Fusion power has a certain reputation, something in the realm of a holy grail, but not in a good way. There is a famous joke
about nuclear fusion about how it never becomes a reality. You can Google it if you like. But really the moment we are
in with nuclear fusion today is probably more exciting
than it's ever been. There's more activity in the fusion world than ever, and not just in
government research labs. There's also an emerging
private fusion industry that's attracted billions
of dollars in capital in recent years. Governments and private investors alike realize that we've got to find a solution that's going to allow us
to get to net zero targets. This is one of the hardest but most rewarding problems
that humanity could work on. Ultimately, we all want the same thing. We want someone to put
electricity on the grid from a fusion power station
as quickly as possible. Frankly, the scale of the challenge, 3,000 gigawatts of fossil fuel to replace. There's not many things that can do that. In fact, there may only be
fusion that can really do that. And while many in the scientific community predict fusion power will take decades, some in the private fusion space believe we'll get there
in just a few years, as soon as the 2030s. There is a lot of money going into these companies. And it's very interesting and exciting. There are some I really love and some I would rather laugh about. The world is desperately searching for a replacement for fossil fuels. Now scientists and startups are betting that a
commercial fusion reactor is finally in sight. We are looking at visible light coming from the plasma. The plasma is this sort of
100,000 degrees temperature, but what you actually
see is the coldest part. The hottest part you really don't see because it's too hot to emit light in the visible, isn't it? Yes. When I started, I was
doing numerical modeling and then I realized
that running the machine was a lot more interesting
and a lot more fun for me. My work is stressful. My work can be very
demanding in terms of time. But this is still one of the most exciting
places in the world. Here in Oxford, you'll find arguably the most successful fusion
experiment on Earth, JET, the Joint European Torus, torus being the technical term for donut, which is how the reactor's shaped. JET's been operating since the early '80s and only by 1997 were we really
ready to try proper fusion. And we produced 16 megawatts
of fusion power at the time which is like a few wind turbines. It's pretty significant. And it shows that fusion is possible. The 1997 experiment set records, but the reactor was only able
to run for less than a second. The team spent the next two decades cooking up a new approach. And in 2021, they gave it another shot. We always knew that we could do better. The last two days before Christmas were dedicated to these experiments, just this window of parameters
where we could get more. And we did. Three, two, one. JET more than doubled its previous record, producing more energy than any
fusion experiment in history. We couldn't hug. We couldn't high-five, nothing, because we have to be at
two meters from each other. But, you know, it was obvious
that this was a record. It was successful. You could see that it was successful. It's a real step towards the ultimate promise of fusion, a cheap, emissions-free power source with virtually unlimited fuel. But maybe don't break out
the champagne just yet. So in the 1997 experiments we produced a lot of power,
but very transiently. So it ramped up and then we lost control. Now we ramp up and
sustain for five seconds. So what exactly makes fusion such a tough problem that sustaining it for five seconds constitutes a world record? Nuclear fusion. Once it's perfected, fusion power will give us an
unlimited supply of energy. So nuclear fusion is
really what is happening inside the sun, where lots and lots of hydrogen atoms are moving at immense speeds. And every so often some
of them fuse together to form helium. Now the process at the atomic level leads to a very small
amount of loss in mass. And that little amount of mass actually generates a lot of energy. And you do that millions
and millions of times and you get the sun. Well look, we know fusion works. It's happening right now in our sun. But the reason it's happening in the sun is because of the mass of the sun. It's so massive, has this huge gravitational force which is pushing those
isotopes of hydrogen close enough to fuse. We obviously cannot
recreate the mass of the sun here on Earth. So instead, we have to give
that fuel even more energy. So we take a gas, we put a
huge amount of energy into it, and that turns it into the
fourth state of matter, plasma. If you consider water,
for example, it's ice, then you warm it up then you get a fluid, and then you warm it
further up, you get steam. And if you then increase
the temperature even further then you get plasma. Common plasmas include lightning, neon lights, and these things. We need temperatures 10 times larger than
in the solar interior. So this is about 100, 200 million degrees. And only at those sort of temperatures do you get fusion to happen here on Earth. Heating something to 10 times the temperature of the sun is, to use the technical term, very hard. Scientists have been working
at it since the 1930s. The major breakthrough has been the first tokamak experiments in the 1960s in the former Soviet Union. They achieved several million degrees, and this was a real breakthrough. Tokamaks is still one
of the most popular ways to create fusion. That's what JET is, along with many other
government-run reactors around the world. Using powerful magnets
to contain the plasma, they've achieved temperatures
of 100 million degrees and well beyond. But there's still one big
milestone we need to reach before fusion power becomes a reality, net gain. We need more power out than
put in to heat the fuel in the first place. If we can't generate
more power from fusion than we put in then the whole thing's a bust. Unfortunately, no one's ever done it, not even the brilliant minds at JET. That's all kind of part of the plan though because JET isn't actually
designed to solve fusion all by itself. It's just set up for a much
bigger project called ITER. Uh, no, no. ITER. We are building this experimental machine in the south of France, ITER,
