Why Fusion May Finally Be Closer Than You Think

progress in Fusion over the last three to four decades is actually outstripped mors law the main measure that we have for advances INF Fusion is something called triple product which is a a measure of plasma density temperature and the time that it can be sustained and since the 1970s we've seen n of magnitude Improvement in the triple product for fusion and that leaves us only in some cases a single order of magnitude away from the types of output that we need to support commercial Fusion that's really really exciting and I think that it's been easy for people to Discount because of how long it's taken um the idea that we would ever get there but if you look all around us just outside your window we are surrounded by vertical curves if the last two years have told us anything about the advances of technology and what we've seen in the world of AI it's that the pace is not going to let up anytime soon and so I think Fusion is one of those areas that is going to catch people by surprise at how fast the Milestones are hit and how quickly we're able to get past not just this one critical Milestone of Q greater than one but is as Ben Conway is a CEO of Zap likes to say we're going to turn that into base camp [Music] there's this joke that Fusion Energy is always 30 years away 50 years ago it was 30 years away 20 years ago it was still 30 years away today though we might be within a decade you just heard from clay deas a general partner at lower carbon Capital One of the world's leading climate funds and the only one to launch a dedicated Fusion fund which they named Q greater than one after the key milestone in Fusion the point at which a fusion reactor generates more energy than it consumes they're betting the fund on the belief that that remarkable triple product curve will continue and that curve is truly a thing of beauty nearly 80 years worth of work on Fusion from governments academics researchers physicists engineers and entrepreneurs across the globe captured in one chart Beyond simply trusting the curve though there's evidence that we're going vertical in the rush of activity from entrepreneurs in the last few years alone after spending most of its life in government and academic Labs startups have taken the fusion baton in the last Sprint towards commercial Fusion earlier this year I wrote a piece in not boring with Rahul Rana called the fusion race we compared what's happening in Fusion to a relay Marathon we wrote imagine a Bizarro relay marathon in which one Runner carries the Baton for the first 26.0 miles opens up a backpack full of batons and hands them out liberally to a waiting horde of sprinters to dash all out for the final 0.2 miles that's the best analogy we can come up with for this moment in the fusion race Global governments are the marathon runner from the race to develop thermonuclear weapons after World War II to the 22 billion 50 plusy year Cooperative Ido reactor currently being built in France to the national ignition facilities ignition achievement in December 2022 governments have led Fusion research efforts for the better part of eight decades companies like helon Commonwealth Fusion systems Tay Technologies General fusion and zap energy are the sprinters armed with billion do in funding most of which has come in the past couple of years alone and decades worth of research made feasible by new tools Fusion startups are locked in a Mad Dash to the finish line line in what might be called Fusion race 2.0 when rul and I wrote that piece we put together a list of about 30 funded Fusion startups which we'll link to in the resources guide today according to Clay there are somewhere around 80 or 90 companies working on Fusion the race is on over the next two episodes we're going to get you warmed up and ready for the race so that you can watch it play out with a Fan's understanding of what's happening and who the key players are today we'll cover the Bas basics of Fusion Energy what it is how it works why it matters how progress is measured and what the main approaches are on the next episode we'll talk to Founders building Fusion companies taking all sorts of different approaches that physicists have imagined for a long time but are only becoming possible now as well as a couple of the investors backing them we spent the first half of the season on nuclear fion and the last episode on many of the other energy sources that will play a role in meeting Humanity's growing energy demands and building an age of Miracles all of them will be critical but there's a growing chorus of people who believe that if we're going to meet the demand for three to five times the amount of energy we use today and do it with clean energy we're going to need fusion and that as we climb the cev scale the framework for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it can use Fusion is going to be our ladder the cev scale proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai kardashev in 1964 lays out the three stages of a civilization a type one civilization can use and store all the energy available on its Planet including the sources we've talked about and some we haven't like earthquakes and volcanoes type two civilizations can harness the total energy of its star not just a solar energy that lands on the planet you need something like a Dyson Sphere for this and a type three civilization can control energy at the scale of the entire galaxy including the billions of stars in it type type four and type five and I think someone even came up with a type six afterward all get more speculative they talk about capturing all the energy in the universe and then in alternate universes and Alternate Dimensions but we're a ways away from that we're not even type one yet in his 1973 book Cosmic connection astrophysicist and legend in the field Carl Sean came up with a formula for measuring where Humanity was then and he came up with a 0.7 on the scale today using the same form we're at about 0.73 one way to climb the cev scale is to capture as much of the energy from the stars as we possibly can the other way is to make that energy ourselves the same way that the stars do Fusion take a second and appreciate how lucky we are to be alive right now to get to see that happen in that context it's easy to see why people are so excited about Fusion but how does it work Andrew cot is a fusion engineer and what one of our favorite follows on X he breaks down complex ideas in deep Tech physics and energy in a way that's easy to understand so we asked him to explain Fusion to us well the easiest way to understand what's Fusion all about you look at the sun