionize another hydrogen let's say molecule and that's how it will go on it's a chain reaction and you will finally get a plasma this is a huge space what are the problems that you face trying to create a plasma within there eater is very special compared to other token max at present you know it's much much bigger than maybe like thousand times bigger than the present token max so we need to optimize it and see that we do have the correct configuration let's say that we can produce this plasma will you get it sorted by 2025 yeah yeah sure there's no doubt about that we have sorted most of the issues at least from the design point of view or it should be fine and 2025 shouldn't be an issue the assembly hall will be the most busy place in the next four years as we put together and assemble the tokamak from all the pieces that are coming from around the world the main tokamak building is made from reinforced concrete because of the strength it has to be very strong building and also because it has to hold in the the power of the tokamak and the fusion reaction whereas these are steel buildings which are much lighter and quicker to build i must say it's really magnificent to see it from this perspective because i feel so small right now it's still very much under construction or we get a first chance to see inside as you see we're walking across a bridge because the whole of the tokamak building is is isolated from the ground in in case there's an earthquake that is a long way down sits on about 500 seismic bearings so the building is able to move freely without being shaken by the earthquake and are we in an earthquake zone very little chance but just in case just in case just in case yes oh wow so this is the assembly hall where in the next few years we'll be putting together the pieces of the tokamak which will be arriving from all over the world gosh it's massive in here yeah so this is where you can really see the scale of the eatertokomac from the size of the pieces the assembly tools that we have here so as you can see it's a hive of activity because the assembly of the machine will start in the next couple of months and then carry on all the way through to the end of 2024 so what exactly are the white columns these are the assembly tools pieces will be carried in these cranes will lift the piece and literally rotate it vertically we loaded onto as you said these white columns which is a maneuverable tools and then the piece the vacuum vessel we put in the center of one one segment like an orange and then the magnetic coils which are big d shapes 18 meters high will be loaded onto the sides and then the machine will rotate to put one piece of the tokamak together and then that will repeat it nine times as as the pieces are lifted up and then put into the tokamak pitch let's face it ken this is just one big lego set exactly yes and somebody has actually made a lego model of each other yes [Music] so where are we heading now so we're going to the pf coil building which is a factory that's been built on site in order to make that what we call the political field coils the pf magnets or colloidal field coils are constructed on site in their own building once complete the tokumaka eater will have the largest and most integrated superconducting magnet system ever built okay so this is the pf coil winding building here we can see the process of the building of a pf magnet so it's built up of layers so we wind the coil the cable around to make a coil in one slat layer and then they're lifted over and you can see the crane here where each layer is put on top of the other to build up the structure of the coil so you can get an impression here this goes around the outside the tokamak the vacuum vessel and so this will create a field within the tokamak to make the fusion happen why is it necessary to use such big magnets well fusion is the source of energy which powers the sun of course and on the sun the sun is rather larger than our takamak even it's a very huge structure so it has gravity and its own gravity is sufficient to keep the the plasma together the sun itself and to make the fusion work but here we're building a plasma on a smaller scale on earth we're building the tocomac a bit smaller than the sun and so and we don't have gravity so we use electromagnets to make a magnetic field a magnetic bottle as you will which will contain and hold the plasma in and so it never really ever touches the outside of the tokamak it's kept in by this virtual bottle of magnetic fields how important is nuclear fusion technology for me fusion is the energy of the future but not a distinct feature the near future because we need ways of producing energy that does not have big environmental impacts and fusion has many advantages the main advantage of course is that no co2 is produced through the fusion process so fusion is the perfect energy to combat climate change but also fusion is a much cleaner process compared with the other nuclear energy options so it's basically this two benefits clean and environmentally responsible that makes fusion really an attractive energy source [Music] [Music] this is [Music] is how will your world change today [Music] what happens here what happens there [Music] or what you make happen for yourself [Music] if it matters to you it matters to us too your stories are these stories that need to be told africa live find your voice on the agenda with me stephen cole we look up into space we look down into data we look at debt we look at politics we look at opioids climate change we look at all the issues that really matter around the world but you matter too we want to tell the stories you want to see and hear about make it your agenda forget you can sign up to our daily newsletter we bring you all the top business headlines straight to your inbox so sign up for free at this address cgtn see the difference the pandemic is changing the world as we know it but within the challenges lie tremendous opportunities as people and industries make the most of a new era watch our special week-long series redesigning the future starting monday the 31st of august on cgtn's global business the world's currencies are more connected than ever before the mechanisms that drive the economy are universal money moves markets we explain these trends and show you how the cash in your pocket can have a wide reaching effect because money makes the world go round global [Music] good business good to see you richard preston is living with an incurable brain cancer called glioblastoma so richard you were diagnosed five years ago and what did they tell you at the time bad news you've got terminal brain cancer it's malignant and it could grow back at any time so within five days of the optician saying there's something dodgy the back of your left eye i was in