424. Common Ground on Climate and Nuclear Energy | Dr. Dennis Whyte

[0] Hello everyone.

[1] I had the privilege today to speak with Dr. Dennis White, who like me is a denizen of a small town in western Canada, small prairie town.

[2] Be that as it may, he's also one of the world's foremost authorities on nuclear fission and has been at the spearhead of both technical and commercial projects to make fusion technology a reality.

[3] offers the opportunity, essentially, if it can be mastered of unlimited energy and potentially at a low cost.

[4] So it's the ultimate and transformative technologies.

[5] We talked about the fact, too, that the fusion revolution, which has been promised, let's say, for decades, which isn't that long a time frame, all things considered, is now being facilitated by tremendous advances in materials, technology, and computational technology, and that just last year, there was one variant of fusion technology that produced for the first time more energy than it consumed, which is a milestone on the pathway towards true commercial viability.

[6] And so we talk a lot about exactly what fusion energy is, how it differs from standard nuclear energy, where we are in the process to transitioning, let's say, to the kind of future that would be endless clean energy at an extraordinarily low price, right?

[7] And that really brings with it the possibility of lifting all the remaining poor people in the world out of poverty, if we could just get that right.

[8] So it's a fairly technical discussion.

[9] It'll be very appealing to you, engineering and science types, but for everybody who's interested in the issue of energy more broadly and the science fiction reality that the world is about to become, then follow along with us.

[10] So thank you very much, Dr. White, for agreeing to talk to me today.

[11] We might as well jump right in.

[12] I think the thing we could do for our viewers and listeners that would be most useful to begin with is to try.

[13] tell them, is for you to tell them what fusion energy is and how that differs from standard nuclear energy.

[14] Just like a rationale for the pursuit of fusion energy and a place and placing of it in the proper context with regard to our pursuit of advanced energy and reliable energy supplies.

[15] Right.

[16] So fusion is the process of fusing together the most abundant and the lightest element, hydrogen, into heavier elements.

[17] So it actually changes the element.

[18] And this is the process that powers the universe because it powers all stars, including our own sun.

[19] And you can think of a star, our own sun.

[20] It's a big conversion factory.

[21] It's like a standard burner in the sense that it takes the huge masses of hydrogen that the sun is made out of.

[22] And in the center of it where the conditions are meet the requirement for fusion it converts the hydrogen into helium and by that process releases staggering amounts of energy per reaction um so um you know usually when i comment in public about fusion it's like so fusion makes life possible in the universe because it's the it's the radiant heat that comes from stars that makes life possible in a place like the planet earth So it is the, you think of it, it's the quintessential or fundamental energy source of the universe.

[23] That's the starting point.

[24] So it distinguishes, why is it such an effective energy source?

[25] It's because it changes the element, right?

[26] So what happens is that if you take the mass of those starting particles of this before you fuse them together, they have larger mass than the particles that result from this.

[27] And you go, but how can that be?

[28] Because we all learned in school that, you know, mass cannot be destroyed or created.

[29] But this is what Einstein realized was that, in fact, mass and energy are the same thing.

[30] And then when you convert them in these processes, you end up with energy.

[31] And it's hard to imagine how much of a different process this is than either fission or standard chemical reactions, which is basically what we run the world on today.

[32] And in terms of comparing it to chemical energy, the average energy released per reaction or per massive particle is about 10 million times larger.

[33] That's amazing, right?

[34] So this is why stars on our own sun can last for 10 billion years.

[35] I mean, there's an enormous amount of hydrogen in the sun, but if it was running on a chemical process, like burning hydrogen, like you would think of in a fuel cell or something like that, it would only last for a few thousand years.

[36] It lasts for 10 billion years.

[37] That's the difference between them.

[38] And with respect to fission, it's actually, there's a relation there in the sense that fission changes the elements as well, too.

[39] But it's literally the opposite process.

[40] Fission, as the name implies, splits of parts or fission's, the most unstable, heaviest elements that exist like uranium.

[41] And again, by this equivalent of energy and mass, it releases energy, but it's a completely different physical process.

[42] And then we can discuss a little bit more about what that means, but at the starting point, you can say, you know, the universe already voted.

[43] Fusion is the energy source of the universe.

[44] Just the question is, how do you actually harness it on Earth?

[45] And the consequences of harnessing it are very different than either chemical or fossil fuel energy or standard nuclear energy.

[46] Now, you said that it's in the deeper reaches of the sun that the fusion reactions take place.

[47] And the sun is extraordinarily large, and the conditions there are very much unlike the conditions on Earth.

[48] So what are the conditions under which fusion becomes possible, let's say, on the cosmic landscape?

[49] And then how is it that those might be duplicated?

[50] How is it even possible to duplicate those on Earth?

[51] And also, how is it possible to duplicate them on Earth without things going dreadfully wrong?

[52] Right.

[53] So the conditions in the set, so I'll take our, it varies from star to star.

[54] Actually, there's slightly, there's nuances to the differences in different types of stars, but I'll take our own son as the example.

[55] It's the easiest one.

[56] So the, as you imagine, like in the center of the earth, Like we learned this in elementary school, like there's different layers to the earth, right?

[57] You have an outer cold cross, and as you get towards the center because of the pressure exerted by gravity and the core and the math, these are all higher temperature, and they're much denser because they're under so much pressure.

[58] The same thing happens in the sun, which is actually larger, much larger than the Earth.

[59] And what you can think of is as you go from the surface of the sun, which has got, is in contact with outer space, that is minimum pressure.

[60] It's actually the coldest part of the sun.

[61] It's at around 5 ,000 degrees.

[62] And as you start going towards the center of the sun, the temperature keeps increasing, the pressure keeps increasing.

[63] And eventually, when you reach the center of the sun, it's approximately 20 million degrees Celsius in the center of the sun.

[64] It's under those conditions that basically the fusion reaction can start to occur in significant quantities.

[65] And that's what's required for a star to essentially ignite is that there is sufficient conditions of particularly temperature and pressure that allow enough fusion reactions to occur that it starts to keep itself hot to allow other fusion reactions to occur.

[66] So this is interesting, is that there are entities, even our own solar system, which didn't quite make it, to stars.

[67] So this is actually in Arthur C. Which one was it?

[68] I think 2010, Arthur C. Clark, brilliant scientist and writer, postulated that at the end of that story, you might remember that Jupiter is turned by the aliens into another sun in our solar system.

[69] It's not quite totally possible, but it is interesting.

[70] Jupiter basically has a very similar composition to the sun.

[71] It just didn't get quite big enough and hot enough in the center to start triggering enough fusion reactions.

[72] to make it a star.

[73] So what this means is that fusion occurs naturally only really in one place in the universe, and that is in the center of stars, because that's the place where you can get the conditions of particularly the temperature that allow it to remain hot enough to be able to sustain the fusion reactions.

[74] And quickly, like, why is that needed?

[75] It's because this process of pulling the hydrogen, pushing them together to fuse means that you have to overcome extraordinary large forces, which don't want them to get close to each other, which is a basic force of nature.

[76] It's the electromagnetic force because the electrical repulsion between those two particles doesn't want them to come together.

[77] So you have to have high average energy, essentially overcome that barrier and get them to fuse.

[78] You can think of, like we use analogies, like you have to have your match or your kindling hot enough to get the big fire started.

[79] Well, in this case, you sort of have to get enough average temperature or energy to start up the reaction and to get it and to get it going.

[80] So those are the requirements.

[81] So this comments then as to why we could imagine that you could make this happen on Earth is the requirement here is actually not so.

[82] much around the energy, because for almost a hundred years we've actually induced fusion reactions on Earth with particle accelerators.

[83] This is one of the first things that was discovered, actually, when particle accelerators were developed in the 1930s.

[84] The question is about how you maintain the temperature of this medium of the hydrogen fuel that allows it to stay hot enough for it to keep fusing.

[85] And the sun and stars work, by the fact that how is it allowed that the center of the sun's so much hotter, 20 million degrees, then, you know, how can it not this heat escape?

[86] Well, it does escape with finite probability or time scales, but a very long time scales, like, you know, orders of a million years or something like this.

[87] And the reason this is happening is because it's the sun's own gravity, which is containing this hot core, which disallows it to escape and dissipate and therefore cool down and then stop the fusion reactions from occurring.

[88] So this is why star, as it turns out, gravity, is the weakest of the fundamental forces by a lot, like many, many orders of magnitude.

[89] And so for this reason, in order for fusion to be viable on Earth, you can't do it the same by the same process that a star works, because it takes something the size of a star.

[90] So with, With a few exotic sort of examples like neutron stars, this is why stars are actually enormously large because gravity is a very weak force.

[91] Ironically, in some sense, it comes back to what I just commented to, the thing that makes fusion hard is this electrostatic repulsion that is occurring because the two light -charge particles, they both have positive charge, don't want to get close together to fuse.

[92] We actually use its cousin, which is the magnetic force, is one of the ways to do this.

[93] we replace that gravitational force which is something which has much higher effectiveness than gravity and primarily what we use is the electromagnetic force and so that's what we in fact primarily use on earth although it's not exclusively that it's mostly that's the thing that we that we used to sort of recreate these temperatures particularly that occur in the interior of the sun so your last question was why why Why isn't that crazy?

[94] Like, it seems dangerous for something to have something at such high temperatures on Earth.

[95] It's actually the opposite of that.