right The Sun Shines by Fusion Energy and that's like a great place to start and how it does that is the sun is very big and so it has a huge amount of gravitational pressure at the center of the Sun so it's very hot it's very dense and at very high temperatures and densities you can take indiv idual atoms and fuse their nuclei together and when they come together they kind of fall downhill in energy and as they fall downhill in terms of energy they gain a lot of kinetic energy like just like a ball rolling down a hill and that kinetic energy comes up as something we observe as heat right so many different types of atoms many different elements can fuse stars are mostly powered by hydrogen Fusion right that's the main sequence or that's the the main lifetime of a star towards its later life stages it'll run through its hydrogen fuel and start to burn heavier and heavier elements but those don't release as much energy and so that's how you get like the end of a lifetime of a start so Fusion Energy for us as as humans most companies are trying to burn hydrogen isotopes of hydrogen specifically dyum and tridium you know there's different isotopes which is when you have more neutrons or a different number of neutrons each type of Fusion fuel has some different characteristics but Fusion is a broad sort of physical phenomenon that is the opposite of fision fion is when large heavy atoms split apart Fusion is small light atoms coming together it all comes back to Einstein's formula the one we talked about on episode 2 eal mc^2 in nuclear fion a neutron strikes the nucleus of a heavy atom typically uranium 235 or plutonium 239 which absorbs the neutron becomes unstable and splits into two or more lighter nuclei releasing energy along with additional neutrons which can trigger more Fusion reactions in a chain reaction Fusion is almost a mirror image of that infusion two light nuclei typically the hydrogen Isotopes dyum and tridium merge to form a single heavier nucleus the process releases energy because the total mass of the resulting single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei the leftover Mass becomes energy E equals mc^2 simple right sahila Gonzalez the global director of Fusion Energy at our sponsor clean air task force and former senior expert in Fusion as a fusion pH phist at the international atomic energy agency total said the principle behind Fusion actually is pretty simple so the principle is very simple you have two lights nucle usually isotopes of hydrogen and as you can imagine in Fusion you fuse the two nucleus fine the problem is the nucleus are positive so when you try to join to positive charge they repel each other so you need to overcome these forces by putting more energy in that system to make them to fuse to collide let's say so the whole trick is how can I make that thing happen to overcome these Columbus forces so it was found by laon it was a criteria which say if you want to have this fusion reaction so to be able to put as close as possible this nuclear to be able to fuse to overcome these repulsion forces you need to go Beyond a threshold and this is defined by three parameters the density the temperature and the time that you keep things together so this density time and temperature is called the L on criteria if the multiplication of these three factors go higher than certain number you are having Fusion reactions so if you are able to imagine a machine that is able to put this hydrogen or Hydro isotop inside and reach this threshold you have Fusion as simple as that of course the challenge is to have a machine where you put the nucle and you hit up them high enough for long enough and you have a density high enough that doesn't happen which is really complicated because these temperatures are hundred of millions of degrees and densities are very high and time even if it's the scale of seconds or less than seconds is really difficult to have it this is why you have magnetic Co because you want to confine all your plasma but the principle is really simple you only need to reach that conditions full stop the principles may be simple but creating the conditions to make them happen here on Earth is anything but some of the smartest people in the world have been working on this problem since World War II and were just now getting close to pulling it off but a ton of progress has been made as clay highlighted at the start of this episode Fusion is progressing faster than mors law there are two main metrics that you need to keep in mind when you're thinking about Fusion the triple product which will cover in depth in a bit and Q greater than one one is roughly the inputs that's the triple product and the other Q greater than one is the goal Q greater than one has been the goal of the fusion industry since the early days simply put it means that a fusion reactor generates more energy than it consumes that critical for a power plant it needs to add more usable energy to the grid than it takes in how close we are to getting there is measured by the triple product the multiplication of the three things that matter most in a fusion reaction density temperature and energy confinement time the losson Criterion that sahila mentioned states that the triple product must exceed a certain value to achieve Q greater than one the plasma needs to be dense enough hot enough and confined for a long enough period of time for the fusion reaction to occur Andrew cot explains I put this chart on Twitter recently this plot that had a scatter plot of these different little shapes right and they're all going up and to the right we love plots that go up and to the right this plot was showing what you call like triple product or really it's the product of density temperature and confinement time and those are the three numbers that really tell you whether a fusion reaction is energy profitable right profile meaning like would it release more energy than you put in and importantly would it become self- sustaining so the density and temperature they have to hit each other going quite fast to fuse together the confinement time is more just like if I put in a bunch of energy how long does it take to leak out right so the longer it can be trapped by the plasma the more efficient the heating and the easier it is to get to ignition and ignition is when the reaction becomes self-sustaining right so it's like I can burn a piece of wet wood right and it'll just smoke a lot and slowly get singed over time but I'm constantly putting energy in whereas if I burn drywood then it becomes like well it turns on it becomes on fire right it ignites and then the reaction is self sustaining so this this