Nuclear Explained – Is Fusion Energy Possible?

This is Nuclea Explained Since nuclear fusion was first theorized in the 1920s, it has captured the minds and imaginations of scientists. And recent breakthroughs are pushing this once-distant dream towards reality. I'm Joanne Lu, and I am Nicholas Gaspar. In this episode of Nuclea Explained, experts join us to explain the science behind fusion and the challenges to overcome before the source of energy could be powering our hopes. Harnessing the power of fusion is the goal of one of the world's largest experiments known as "Eater". We will ask the experts to tell us more about this project and the latest developments in the world of Nuclea Fusion. To begin, I speak with an expert from the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy. My name is Hyun Kyung Chang, I work for Korea Institute of Fusion Energy. I have been studying fusion for about 30 years. Could you explain to us what exactly is fusion? So there are basically two ways of generating energy from nuclear reactions. One is fission and the other is fusion. Fission happens from the very heavy element like renewing or platinum and things like that. And then it breaks out a nucleus and becomes many nucleus. And the other hand, fusion is to make two nucleus fusing together. In order to achieve fusion, one has to heat up the gaseous state of the fuel like hydrogen into plasma state. And what makes it different from other sources of energy? One of the biggest differences that fusion has compared to other sources of energy is the fuel. The fuel of the fusion energy is the hydrogen isotops called dutrium and tritium. And the dutrium and tritium have the fusion reactions to make helium and neutron. We have dutrium in the sea water, almost like 0.16% of the sea water is dutrium. So far, most of the energy is basically resource-based energy sources. So where you live, if you have fossil fuels where you live, then you have abundant energy sources. With fusion technology, we are moving from resource-based energy sources, community or society to technology-based energy sources, society. So I think the biggest difference that the fusion energy has is that we have pretty much unlimited energy sources, as long as you have technology. There's a lot of talk about it, but what is it? You know, it's often called the largest experiment ever. Why is that? The main goal of the eater is to produce 500 megawatt fusion power, and then achieve the self-sustaining burning plasma. Ita is basically a tokama. Basically, the sun has gravitational confinement. In other words, sun has huge mass, so it has gravitational force, so the hydrogen in the core cannot escape. Unfortunately, on the earth, we do not have such a thing as a sun. So we make container called tokama. Tokama is probably the easiest device to create fusion reactions, self-burning plasma. So there are seven member states, USA, EU, Japan, Russia, and China, Korea, India, and it is built in France, in the Qadarash. The first plasma operation is planned for 2025, and they are designed, or they are planned, to demonstrate self-burning by 2038. And why does it need 15 to 20 years to be built? Seven member states will build the machine and deliver the components, and then the eater organization will assemble. It's a huge machine. The vacuum vessel that contains this plasma is huge, so it has 19.4 m/s and 11.4 m/s. The vacuum vessel itself is 5200 tons, the total machine weighs 23,000 tons altogether. And also, there are 1 million components to go into this machine, and many of them are the first of a kind that human being has never designed or produced before. Therefore, many of these components are engineering challenges. They should be designed and tested, because most of the components are first of a kind, the French nuclear authority require very strict safety guidelines. So from vacuum vessel, it took almost 10 years to make. But I suppose that after we build this machine once, the next generation will be built much shorter timescale, because we have gone through all these engineering challenges and also licensing issues and so on. You're listening to Nuclear Explained. Ether will be an impressive site to behold. It will weigh 23,000 tons and stand at nearly 30 meters tall. Ether means the way in Latin. It is just one step toward the realization of nuclear fusion for commercial energy. In this next segment, Minkloch speaks with Ian Chapman to find out what will happen next after Ether. Ian is the CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Let me start by asking you about what happens after the experiment in Ether. What are the steps between Ether and commercial fusion? So after Ether, everybody, all the participants in Ether, actually, are working on demonstration power plants that would follow Ether and a demo, a demonstration is sort of like a prototype. So it will show that you can produce a net electricity, right? I mean, Ether actually won't even attempt to produce electricity. But if it did attempt to, it would produce less electricity out than is required to get it going in the first place. A demo will produce a net gain in electricity. It wouldn't be commercially viable and it won't be enough of it. And then after those demonstration plants, of course, we then get into, first of a kind, probably requiring significant subsidy as most new entrants to the energy market have always required government intervention and subsidy. And then you get the next of a kind and eventually you drive down the prices and become cost-compatitive. So what technical changes remain outside what's in the scope of Ether's mission that we will need to overcome in order to do demos and then eventually the commercial scale plans? So let me point about five things that will be different from Ether to then demonstration plants. The first is that you need to breed your own tritium. You need to make the fuel that's going on in the centre of fusion. The tritium is short half-life, so it's naturally more or less decayed away, so we have to make it ourselves. An Ether won't do that, but a demonstration plant will. So we'll produce all of the fuel that it needs. You also want that plant to run more or less in steady state, so continue running around the clock. And that means you need to be able to drive the plasma current, the current, which heats up the fuel in the first place. You need to be able to drive that without using a