[96] And it comes from a little bit of a subtlety of understanding the thermal balance in the fusion system is that while the materials, this fuel gets extraordinarily hot, there's extremely little of the fuel, like very, very little of the fuel.

[97] So one of the leading concepts, for example, that's the focus in my own research.

[98] In magnetic confinement, the energy content of the fuel, even though it's at 100 million degrees, is less than boiling water because there's so few particles in it.

[99] So you basically need, in order to have something that has high energy content and therefore it could be considered dangerous, it has to have high temperature and large numbers of particles of it.

[100] So fusion has very high temperature, but very, very few particles.

[101] So when you put those numbers together, it turns out it's not dangerous at all.

[102] And the other thing that makes it safe is because what makes fusion hard on Earth is in fact isolating it from anything that is crestrel, anything that's earthlike, anything that has root temperatures, anything close to what we're used to, is that what tends to happen is this fuel will just leak its heat so fast into that medium.

[103] It cools down and immediately stops making fusion.

[104] So, in fact, fusion has inherent safety built into the physics of it.

[105] It's actually not really an engineering safety concern.

[106] It's a, it's, it's, you just, you can't actually, in many ways, you can't actually use it intentionally to do bad things with it, because of those physical properties of the fuel.

[107] Okay, so let me see if I've got this straight so far.

[108] So a star aggregates together, primarily hydrogen, because of gravity.

[109] And if there's enough aggregated together, the gravitational density, especially in lower levels of the star's star, becomes such that fusion reactions can begin to take place.

[110] Now, is that primarily because initially of, is it that the atoms are crushed together despite their electromagnetic opposition?

[111] They're crushed together by the pressure that's a secondary consequence.

[112] of the gravity.

[113] So they're just brought into proximity.

[114] And so, so, and what happens?

[115] Does like one fusion reaction take place and then start a chain reaction under the appropriate conditions?

[116] Yeah.

[117] So no, actually, it, which is the other part of, thanks for asking that.

[118] That's a very insightful question, actually.

[119] It doesn't work through a chain reaction.

[120] It works rather through a thermal process, which is different.

[121] Let me, let me just quickly explain this, because this is a fundamental difference to fission.

[122] So in fission, what happens, imagine, so here's your great big uranium nucleus, right, right?

[123] And the fission gets triggered by an extremely simple process in many ways.

[124] It's a neutron, which is one of the components of the nucleus, which is made of neutrons and protons.

[125] Neutrons have no electric charge, protons have electric charge.

[126] They hold them themselves together in the nucleus through the strong nuclear force.

[127] A neutron, which can participate in that force, basically gets in proximity to the uranium nucleus and it splits apart and releases energy.

[128] It also releases neutrons when it does that.

[129] And so when those neutrons leave that as a cause of that reaction, if you design the assembly of the uranium in that case or other materials which can undergo fission, what you do is you design it such that neutral, it's that particle that actually starts the next reactions.

[130] So in a power plant, like in a fission, pardon me, nuclear power plant, you design this very carefully and control it very carefully that on average, when one fission reaction occurs, one particle that is released from that triggers the next fission reaction and you control that.

[131] If you intentionally don't control that, then the process runs away because that one, say, triggers two more fission reactions and then four, eight, 16, and up it goes and in fact, that creates an explosion.

[132] Fusion does not work that way because the products that are made by fusion are very, very hard to fuse.

[133] They actually don't trigger the next fusion reaction.

[134] So, in fact, that almost comes by definition because what's happening is primarily it's converting it to fuel into helium, and helium is an extremely stable nucleus.

[135] It actually doesn't want to fuse anymore.

[136] That's actually why fusion, is such a good process and such an energy -efficient process.

[137] So it's not that particle that wants to fuse anymore.

[138] It's the heat, which is released from the fusion reaction that gets the fuel a little bit hotter.

[139] If you get it a little bit hotter, then that will want to make more fusion reactions.

[140] And as it releases heat, it'll actually get the fuel hotter and it will go up.

[141] Why is it more likely for...

[142] We talked about the relationship between gravitational pressure and the preconditions for fusion, why is that more likely at higher levels of temperature?

[143] Right.

[144] So that does come from the fundamentals of the process.

[145] So if you take a single reaction of fusion and you consider the average energy of the particles, that in general, although there's a limit to it, as you increase the average energy, the velocity, essentially, the particles to fuse, that gives them a higher likelihood of overcoming the reaction.

[146] Oh, I see.

[147] Because they're in motion.

[148] and then basically allows them to do that.

[149] And that's actually, and that's a good one to speak about, because as I commented before, accelerators, in fact, I have an accelerator run by graduate students at MIT that can trigger fusion reactions all day long because you take an accelerator, you give a single particles back basically a high average energy, and you impinge them onto a target of a appropriate composition, you'll trigger these kinds of fusion reactions all day long.

[150] that cannot make net energy.

[151] It turns out it's because what's happening is basically most of the energy that you're supplying to this particle just gets lost in useless heat essentially in the system.

[152] What's happening inside of stars, and that's why I said temperature, not energy, is that it's a contained thermal system.

[153] What I mean by thermal, this means it's the equivalent that we're used to of thinking about, you know, like we think of water, of how.

[154] having a temperature or air of having a temperature.

[155] This medium, which is called a plasma, actually has a temperature.

[156] It is a system in which the particles have a distributions of energies based on thermodynamics.

[157] And so that's why I call it a temperature.

[158] So this is key, it's a thermodynamic process in that sense, is that you have something inside of it, is that individual particle reaction releases kinetic energy because that's forced to give that energy back as heat into the medium.

[159] the temperature increases, the average energy of the particles in the medium increases, increases the probability, and this builds up your way to actually being able to do that.

[160] So you crush them together, and that increases the probability of fusion to some degree, and then you heat them up, and that increases the probability even further.

[161] So I'm curious about the temperature and the movement of the hydrogen atoms.

[162] So, this is a stupid question, likely, but the answer doesn't spring to mind.

[163] As you increase the average temperature of the plasma, what actually is happening to the atoms?

[164] Like, are they vibrating back and forth faster?

[165] And if they're vibrating back and forth faster, why don't they just go off in a single direction?

[166] Why is the motion, like that just, I can't understand that exactly, because you'd think that with a given momentum, they would go in a specific direction.

[167] Are they bumping into other atoms?

[168] Is that the issue?

[169] Yeah, so right.

[170] So now I have to pull up a whole other level about what the medium of the fuel is.

[171] And it's because, so the temperatures involve always infusion exceed tens of millions of degrees.

[172] So it turns out that any matter, when you increase it up to around 5 or 10 ,000 degrees Celsius, it turns into a different phase of matter.

[173] so you can no longer think of it as atoms in a lattice as you do in solids or atoms floating you know basically a fluid like water or even even the atoms in this air bumping into each other it turns into a completely different phase of matter this is called a plasma and plasmas have unique properties because what they're doing is disintegrating the atom and atoms are made up of the simplest one is hydrogen.

[174] There's a positive charge nucleus.

[175] In the case of simple hydrogen, it's just a single proton, and things like Deuterium, which is the heavy form of hydrogen, there's a proton and a neutron that are held together, and then there's a single electron, a negatively charged electron around it.

[176] So all the matter that we always deal with on Earth, solid, liquid, gas are all in the phases that are all stable atoms.

[177] that are holding themselves together through the atomic forces, which are in there, not nuclear forces, which is atomic forces, which are in there.

[178] Once you get up above 5 ,000 or 10 ,000 degrees, those temperatures are so high, they start breaking those bonds.

[179] And basically what happens is that there's enough energy that, on average, the electrons are all pulled away from their partner that they had here.

[180] So the distinguishing feature of a plasma is that, in fact, they're not little, atoms like wiggling around like this, they're actually freely going around particles that all have electric charge.

[181] And particularly when you reach temperatures required for fusion, everything has a charge in it as well, too.

[182] The reason this is, so by the way, plasma is a discipline in and of itself.

[183] I actually work at a place called the Plasma Science Infusion Center.

[184] Plasma is the central medium that you use to make fusion happen so like what is an example of that well it's the sun the sun is not actually a ball we think of the sun is a ball oh it's a ball of maybe gas or liquid or something no it's plasma because everything is above 5 000 degrees in the sun so this gets a little bit harder to say so what does this mean about what will that it's a plasma like why is it special why is it difficult to think of this does go into your question but how on earth do you actually tamed this, right?

[185] Well, what happens from this, it goes back to this whole pushing against each other through the electromagnetic forces, and particularly the fact that they've got charges now.

[186] Remember, I told you before, when the hydrogen protons come together, they don't want to come together too close because they get repulsed from each other.

[187] That's actually a force that acts not when the particles physically touch one another, but it's always present because they're interacting through their charges.

[188] So particles out here, they can be zipping by each other like this, but actually impact each other because they get to interact with each other through a basic force of nature, which is, again, the electrostatic force.

[189] And it turns out, well, it's sort of intuitively almost a matter, and this is why it's, by the way, plasas are not intuitive, because the physics that dictates them is action at a distance, and therefore they have a really pretty wild set of collective behaviors that has been a, you know, has been a source of study in, it's an entire discipline of physics, plasma physics, that has been studied for over 100 years, there's sort of understand this medium.

[190] But in the end, one of the ways we do describe it is you can almost think of like a gas, but rather the particles have charged, and so they're bouncing me off each other without actually physically touching into each other, which gives them complex sense of behavior.