concept of triple product or like density time and pressure there's been a slow March of steady progress on this metric over decades and across different reactor designs and the plot I put on Twitter really shows that it shows like stars and circles and squares which are different kinds of reactor designs overall as they slowly get closer and closer and closer to these conditions where you start to get Break Even energy release and then actually like a self sustaining reaction which is like Q infinity or something like that we're going to hammer this point home because everything we're going to talk about from here on out is essentially a function of increasing the triple product by using technology engineering and physics to increase density temperature and confinement time here's what each is and why it matters first density the number of fuel particles in a given volume of plasma plasma is a hot ionized gas where electrons are separate from their nuclei more particles higher chance of collision higher chance of fusion second is temperature Fusion requires extremely high temperatures often hotter than the core of the Sun itself north of 100 million degrees at such high temperatures particles move really fast and the faster they move the more likely they are to overcome electrostatic propulsion and collide with enough energy to fuse and third energy confinement time the average time the energy remains in the plasma before it's lost Fusion reactors need to contain and maintain the plasma at high enough temperatures long enough for Fusion to occur efficiently more time in the plasma means more time for collisions and fusions in other words a higher triple product increases the likelihood of achieving Q greater than one and eventually of Q infinity or self-sustaining reactions so how do you increase the triple product and eventually achieve Q greater than one and Q Infinity different types of fusion reactor designs that place varying emphasis on each of the components in the triple product the two main categories are a magnetic confinement and a ntial confinement magnetic confinement Fusion as the name suggests uses magnets to confine plasma within the reactor magnetic confinement reactors typically optimize for high temperatures on the order of 100 to 150 million degrees Celsius and longer confinement times on the order of seconds inertial confinement Fusion on the other hand works by rapidly compressing and heating a small Fusion fuel pellet by bombarding it with high energy beams like lasers or ion beams inertial confinement also relies on high temperatures north of 100 million degrees Celsius but optimizes for density instead of confinement time the fusion event in ICF inertial confinement Fusion is measured in Nan seconds or billionths of a second to date inertial confinement Fusion is the only approach to achieve Q greater than one in December 2022 the national ignition facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab or NF shot 192 lasers at a dyum trium fuel pellet and generated a little bit more like a battery's worth of energy from the fusion reaction than the lasers put into it it was a huge milestone it confirmed that Q greater than one is possible in a reactor but as Andrew told us publicly funded laser inertial confinement has never been part of an energy development program NF has always been used for weapons testing it admits that that's what its job is using lasers to tune the yield in the hydrogen secondary stage of nuclear weapons given the super short Fusion event capturing the energy in the form of neutrons and radiation and then converting it into useful power in a controlled and sustained way remains a huge challenge thanks for listening so far hang on we'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors are you a Founder who spends far too much time on bookkeeping or taxes good news we partnered with our friends at pilot.com so you never have to waste time on accounting again how nice does that sound pilot is an accounting firm specifically built for The Unique needs of startups pilot provides accounting CFO and tax services that are designed with flexibility and scalability in mind as a Founder you have a million things going on sales fundraising product hiring and more it's hard to find time to do it all Pilot's team of full-time us-based experts take care of accounting bookkeeping and taxes for you giving you the time you need to lead your business whether you're just starting out as a team of two in a garage or you've grown to a multi hundred person team pilot will support you at every stage of the journey Jeff Bezos famously said focus on the things that make your beer taste better meaning focus on the specific areas that make your product better for anything else bring in the experts you'll get higher quality work and you'll be able to focus on your own own unique strengths speaking from experience here accounting is the sort of thing that you really want done by an expert like pilot expert accounting doesn't just save you time it gives you the information you need to make Better Business decisions and pilot truly are experts they're the largest startup focused accounting firm in the US and they've worked with thousands of startups including companies like open AI scale Ai and air table scaling with them from precede to series C and Beyond to get 20% off your accounting bill for the first 6 months go to pilot.com Packy that's pilot.com slpy that said there are private companies developing inertial confinement Fusion for energy production along with a number of approaches within magnetic confinement including tox which are the big donut shaped ones and stellarators which are the big twisty reactors there are even startups like the Sam Alman backed helon pursuing hybrid Magneto inertial reactors or magnetic Target Fusion that combine elements of each approach these aim for higher densities than typical magnetic confinement systems but lower than ICF while also seeking longer confinement times than ICF but shorter than typical mcf approaches amazingly many of these approaches are based on Old ideas that are only now becoming feasible now that we've given you some of the basics we can go back to the beginning and ride the triple product curve back up to the present day the history of fusion is one of scientific discovery military application and a mix of global competition and cooperation once humans discovered how the Sun makes its energy the Bizarro Marathon began since then it's been about figuring out how to increase the triple product using the best available Technology and Engineering at any given time where do we start to start our journey into the