his video is brought to you by Incogni. Fusion energy is basically just smashing
things together to make energy. Grossly oversimplified? Yes, but still accurate. First
Light Fusion in the UK has a unique approach to fusion energy that takes that “smashing
things together” to another level. I had a chance to see their facility first hand and
talk to them about their current progress, as well as what’s to come at their new
demonstrator plant. Are privately funded companies, like First Light Fusion, the
path towards our fusion energy future? I’m Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided. This is the second video in my “UK
nuclear tour.” In my first video, I visited the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s
(UKAEA) Culham Science Center, which is the hub of the UK government’s fusion research.
That’s where you find the JET and MAST-U tokamaks, but what’s interesting is that the UKAEA
isn’t just about publicly funded research. They’re also working with private companies,
like First Light Fusion, to offer support to accelerate all kinds of approaches towards fusion
energy. First Light just recently announced that they’re building Machine 4 at the Culham Science
Center, but I’ll get to more on that in a bit. What’s crazy to me is just how much private
money is fueling the current growth we’re seeing in fusion research. According to the
“The Global Fusion Industry in 2022” report from the Fusion Industry Association, there was a
massive spike in funding between 2021 and 2022 — a whopping $2.8 billion dollars. $4.74 billion
in private funding and $117 million in public funding make up the grand total for 2022’s
fusion investment. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared
to the rest of the energy industry. According to a 2023 report from the International Renewable
Energy Agency (IRENA),] about $0.5 trillion was invested in renewable energy in 2022. So if you’re
concerned that research and interest into fusion is going to slow down adoption of existing
technologies, like solar and wind, don’t be. But what exactly is First Light Fusion doing
that sets them apart? First Light is harnessing a different weapon…literally. Their novel
pulsed ignition is called projectile fusion, and it shoots off an old concept known as inertial
confinement fusion (ICF).[^27] Put simply, after triggering a sort of railgun, a copper
disk-shaped projectile will fly at about 7 km/s[^28] towards a target that’s encapsulating
the fuel (ideally deuterium + tritium). It’s about 1-3 millimeters in size and is uniquely designed
to amplify and direct the effects of the impact, which gives rise to a pressure wave that
collapses the fuel. This then turns into plasma, sparking fusion. First Light Fusion successfully
demonstrated fusion in November of 2021, so this is a proven concept. The crazy bit is where the
inspiration for this idea comes from: a shrimp. A pistol shrimp snaps its claw together so
fast that it rips the water apart, creating a low pressure zone. Bubbles collect in this area
and rapidly expand. The outside pressure of the surrounding water pushes back and collapses the
bubbles. The vapor inside that low pressure zone is compressed to the point that plasma actually
forms and reaches temperatures over 4,700 °C. That idea spurred First Light Fusion’s founder, Nick
Hawker, to research and simulate the phenomena. “We were trying to distill that into something you
could study on the computer. I kind of describe it as the start of the inventive journey because what
we're doing now is nothing to do with the shrimp. It looks completely different. The great thing
about simulations is if you have an idea, you can test it out so quickly, you know, so you can
iterate really, really fast. And 10 years later we have a completely new way of doing inertial fusion
that came from that sort of starting point.” Nick took it a step further to help me wrap my
head around the concept and described it like an internal combustion engine. The high
velocity projectile is the spark plug, the target is the fuel, and the entire
system will pulse at a certain cadence to produce the right amount
of heat and power needed. They’ve got several test machines that
I got to see while I was there. The first is a giant rail gun where
you shoot off a projectile using explosives and then amplify the speed of
the projectile before it hits the target. “At that end we put in three kilograms of
gunpowder that launches the first projectile, which compresses hydrogen ahead of it. And
the hydrogen gets compressed into this central piece here, where it then launches the second
projectile, which gets a much higher velocity. So this, the first stage, gets to normal gun
velocity of about one kilometer per second. The second stage gets up to seven kilometers
per second. And what that does is it delivers a shock wave to our target and allows us to do
the target physics testing that we need to do.” While this is great for testing the physics
of the projectile design and other effects, it’s not capable of achieving the
speeds they need. They can get projectiles up to about 7 km/s, but need
something around 50-60 km/s. Basically, this is a very cool piece of lab equipment they
can use to test out ideas before scaling up. So how are they going to get up to that 50-60
km/s speed? Instead of explosives, they’re going with an electromagnetic launch system, which
brings us to Machine 2. It’s a pulse power machine that they use to test launching their