solenoid, and Ether will use a solenoid. So that's the second thing. The third thing is that a demonstration power plant will produce a lot more new troms than Ether will. So you have these very energetic new troms, but a much higher flux and higher fluids than Ether will have. And so you then need to worry about how that affects the material lifetime. The fourth challenge, which is sort of woven into that, is using materials, ideally using materials, which will produce much lower waste after the operation of the power plant. So Ether is being constructed with known steels, for instance. When we get to demonstration plants, ideally we'd like to have low activation steels, so that when these new troms come through, we don't produce waste that we have to deal with afterwards. And then the final challenge is about availability, so the duty cycle of Ether will be very low. It won't operate for much of the time. A demonstration plant, you want to be operating more of the time. It still won't be like a vision plant, which runs 90% of the year. It might run half the year if you're lucky. And so you want to increase that availability, which will be a big step from Ether. So you mentioned five areas that need solutions, but where does the research stand globally in these five areas? I presume we are not going to start the research after Ether, this is all ongoing. Absolutely, so there's research in all of those areas. Indeed, there are designs for demonstration plants happening at the same time as us building Ether. So we're not waiting for Ether to be a success and then start thinking about what a demonstration plant looks like and start the concept work and start the research. That's absolutely happening in parallel because we want to get there as quickly as possible. Today, using today's technology, we couldn't do any of those five things, and we need to make breakthroughs in all those areas. After demos, what will happen next? I mean, you've mentioned that well then we'll need to build commercial reactors, but why are the challenges at that level? Even in a demonstration plant, we'll have pretty low availability, pretty low duty factors. The cost of electricity will be really high, it won't be market competitive, so the demonstration plant will be optimised with what we know today and what we know in the near term and aiming just to break even to produce this now electricity. Commercial plant, the first of the kind, might aim for a much higher output point so that the cost of electricity might come down, so you're optimising for different things because you're trying to get into the market, you're trying to produce something that somebody will want to buy. So perhaps at that point then we are moving from what's more of a research task into engineering challenges, and then business. Exactly. That's a good word putting it. So what about things like regulatory framework, public acceptance, the different supply chains and work for the development, just so that an ecosystem is created for industrial fusion? All of those things are absolutely essential, right, that I call them sort of enabling interventions, that without them, you know, you can have the technology, but you can't take it to market if you don't have a regulatory framework. In my view, we should be starting them now. Just like we're starting research now on things which will follow in the future and we're doing concept design work for demonstration plants now before ETER has got up and running, we should be working on those enabling interventions now as well, right. So as I said, you can have a design, but if you don't have a regulatory framework, if you don't have public acceptance and pull from the market, if you don't have the skills base, if you don't have the supply chain, you can't actually take it to market and you can't make any impact on the climate change problem. So we need to start stimulating all of those things today so that they're ready, so that those enablers are ready for when they're required. From what you know, are the countries working on developing a regulatory framework yet? Absolutely, for instance, in the UK, a bill was read in our parliament which clarified how fusion we regulated in the future. So that is very live subject, it's going through primary legislation in our house right now and we will have a decision about how fusion is regulated maybe spring next year. And then that regulator will start up skilling and start developing a team and start establishing a framework. Fusion represents a nearly limitless, clean, safe and self-sustaining source of energy. It is estimated that fusion generates nearly 4 million times more energy than a chemical reaction like the burning of coal, oil or gas. We've heard from our guests about the challenges to be addressed. Now, we'll turn the conversation to learn about the latest breakthroughs in fusion development. Dennis White will tell us more. I've worked on fusion my entire career. I don't think I've ever seen so much excitement around fusion. Dennis is the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A common misperception is that fusion hasn't occurred or we failed in making fusion. In fact, we've made fusion reactions. In fact, we've made temperatures that exceed 15 million degrees Celsius, but what was needed was essentially the combination of sufficient containment, temperature and density of the fuel that it actually pushed it over this threshold, which is to achieve net energy gain from the fuel. This means at that point that the amount of fusion energy, which is being released, exceeds the amount of heat that you had to apply to the fuel to get it to those conditions. The last year has seen is a very exciting set of progress around this. The prime examples were our colleagues at JAT, which is a magnetic confinement fusion device in the United Kingdom, achieved a record for the amount of fusion energy which was significant. It was producing around six or seven million watts, which is a lot of power, a fusion power for around 10 seconds, and in fact set a new record for the total energy. Our colleagues at Livermore national laboratories and associated collaborators at the National Ignition Facility in California with laser food, which is a very different approach, but is also trying to reach these similar conditions, actually got the point where the fuel for a brief period of time was being dominated by the fusion reactions