history of Fusion Energy we actually need to go back to right before World War II until 1939 physic's best understanding of what happens inside Stars was based on Lord kelvin's yes that Lord Kelvin the temperature Kelvin 19th century theory of gravitational contraction stars are balls of gas and as gravity pulls the gas in it heats up causing the star to emit light and heat pretty good but in 1939 building on the previous year's work by George gamau and Edward Teller who theorized partially correctly that stars produce energy through Fusion as protons tunneled through the strong nuclear force that holds them together two physicist Hans Beth and Carlos Friedrich van weaker independently arrived at the proper explanation they proposed that stars produce energy through a series of nuclear fusion reactions known as the CNO cycle for carbon nitrogen oxygen by which stars convert hydrogen to helium Betha and wecker's theory was timely coming as it did on the eve of World War II on episode 2 Rod Adams told us that we actually tried to use fion for energy before using using it for the bomb for Fusion the bomb came first as Andrew explains we had fision reactors before we had fision bombs the first one was Chicago pile 1 it was like underneath a dorm what what's now a dorm at the University of Chicago run by fmy and solar and stuff so we had fion power very early on after we had developed the fion bomb people started working on What's called the super which is a hydrogen bomb so they start to understand those reactions more what the bomb makers figured out at Los Alamos was a clever and destructive trick the teller ulam configuration named after the physicist who devised it uses the energy from the fision bomb to compress and heat the Fusion fuel to such an extent that the atomic nuclei begin to fuse together releasing a huge amount of energy the resulting hydrogen bomb Ivy Mike yielded 10.4 megatons of energy over 450 times the power of the bomb dropped at Nagasaki and obliterated the island on which the test was performed leaving an underwater crater 6,240 ft wide and 164 ft deep where the island had once been hydrogen bombs are not a practical way to create Fusion Energy you don't want to turn your power plants into smoking crators but Ivy Mike was the first man-made Fusion reactor to achieve Q greater than one fortunately the bomb has never been deployed in combat but with Fusion proven possible governments around the world sprung into action to harness it in the US President Truman signed the atomic energy act and established the United States atomic energy commission as a success to the Manhattan engineer District better known as the Manhattan Project given the relative maturities of the two technologies the aec focused most of its effort on nuclear fion becoming both the champion and regulator of the N industry as we discussed on episode two with all of the problems and benefits that that came with but the aec also laid the groundwork for research in Fusion Energy then in 1951 Argentinian president Juan Peron Dropped a Bomb of his own announcing that a scientist named Ronald RoR who had moved to the country from Germany after World War II had achieved controlled nuclear fusion the claim turned out to be false but it did accelerate the race worldwide if our history of nuclear fion was about understanding what slowed nuclear down in order to take those lessons into the nuclear Renaissance what's most Salient in the history of fusion to me it's really the Bizarro relay Marathon that we talked about the race went from various countries competing with a bunch of design to a big Cooperative International effort focused on just mainly one design that was cool in a Kumbaya sense but bad in that it slowed down the development of fusion in the way that any large International project and lack of competition slows things down but governments and Academia did make real progress and today's entrepreneurs get to piggyback on their work yeah the early days of fusion remind me a lot of the early days of fision with just so much experimentation going on with different designs starting in 195 51 with Fusion after the Argentinian announcement three separate projects pursuing three different approaches to plasma confinement sprung up and would form the basis for project Sherwood a classified us program in controlled nuclear fusion first was the accelerator designed by Lyman Spitzer at the Princeton plasma Physics laboratory accelerators are devices designed to confine hot plasma within magnetic fields in a Twisted Taurus shaped configuration to sustain nuclear fusion reactions next is the pidal pinch designed by James tuck at Los Alamos pital pinch devices work by confining a high temperature plasma into a donut shaped chamber using magnetic fields the fields are generated in such a way that they pinch the plasma increasing its pressure and temperature to the point where nuclear fusion can occur tuck named the device the perhaps Atron because perhaps it might be able to achieve a fusion reaction the perhaps catron I think is my favorite product name of all time not just infusion it sounds like it's a nuclear Fusion device straight out of Dr Seuss totally totally and finally there was the magnetic mirror I mean the names are great here this one was designed by Richard post at the Livermore National Laboratory magnetic mirror devices contain plasma within a chamber using magnetic fields that are stronger at the ends reflecting the charged particles back to the center creating a magnetic mirror instead of me trying to explain the physics of these crazy devices let's turn it back over to Andrew in the early 50s you kind of have this flourishing of different approaches or conceptions for a fusion reactor and they've kind of evolved in an interesting way as we've kind of learned more about the field you know plasma is a interesting substance right it's a gas of electrons and ions that are separated from each other so you can get current that flows in it but you can also get it also responds to Magnetic and electric fields and currents generate magnetic fields and so forth there's lots of really interesting Dynamics so one of the first devices was called Z pinch and that's you have like a a plasma in a tube basically you drive a current through it and that current generates a magnetic field that tries to constrict the plasma tube and as it gets constricted it can hypothetically heat the plasma ions up enough so that they hit each other with enough energy to fuse and then release more energy right you know that there's issues with that I it didn't work for a lot of reasons like plasma instabilities and and magnetic confinement