projectiles with electromagnetic pulses. In fact, this machine is actually two pulse power machines
because, much like the two-stage light-gas gun, it’s a piece of lab equipment where they need
to measure the effectiveness of their designs. “So this was a really important platform for us
when we were first getting into electromagnetic launch. First understanding of how the process
works and getting some experiments to check the predictions against. But we're still using it. So
what we're actually seeing right now is there's actually two pulse power machines here. There's
the machine, which is launching the projectile, which is behind. And then this in front
is actually a second pulse power machine, which is an X-ray source. So we're actually
using this to make a really bright, really short, fast pulse of X-rays. And then we're using that
to X-ray the projectile in flight because we need to have a solid projectile so that it can fly the
distance we need in the power plant. How are you gonna measure that? It's solid. We hit it into a
block of other stuff when it produces the shock wave, which is consistent with it being solid,
but is that really measuring that it's solid?” And that brings us to their most current machine, Machine 3, which is a lot to
take in when you first see it. And speaking of a lot to take in,
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for supporting the channel. Now back to machine 3. In the center of the machine is a giant vacuum
chamber that houses the projectile and target. Surrounding that chamber are a total of 192
capacitors. The top layer is charged up to +100 kilovolts and the bottom layer is -100 kilovolts.
The flow of energy is controlled by 96 switches. “It'll have a hundred kilovolts here and zero
here. We've got a triggered cable through here. Pass the signal through here and it disrupts
the electric fields and you get a cascade of different arcs through all the different balls.
So it's a really low inducting form of switch.” But the part that I found kind of crazy was how
they wire everything up. We’re talking about an incredible amount of energy flowing through
all these capacitors into the vacuum chamber in order to fire off the electromagnetically
propelled projectile. That current doesn’t flow through wires and cables, it flows
through the structure itself. The walkways we stepped on to get to the top of the vacuum
chamber are basically gigantic aluminum tabs. “What we literally walked on is the
wire, which connects the capacitors to the central machine. There's so much
current it can’t be a little wire, so the wire is actually plates of
aluminum 10 millimeters thick. And that's how we carry the current from the
capacitors and into the vacuum chamber.” “You said something about it moving?” “Yes. And so on top of the aluminum we have these
big, huge steel plates, which the aluminum plates want to push apart because of the force
involved. So we have to stamp that down.” That power that gets funneled into
the vacuum chamber is used to create about 500 Tesla of magnetic force
to shoot the projectile forward. “So this is what a projectile looks like, or
rather, this is what we call the load. So this is where it connects into the machine, so it's
bolted into the machine of this, of this radius, right? And then the current flows in from
all sides here, and it comes round to this, it’s what we call the pier.”
“So there's a little sticky outfit, like a, you know, seaside pier jutting out. And
the current comes in through there and then down, and then underneath. There's a mirror image,
another one of these below, right? So the current flow's in, then down, and then back. And in that
tiny, tiny gap, we get the incredible magnetic fields, which I talked about, right? 500 Tesla.”
“And the projectile is actually part of this whole piece. The little square at the bottom
there … that becomes the projectile. The forces are so high it's literally torn out
from the assembly, and this little piece is launched upwards at incredible velocity. So
that little postage stamp is the projectile.” “I deliberately picked up this one
because of the size, and shape, and thickness of this. This is the optimum design
for machine three, which took us, you know, tens of thousands of simulations and hundreds of
shots to find that this is the optimum design. The design for the gain demonstrator turns out
the optimum design is nearly identical to this.” “It's within half a millimeter of the dimensions.
It's just that machine 3 launches this to 15 kilometers per second. Machine four will launch
it to 60 kilometers per second. That's what makes a difference. And then after the shot, this is
what it looks like after it's been cleaned up.” “So you can kind of, can almost see where the
currents flow in and then round. And that pier has disappeared basically. You get all this
sort of interesting patterns happening.” “That's incredible.” Just let that sink in a bit. The two-stage
light-gas gun shoots a projectile at about 7 km/s, but this machine, machine 3, shoots at
about 15 km/s. And their demonstrator that they’re going to be building
at the Culham Science Center will be shooting at about 60 km/s. So just
how big is that machine going to be? “This is absolutely massive. But
you were also describing that machine four is how many capacitors?” “So this machine has 192 capacitors, but four
will be more like 8,000 capacitors. This one is 12 meters in diameter. Four's probably going
to be something like 75 meters in diameter. So it's an absolute monster. It's huge.