[191] So in the end, in order to contain, it's like in the sun, that's happening in the sun, is that this means that they're sort of randomized motion, actually, for any individual particle.

[192] As an ensemble, they actually have predictive ways through statistics, assist, statistical mechanical descriptions that allow us like we do in gases and salts and others, that we can sort of describe this in terms of a thermodynamic point of view, even though it's in this crazy plasma state.

[193] So it sounds, let me use an awkward analogy, maybe it sounds like a, a bunch of singular north poles of magnets trying to get along together in a crowded room.

[194] It's not approximately right?

[195] Because you can imagine pushing north poles together.

[196] They don't like to come together.

[197] They twist around each other.

[198] And you can imagine that being compressed together as a consequence of gravitational force.

[199] Now, would it be then that there's a probability distribution that those interacting those interesting particles are going to actually collide hard enough to fuse?

[200] So they're interacting, and now and then the interaction is such that they fuse, and there's some set probability of that that increases as temperature and pressure increases.

[201] That's exactly what it is.

[202] So it's, and in the end, what happens is you can take this statistical approach to the large distribution of particles that are behaving in.

[203] You can't predict an individual particle's probability.

[204] Right, right.

[205] ensemble of them, you can start treating them statistically.

[206] And that's in fact, exactly what we do.

[207] We use laboratory measurements of things like we basically take single particles and find out their probability of interacting at a given energy.

[208] We measure those extremely accurately.

[209] And then what we do is we assume that the system is in this deep thermal state.

[210] Essentially, what's happened is it's maximized, its entropy effect, effect, because they bounced off each other so many times.

[211] And then you can statistically describe a probability that actually the particles will fuse, and this probability depends only on the temperature.

[212] We call this a rate coefficient to be more tactical, but that's okay.

[213] It's basically just a probability in an ensemble of these particles that in fact the fusion can occur because of these interactions.

[214] Right, and the denser that medium, the higher the probability that those are going to occur.

[215] And then we tend to separate those.

[216] There's basically one function, and this is key actually in fusion, which we might get a little bit more into is that so one of the independent we we consider the independent parameter or the controlling parameter primarily temperature because it is the ultimate it is an absolute requirement so if you take the most simple fusion reaction there's there's minimum temperatures that you can get net energy out of it it tends to be about for the terrestrial sources so it's about 45 million degrees Celsius that depends only on the temperature so we tend to break it out there's one there's one part of the reactivity depends on the temperature and then we separate and there's another one that depends on the density of the fuel and this is actually intuitive right it's like oh it's like i've got a if so as i increase the density of the fuel and i have fixed probability for an average ensemble of them i can calculate how much how many fusion reactions i'll make in that medium in a unit of unit of time and in a fixed volume.

[217] So this is really important because this informs us about how much on for a terrestrial energy source, how much fusion power, because every time that fusion reaction occurs, it releases energy.

[218] So we can actually calculate from this directly the amount of power that we make in a fixed volume of this fuel once we reach those conditions.

[219] And it depends on the density of the fuel and the temperature of the fuel.

[220] Yeah.

[221] Okay.

[222] Okay.

[223] So now we've explained how this occurs in the sun.

[224] We've explained why it isn't a runaway process.

[225] We've described the relationship between pressure and temperature, but then we're stuck with the next mystery, which is, well, you don't have the sun on Earth, you don't have that gravitational pressure, that volume of hydrogen.

[226] How do you duplicate the conditions that are necessary to produce fusion?

[227] How do you produce temperatures approximating, you said, 45 million degrees?

[228] It's an unimaginable temperature.

[229] It's no wonder that cool down, when a fusion reaction would cool down if it touches anything earthly, because that would be like plunging it into the most frigid deep freeze imaginable.

[230] So how do you duplicate these conditions, however temporarily on Earth?

[231] You do something like make these electromagnetic containers, and I know that you use laser beams to increase the density, but maybe you can walk us through the construction of the electromagnetic container.

[232] What technical innovations, that's dependent on, and then how you attain those temperatures and pressures.

[233] Right.

[234] So I've introduced two of the three requirements for fusion.

[235] So one is the temperature.

[236] The other one is the density of the fuel.

[237] The third one is a, before I start, before I talk about the technology, I'll just describe what it means conceptually.

[238] So we call this confinement.

[239] What I mean by confinement is that.

[240] that because these systems must be thermalized, namely the fuel must have a temperature, technically what that means is what I've actually allowed to happen is that the fuel medium is having way more many, way more interactions with themselves that don't fuse.

[241] It's just like thinking about the articles in this room colliding off each other.

[242] All those things, what they do is they exchange energy and momentum, And that's actually what allows the system to thermalize.

[243] And once in a blue moon, a fusion reaction will basically happen.

[244] So that's what that's going on.

[245] So what that means is that you must have a system that provides particle and energy containment.

[246] What I mean by this is that it's okay because this fuel is isolated in some way away from everything else so that you basically allow those non -fusing reactions to occur and you don't really care.

[247] is you provide containment.

[248] So what does this mean conceptually?

[249] It's like of whatever you think of your fuel assembly on this is that there's some physical mechanism, which is disallowing it to basically touch anything that's at room temperature or even close to it.

[250] So it's isolating it in some way.

[251] So that's the concept.

[252] So we call this the energy confinement time.

[253] And the way that you can think of, just sort of close your eyes.

[254] Imagine you got some ensemble.

[255] And you put some use.

[256] unit of energy into this, and you kind of wait and you say, oh, it took this long to cool, that characteristic time is called energy.

[257] You can find a time.

[258] This was conceived of by a scientist in 1950s Lawson who came up with who realized this important, added this important concept into play.

[259] So it turns out that when you look at a fusion system is that once you reach a certain temperature, it's actually, and it takes a little bit of math, but it's like whatever, it's, it's it's pretty much the first thing you teach like entering grad students at MIT about how to establish fusion energy system is that it requires a minimum amount of containment for a given amount of how many fusion reactions you're making and that's set by the density because you've in this you've assumed some kind of temperature in it and it turns out when you work through the math of it it's the product of the density of the fuel and this energy confinement time, but actually make, realize what you want, which is to get net energy out of the system, and particularly the ultimate goal, which is you basically put in almost no external energy, and the whole thing is just keeping itself hot by its own fusion reactions.

[260] So it's very important.

[261] And the reason, and the story that's a little bit complicated, but it's so important to understand infusion, because this is unlike a lot of, usually when you think a physical system, It's rare to come across a product of two important parameters controlling each other, namely you multiply them by each other, right?

[262] And it turns out the physics doesn't care about the absolute number about those, as long as the multiple of them actually meet this minimum level on Earth.

[263] And that was density and confinement time?

[264] It's density and confinement time.

[265] So it's how many particles there are per unit volume, and then you multiply it by this characteristic time.

[266] By how long you hold it together?

[267] basically how long it holds its energy technically, right?

[268] Okay, okay.

[269] All very good.

[270] And so this is what confuses a lot of the public about fusion because you'll see this picture.

[271] There's this great big magnet.

[272] Wow, they did fusion.

[273] Or you see this other thing, which is an electrode.

[274] They made fusion.

[275] Or you see this laser.

[276] They made fusion.

[277] What the heck do these things have to do with each other?

[278] What's happening is that they're using the same physical principle that I just talked about, but they're vastly changing, the density and confinement.

[279] Basically about how you get to the multiple of those two.

[280] And so you can imagine what this is, is that if I allow the density to be very, very high, then I don't need a very long energy confinement time.

[281] And vice versa, if I make the density very low, I must get a high energy confinement time.

[282] And that's actually the approaches that are there.

[283] So just a quick comment, because this is why it is a little confused.

[284] If you look, right now, the two, you know, methods of getting there that certainly have obtained the most publicity, but also probably, you know, the furthest along in terms of the scientific accomplishments is in magnetic fusion, which is the focus of my work, which is, in that case, we use very, very low density fuel.

[285] The density of the particles in this is 100 ,000 times less than air.

[286] It's very, very undense.

[287] And this requires an energy confinement time of around one second, which doesn't seem very long.

[288] But recall what you're doing is, like, the particles that you're containing at 100 million degrees have such high average velocities that when they fuse, like I'm here in Rhode Island right now, they would go from Rhode Island to Los Angeles in about three seconds.

[289] That's how fast they're going.

[290] So containing these kinds of things for a second is a pretty impressive feat, indeed, right?

[291] And that's that approach.

[292] And this is the one, How do we do this?

[293] We use the magnetic force to basically force those that I can get back to more details and that.

[294] But just this comparison of that.

[295] Then I go to the other extreme of this.

[296] It's our colleagues that have performed this with lasers.

[297] And in the lasers, the lasers are actually not heating the fuel.

[298] They're compressing the fuel.

[299] They're achieving densities, which are about 10 billion times higher than what we're using in a magnetic fusion.

[300] And correspondingly, their energy confinement time is a fractal.

[301] of a billionth of a second.

[302] And there are people and companies and other groups which are approaching things which exist in those in -between areas as well, too, like pinches and so forth.

[303] So this is one of the reasons for, it's an interesting one, it's both, I would argue, an advantage, but also has been one of the challenges of fusion.

[304] There's so many, because it turns out when you vary those physical parameters by so much, it actually vastly changes the technology that you're thinking about how you would actually get there.

[305] So this is an interesting thing as of thinking about how you develop it as an energy source because you've got a lot of choices.

