This could be the world's first nuclear fusion power station

foreign take it for granted but electricity is the lifeblood of our societies and economies our factories are powered by it and it lights our cities coal has remained the dominant source of electricity generation through most of the last century and it was still generating 37 of the world's electricity in 2019. now we know that this dominance and use of other fossil fuels came at a price sending out climate on a warming cycle with uncountable environmental and social consequences [Music] it's the base of a cooling tower for a coal-fired power station at West Burton and North Nottinghamshire in the UK this is all about to be decommissioned in a couple of months and this whole area will start a new life moving from fossil to Fusion the UK government has set itself the target of building the world's first nuclear fusion power plant here by 2040. Saran postense is part of the UK atomic energy Authority team setting up the project and what are some of those things that you need that this old Coal Fired plant gives you so actually what's here will be decommissioned and taken down to ground level so we won't use what's here currently except the connections to the National Grid and also we're right next to the river Trent here so we'll definitely use the river as a cooling source for the plant so actually what we need is the land and this is a big site it's 330 hectares in total so we'll be using that land to its sort of fullest extent not just for the step plant but also looking at opportunities to bring adjacent Industries and other things here as well so it becomes a second kind of Center of Excellence for Fusion in the UK so we've seen a few breakthroughs recently like the ignition in the United States recently and Cullum a year or so ago get a sustaining a plasma for five seconds are you really confident that you can have a working prototype provide fighting energy to the grid by 2040. yeah so there's a it's away of challenges they have their hand is about why Fusion hasn't come to the grid before now but we really feel like there's lots and lots of breakthroughs so we're really confident that we're kind of getting to the sort of scientific challenges and overcoming days and then really it's about engineering and how do you bring all of the different components you need to have together in an integrated power plant and that's what steps aiming to do step stands for spherical Tokamak for energy production and a tokameg is a type of reactor where Fusion takes place nuclear fusion is the process that takes place in the heart of the Stars like our sun and recreating it here on Earth could create an unlimited clean energy source at its simplest the sun is a huge glowing sphere of hydrogen and helium its extreme temperatures and gravity strip hydrogen nuclei of their electrons leaving the protons and electrons moving free from each other in what is known as a plasma because protons are all positively charred they normally repel each other but the sun's extreme temperatures and huge gravitational force overcome this repulsion forcing 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 and that happens inside a containment vessel known as a Tokamak which is one of a number of ways in which scientists are trying to achieve Fusion here on Earth previously on Riser we visited ETA the world's largest Fusion experiment which is building a Tokamak reactor in the south of France and yet The Joint European Taurus is already up and running at the UK atomic energy Authority in Cullum these tokamaxis donut-shaped reactant but for the planned prototype Power Station a spherical Toca makers being developed Dr volvio milapello a fusion scientist with 20 years experience is currently the director of Tokamak science at the Mast upgrade experiment which is testing the spherical Tokamak design it doesn't look like a sphere to me it looks like a cylinder it is a cylinder that contains a sphere ah a sphere of plasma yes right the sphere is is around here your Apple without the core is around here oh I see so if we imagine it going like up there then it's a sphere of pleasure yes it's a cylinder containing a sphere a cylinder containing a sphere yes tell me what does Mast stand for master stands for Mega and paraspherical tokamaka Megan per fundamentally tells us how much current is Flowing inside the device and spherical talk uses our geometry so this cord apples fundamentally represent a slightly different approach to Fusion Energy so we've had colleagues here before looking at the toroidal Tokamak the donut what's the difference between that and your spherical document so the difference between the experiment that we have a jet in the experiment that we have here Master guide is fundamentally the shape and the size and so the spherical design allows us to use less space they give us a more compact device that can use more efficiently the magnetic fields that we're using to confine the plasma to keep it in place it is a way of reducing the cost of a future power plant and That's essential because otherwise the cost of electricity will be too high and it will not become they will not be competition with other forms of energy I'm confused we haven't yet cracked Fusion we haven't got more energy out than we put in why are we experimenting with the shape we have a fusion every day in our our devices but as you correctly said we