and the heat that it was producing. That was very exciting. The final one was in jumping back to magnetic fusion again that although it wasn't directly a demonstration of fusion, we actually demonstrated a new kind of electromagnet that promises to greatly enhance the efficiency of those containment devices, and that was actually done at MIT, along with our collaborators, the common law fusion systems. It was a pretty big year and it felt like advances along multiple pathways, which are combinations of scientific and technological breakthroughs that really felt that fusion was getting closer. I think it is. Given these latest breakthroughs, what more needs to be done and how can we accelerate the possibility of fusion energy becoming a reality? Our practical fusion energy systems, which is what we all want to see, which is putting electricity on the grid and making carbon-free energy at a large scale, it has both technical and economic challenges. That integration, I see it as the most difficult challenge you have to advance. The conditions of the science make the technology robust and actually learn how to make it essentially inexpensive enough that it will actually be used by people. Beyond that, I imagine it also takes a lot of resources and funding. It comes from the science of fusion. The first demonstration of net energy gain from fusion occurred at the one watt level, like this is less than you get out of a battery, like in your cell phone. This is because the physics of nuclear power of fusion allows it to occur at room temperature. And Fermi had his famous experiment in the squash court in the University of Chicago. That was, of course, a major advancement. You understood that this is a pretty small team that was able to get past that threshold. Fusion is unlike that. The science of fusion requires these extraordinary conditions to do it then. And it turns out it also requires basically a minimum amount of power. If you want it, like, why has it been slower? Part of it is because there's minimum size to even the demonstration devices, which have to get there. The one that we're designing, we have designed and Commonwealth fusion systems is building, is that 100 million times more power than that demonstration of fusion by Fermi and his team. So that gives you a sense of why it's been expensive and sometimes slow actually about advancing fusion. There's been a lot of attraction from private capital into fusion. And we see a lot of startups coming up. What are these startups actually doing? And do you think it's conceivable that they can achieve in a few years what government-funded research has been doing for decades? This is not unique to fusion. Technological development happens in particular integrated technology, happens in fits and starts. And almost always the origin is government funding because it's stable and it's long-term. These have been national and now multinational efforts actually around the world. Because the scale that was required and the resources that required and the longevity of pursuing this pretty difficult science. So it's always a good question. When does it switch over? Right now, what the urgency of climate change combined with these real advances actually in the science and technology understanding of fusion have basically pushed this into a way that says, you know what, we want to pull this sooner into the private sector with the idea that that's going to be what, you know, accelerates the development of actual commercial fusion power plants. The private sector has spoken and wants to invest resources into this, you know, alongside what our substantial government programs. So, you know, we're really still in a transition period. There are major government programs still and now there is also a burgeoning private sector. Companies are excellent at actually developing products. The other thing the private sector brings is diversity of approaches because they all try to distinguish themselves from each other in the marketplace. And so what they're doing is attacking fusion with a really wide variety of different scientific and technological risk taking, which is also an interesting thing with an interesting aspect which the government funding doesn't do all the time because there's a different kind of a down selection of for how that happens. So, that's the other thing that the private sectors have done is brought this in. What is the challenge in front of us? It's not just making fusion work to making fusion economical and that actually is, of course, what companies will excel at and the private sector will excel at because that's there in the end they have to sell to a customer that fusion is so important to the energy future of humanity that we, it's good that we actually try some different approaches to them. But how close? I've asked Ian this burning question. One of the forefathers of fusion, chap called Levart Simovitch, who was asked this question in the 1970s and he answered the question by saying fusion will be ready when the world needs it and I still think that that answer holds true today. The world needs fusion today much more than it did in the 1970s. There is much more imperative climate change is happening and affecting our lives today. So, with that imperative, we are seeing increased investment, we are seeing increased risk taking and so the pace of delivery is increasing, we are seeing an acceleration. That needs to continue. And as for when fusion will be on the grid and when people can buy fusion power, it's entirely dependent on how much risk you take, how much money you spend, what breakthroughs we can achieve. So, it's when the world needs it, when the imperative drives it to happen. For fans of back to the future, did you know the Delorean Time Machine is powered by nuclear fusion? The Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor used household waste like that banana peel and beer can to fuel the time machine. We hope that you have enjoyed today's show. Subscribe to Nuclear Explained to learn more about the world of nuclear and how nuclear is integrated in our daily lives. Go to iae.org/podcasts for more information and resources related to this episode and more. Have a question or want to share feedback? Send us a voice recording or write to us at [email protected]. I'm Joanne Liu and I am Nicholas Gaspar. Thanks for joining us. You have been listening to Nuclear Explained. (gentle music)