[306] But there's so many choices, it's led to this.

[307] It's an interesting race in some sense, right, about how you would get there.

[308] Right.

[309] So you can vary the density using various technologies, and you can vary the time to confinement using very.

[310] technologies.

[311] Now, how exactly in your magnetic fusion designs, how exactly do you confine?

[312] Like, I'm trying to conceptualize this.

[313] You're using very, very powerful magnetic fields.

[314] I read that you've produced magnetic fields that are many multiples of the force of the entire Earth's magnetic field.

[315] Now, I'm wondering, why doesn't that take a staggering amount of energy just to manage that, but also what exactly, how do you conceptualize the confinement space?

[316] Like, is it an enclosed magnetic field?

[317] And then inside that, there's this relatively low density hydrogen, and is it, when does it become hydrogen plasma?

[318] And then if you're only confining it for a second, well, you don't want a power plant that only works for a second.

[319] So I don't see how to jump from that to something approximating a sustainable power source.

[320] Yeah, yeah, so I'll parse that out.

[321] So first of all, so this is a focus on magnetic confinement.

[322] So the physical principle that's being used to contain the particles is another fundamental force called the Lorentz force, which is that if you have a charged particle that is in movement and there's a magnetic field present, it will exert a force on that.

[323] charge particle.

[324] So it'll prove.

[325] It's actually, so this takes, I'm going to use my hands to try to get this.

[326] So magnetic fields, most people know this from using a compass and oh, there's a so there's two things that are important about a magnetic field.

[327] It's amplitude, it's magnitude, right?

[328] And it has a direction because the way that we come and it's a vector, right?

[329] So it's a direction, okay.

[330] So I'm just going to tell you, I've got a magnetic field, which is going like this.

[331] right?

[332] It's in this direction.

[333] It's pointed at this direction.

[334] There's a certain aptitude to it.

[335] So what this means is when I put charged particles in the presence of this magnetic field, it exerts a force on it, which is an interesting force, by the way.

[336] It's a force that always acts in a direction that is orthogonal to the direction of the charged particle.

[337] When you work out the map of this, what this forces the particle, any particle to do like this, is that it will execute a circular orbit like this around the magnetic field.

[338] So no matter how fast it's going, it basically holds, it's like it ties it to the magnetic field like that.

[339] And this is for both negative and charged particles.

[340] So remember the collection or recollection of the definition of a plasma, so when it gets hot enough that most of the particles become charged, and that's certainly true in fusion plasmas.

[341] So every single individual particle is actually feeling a containment force, which is coming from that magnetic field.

[342] okay so what does that mean so what that means is and there's a oh by the way and there's another special one is that not only is it orthogonal to the direction of the of the charged particle it's also must be orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic field itself so what this means is that you can think of these as like barber poles of motion of the particles that they're going along like this they do not get affected in the direction that is along the magnetic field.

[343] So there is no containment along the magnetic field.

[344] So in general, what we do this is we come up with a set of topologies of magnetic fields.

[345] Primarily, what we do is we make them close back on themselves, so there is no end to the magnetic field, right?

[346] And the way you do this is, okay, so in the end you can think you had it right conceptually.

[347] It's basically you can think of these vectors or line, we conceptualize them as lines of magnetic field and magnetic force.

[348] And this basically when it's put together in a particular configuration, it becomes extremely effective at holding this very hot fuel because of that force is exerting because that circular motion doesn't allow them to escape unless some other thing happens, like they collide into another particle or something, which sets in energy complex.

[349] Is the strength of the magnetic field necessary proportionate to the average speed of the particles in question?

[350] So the higher the temperature, the higher the magnetic field required, the more powerful the magnetic field required?

[351] So technically the force that's exerted is proportional to the charge of the particle but that doesn't matter because that's fixed because it's always the same.

[352] The velocity of the particle, the velocity of the particles increases the temperature increases.

[353] It goes up as the square of the velocity.

[354] And it increases as the strength of the magnetic field.

[355] So in the end, what that ends up being for fusion's sake, what this means is that in magnetic, confinement has very critical consequences is that when you solve the particle's motion, and what that means is that if you now consider, I'm the magnetic field pointing like this, what we care about is the size of this orbit, the thing that's the size of this orbit, because it's basically a circular orbit.

[356] And if you keep everything else fixed and increase the strength of the magnetic field, the size of that orbit decreases.

[357] It shrinks because the force is better.

[358] So basically holds it closer to the magnetic field is what you want.

[359] And this is really important because it turns out from that other argument, although there are different arguments about this, is that the first argument about the requirement of the temperature, it turns out that there is a optimized temperature to access fusion.

[360] It's about 100 million degrees for the leading kind of fusion that we consider on Earth, which is not the same as it isn't.

[361] That's why it's a different temperature than this.

[362] the sun because it's actually a different fuel combination that we use.

[363] It's the heavier forms of hydrogen.

[364] But anyway, that's at about 100 million degrees.

[365] So basically anytime, if you're a fusion power plant designer, you more or less always pick that temperature because it's the easiest one to achieve.

[366] And that means that the temperature is approximately fixed and therefore the velocity is approximately fixed and therefore generally, in general, what you're controlling is the strength of the magnetic field to make that orbit smaller and smaller, and consequently make the engineering system that you have to build smaller.

[367] Right.

[368] Does that also increase the density of the fuel?

[369] Ah, it does, but for more subtle reasons.

[370] And it depends on what kind of, it depends on the details of the shape of the magnetic bottle that you make, but in general, yes, but it's not so straightforward of a path to tell you about how it does it.

[371] But in general, the density of the fuel is allowed to increase, which is important because that actually means you can access them net energy gain.

[372] If you're at higher density, this allows you to do it at lower energy confinement time, which is sort of a double win in the system.

[373] You want to think of it that way.

[374] Okay, so now, okay, so a couple of questions there.

[375] Go ahead.

[376] Yeah, no, yeah.

[377] Well, and you had an important one about the one -second business.

[378] So this really important.

[379] Right.

[380] So the one second is not the duration of the existence of the fuel.

[381] It's the characteristic time at which it holds energy.

[382] So namely this, this, so if you think of it this way, it's almost like I think of, because it's the middle of winter right now, I'm thinking of heating our house and so forth.

[383] You can think of when I put a unit of energy into this house, there'll be some characteristic time, like a few hours that'll basically like leak out, right, to the outside environment.

[384] that's but the house is still here all the time that's more of what we're doing so this one second is that each time it's not how long the house lasts yeah okay okay now you have to segregate the system from the ice cold temperatures of terrestrial reality let's say how in the world then do you how do you actually harness the heat that's thereby generated how do you turn that into while transmissible energy or mechanical force.

[385] Right.

[386] And there's a variety of ways to do it, but I'll, so I'll walk through the system of how you do this.

[387] I'll use magnetic confinement, and it varies a little bit if you change, if you use other containment schemes, but it's whatever it's good.

[388] So in the end, basically, whatever you're doing to provide this for, so like the magnetic fields that we make, use an electromagnet.

[389] This electromagnet is not in physical contact with this fuel at all.

[390] because the electromagnet makes a magnetic field at a distance.

[391] In fact, the leading way that we do this is we configure these magnetic fields, and in fact, the magnetic field can't even escape the magnets.

[392] It's just sort of encased inside of these.

[393] So usually you think of these as large circles or d -shape.

[394] You put these in a particular configuration, and on the inside, what you have is this beautiful kind of magnetic cage, which is on the inside of it.

[395] So the electromagnets have no idea.

[396] There's like a star inside of them.

[397] And the star, all their feeling is the magnetic field that's coming from the electromagnets.

[398] That's the key.

[399] It's physical isolation of the systems completely from one another, right?

[400] Because that's also confusing to everyone.

[401] It's like, so it's not a physical container in that sense that's holding the fuel.

[402] It's analogous in some ways to the gravitational field that keeps the Earth in orbit around the sun.

[403] Exactly.

[404] It's an action at a distance.

[405] That's the right way to think of it, right?

[406] So it's doing it through that process.

[407] Right.

[408] So then this goes to, well, what is fusion energy?

[409] Like, where is the energy?

[410] That's the important.

[411] Yeah, yeah.

[412] And how do you get access to it?

[413] Right.

[414] So the original energy sources, I said, is that the two particles collide and they actually make new particles.

[415] and by the nature of the fact that this is coming from the strong nuclear force, which is the thing that holds all nuclei together, what that means is that the energy is actually in the kinetic energy or the velocity of the particles that result from this.

[416] The fusion particles, yeah.

[417] So we take heavy forms of hydrogen like Deuterium and fuse them together, and then what will come out, it's actually the same, subatomic particles the neutrons and protons it's the same number that come out afterwards they're just rearranged right so for example deuterium deuterium can come together and then what you would have is something called you can have helium 3 which is two protons and one neutron and then one spare neutron or you can rearrange it into another way that is actually a it's a proton and a, I'm losing track, it's a, right, it's a proton and a, and a triton, which is a proton and two neutrons.

[418] So it basically is just rearranged them, and those have lower mass and they release energy.

[419] But because it interacts through that mechanism, it turns out the energy is only, it's released in the kinetic energy of those particles that come flying up.

[420] And what happens is that it's, when you write out the equations of the conservation equations, it's the lightest particles that the energy gets partitioned in a way that has to do with the masses of the things that result from this.

[421] And what happens?

[422] And they can escape.