and the the early history of fusion development was really how can we beat these kinds of scaling laws for how well we can capture the heat energy versus how strong the magnetic fields are so there's other devices like magnetic mirrors those also came along and that's where you think of like having a magnetic bottle like this where like ions really the Fusion fuel it's like bouncing between them along these magnetic field paths right so another early design that had some limitations where it would constantly leak fuel or leak heat energy through a certain kind of like window of particle trajectories called the L cone that's like a theoretical result so it wouldn't work too well even in the best case and then there's lots of other machines Z machine was another kind of design so there's also aerator which is a kind of magnetic confinement Fusion device where people thought okay look this magnetic mirror doesn't really work because every time the particles have to bounce back and forth you lose some right there's a chance of losing some so what if we took that bottle and then we wrapped it into a circle right and so now the particles never have to reach the end of the bottle and they can keep circulating indefinitely right you think you could build up lot more energy you know putting energy into the speed of the particles and they remain trapped along this magnetic field lines that could work really well right so that was uh Lyman Spitzer at Princeton developed that concept I think in 1952 around there maybe 1956 called the accelerator and you know at first it looked like the super figure8 thing what he realized though was that it actually performed worse than he expected right so there kind of these scaling laws it's like how easy is it to trap energy versus how strong the magnetic field is because it's hard it's expensive to get very strong fields and reproduce them very accurately so it didn't work quite well at the same time I think it was 56 the Soviets published their data on the tokomak which was like their kind of version of a magnetic confinement Fusion reactor and it just blew everything out of the water as Andrew points out physicists devised a number of ingenious designs way back in the 1950s but they didn't work given the materials and Technologies of the era and then there was the tokomak the dominant design for the past half century there's a fascinating bit of History here that led to its development in 1952 the UK began work on its own attempt The Zeta Zero Energy thermonuclear assembly project which attempted to use the Z pinch method in this method an electric current is shot through the plasma in a straight line along the Z axis generating a magnetic field around it which compresses the plasma Zeta is perhaps most famous for a series of false positive results in 1958 The Zeta team announced that they had observed neutrons indicative of fusion reactions however subsequent analysis revealed that the neutrons were likely produced by instabilities in the plasma which is always a big problem for Fusion reactors not Fusion reactions once again a strong idea faced with the technological limitations of its era while Western democracies were experimenting with a range of approaches the reigning heavyweight champion would be developed a few years later on the other side of the world in communist USSR in 1956 Soviet Premier Nikita kushev actually visited the Zeta there's a great picture which will flash up on the screen that shows a bald man in the middle looking at the Zeta that's Kev a sign of the open International cooperation on Fusion development two years later the Soviets would crack open the problem and reveal the approach That Remains the leader to this day the toac to the extent that you think about Fusion reactors the image that Springs to your mind is probably one of a toac the toac uses magnetic fields to combine a plasma into a donut-shaped configuration this plasma is heated to extreme temperatures causing Atomic nuclei to collide and fuse together releasing energy in the process magnetic field helps keep the hot plasma away from the walls of the machine which is crucial for maintaining the conditions necessary for Fusion to occur compared to early stellarator and pinch designs tokomak were more efficient stable and scalable in 1958 the Soviets unveiled the first tokmak a decade later in 1968 they announced that the T3 tokat had achieved significantly higher plasma temperatures and densities than their Western counterparts around 1,000 electron volts EV or 10 million degrees C the numbers beggared belief so in a decision that would set the stage for ongoing International cooperation and fusion research they invited a team of British physicists behind the Iron Curtain in 1969 to confirm the results which they did the tokom MAAC was the real deal starting with that confirmation in 1969 the same year that we landed on the moon the tokomak has attracted most of the international funding dollars and research efforts that's not necessarily because it was the best platonic ideal design the easiest to operate or the most stable Ian Hogarth an investor at plural platform told us that the world essentially made a tradeoff the way it really felt to me reading the history of the field is that the stellarator the plutonic ideal of magnetic confinement it was like the 1951 this would be the perfect way to do it confine the Plasma on three dimensions using external magnetic fields and then when you tried to design that in 1951 it was just too challenging because you've got this incredible kind of complex coil shapes to design and so the toac represents kind of a reducing the design complexity to to be able to build something but losing that steady state and so there's a kind of you could think of it as almost being like 70 years of accepting that we'd have a harder to operate machine that was easier design and we're now moving into the era of using these new techniques these high kind of complexity simulation techniques to basically accept hard design easy to operate Ian makes a really really important Point token Maxs because they're just shaped like big Donuts were easier to design and build than some of the more creative designs that's why the world converted on them not because they were The Highest Potential reactor that had ever been designed but the result of the Soviet experiment if you'll allow this metaphor was kind of like an inertial confinement fusion reaction in its own right really quickly all the different experiments fused into a concentrated International effort to work on the tokomak it's only recently that there's been Vision as new reactor designs that are harder