the operation room having a six hour operation on my head it's one of the most common types of malignant brain tumors in adults and 70 of people diagnosed with glioblastoma die within a year i'm emma keeling in london where a professor is on the brink of a breakthrough using soviet era treatment once shunned by western countries [Applause] oncologist dr matt williams says although brain cancers are rare they disproportionately affect young people and are more often fatal so their impact can be greater so why are brain tumors so hard to treat i don't really think we know all the answers there are two obvious things the first thing is that they're rare and therefore we don't get that many examples of them but the second thing is the brain is a protected structure so it's obviously protected by the skull so it's difficult to get tissue but even within the skull the brain is insulated from the rest of the world by something we call the blood-brain barrier and so actually most of the chemotherapy drugs that we give that might work for breast or lung or colorectal cancer just don't get into the brain throughout the body there are small gaps between the cells which line the interior of blood vessels these gaps allow ions and small molecules to pass from the blood to the surrounding tissues but in the brain these cells are closer together even overlapping which allows only nutrients water and some gases to pass into the brain tissue keeping out pathogens and toxins often brain tumors are regarded as kind of the poor cousin of other cancers and so part of my job is to try and turn that around and say actually no no don't do it in breast lung prostate and then come and look at brain come and work on brain because if you can crack that which is difficult everything else will be a piece of cake one of the researchers dr williams spoke to was professor arman hijitsu so do you remember that conversation with dr williams i do it still sticks in my mind especially when he described the the poor the very poor prognosis and the disappointing outcome for existing treatments professor hijitsu has been working for 12 years on a cancer treatment using bacteriophage therapy bacteriophages are the most abundant and diverse microbes found in the body but the property that makes them of special interest is that they can cross the blood-brain barrier [Music] a bacteriophage or simply phage is a kind of virus that only infects bacteria thousands of varieties exist but each variety infects only one or a few species the phage punctures the surface of bacteria injecting it with its own genetic material the bacterial dna is then modified to manufacture more copies of the phage which eventually kills the bacteria the phage is able to recognize its prey by proteins known as receptives which are found on the surface of each species in the 1920s phage therapy was used extensively to treat bacterial infections the discovery of antibiotics saw the treatment lose favor in the west but russia and eastern european countries continue to study and use phages this is what we call a tissue culture room in which we grow human glasblaster muscles we grow them in order to test whether our phage can actually kill them before initiating the clinical studies in animals so how long before you see any changes to the cancer cells once the phages have been added with the first generation of viruses we had it could take up to four or five days but now with the superior we have better viruses it could take two days we can start to see the death in cancer cells professor hijito and his team have genetically modified a type of phage known as m13 to recognize receptors found exclusively on the surface of cancer cells instead of bacterial cells they also edited the virus's genetic material to include a therapeutic gene which activates when injected producing a protein that destroys the cell trials have shown that phages only attack the cancer unlike chemotherapy and radiation that can leave the patient quite toxic what am i seeing on the screen here we are looking at a section from the brain of an animal which was implanted with human glioblastoma cells this border between the tumor and the healthy brain what you see in green here is the face this phase was able to cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in the tumors without harming the healthy brain the treatment requires thousands of phages so they must be harvested as you can see she has the face in very small volume that's all we have at the moment but she just adds the face to the bacteria each bacteria serves as a factory to manufacture to produce the phage so the more bacteria the more phage will be produced in that flask we have a mixture of bacteria and phases we need to get rid of the bacteria the centrifugation will separate between bacteria and bacteriophages and that's all phages in there that's all phases the phages are delivered into the test subject via multiple injections a low dose of a chemotherapy drug amplifies the therapy by activating the immune system we met richard and he'd had his tumor taken out but there was a little bit left behind so is that where your phage therapy would be used surgery by itself is not enough to remove the whole tumors it has to be combined with other therapeutic approaches like chemotherapy radiation therapy in order to destroy the romanian cells but in these cells you find what you call cancer stem cells which are resistant to chemo and radiation therapy from which the tumors grow back and lead to death of the patient this is where our face comes with this advantage because we showed that our face can find these cancer stem cells and destroy them the other advantage of our phases they can be given repeatedly without any safety issues unlike other viral therapies or chemotherapy or or other therapeutic agents so how confident are you that phage therapy can cure glioblastoma to be frank only clinical trials in human with glioblastoma will prove that but we are optimistic we hope it will happen we have to live in hope clinical trials may begin in the uk within the next three to five years but they could start even earlier in other countries so your outlook on life is just very positive i try and make it as positive as possible because i mean i've i've had the cancer had i've had it taken out i've had the drugs i'm just cruising along now waiting for it to happen again because they say it's inevitable it's going to happen again so if you had the opportunity to take part in a clinical trial to try something new yes would you take it yes i've already decided that anything i can do to help other people is worth me doing [Music] you

Channel: CGTN Europe

Views: 10,817

Keywords: CGTN, cgtn europe, China news, Europe news

Id: 0Fijd68b3lM

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020