[423] They escape from the magnetic children?

[424] It depends, actually.

[425] So some of them have electric charge and some of them don't have electric charge.

[426] In particular, if it's a neutron, which is one of the fundamental.

[427] mental particles.

[428] It has no electric charge and therefore it can escape the medium immediately.

[429] It escapes the magnet.

[430] Because because that is no electric charge, it feels no interaction with the other plasma particles, let alone the magnetic field, which it has no interaction with.

[431] So it escapes.

[432] So I'll use this one because the most prevalent approach right now is Deuterium -tridium fusion and what happens there is that those are the two heavy forms of hydrogen and what is released is a helium, just a normal helium nucleus and a neutron.

[433] So the helium has two protons, two neutrons, so it has a net charge in it.

[434] This cannot escape the magnetic bottle because it's feeling that force from the magnetic fields.

[435] More, not say more important, but just as important, it is also feeling the electrostatic reactions.

[436] like you said that the magnet's pushing against one, the poles pushing against each other, while it has electric charge, just like all the other particles in it.

[437] So it has way more energy than all the other, than the average energy of the particles that it's in.

[438] And therefore, it starts undergoing collision.

[439] So it's sort of like releasing like a cannonball.

[440] I think it doesn't, like a cannonball into one of those, you know, those kiddie things where they have the big balls that they can go play in.

[441] It's like putting a cannonball into that.

[442] It's like it basically, forces the cannibal to give its energy into all those other ones, that's what's happening.

[443] Because that's the heavy particle, that has a mass of four units because it's got four, got two protons, two neutrons.

[444] And there's a total mass of five particles.

[445] It has the inverse of those.

[446] So it gets one out of five, sorry for the math.

[447] But it means so that means it has 20 % of the fusion energy is released.

[448] So that's very important because where does that energy go?

[449] this is the heat.

[450] Remember, way back at the beginning of this, that in the end, fusion sustains itself by the fact that the particle energy, which is released by these single events, actually just ends up as being heat that is distributed amongst all the rest of the fuel.

[451] And this helium will not fuse again, because it doesn't want to fuse, because it's extremely stable.

[452] So it's basically the ash product of fusion.

[453] By the way, just a quick comment, why fusion is that the process, the ash product of the thing that releases energy is helium, which is a harmless neutral gas, right?

[454] Unlike fission, where the thing that's made by the reaction itself is this super mix of hundreds of radioisotopes because you're splitting apart this really unstable uranium.

[455] So that's one of the other fundamental differences between fission.

[456] Part of the cleanliness of the process and the simplicity in some sense.

[457] sense of the process.

[458] Okay, so you have this increasingly hot plasma, and you explained the mechanisms there.

[459] How is that converted into usable electricity?

[460] Yeah.

[461] So in some way, you've got to get back, you've got to get this back into heat.

[462] That's essentially how you're going to do it.

[463] So, and the two, I used to say, fusion is basically two forms of recycling heat.

[464] So it's taking this major kinetic energy in these local particles and converting it into heat.

[465] So the first mechanism I just described, which is that heats the fuel itself.

[466] This is the key mechanism about how you make fusion a net energy source on Earth.

[467] It's actually, it was that process that was solution to this thing with the product of the density.

[468] It's actually that process, because what it's telling you is that you're making enough fusion reactions that you're basically able to keep the system hot.

[469] because it's keeping itself hot and that in this form of fusion that's 20 % of the energy very important the 80 % of the energy and that reaction is in a neutron it cannot be contained or it doesn't interact with this so it interacts very weakly with matter because it doesn't have an electric charge so there what you have to do is put something in front of it and what we tend to think of it's either something of a liquid or solid that forces this neutral, which is like a cannonball, again, another cannibal going into this, and you force it to undergo interactions with the atoms that are in that solid or liquid base.

[470] This tent, by the way, this thing we call a blanket, because you basically wrap the fusion thing around it.

[471] And the idea is that we force these neutrons, even though they escape the plasma and magnetic fields, they're forced to interact with this blanket.

[472] And after, you know, it varies on the design, but after about 30 or 40 collisions, kind of in general, they basically give up all their energy.

[473] And where is this energy?

[474] It's actually, it's in the motion of the atoms that were in that blanket.

[475] Right, so that's like heating up water with it, say.

[476] I don't know what you use in the blanket, but.

[477] Yeah, so this is actually why fusion isn't, It's another reason why fusion is such an attractive energy source.

[478] This all sounds very exotic, but actually if you just close your eyes and think, I give you a fusion power plant, what are you actually getting?

[479] You're getting a heat source because this blanket that heats up, you know, you just get out this heat and then you do whatever you use to use heat for.

[480] Make electricity, run industrial power plants, make synthetic fuels.

[481] it's it's really just it's adaptable to almost anything that you can imagine that we use from any other fundamental energy source yeah right okay so let's turn away from the engineering elements and the practicalities of the process to the practicalities of producing a usable energy source so i've got two questions there really i know there's been tremendous look we have reliable fission energy already although some of the plants seem very complex.

[482] They're built as one -offs.

[483] There's tremendous bureaucratic red tape.

[484] There's a bit of a problem with nuclear waste.

[485] People are afraid of it.

[486] It's got a bad name.

[487] But I saw a company the other day, for example, I think I'm going to interview the CEO that's produced this very cool little nuclear reactor that just sits on the back of a truck and that can be pulled to, you know, like a northern community.

[488] To some, and these, there's all these thorium salt reactors and so forth that have come on the market recently.

[489] and it looks like we're starting to mass produce them.

[490] And so like it seems to me, and I'm certainly ignorant about this, but it seems to me that if we had the political will, we could be turning to fission energy at a much higher scale than we have been.

[491] And so we have fission as a potential alternative, and the fusion problem is very interesting to solve technically.

[492] But why not devote our attention more particularly collectively to the fission issue?

[493] Why pursue fusion?

[494] And then if we're going to pursue fusion, where are we with fusion because I'm old enough now that fusion has been 10 years in the future for 50 years so how are you what do you feel about all those issues yeah so I mean to make it clear I am personally totally in favor of of deploying fission at a larger scale you know to meet our energy security demands it's actually you know the reality is that fission is one of the is one of the if not the safest forms of energy that we use right now.

[495] It's a great fit into the things that renewables are not.

[496] Renewables are a lot of great things, but they're not reliable because of their intermittency and their low power density.

[497] Fission is like that as well, too.

[498] And as you commented to, it's like we've got a lot of experience with this, and we know that we can make it work.

[499] So I guess my comment too would be sort of a meta comment at first, which is the staggering challenge of if we really are serious about decarbonization, which in my opinion is a society, we are not yet serious about it, just based on the math of where we are.

[500] But if at some point, let's put it this way, we know mathematically sometimes human civilization will run out of fossil fuels, we can argue about what it is, but it will, because it's a finite resource.

[501] And we need to think about what is a sustainable and deployable, almost universal, high -energy density, dispatchable energy source.

[502] And our choices are so few that it's basically, it's not my argument about fission versus fission.

[503] It's just like, I want a set of alternatives on the table to let me do this, because this is the way almost all, I would argue, all technologies work.

[504] We don't have monolithic solutions to these complex problems.

[505] They just don't really exist.

[506] And so my comment to this is that in many ways, I think the free market will decide this as well, too, because there are just intrinsically different properties of fusion about its inherent safety, about the long -term consequences of the waste products that come out of fusion.

[507] The ability to license them is very different than fission.

[508] So while it has, you know, a commonality in some of the physics to, you know, to fission.

[509] It's really such a different energy source.

[510] And there are so few other options in the long term.

[511] It's like, let's do this in some sense now, while we have the resources and the wherewithal to actually, you know, get after this problem.

[512] Right.

[513] So you're not seeing them at, you're not seeing them in competition in some sense at all.

[514] And your point is that.

[515] Well, because, you know, fusions, you know, the time scale is such that fission can be deployed now, right?

[516] Yeah.

[517] And we've got that.

[518] But there are serious, look, any technology has consequences.

[519] Like if somebody comes and says, I've got a technology and it's got zero societal and environmental, you know, consequences, then go by a bridge or something.

[520] It's like it doesn't exist, okay?

[521] It just doesn't.

[522] And we know about these.

[523] Like, we know about the consequences of fossil fuels, which have been, you know, honestly have been the reason that we get to live the way that we do now.

[524] Right, right.

[525] By burning fossil fuels.

[526] But we also know there are direct health consequences.

[527] We can track these through, you know, through air quality is a direct link, actually, to people, you know, dying prematurely of asthma.

[528] Like, we know these things, right?

[529] There's always a consequence.

[530] So that's the meta view, I would say, is that you better get after, you better get after these.

[531] And so what does it mean about a scalable energy source?

[532] And this is an interesting one and about deploying it at a global level.

[533] Well, an interesting one that comes, and it's not a criticism of vision, but it's just the reality of it, is that because of the physical process that fission works on is actually at the heart of actually how you make a nuclear weapon is that always has been made to fission is that you must have proliferation you know control in fact next week i'm going to be at a workshop that's discussing proliferation uh aspects of this so you have to take this into into account and you don't have that problem with fusion well it's a different problem in fusion it's actually such a new technology we're sort of figuring it out in general you don't because you don't, in the end, you don't require uranium or plutonium on a fusion device, so it's like it's very different.

[534] Okay, so that's that one.