to build but easier to operate once they're built are being given another look this time period right after the the confirmation in the early 1970s is almost like the mere opposite of what we saw happen in Vision just as the growth in nuclear reactor orders cooled off Fusion research took off the conditions on the supply side early tokomak progress and the demand side High Energy prices formed the perfect storm for Fusion excitement the 1973 oil crisis did what you'd expect in the case of fusion sparked interests and sources of energy that would free the United States from its dependence on OPEC and inspired a 6X annual Government funding increase as the energy crisis abated however so did US funding for Fusion research in inflation adjusted dollars spending has leveled off at about onethird of its 1970s Peak but while us funding for Fusion slowed Fusion research became an international and increasingly Cooperative Affair for better than worse across upon the European atomic energy Community or urome and it should be your atom it's right there in the name announced the joint European Taurus or jet in 1977 they began construction on it in 1978 and achieved plasma by 1983 jet a tokomak reactor had a bunch of Firsts it was the first to use trium it produced 16 megawatt of fusion power from 24 megaw of input heating power good for a q of 67 in 1997 and importantly furthered confidence in the tokomak design setting the stage for the largest tokomak ever built the international thermonuclear experimental reactor or Ider Ider was born a compromise in 1985 as the end of the Cold War approached American president Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mel Gorbachev convened in Geneva to establish a personal Rapport and negotiate among other things a reduction in nuclear arms while they couldn't come to an arms control agreement during the summit they did include as the last item on a joint statement a bullet that emphasized the potential importance of the work aimed at utilizing controlled thermonuclear Fusion for peace purposes and in the connection advocated the widest practical development of international cooperation in obtaining this source of energy which is essentially inexhaustible for the benefit of mankind by the next year in rikic the initiative was confirmed and a quadripartite initiative committee was formed with ome and Japan in 1987 in Vienna the quadripartite committee agreed upon the name Ider Ider the largest tokm reactor ever designed has been the powerful magnet sorry for the pun again at the center of fusion research since its Inception a collaboration among 35 countries including Russia the United States China India South Korea Japan and the European Union across five decades the project has five goals one achieve a dyum tridium plasma in which the fusion conditions are sustained mostly by internal Fusion heating two generate 500 Mega of fusion power in its Plasma on 50 megawatt of input that's Q greater than 10 you just divide the output Power by the input power 500 over 50 Q greater than 10 three contribute to the demonstration of the integrated operation of Technologies for a fusion power plant four test trium breeding and five demonstrate the safety characteristics of a fusion device the facility is still under construction in s d France and plans to generate its 500 megaw of fusion power sometime between 2035 and 2040 achieving Q greater than 10 whenever that happens will be an incredible feat at the same time you have to wonder what the state of the fusion industry would be today if so many eggs hadn't been placed in one huge slow expensive basket at least to start the United States one of the largest potential drivers of fusion progress essentially Outsource much of its work to an International Coalition with all the benefits and challenges that entails a 1976 report by the US Energy and research development Administration the R&D successor to the aec the regulatory arm was split off into the nuclear Regulatory Commission the NRC proposed 40-year funding scenarios ranging from maximum effective effort to Fusion never when Jeffrey olenic analyzed the actual Fusion funding 40 years in he found that funding traed below the fusion never scenario since the mid 1980s right around the time the US decided to partip either Fusion never was probably a bit overdramatic thankfully a lot of progress has been made the triple product continues to outpace mors law Innovation on other approaches did continue if more slowly and with less funding earlier Andrew referenced a chart that he posted on Twitter with a bunch of different symbols representing different reactor designs and their triple products there are a lot of circles on that graph those represent tokumx but there are also green stars representing stellarator black X's representing laser inertial confinement and maroon triangles representing mag lifts a Magneto inertial approach all near the top of the achieved triple product range while the world waits for Ider progress is still being made across a number of approaches across the world the world's largest celerator for example is the vendelin 7x at the max plank Institute in Germany it began Construction in 1995 and began operation in 2015 pretty fast at least relative to it was the first to be tested in silico before construction meaning they used simulation software to test it before they actually had to build in the real world as mentioned NF achieved Q greater than one with laser initial confinement fusion and a number of other approaches like sphx and field reverse configuration lived on in labs around the world but until 2010 novel approaches were few and far between Ider sucked a lot of air out of the room as Commonwealth Fusion systems co-founder and MIT profess Professor Dennis white told Lex fredman I worked most of my career on eer because when I came into the field in the early 1990s when I completed my PhD and started to work this was one of the most like you can't imagine being more excited about something like we're going to change the world with this project we're going to do these things and we just like pour like an entire generation and and afterwards as well too has just poured their imagination and their creativity about making this thing work very good but at also so at some point though when you know when it got to being an another 5 years of delay or a decade of delay you start asking yourself well is this what I want to do right am I going to wait I just want Fusion Energy okay because I think it's so important to to the world if that's the case then why do we have only one attempt at it on the entire planet which was eater mhm it's like that