which is going to be big. And it's the first one that
will produce really more energy than what it consumes. ITER is a massive
international collaboration between 35 different countries. And everyone involved
seems pretty confident it's going to get to net
gain for the first time. So fusion's just around the corner, right? Well... With the ITER project, the first plasma is supposed to be created by 2025, but full fusion reaction
isn't expected until 2035. So if ITER were the only bet
that we were making on fusion then it would be a safe bet to say that nuclear fusion is
going to take decades, and that's too long for the climate fight. Even the most optimistic scientists think that fusion power may
not be developed for 50 years, if then, if ever. Some think we can get there much faster. There's more than 30
private fusion companies around the world. And it feels like every month or two there's another private company
that springs up somewhere with another great idea
about how to do this. The amount of funding going into fusion has also been scaling. There's more private funding
going into fusion per year than there is federal government funding in the United States. The private fusion space is still small in terms of budget and people when compared to the mainstream. But if you look at the rate of progress, I would say it's much, much faster. And I do think that it
will be the private side that produces the first vital technology. Canadian fusion company General Fusion is steering away from the
traditional tokamak design. If you have followed fusion
at all in recent years you might have come across
this steampunk octopus, an earlier prototype of their reactor. It's very analogous to a fusion version of a diesel engine. So you basically, you have this very large cavity that's opened up inside of liquid metal. And into that liquid metal we inject a high temperature
plasma of hydrogen. We can now perform this
compression to heat up that plasma very much the same way
you think about a piston compressing and heating the
fuel in a diesel engine. This is a steam-driven compression process using an array of drivers. It compresses and heats
this magnetized plasma to fusion conditions. General Fusion's reactor would create brief
bursts of fusion energy, an approach they hope will
achieve net gain more easily than a tokamak. Founded in 2002, and supported
by investors like Jeff Bezos, they're one of the furthest along in the field of fusion startups with plans to build a demonstrative
plant by 2026 in Oxford on the same scientific campus as JET. This thing won't actually
put megawatts on the grid, but it will prove that
our approach to fusion in a power plant relevant environment can actually make fusion happen. Aiming to break ground
in a matter of months, the company is running full tilt to work out all the kinks before showtime. This is about 2/3 of the full scale that we'll need in our
fusion demonstration plant. So it's mostly at this point a question of understanding
the properties of the plasma and the plasma physics, to be confident that that will scale as we build the larger version. The alarms you hear when we start charging are alerting you to the fact that we're starting to
charge this machine. You hear a ping from when the plasma is interacting with the
wall of the machine. You see, at the time you heard that thump, that's when the machine
created the plasma. It's really exciting to see what's happening in the
private fusion industry. Of course, I came to General Fusion because I like General
Fusion's technology. That's one man's opinion. I think we have, my view is the first
really good shot on goal. But what really feels good is there's going to be lots
of shots on goal, right? And I'm very confident we're going to score the win that we need. Not far from General
Fusion's headquarters, you can find another fusion company. Helion Energy, one of
the most buzzed about fusion companies in the world is hunkered down in some
former Boeing hangers just outside Seattle. What we have tried to do at Helion is approach fusion from
a different direction than a lot of other people. We looked at the state of the art of what was being built in fusion and thought really there
has to be a better way to get to commercial fusion faster. That might sound like hype, but there really is
something radically different about Helion's reactor. Almost every idea behind
a nuclear fusion startup or a company is to rely on the heat that
is generated by fusion. And then converting that heat into steam, which is then used to turn
turbines to generate electricity. Now, Helion says that it
doesn't have to go through that heating and turning a turbine phase. So we do something called
direct energy conversion where we take the magnetic
energy of the fusion system, the charged particle energy of the fuel, and directly extract that to electricity. We inject our fuel. We magnetically compress that fusion fuel. Fusion begins. It pushes back on that magnetic field. So, a good analogy is
regenerative braking in your car. We then directly regeneratively take the electricity back
out of that fusion expansion and turn that into electricity. By cutting out the steam step for fusion we can radically increase the
overall engineering efficiency of the system. We aim for a system now
that can be much smaller, required a lot less of the
complexity and the challenges, and really, from my point of
view, a lot less of the time. That pitch was good enough to get Silicon Valley giants
Sam Altman and Peter Thiel on board as investors. The company's $500 million Series E round makes them one of the
best-funded fusion companies in the world. They're also making one of
the most ambitious predictions in the industry. The goal is to get this built by 2024, running, generating net
electricity from fusion for the first time. Timeline is the driver. It's always the driver. And so if it's a question of, well, it could be a little bit better, but take an extra year, we say, no, we're going to
make it a little bit worse but get it done a year earlier. It's the Silicon Valley mentality of how can you build as
absolutely as fast as possible? Yeah, help me with the gas pressure. Everything's isolated. You got the gas pressure. Fire.