[535] And also, and I think although people would argue that there are solutions to that, like the long -term waste storage one is an interesting one, is that because in fission, this is linked to the physical process really of the fission itself.

[536] In fusion, the physical process doesn't actually make any radioactive waste.

[537] It makes helium.

[538] But the engineering that you put around this, like what you make this blanket out of it and what you do these other things, these are engineering and design choices that you have about improving the public acceptance and the viability, the licenseability of the fusion one.

[539] It's an engineering choice that you have, even though there's some pretty severe challenges around making that engineering work.

[540] So that's where I would comment to that.

[541] And in the end, the fact, and I should get back to this one, this one is that it is like the, you know, they call, we have to watch out how use analogies, but the holy grail of energy, the things in this, why?

[542] It's because it actually uses very few raw materials to build the thing, if you build it effectively, and the fundamental fuel source is essentially inexhaustible on earth, and freely available to everyone.

[543] It's like, that's why you pursue it, right?

[544] But it's important to understand, Like, what is it you're pursuing, which I think was your second question?

[545] Right.

[546] Well, I'd like to take the skeptical approach to that now, because, as I said, this is being for so, now, look, I mean, we haven't really been trying to develop fusion technologies for very long, if you think on any, like, reasonable time scale of technological advancement.

[547] I mean, we're so accustomed to having complex technological problems solved within the space.

[548] spans of single lifetimes that we think anything that takes like 200 years is hopeless.

[549] And so I'm certainly not making the case that fusion is an uncrackable problem.

[550] But having said that, it has been continually announced for many decades that, you know, fusion is a decade into the future, viable fusion.

[551] And that would be fusion, as you pointed out, that produces more energy than it takes to produce.

[552] And so now you've been involved in a, until recently headed, a very thorough project developing this magnetic technology that we described.

[553] You step down from that position in November, if I have my facts straight.

[554] So tell us about that project.

[555] Tell us where you think we are on the fusion horizon and what you think the next steps and something approximating a timeline might be.

[556] And maybe you could also tell us why we might not, why we might be optimistic about that timeline.

[557] Yeah, right.

[558] Again, the meta comment is, it's interesting on AI, right?

[559] Like the term artificial intelligence was invented in the 1970s, which is, you know, fittingly, about the same time that fusion technology really started taking off as well, too, right?

[560] Or maybe it's in the 60s, like Marvin Minsky.

[561] So anyway, like these ideas are around because they survive because they're compelling ideas, would be is my argument and then all of a sudden things happen that all of a sudden makes this thing which people conceive of uh oh yeah i get the dream of this right and all of a sudden things happen that all of a sudden make it you know a reality like you see something right around them so i'll pull back that's the meta climate like why fusion right so so some of it is the pull right um that i would argue that as a society if we really are serious about decarbonizing.

[562] The set of choices we have in front of us about replacing 82 % of our fundamental energy which comes from sulfur and fossil fuels and basically hasn't changed in decades.

[563] You need just massive amounts of carbon -free energy, like massive amounts.

[564] So that pull that is coming from that has increased significantly compared to like the 90s or something like 1990s.

[565] Very important.

[566] I think the it's actually not and it's even more nuanced than that it's not just access to that kind of energy it's like the realization that renewables alone because of their intrinsic limitations like try to run a gigawatt chemical processing plant on renewables especially when it's cold yeah well I mean the science doesn't you know the science is against it it's not nothing needs to renew we just have to be cognizant of the limitations of any kind of energy source.

[567] It's like the limitation and fusion, by the way.

[568] Like, you can't make a fusion power plant that heats this whole because everything's got to be at bigger scale.

[569] It has to make way more power than it would be appropriate for heating.

[570] So, everything's got limitations.

[571] Right.

[572] Surround on those.

[573] So I think this was part of it.

[574] And then, of course, what happens, like in a lot of...

[575] So fusion, this distinguishes it.

[576] The science I described has been known for a long time.

[577] And the criteria to make fusion been known for a long time.

[578] So what happens is the reality of actually making fusion practical, as usual, it comes from synergies of technological and scientific advances that tend to make you feel that it's ready for prime time.

[579] And I'll comment on this is that really in the last 10 years, there's been really, I think, a set of those.

[580] One of them has been computational power.

[581] It's a really complex problem.

[582] You know, one of the origins of the company that we launched out of MIT and some of the ideas that we've been pursuing came out of my classroom.

[583] What I say is, it's like the computational power that's available to my students in a single semester class at MIT surpasses the people, the computational power available to people, one generational goal that we're actually trying to design the biggest effusion experiment in the world.

[584] Like, that's going to make a difference, right?

[585] because it's a complex problem.

[586] I think the other part is because, you know, a fusion's advance seemed to take a hiatus because we were trying to figure out the way past that next threshold, particularly of the scientific threshold, was getting net energy, which meant what that means is when you hit that, you're actually, the fusion reactions are the dominant heat source in it, and there are multiple approaches to that.

[587] And we were, it was a big step, needed to get our scientific feet underneath us.

[588] And that was, honestly, like a two -decade process.

[589] I was heavily involved personally in that as well, too.

[590] It's a major, major scientific, you know, task to basically get after these things.

[591] And that particularly evoked itself in forms of advanced magnetic confinement devices, one called Eder, which is in the south of France, and now our own experiment, you know, that's been launched out of MIT and common effusion systems.

[592] and also with the laser fusion, which had a big breakthrough approximately a year ago as well, too.

[593] And guess what?

[594] One of them did break through, right?

[595] The laser experiment got to the point where they got the fuel to the place where the fusion reactions were the dominant heat source, an amazing scientific accomplishment.

[596] And this was the thing that sort of broke through the news cycle, if you remember in December of 22.

[597] Yeah, very, very important.

[598] And of course, everybody looked at it.

[599] It's like everybody, you know, calm down about an energy source next week, but a major scientific accomplishment.

[600] And this is, you know, this is the fruit of decades of work, right, that the general public won't see.

[601] So that's the second one.

[602] Like, we really know a lot more than we did 20 years ago through that.

[603] And the computation, by the way, affects the science and the engineering for sort of the synergistic buildup.

[604] Right, right.

[605] And then the final one was advances in technologies that come from places that weren't necessarily infusion.

[606] And that's one of the ones that we just.

[607] discovered was that namely there was a commercialization of a new kind of technology, a new kind of superconductor material that was going to apparently allow us to greatly improve the efficiency of the magnetic bottle that we were making in that approach.

[608] And interestingly, like the path of that one came from a fundamental science discovery in the late 1980s, won the Nobel Prize in physics.

[609] Everybody went crazy because this is so -called superconductor, which could say superconducting, and extraordinarily for that kind of technology, high temperatures, usually superconductors are near absolute zero.

[610] This is at a stunning, like 70 degrees above absolute zero remains superconducting.

[611] But that took, you know, over 20 years to commercialize.

[612] And it turns out our team was ready sort of with the right set of ideas to take that new material now in a commercial forum in terms of a tape.

[613] And in turns it turned into an, into a into a highly performing electromagnet that produces this cage.

[614] And that's in fact was a major pursuit of my group at MIT and now the commercialization aspect of this with common fusion systems which a couple years ago essentially demonstrated this quantum jump and the capability of the magnet to be an effective container for the fuel.

[615] And just to put that one in context is that that was approximately a factor of 20 to 40 improvement in the efficiency of this.

[616] So this meant that the cost of achieving of being able to build a device that would see fusion, this net energy gain for the first time, it shrunk it by a factor of approximately 30 to 40.

[617] So that's an enormous one which goes, but by the way then, and now there are other fusion concepts which can also use that breakthrough, along with the computing power, to design it.

[618] In fact, early this morning, I was having conversation with my MIT colleagues about how we might apply this to a different configuration.

[619] All this being said is that it's a lot of details I know to go through.

[620] Look at technology breakthroughs.

[621] They always happen this way, that namely there's things which are sitting there, which are ideas, but are hard to imagine self -consistently together as a commercial product or something that we can all use.

[622] And then what happens is a couple of things pop together, and all of a sudden, what seemed impossible becomes, I'm not going to say inevitable, I'd never say inevitable, because that's too much hubris, but I think it becomes much more likely, actually, around on this.

[623] And, of course, the important thing for this is that is there a customer on the other side, if you're thinking about commercialization?

[624] And the argument here is that in the energy world, who become hungrier and hungrier for these kinds of products, not less hungry for those.

[625] And I think that's why the landscape has changed for fusion.

[626] Okay, okay, okay.

[627] So you're pointing to, well, clear advances on the laser side, advances in material technology, stunning advances in computational ability, which I presume enables you to model the things that you would otherwise have to build and test much more precisely, much more rapidly.

[628] and so you can see an acceleration of movement towards the end goal.

[629] How far away do you think, maybe this is an unfair question, and if it is, well, deal with it however you want, but how far away do you feel that the teams that you've been leading or the team that you've been leading is a way on the magnetic containment side from producing a reaction that produces more energy that it consumes?

[630] I mean, you talked about commercializing this, and I know there are plans in the work for that, so I presume you feel that you're on the threshold of this or close to it.

[631] How do you know that and how do you track your progress and predict?

[632] Yeah, so one of them is that there's a place about an hour drive away from here in suburban Boston that has built the buildings in which it will be in, that has built the factory that is building the magnets, which basically took the magnet development that we did jointly with the company at MIT, between MIT and the company, and they're building the magnets.