have not yet managed to amplify the amount of energy we put in the device a future power plant is going to be fundamentally an energy amplificator you put a lot of energy in you get much more energy out we haven't done that yet but we are on track to do this the experiments that we've done at jet years ago have already shown that we can get almost a break even which basically means as much energy as we get out and we think that by changing the elements that we're using in our machines in terms of plasma and changing structural device itself its size we can reliably go to much higher energy amplification but why is it useful to have the experiments that we're doing here it's because we are building the physics knowledge that is required for future power plants and we're also testing our tools we are teaching our people how to operate devices and we are creating also numerical quotes that can allow us to understand how the physics of the plasma inside the device will behave in a future power plant and we're testing this and everything that we're getting from our smaller device not yet power plant size is indicating that we can get to the point in which Fusion will become a reality so we just heard a countdown we're about to fire a pulse yes so we're gonna we're actually going to see a plasma be created yes okay but it might take a little bit of time yeah no well let's just wait for that let's wait for that to happen how much time do you think ah we need to ask I think it could be a couple of minutes okay that's all right it's very exciting so before videos just gone off to find out less than 60 seconds less than 60 seconds there will be a flash of light in in the air in that monitor and then and then all the data will start appearing in the following minutes very exciting side you're used to it yeah so that's the main screen we're going to be watching over there Paul the plasma pulses here in master are relatively short we don't need more than a couple of seconds so you really have people gathering in front of the screen looking at the plasma as it goes here it goes sorry yeah you see the The Flash over there wow it has happened and now all the data are transmitted to our computers the scientists are starting to analyze them some will arrive faster some are a little bit slower and we will go for the next pulse so that tiny amount of time is giving you a multitude of information absolutely we have tens of Diagnostics around the device that are looking at many different aspects of how the plasma behaves so of course visual cameras are part of the agnostics that you're using but there is much more than that we have a very sophisticated technologies that are used to analyze what is happening in a plasma thank you at the moment we are trying to tackle two major problems that Fusion has one is to keep the plasma hot the other one is to make sure that there's a stellar energy is not negatively affecting the internal surfaces of the machine so these two things are both crucial for fusion and they have to coexist we have to make sure that both of them are working in the right way it's a little bit like a trying to keep your coffee hot in your mug and avoiding burning your hand so what we are trying to do now in this set of experiments we must upgrade is to try to combine these two needs of maintaining the plasma heart and avoiding damages to the surface of the device at the same time so the trick is to keep the plasma as hot as you need for as long as you need right yes for indefinitely not necessarily so there are different designs in in our community there are ideas of having a past the power plant which has a plasma pulses of the order of a couple of hours and there are other designs that are assuming much longer pulses that can be potentially of the order of many many hours if not days if not weeks so you're not just working on the problem of fusion here you're working on also at the same time how to take it to build a working power plant absolutely especially here at ukea moving towards a power plant is a very strong focus of our research after all we are in the business of Applied Physics so we really want to deliver energy for the future generations and we really think that we can do that if you want a noble cause to to work on fusion and it's actually extremely exciting also for a physicist there is a very big intellectual Challenge and at the same time you get the reward of doing something that is good for all Humanity while Dr Militello and his team work on the plasma physics the engineering challenge of building and running a fusion reactor is also being tackled Professor Robert Buckingham is director of race race stands for remote applications in challenging environments applications and challenging environments that sounds a bit James Bond to me I think Tony Stark or James Bond why why do you think that well you know a Tony Stark fusion fusion reactor on his chest loves robots we do a load of stuff on both of those things so yeah totally start more than James one he's a bit passy Yeah in what way we think of nuclear fusion as completely benign and what waves are the challenging environment we're trying to create this a start on Earth and when you think about having a star somewhere on Earth that doesn't sound like a very sensible thing lots of energy it's going to cause damage okay um and um in race we're actually we recognize that you're trying to create star