But it's not very expensive. Cause again, it comes to that number of joules of energy
delivered to the target. Machine 4 will be $2 per joule of energy, whereas the Nuclear
Ignition Facility is $2,000 per joule of energy.” And that brings me to some of the economics
and supply chain issues with almost all fusion development into full fledged power plants.
Tritium is exceedingly rare and expensive. There’s not enough tritium in the world today
to run a single fusion power plant for days or weeks. This is a key issue that always comes up
in every conversation I have with people who work in fusion research. As I mentioned in my last
video, the UKAEA has just built out a tritium research facility. But at the same time most
fusion startups and privately funded companies have this on their radar too. First Light
Fusion is no different. In fact, they claim that their process will produce excess tritium,
so they’ll be able to create their own supply. “You have to go right into the nuclear
physics of how you produce tritium to understand why it's a big engineering
challenge. And the answer that you get basically is that you use one tritium to
produce one neutron in the fusion reaction. No matter what you do, you can't get more
than two tritium from that one neutron.” “So if you think about the total amount of area
you have around the vessel in the power plant…if more than 50% of that area is taken up with stuff
that doesn't produce tritium, like laser optics or magnets, then you can't close your fuel
cycle. Right? And this comes in as a design constraint. So meeting that design constraint
means tokamaks have to be bigger, for example.” “So it's totally possible to make your own tritium
and have self-sufficiency, but it's a constraint, right? For us and with our approach we can use 99%
of the solid angle for making tritium, so we can easily close the fuel cycle. And that means we
can easily have a self-sufficient technology.” “It also means in the early days for the pilot
plant we can deliberately overproduce tritium, which then unlocks the scaling to the first
kind of commercial fleet of power plants.” It’s going to be really interesting to see the
results of Machine 4, which is supposed to be in operation around 2027. But again, this all
comes back to just smashing things together to make energy. In fact, one of my favorite moments
from my visit at First Light Fusion was this… “What I really love about the, kind of the,
what I really love about our approach is the juxtaposition. Our approach relies on this
incredibly intricate finesse design within the hub that focuses the shock waves just so …
just the right way. And our targets are getting to the point of complexity where you can't
look at them as a human scientist and say, oh, A happens, then B, then C, then D. And
that's how it works. You just see the dynamics happening and it all works. You can't isolate
exactly what's happening. Finesse in one part, but then ultimately we just smash it in
the face with something massive. You know, so it's really simple, stupid on the outside.
But it's really sophisticated on the inside.” Fusion … smash it in the face with something
massive. I love that. From my time at the UK Atomic Energy Authority and talking to the
folks at First Light Fusion, it’s really clear to me that each company and group is racing
to get to net positive energy generation first, but at the same time there’s a recognition and
respect amongst everyone. I heard it again and again … that there isn’t going to be one winning
form of fusion energy production, there’s going to be multiple solutions and companies that can
all win. With First Light Fusion aiming for the end of this decade for their demonstrator, we’re
looking at the 2030’s for an initial power plant. But we don’t have to wait that long
for other uses for fusion. In fact, stay tuned for the last video in my UK nuclear
fusion tour series because it’s about a company doing something with fusion that isn’t about
creating electricity … and it’s something that can impact our lives today. Be sure to subscribe
and turn on notifications to not miss that one. So what do you think? Jump into the comments and
let me know. And be sure to check out my follow up podcast Still TBD where we'll be discussing some
of your feedback. Thanks to all of my patrons, who get ad free versions of every video.
And welcome to new Support+ Member Ovidiu Dumitru Nita. And thanks to all of you for
watching. I’ll see you in the next one.
Matt Ferrell is probably the best individual reporter on fusion out there. Interesting videos, a good understanding of the challenges and difficulties, doesn't shoot concepts down or report that they are on the cusp of energy too cheap to meter. I don't expect that anyone who downvoted this watched more than 2 minutes