[633] In fact, on this podcast, I'm missing my weekly meetly.

[634] about the magnet fabrication.

[635] Okay, because that's how real it is.

[636] The money is there, the team is there, it's putting it together.

[637] And the, you know, right now the projection is it's a few years away, like a couple of years away.

[638] I can't speak in detail about schedules, but that's okay.

[639] So that kind of puts us into context.

[640] And what are we mean by it, right?

[641] It is something that makes fusion at a commercially relevant scale, namely that it's in the orders of hundreds of, millions of watts of fusion power, and it makes, and it has a net energy gain in the plasma, which is a fundamental requirement, obviously, to make a net energy system around on that.

[642] So, you know, sometimes I would ask you, you know, you as, you know, somebody who obviously, you know, you're scientifically literate, but not an expert in fusion, if you see something like that, you know, do you think fusion is taking a big step towards commercialization?

[643] Right, right.

[644] Well, what you see is that people are willing to bet resources they actually have at hand on that realization.

[645] And so you'd assume if they're sensible people, and I suspect they are, that they've done their due diligence and believe that this is a possibility in some time frame that makes the investment worthwhile.

[646] And that they're more interested in that than they would be investing in Fission, for example, which is a more proven technology.

[647] So that's how it looks from the outside.

[648] I have two issues that came up in our discussion that I didn't get quite cleared up that I'd like to return to, and then we can move the discussion forward more generally again.

[649] When the plasma forms and the electrons are stripped off the hydrogen plasma, what happens to the electrons?

[650] The electrons are contained as well, too.

[651] So a fundamental feature of the plasma is essentially an equal set of negative and positive charge particles.

[652] That's actually one of the definitions.

[653] Oh, really?

[654] Oh, I see.

[655] So they're in the soup.

[656] They're in the soup.

[657] Yep.

[658] Which is interesting because they do not fuse together.

[659] They're fundamental particles that do not change.

[660] And in fact, they're interesting one because it's a good, if you mind, I'll just divert this because it's an interesting technical challenge if you think of this way, is that the electrons have way less mass than the other part.

[661] There are 2 ,000 times less massive than the hydrant than the other parts.

[662] So this is a weird fluid.

[663] It's one of the reasons why plasma physics is complex because you have a fluid where the two particles have a difference of mass of an inertia, a factor of 2 ,000 from each other.

[664] So they can behave quite differently.

[665] So, for example, the size of that orbit that I mentioned, it's inherently a hundred times smaller for the electrons than it is for the other particles, which means this is why it's a difficult physics problem because you're dealing across very different spatial scales because of that.

[666] Okay.

[667] But it's interesting in a fusion and an earthly fusion system these are really important why is this?

[668] Because you've got this equal ensemble of the hydrogen species of the nuclear and the electrons.

[669] They're all together like this.

[670] They're actually exchanging energy to each other through collisions as well too.

[671] But when the fusion reaction occurs, this particle that is ejected is so energetic that it's actually going even though it has a mass which way more than the electrons, it's actually going at a velocity, which is actually about the same as the electrons, because it's got so much pop to it.

[672] And through what reasons I will derive, this means that actually that very fast particle gives, technically gives most of its energy into the electrons, not into the rest of the fuel.

[673] So the electrons get hot, and then the electrons actually exchange energy through collisions with the fuel.

[674] And then it's the fuel that makes the fusion.

[675] But the rate of fusion fuel actually is a thing that sets the rate at which those energetic particles go out and hit the electrons.

[676] Wow.

[677] So you see the physical coupling in this is complex because there's essentially three independent species sort of navigating this with each other through collisions and power balance.

[678] This is just one of the kinds of complexities.

[679] that we deal with in fusion systems, yeah.

[680] Okay, so I had a, thank you for answering that.

[681] I had a question to, on the conceptualization side of this with regards to the justification for fusion technology.

[682] Now, you justified it, and I'm not putting words in your mouth, and I hope not to, but one of the angles of justification that you adopted was, you know, an emphasis on decarbonization, But it seems to me that the proponents of fusion power have a better environmental sustainability argument than decarbonization.

[683] So, for example, we know that there's almost nothing more tightly tied to economic progression and success, the amelioration of absolute poverty, than decreased energy cost.

[684] I mean, it's almost a one -to -one relationship because energy is work, and work is productivity, and productivity is wealth.

[685] And so that's not much of a complex causal scheme.

[686] It also turns out that if you get the average GDP of the absolutely poverty -stricken up to about $5 ,000 US dollars per year, they start taking a long -term view of environmental sustainability at the local level, because instead of having to scrabble for their lunch in the dirt and burn dung, they can start thinking about what sort of greenery might be around for their children, right?

[687] And so it seems to me that instead of following the green pathway, so to speak, and pointing to the utility of fusion energy as a substitute for fossil fuels, which in principle might become more expensive as they become more scarce, and which also could be used perhaps more wisely for the production of chemicals rather than to burn.

[688] Exactly, because it's a rootstock, right?

[689] Well, absolutely, absolutely, and for fertilizer as well, let's say, that beating the drum for driving the cost of energy down to the lowest possible level, you know, conceivable, seems to me to be a more appropriate and potentially deeper, long -term, say, public relations strategy.

[690] Like, what could we do with the world if we had an inexhaustible source of inexpensive energy?

[691] I mean, it makes enterprises like desalinization, for example, widely possible.

[692] And, well, that would be a wonderful thing, given that, in principle, we're going to be facing water shortages in the future as well.

[693] So I'm wondering, what's your view with regards to the viability of fusion as a genuinely inexpensive and universally available source, apart from the fact of its cleanliness and safety, which is obviously relevant.

[694] Yeah.

[695] Right.

[696] So that is actually the challenge, I would argue, in front of us as technologists who propose fusion energy systems, right?

[697] Is that I feel, you know, my belief is that we've gotten past the point where we were pretty, Because we've demonstrated so many of the different parts of the system, like the science of it, while it sounds like science fiction, has actually been done.

[698] By the way, for example, 100 million degrees, which sounds like science fiction, we ran an experiment on the campus of MIT.

[699] When we ran the experiment, 30 times a day for a few seconds at a time, we'd made the fuel 100 million degrees.

[700] I remember we had a VIP visitor who saw one of these, and they said, why isn't everybody applauding?

[701] Because we do it.

[702] We did it.

[703] We did it 30 times.

[704] the sign of inviability is there and what was missing were two components i would argue so one one was does the you know were you past the point where you felt like when the system became more self -determined and heating itself that it was going to be it was everything was going to behave you know properly and it's not all the way obviously there but the laser fusion result has been in a major impetus to us saying that darn it that looks pretty good and the project that called spark which is the one which is outside of Boston.

[705] Basically, that shows it for magnetic fusion and also shows the fusion power at a commercial type of scale.

[706] I think your question about essentially the physical reality of fusion fades away.

[707] And what becomes the question now is what price point can you deliver the energy system of that?

[708] And as you heard from because all the exotic parts of this containment and all of, it's like, of course that's still important, but Now it comes to the effectiveness of the integrated engineering system that you're building, this so -called blanket.

[709] Like, how effectively do you extract the heat?

[710] What, like, it sounds like simple things, but it's not.

[711] Like, what temperature do you extract the heat at?

[712] This is enormously important in terms of the thermodynamic efficiency.

[713] What you might use the power for, you know, how reliable are those systems?

[714] Because they're in pretty intense environment, right?

[715] So how reliable are the components inside of them?

[716] How long will it last?

[717] These are the things.

[718] And that's why, you know, although some of my colleagues still disagree with us, I feel the fusion technology, the fusion development world has changed in the last few years is that we're starting to ask the question of how, what will the cost be, not whether or not can do it.

[719] Right.

[720] And that's, and I think that's a good deal.

[721] Well, so this is very, but it's still hard, by the way.

[722] I mean, because it varies across the all these different approaches about how you might.

[723] And the cool thing is that there's like 30 some things, you know, a huge variety.

[724] of scientific, you know, maturity and so forth, that are trying to answer that question, because in the end, what answers that question about the, you know, is the marketplace, right?

[725] Right.

[726] That's what's going to do it.

[727] In fact, we're going to, there's, you know, we're doing a study of this at MIT right now, which is we're calculating with understanding and some projections of energy markets, like, where will that be?

[728] So that, namely, all new energy sources tend to penetrate at, some more expensive, you know, some point because people are saying, well, it's okay because it's a new energy source will kind of give you a break.

[729] But if you want to deploy it at mass scale, you've got to get it competitive to the other ones.

[730] And then you sort of look at the relative advantages and disadvantages.

[731] So that's exactly where we should go.

[732] And, you know, I think the simple answer is if you get, if you get fusion in the right ballpark and enter it and start reducing the price of it, it's incredibly disruptive to the energy.

[733] Right, right.

[734] Right, of course, because it's so expandable, you know, that's one of the, and in the end, it does, the physics or the science of the energy source does matter, right?

[735] And in the end, you cannot physically increase the solar radiant heat flux on the surface of the earth.

[736] It's a, it's raised, right?

[737] And you can't snap your fingers and make the wind intensity higher or things like that.

[738] And all these different things is that this is why we pursued fusion, is that you look at the, the eye, The ideal effusion is you can't run out of the resources, apparently, as far as you know, about deploying this, right?

[739] And so that end goal is that.

[740] It's like, if it becomes inexpensive and you can deploy it at fast time scales, it becomes a dominant energy source.