makes no sense to me right we should have multiple attempts at this white praises the contributions of Ider and the importance of government funded research to pushing the space forward and he's right think about it it's near miraculous that in less than a century since unraveling the Stellar secret of nearly Limitless energy production we stand at the cusp of harnessing that very power for our own use but he's also right to say that we should have multiple attempts at this we can't afford to wait just for Ider fortunately we're not waiting and by we I mean entrepreneurs across the globe who are taking what they learned at Ider at school and in other government funded Labs combining their knowledge with modern materials software and a little bit of VC funding and taking the Baton into the final Sprint of the fusion race we'll talk to some of them including folks from helon zap fuse and Proxima on the next episode before we get there though let's do a little recap of where we've been so far with fusion and where we're headed next I think it's remarkable and almost a little scary that we started out out with the hydrogen bomb as the first instance of Q greater than one but it's cool to see that we've you know captured that taken a step back and said this is really important for society we've seen governments all over the world even from you know great power competing uh Nations right working on this together wanting to come together on this yeah I would love to be in one of the committee meetings at Ider where people from Russia and China and the US are all sitting in a room working on this thing together it reminds me a little bit of if you watch For All Mankind last season when the the Russian astronauts and the American astronauts even though they're in the middle of the Cold War are kind of working together because they just care about the science and kind of making these these missions to the moon and Mars happen uh it feels like hopefully a similar vibe there but it's a big government project so it is a little bit slow you know to me coming into the space from the outside I had kind of thought you know like believe that joke that it was always 30 years away believe that Fusion was this like nearly impossible thing and looking at this and this is like maybe a little philosophical and amazing but that despite all of these like ups and downs and dips and funding that curve just kind of continues to go up the Triple product continues to increase and now there's all these different companies for reasons that we'll talk about on the next episode that are taking all the learnings from these different labs around the world and then adding a little bit of startup secret sauce into that and then they're going to continue the Cur like it's wild to me how that stuff works out like also by the way right at the time that we need a bunch of clean energy we're going to need a lot more electricity and we need it to be clean it's kind of wild that the world works that way I love that you framed our Fusion discussion here as this Bizarro Marathon you have all these companies with these different approaches because I'm actually genuinely excited and curious to see who's going to win right there's all these different approaches we know who's made you know what types of progress um but super excited for the next episode where we dive into each of the different approaches the various startups are taking learning more about them there's not one right way to do this um but there might be one that moves us forward the fastest and that's what I'm I think everyone's super excited to follow along with right it's been you'll you'll get to hear this on the next episode and maybe I'm just like easily convincible by really smart people who are working on big things but like each conversation I was like that actually sounds like the right approach like that's the approach that I would take you know what that sounds like the right approach on each and every one of those conversations I'm really interested to see and you know I think each person had a different answer but we'll have to see it play out in the real world if it's a win or take all kind of Market if like the first one that gets there just gets all the funding signs the big government contracts I'm sure there's going to be a race once this is possible among countries to be the first to put a fusion reactor in their country among states in the US to be the first to have a fusion reactor in their state does everything coales again around one design or do we see a bunch of different things work for different reasons maybe you know for the military there might be one thing for municipalities another approach might actually work a little bit better I think all of that is TBD and we'll dig into that a little bit on the next episode at least how these companies are thinking about it but is it a race to like Untold trillions of dollars in revenue for one of these companies or they just going to be a bunch of hundred billion to a trillion dollar companies that come out of the fusion race I think it's a fantastic question and you know I don't want to undervalue also the the labs and the the governments and the academics who are working in this field too because those are actually sometimes the people who keep the really like obscure out there ideas going sometimes right when maybe maybe the commercial markets kind of uh decide that they all want to you know stick towards one approach that's been the most proven thus far but you never know when progress is also made in other funny little Corners that just come back again right it's kind of like some of the malt and salt reactors you know largely academic and National Lab driven um but that are now coming back again decades later with a commercial approach you never know if you might we might see something like that happen in Fusion too I mean even Alo is going through University reactors and research reactors as their as their sales Channel I think it gets lost in the conversation like just Nuance gets lost on Twitter or just in these big conversations about like is it entrepreneurs who move the world forward or governments or academics and like this is one of those examples kind of like the Space Race where it's like just very clearly all three of them would you like Ida to be moving faster sure would you like there to have been more progress we made and we already have Fusion on the map sure but I think it takes kind of each leg of that that Bizarro Marathon to get where you are on a problem that is this hard and it is just cool to me like the reason I wrote the piece in the in the first place is that it's cool that we got