Firing. Nice. Good shot. That was easy. Back in Oxford, First Light Fusion is taking what might be the most original approach
of any fusion company, borrowing from a branch of fusion called inertial confinement. The idea behind inertial
confinement is you hold plasma for a very short time in a very small space. So, one example of inertial confinement is where lasers, very high-powered lasers, are used to heat a very
small amount of hydrogen for nanoseconds, that is
billionths of a second. This has been done before, most famously at the
National Ignition Facility in California. But First Light has come
up with a new approach. We call it projectile fusion. We have a high velocity projectile. It flies in and it hits into
our, what we call a target. And the target has to focus
the energy of the projectile into the fusion fuel. This is one of our targets. This is the key technology
to our approach to fusion. So this is completely turned into a plasma by the force of the impact
and the energy released. In a power plant, one of these targets would release enough energy
to power the average UK home for over two years. That sound. That's the projectile being
fired out of this gas gun at around 15,000 miles an hour. To generate power you have to do that at a repetition rate. You have to do a certain number and it's the energy you release every time times by the frequency and that's the power. So in our power plant design we'd be doing this about
once every 30 seconds. So we recently showed fusion in our lab with a projectile driven
approach for the first time. Just simply experimentally
it's a big proof of concept that it can really work. If we look at the actual
amount of fusion we produced then that number by
itself, it was 50 neutrons. And we're not hiding it. It's not very impressive. But the point is that's exactly what the
simulations predicted. And that's what gives us
the very rapid, we hope, pathway forwards to improve that number. I hope we're not talking about 50 neutrons at the end of the year. So there's these disruptive technologies which are coming into our
space, which is great. We want new ideas. We want people to come and tackle the big challenges that we face. There's lots of startup companies. Some of them will fail. Some of them will go to the wall. Some of them will wildly succeed. That's just healthy. Some on the scientific
research side of fusion are more critical of
the startup phenomenon. Few private fusion companies
have shown any results beyond fusing a few atoms. And many scientists
worry that these startups are promising too much. The cons in my mind are the promises by companies who either have a concept that we have already, for
good reason, put apart and knew why they won't work, or completely new concepts. Some change them every other year. And then they still promise fusion energy by 2030 or something. And I don't like that too
much because I'm afraid that if there are so
many promises not kept that this would not be
positive for fusion energy in general. If you look at the timescales
that governments work at in research, that's completely different
than the timescales that entrepreneurial
private industry works at. It's not that there's a
problem there with government, but, you know, they're a
different set of metrics there. They're largely
research-driven organizations. You need look no further than
commercial access to space. SpaceX. They've created what people
thought would never be possible, which is reusable rockets. NASA was never able to achieve that because they weren't
motivated by the same things. And so when it comes to the
last mile of commercialization, that's where you really
need to hand the baton from government to private industry. From what I know, some
of the private sector is very serious and is bringing significant capital and
significant engineering advances. It needs to promise things on the time on a realistic timescale. So, not next year. And the timescale of about
20 years is realistic. It remains to be seen whether the Silicon
Valley VC type approach will actually get us to
commercial fusion faster. One thing is for sure though, progress, however slow and
incremental, is being made. And if we're going to get
to a fusion powered future, we're probably going to need
both the painstaking research and the risky new ideas. I think the rate of
progress is really driven by the imperative. And to be honest, I mean, let's
just be honest as a society, over the last 20 or 30 years we've been pretty comfortable
with burning fossil fuels. The fact that we have to stop it now drives the imperative. This is the most important
question for mankind because, I mean, you need
electricity or energy for everything. We have a lot of developing countries, and if these countries want to come to our standards of living, there's no way other than
provide them with cheap energy, and better, CO2 neutral. Otherwise, we have a climate crisis. Each fusion technology has a slightly different flavor in terms of its ultimate
value proposition. And so I think that you're going to see a portfolio of technologies
being commercialized over the coming decades that address different
parts of the market. And the market is huge and diverse. The total addressable market for fusion is on the order of $1 trillion a year. It might be decades before fusion becomes a reality, but it's the kind of
cheap, unlimited power that you would want to give a civilization to be able to do all
the things it wants to. Imagine if you could
make a lot of rocket fuel to create an entire fleet of rockets that would go and mine asteroids because, you know, at some point we're going to run out of metals. Or you could remove existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back down and bury it deep underground. That process requires a ton of energy, but if you were able to
create nuclear fusion you could imagine restoring
the Earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. And these are the kinds of application that really cheap and clean energy can enable humanity to do. I want my kids to have a future that has the possibilities that I've had. So I hope we get fusion, and I think private, public, it all needs to come together
because this is worth it.
The billions flowing into fusion are good but I do wonder to what extent the investors are factoring in the chances of success of their rivals. e.g. if ZAP works then it's hard to see how General Fusion or any of the tokamac type startups could produce a competitive commercial plant even if they can get their design working. If Helion works even ZAP might not be commercially viable though there could still be space for the exotic aneutronic designs. The first working concept could result in the other investors cutting their losses and the other startups failing.
What is it with people trying to sell fusion that they keep claiming it's going to be cheap? Are they crazy, or just lying, because there's literally no reason to think its going to be cheap.
Most of the most plausible designs use tritium, which needs to have a whole other set of fission reactors built to make it. There's talk of breeding it in the fusion reactors, but there's not enough of it already to start that process, and nobody has a clear idea of how that would even work.
Most exotic designs with larger nuclei are even more difficult to produce - likely adding a long time to the build time and expense.