and we're thinking about the bottle that you're going to put the star in right yeah yeah so that bottle is going to be damaged by the star because the star that we're creating this very very hot plasma is radiating stuff that stuff is very energetic so we've got lots of energetic particles that are flying off this plasma those particles are going to fly into the bottle and the bottle is going to get damaged so let's say if we were in there we would just get vaporized literally I mean because there's so much energy which is what you want but that energy would just destroy biological material so we have to use robots that made a metal we have to use a bottle that is made of metal so that it actually can last I hear we talking about a hundred million degrees Yeah inside that bottle but how is that even possible on Earth first off is we're not really talking about temperature in the way that we sort of feel it in an oven right it doesn't it's not hot like that this is this is actually about kinetic energy so it's about speed we've got these particles that are coming off and they're moving really really fast okay so it's like billiard balls or things like this not not quite doesn't quite that analogy doesn't quite work but billiard bills that have got lots of energy and they're moving really really fast the way so though when those hit things like if you were hit by a bullet these are really really minute bullets that are moving it would hurt right it would it would dissipate the energy into you and you'd fall apart so what we're doing is we put it inside a magnetic cage that's okay for the charge particles we can keep the charged particles within a magnetic cage within a magnetic particles such as an alpha nucleus or an alpha particle which is a helium nucleus which is formed when you fuse the different types of hydrogen yes so let's back up so the fusion reaction is where you combine two types of hydrogen those are deuterium atom and a tritium atom without their electrons because that happens when you get into a plasma when it's very very hot when you combine those two things together what happens is you create an alpha particle and a neutron so that energy is carried away in the form of kinetic energy so the alpha particle is moving it's not stationary and the neutron is moving really really fast so yeah that's what we mean by a 100 million Kelvin of the particles yeah it's it's the energy which is within the stuff that is released when you when you do Fusion okay so you're using a magnet field to contain all that energy in a bottle but not the neutrons because they're neutral they can escape the magnetic exactly so the neutrons are flying off in any direction they're not charged so you can't control where they go with a magnet so they're going to go wherever they go and that's problem because they've got the energy we want to rip the energy off them and create electricity [Music] so the magnetic field inside the Tokamak contains the superheated plasma and an internal vacuum creates an almost perfect insulating layer between the hot plasma and the sides of the chamber but the high energy neutrons release during Fusion can travel through both the magnetic field and the vacuum I think in a lot of people's minds you stick a plug into a fusion reactor that isn't how you get the energy out how do you actually get the energy out okay so the bottle that contains the plasma becomes hot we then stick that hot thing in a load of water or helium or some other coolant it heats up that coolant and then we then we can make that coolant Flow Away to somewhere where we can actually take the energy out of the coolant so there are these heat exchange Cycles which move the energy away from the plasma to the turbine which creates the electricity most of us when we read about Fusion don't think of it as radioactive we think efficient as radioactive but Fusion has completely benign in what way is it radioactive well the neutrons have so much energy that when they pile into the bottle they they change the materials in the bottle to become active and what do you mean by activated materials materials that then radiate themselves right so let's say you've got an aluminum atom that's probably a bad example but you know an aluminum thing which is which is not active if you hit it with enough energy you can make it go to a state which then does become radioactive and that sort of thing is happening with the steel and with other things that are in the bottom which is why you need all these guys these robots people can no longer go inside it yep it's slightly worse than that actually we probably can't go near it so at the moment in jet we can't go inside jet but we can get near the machine but when you start to get to the powers that you acquire for a power plant actually you won't go in the room that the reactor is sat in so actually the robots have got to do a lot of work so we'll have a facility which basically maintained by robots with people further away which brings me back to why race is called races remote applications the people are remote from the hazard they're controlling the robots that are doing the work on the Hazardous plan and one day when it comes time to decommission that the bottle you talked about yeah it'll be all robots won't it yep so we're thinking about the whole life cycle um and that's you know that's very important as well [Music] even though we've focused a bit