to the point where at least 80 smart people and a bunch of investors think that now is the time when it makes sense to start building Fusion companies because we are that close I think it's super heartening that there's 80 plus companies now working on Fusion because that you just know that that means there's going to be this talent pool developing of people who are going to develop knowhow now over the years working on this that will further help us you know move towards figuring out unlocking commercial Fusion so that's exciting it'll also mean there's going to be an industry that gets to stand up around this right it's like the picks and shovels of the world Supply chains that are needed we'll talk about this on the next episode but there has been a a why now for Fusion in some of the capabilities like technology breakthroughs that allow certain things to exist today to be possible for to support Fusion Energy right now and so you know those will also like further continue to Compound on themselves and I think strengthen the entire industry totally I mean like even if you believe the Peter teal view of the world that like we've had this 50-year period where like we haven't built anything in the world of Adams the fact that software is playing such a big role in the why now for Fusion like this is one of of my big beliefs is that like none of that was was a way first of all we're doing this over zoom and people get to listen to it because of everything that's happened uh over the past 50 years but probably more importantly like we're now able to kind of combine the bits and atoms in really interesting ways that we wouldn't have been able to 50 years ago this is like the prime example of that it's not like people didn't have the ideas the designs were there they're on paper but you just couldn't quite optimize them without everything that's happened in software over the past 50 years not everything like without cat pictures we'd be fine but like certainly without the simulation software and all of that is you know this amalgamation of a bunch of different things that went into creating the simulation software so progress is like you know I'm obviously a big fan of it generally but I think Fusion is just like a really great example of how this works before we wrap up this episode because we have a jam-packed one next one so I don't think we're going to have time for this and I want to make sure that we get it in we asked a few of the people that we talked to why when we have fion we have solar we have fossil fuels why Fusion matters and I think that's a good place to to leave this one so we're going to turn it over to a few of them here's sahila the demand of energy from population is growing and we cannot afford to be burning coal and gas forever you need energy because population is uh demanding that everyone is hiding this life standards in particular people from not so welldeveloped countries and now they're having access to many other uh facilities and needs which is great and simply you cannot afford to keep burning fossil fils so you need to find new source of energy new source of energy that needs to be clean by definition and on top of that you want to have sort of security and geopolitical uh Independence let's put it in that way so Fusion provides you that kind of characteristics that you are looking for so it's clear that the mankind needs to find this new source of energy which are much more sophisticated much more complicated that burning C for sure but needs to be developed and here's Ryan from zap energy you know this really comes down to a a Thrive versus survive kind of thing for me right yes it is possible right uh Renewables Plus Storage can really help decarbonize um but all the models I've seen show that as you try to decarbonize fully with Renewables Plus Storage um costs for electricity start to Skyrocket when Renewables Plus Storage get to something like 80 90% of um the target for decarbonizing and so yes we could get there and and there's ways um but if we want to thrive as a species versus survive um we need to start harnessing the the power source of the universe right and that is Fusion Energy and here's clay from lower carb Capital so much of the conversation around climate change today is about how to give up things that you love living in smaller homes driving smaller and less powerful cars flying less changing your diet and there's no doubt that some of those things can be impactful but that's not a future that most people are inspired by and we have a perspective at lower carbon Capital which is that there are for being generous a couple hundred million people around the world that will go out of their way pay a little bit more be in convenience to do the right thing for the planet the question is how do we turn the other 7.8 billion unwittingly into hippies and that is that is the task for all of us and with with Fusion I think you can actually imagine the the path to that world where you can give and and promise people access to more energy at lower prices to live a much higher quality of life it's really hard to see doing that with just the technologies that we have at our Disposal today so solar and wind have been transformative and will continue to reshape the global energy landscape we are going to see geothermal energy unlocked in places where they never thought they could have geothermal energy I think we're going to see in at least in certain parts of the world a lot more investment in fishing but to get to the place that we need to get to for everyone to have a super Abundant Life that doesn't also turn the entire planet into an open pit mine I think we're going to need Fusion to support that all right so this stuff matters we're going to need at least 5x the amount of electricity that we use today in the next couple three four decades in a pretty short timeline within most of our lifetimes we're going to need a lot more electricity yes to fion yes to solar but hopefully also Fusion on the next episode we'll talk to the companies racing to make that happen I can't wait see you then thank you for listening and watching to this episode of age of Miracles if you like what you he please rate subscribe and share and if you're feeling really generous tell us what you think in the comments plus we have a ton of resources and references in our resource Hub if you want to go deeper and we've linked them all in the show notes below see you next week

Channel: Age of Miracles by Packy McCormick

Views: 20,929

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Id: aprVwwDA4kY

Length: 53min 16sec (3196 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023