[741] This is why people want to invest in it, because it's not just altruism.

[742] It's like, this is a business proposition, but we've got this serious challenge of that it's still a pretty, we've only turned that corner in the last few years.

[743] And what this means is that we're facing the challenge of how do you take these different concepts and actually deliver on the full integrated energy product.

[744] We've got a long ways to go on that.

[745] Well, we have, you know, on the optimistic side, we have quite a world waiting for us if we're sensible and fortunate.

[746] I mean, you can imagine that, imagine here, so I know a group of people who are avidly pursuing atomic level deposition in 3D printing, which opens up the possibility that we'll literally be able to print anything we can model and then add scale and then very inexpensively.

[747] And so just God only knows what that's going to produce.

[748] And these aren't pie -in -the -sky technologies.

[749] These sorts of printers already exist.

[750] And they're working very hard on making them economically viable and distributable and dirt cheap as well, eventually.

[751] And so that's remarkable.

[752] have these AI systems that are now conversation level that I can envision being put into technologies that will be able to teach every child on earth, every single subject there is at their level of comprehension, and also exceedingly inexpensively.

[753] And then with this, if this...

[754] Can I just give an anecdote to that, actually?

[755] Sure, sure.

[756] Because we're both professors or I've been professors.

[757] And it's, I recall my colleagues when the chat GPT came out, they were rapidly using, you know, they were checking to see, well, how would students, like, cheat, basically.

[758] Yeah, yeah.

[759] And they're putting qualifying exam questions and so forth.

[760] And, like, my comment to them was, you might be not realizing whose job this might imperil.

[761] You have no kidding.

[762] Right.

[763] What does this mean?

[764] But by the way, it's like, as usual with these big.

[765] disruptive ones, which I think Fusion would be as well to, people probably look at it a little bit incorrectly is that if I, by the way, one of the, I'm sorry for the sideline, but, you know, one of the greatest challenges we have right now in Fusion is people.

[766] And it's because this transition from a science -only program to thinking about integrated engineering energy products happen so fast.

[767] In fact, I just wrote a paper.

[768] In fact, I'm giving a seminar, a national webinar on Friday about it.

[769] Our academic system is just like, because it's frozen in that place that it was, you know, 50, like academic systems are, right?

[770] They can't have really long lag times and lead times.

[771] It's like, oh, my gosh, it's like, we are not ready for this at all.

[772] Right, right, right, right.

[773] And so in fact, we don't even have the right distributions of kinds of expertise and faculty and so forth.

[774] It's like, oh, what if, in fact, I, you know, and there's set of, what if I can, because I, one of my, I would argue my specialties is, is integrated fusion, does.

[775] design analysis, and that's one of my classes, I get to teach, you know, order 15 to 20 students every one or two years at MIT.

[776] What if I can teach thousands of students of that through AI?

[777] Right, right, absolutely.

[778] And so the synergies in this are amazing.

[779] The other part, which is in fact we just signed an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that we are now, we are active and very, very actively pursuing AI use to basically be the, entity that runs the power plant.

[780] Oh, yes.

[781] Oh, yes.

[782] Of course, right?

[783] And are the AI systems helping you now already with design?

[784] It was almost ready for it.

[785] And I almost thought about using it in my design course that's coming up, actually, in a few weeks.

[786] It doesn't quite ready for prime time for that.

[787] But here's, of course, what the amazing thing about being at a university, by the way, the students have already started to do this.

[788] And so what did they do is, I told you, we ran this experiment.

[789] It was an integrated fusion experiment, had an electromagnus in it, it made this magnetic cage, had the 100 million degree fuel, had this amazing set of measurement tools and so forth.

[790] But it also had people running it, which is in, so all that data is, of course, recorded and used.

[791] But it also had people, experts who were examining the data and inferring things about the performance of the fuel and so forth.

[792] But that was sitting there is essentially as a static, not really useful set of dialogues that had happened in that.

[793] They're training an AI language format, basically on sort of 20 plus years of human expertise built down into AI thing.

[794] It's just like, oh my gosh.

[795] So this is what I also find so cool about being a technologist, by the way.

[796] You never, it's always these synergies of things that like that apply.

[797] to each other, like these new superconductors and a new kind of magnet, then a new kind of AI, then a new kind of thing, and then you just keep bootstrapping yourself up all the way of the technological ladder.

[798] I think it's...

[799] Yeah, well, you know, you're at a point now where if there was enough of your published and spoken material is that you can have a dialogue with yourself about problems you haven't solved.

[800] So I'll give you an example.

[801] We built an AI system recently based on the first part of a book that I'm writing.

[802] And the book is, is an analysis of deep themes in biblical stories.

[803] So you could imagine that your bright students are going to put together all the relevant literature that pertains to your engineering problems, and at least you'll have a partner that'll be something like an instantiation of you that you could, or you and your colleagues, that you could discuss these problems with.

[804] Yeah, even better that it's an accumulative one of those, right?

[805] Right.

[806] And, you know, I've been at Fusion now for 30 -some years, a faculty member, it's like, I can tell you, almost all of my insightful breakthroughs came with a version of that, which is that we already had this.

[807] It's called training students at a university.

[808] Yeah, right, right.

[809] Why do we have universities?

[810] One of the reasons is we accumulate people in the same place, and we take senior people who convey certain aspects of basic knowledge and so forth, which are required to make sense of the problem.

[811] But it's like, I'm, like, almost every innovation that has ever come has been sitting there talking.

[812] with the student of explaining about why such and such a thing is a problem and they go and they ask some you know what quote unquote stupid questions not stupid at all it's actually an insightful question because in some sense they're they're training their own neural network right yeah right definitely and then all of a sudden you sort of see it from a different angle or you take it from a different approach it's been almost all the totality of my innovations in the last you know 25 years have been almost all through student interactions so it's another version of that i think is is what what I'd be saying, yeah.

[813] So, right, those are the kinds of, and by the way, that is another one where you talked about, in fact, I left that off.

[814] I should have reminded myself of that one, which is additive manufacturing is another one of those aspects that is coming to bear in fusion, because in the end, we build these complex physical objects, the ability to design it from the ground up is just.

[815] And to produce variance rapidly.

[816] Oh, my gosh, yeah.

[817] A simple example is, you know, in the end, while you've got this containment system, there has to be this really effective, essentially heat exchanger on the outside of this to remove this kinetic and get it into a usable heat form.

[818] You know, the way I would describe this to date is we build, because we could build it this way.

[819] You know, you build square blocks of things and you put a round hole in it and you pass, you know, some fluid through it to get it to cool.

[820] Nature never cools anything that way.

[821] Take a look at a leaf, right?

[822] But additive manufacturing allows us to make the equivalence of leaves or like the capitalist systems in our own bodies.

[823] It's like what that means we don't even know.

[824] Right, even at the atomic scale.

[825] And even at the atomic scale, which means you can start mimicking biological functions as well, too, as well.

[826] Yeah.

[827] It's almost like a science fiction world that we live in.

[828] It's amazing that people sort of comment that it's like our, hmm.

[829] again, sort of medical, that are pessimistic about where we're going.

[830] If you'd have shown me, when I was, you know, when I was a young boy in rural Saskatchewan, if you were showing me this technology, I would have thought I was living in a movie.

[831] Right.

[832] Right, right, absolutely.

[833] And it's a new movie every day at the moment.

[834] Well, that was great, man. I really appreciate, well, first of all, stepping us through the complex technical elements of understanding the fusion technology, which I think we managed very well, and then moving effectively from that into the practical realization and the problems at hand, and also interleaving with that, you know, a sense of, I would say it's like 1950s to 1970s can do engineering optimism, something I really loved about engineers in general, about MIT in particular.

[835] You certainly saw that at Stanford, too, and with the Silicon Valley types, is that there isn't a problem that we can't crack.

[836] And it's lovely to see that spirit still alive at MIT.

[837] For everyone watching and listening, I'm going to continue this conversation, as I always do, on the Daily Wire Plus side, it turns out that Dr. White and I have some autobiographical features in common because he grew up like I did in Western Canada.

[838] And so I'm going to harass him about that and see how he emerged from that Canadian prairie environment into a position of foremost influence at MIT, we're going to talk, too, about how is interest in fusion technology in engineering and physics developed?

[839] And so, as some of you watching and listening, know, I'm very interested in how people find their purpose, find their meaning, and the interweaved relationship between the demands of their conscience, right?

[840] The problems they're trying to solve that lay themselves in front of them as objects for them to take responsibility for, and then the spontaneous interest that manifests itself to people around topics that, you know, aren't, it's very, it's a very curious thing how interest finds its home.

[841] As a Saskatchewan Prairie Boy, you got obsessed with fusion technology.

[842] It's like, well, why?

[843] Well, that's what we're going to delve into on the Daily Wear Plus side.

[844] So you guys who are watching and listening can join us there if you're inclined to.

[845] In the meantime, thank you very much, Dr. White, for walking us through all that and for agreeing to be a guest on my show.

[846] Congratulations on the success that you've had.

[847] We'll be watching to see how this unfolds over the next few years, including the success of this commercial enterprise, because it's an exciting possibility that that's making itself manifest.

[848] And to everybody watching and listening and the Daily Wire Plus crew, thank you very much for your time and attention.

[849] Good getting to know you a bit, and thanks again.

[850] Thanks for the opportunity.

[851] Appreciate it.