on any possible radioactivity overall nuclear fusion is a lot safer than fishing for a start there's no chance of a runaway reaction such as what happened at Chernobyl and it's important to remember that even though the reactor itself will become radioactive any resulting waste will be a tiny fraction of what is produced by traditional nuclear fission plants and it's expected that materials from the Tokamak will be able to be recycled within a hundred years whereas waste from nuclear efficient can remain dangerously radioactive for thousands Maddie Kenny is one of a number of mechanical engineers working at race what's going on here so we're just doing some graduate training at the minute so this is our aim to sell which stands for automated inspection and maintenance test unit so you've designed these robots for maintenance and testing so the robots are off-the-shelf robots we've designed this cell to enable us to automatically maintain and inspect there are a multitude of robots in this huge Anger from small robotic arms to monsters such as these all focused on a different task that will be essential for running the fusion reactors of the future jobs such as repairs refueling and replacing components and eventually decommissioning what have we got here this uh seems a bit gruntier for whatever yeah so this is a much bigger standard robot that you can buy obviously it's much bigger so it's much more expensive but this will be controlled by at this stage by a person remote controlling so not with this it's uh somebody writes a program and then they set commands which allow them to automatically run run so this is kind of uh the same sort of robot that you'd use see in a car factory yeah that very similar robots it's just different software so again it's software development that's going on here so even though these machines are very big and and granted we're actually talking about what you're working on is not the hardware it's the brainware the software for these yeah so a lot of these they're just off-the-shelf robots so the thing the research that we're doing is all about the software development but you're also developing Engineers of the future over there yeah we have a lot of graduates every year we get a big intake of graduates so we're doing some training so just a bit of a appreciation of how the robots work 350 people a year are being trained to be the fusion engineers and technicians of the future so one of those graduate students we saw this morning in 2014 maybe the one who switches on step yeah exactly yeah that's that's the plan it's a good plan [Music] the power plant will also create many jobs for people in the area and the general response from locals has been positive [Music] Andy most people when they think about big infrastructure projects like this new Step Fusion reactor think not in my backyard but you want it in your backyard don't you well as a group we've consulted friends we've done a lot of Outreach to people to find out and on the whole people are enthusiastic for it when the coal mines closed and the qualified power stations closing you're losing a lot of good well-paid jobs also there's a lot of support industry to it now the industry has found other things to do but we don't need more distribution centers and things what we need is some technology that we can build off and that will give rise to to other jobs and things and to education and that's why it's a it's a good project but how do you personally feel about this because looking at the color of both of our hair we may not be around with this thing finally gets going I have grandchild I have a grandson looking forward to his time if we can come up with a really green source of energy then that's a huge benefit and not just for the this country but for the whole world so this is going to be a prototype fusion power station but will it provide power to the grid yeah so the point of Step it's absolute fundamental point is to put electricity on the grid to demonstrate that that's possible from a fusion power plant so the idea is that we generate around 100 megawatts of electricity that's our sort of aim and then that builds to the commercial plants of the future how much is 100 megawatts in terms of houses powered for example yeah basically it's a small village I would say this is a personal question I don't want the scientific or the political answer do you feel confident that in 2040 this place will be putting energy into the grid even a small amount these projects of any scale are always tricky but yeah I mean I look at the work that the team are doing day in day out gets me excited every day I love coming to work for that reason so there'll be plenty of challenges along the way but yeah I have reason for confidence that we'll we'll get there 20 40. so our view is that if we aren't ambitious we will fail you have to put a marker in the sand and have a go we know it's probably the most difficult problem on the planet but if you don't have a go you'll fail you're literally reaching for the star on Earth yeah I mean so if we can make fusion work on Earth it's it's the power source that powers the whole of the universe if we can make that work on Earth then we have changed Humanity's future [Music] thank you

Channel: RAZOR Science Show

Views: 7,171

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Id: E4c3NKde1CU

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023