Fusion Power Explained! | Dr. Dennis Whyte | EP 424

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

It is like the Holy Grail of fusion energy. The things—and this is why—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. That's why you pursue it.

Hello everyone! I had the privilege today to speak with Dr. Dennis White, who, like me, is a denizen of a small town in western Canada—a small prairie town. All that said, he’s also one of the world's foremost authorities on nuclear fusion and has been at the spearhead of both technical and commercial projects to make fusion technology a reality. Fusion offers the opportunity, essentially if it can be mastered, of unlimited energy and potentially at a low cost. So it’s the ultimate in transformative technologies.

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. 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 toward true commercial viability.

So we talk a lot about exactly what fusion energy is, how it differs from standard nuclear energy, and where we are in the process of transitioning, let’s say, to the kind of future that would be endless clean energy at an extraordinarily low price. 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. It’s a fairly technical discussion; 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.

So thank you very much, Dr. White, for agreeing to talk to me today. We might as well jump right in. I think the thing we could do for our viewers and listeners that would be most useful to begin with is to tell them, for you to tell them what fusion energy is, and how that differs from standard nuclear energy. Just give us a rationale for the pursuit of fusion energy and its place in the proper context with regard to our pursuit of advanced energy and reliable energy supplies.

Right, so fusion is the process of fusing together the most abundant and the lightest element: hydrogen into heavier elements. So it actually changes the element, and this is the process that powers the universe because it powers all stars, including our own sun. You can think of a star—our own sun—as a big conversion factory; it’s like a standard burner in this sense that it takes the huge masses of hydrogen that the sun is made out of, and in the center of it, where the conditions meet the requirement for fusion, it converts the hydrogen into helium. By that process, it releases staggering amounts of energy per reaction.

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 radiant heat that comes from stars that makes life possible in a place like the planet Earth. It’s, you think of it, it’s the quintessential or fundamental energy source of the universe. That’s the starting point.

So, you ask, why is it such an effective energy source? It’s because it changes the element. What happens is that if you take the mass of the starting particles before you fuse them together, they have larger mass than the particles that result from this. You go, "But how can that be?" Because we all learned in school that mass cannot be destroyed or created. But this is what Einstein realized—that in fact, mass and energy are the same thing. When you convert them in these processes, you end up with energy.

It’s hard to imagine how different a process this is than either fission or standard chemical reactions, which is basically what we run the world on today. In terms of comparing it to chemical energy, the average energy released per reaction or per mass of particle is about 10 million times larger. It's amazing, right? This is why stars, on our own sun, can last for 10 billion years. I mean, there’s an enormous amount of hydrogen in the sun. 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. It lasts for 10 billion years—that’s the difference between them.

With respect to fission, there's actually a relation there in the sense that fission changes the elements as well, too, but it’s literally the opposite process. Fission, as the name implies, splits apart or fissions the most unstable heaviest elements that exist, like uranium. And again, by this equivalent of energy and mass, it releases energy, but it’s a completely different physical process.

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: fusion is the energy source of the universe. Just the question is how do you actually harness it on Earth? The consequences of harnessing it are very different than either chemical or fossil fuel energy or standard nuclear energy.

Now, you said that it’s in the deeper reaches of the sun that the fusion reactions take place, and the sun is extraordinarily large. The conditions there are very much unlike the conditions on Earth. So what are the conditions under which fusion becomes possible, let’s say, on the cosmic landscape? And how is it that those might be duplicated? How is it even possible to duplicate those on Earth? And also, how is it possible to duplicate them on Earth without things going dreadfully wrong?

Right, yes. So, the conditions in the sun—it varies from star to star. There’s nuances to the differences and different types of stars. But I’ll take our own sun as the example; it’s the easiest one. As you imagine, like in the center of the Earth—we learned this in elementary school—there are different layers to the Earth. You have an outer cold crust, and as you get towards the center, because of the pressure exerted by gravity and the core and the mantle, these are all higher temperature and they’re much denser because they’re under so much pressure.

The same thing happens in the sun, which is actually much larger than the Earth. What you can think of is, as you go from the surface of the sun—which has contact with outer space, that has minimum pressure, and is actually the coldest part of the sun, around 5,000 degrees Celsius—as you start going towards the center of the sun, the temperature keeps increasing, the pressure keeps increasing, and eventually, when you reach the center of the sun, it’s approximately 20 million degrees Celsius.

In this center of the sun, it’s under those conditions that basically the fusion reaction can start to occur in significant quantities, and that's what's required for a star to ignite. There must be sufficient conditions of temperature and pressure that allow enough fusion reactions to occur so that it starts to keep itself hot and allow other fusion reactions to occur.

This is interesting: there are entities in our own solar system that didn’t quite make it to being stars. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke in, what was it, 2010? A 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. That's not quite totally possible, but it is interesting. Jupiter basically has a very similar composition to the sun; it just didn’t get quite big enough and hot enough in the center to start triggering enough fusion reactions to make it a star.

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—particularly temperature—that allow it to remain hot enough to sustain fusion reactions. Quickly, why is that needed? It’s because this process of pulling hydrogen together to fuse means that you have to overcome extraordinary large forces which don’t want them to get close to each other; that’s a basic force of nature—it’s the electromagnetic force.

Due to the electrical repulsion between those two particles, this doesn’t want them to come together. So you have to have high average energy to essentially overcome that barrier and to get them to fuse. You can think of it like this: we use analogies like you have to have your match or your kindling hot enough to get the big fire started. Well, in this case, you sort of have to get enough average temperature or energy to start up the reaction and to get it going.

So those are the requirements. 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 much around the energy because for almost a hundred years, we’ve actually induced fusion reactions on Earth with particle accelerators. This is one of the first things that was discovered actually when particle accelerators were developed in the 1930s. The question is about how you maintain the temperature of this medium of hydrogen fuel that allows it to stay hot enough for it to keep fusing.

The sun and stars work by the fact that... How is it allowed that the center of the sun is so much hotter, 20 million degrees, and how can it not let this heat escape? Well, it does escape with finite probability over long time scales—like, you know, orders of a million years or something like this—and the reason this is happening is because it’s the sun's own gravity that contains this hot core, which disallows it to escape and dissipate.

Then consequently, it doesn't cool down, and then this stops the fusion reactions from occurring. This is why stars—turns out gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces by far, many orders of magnitude. So for this reason, in order for fusion to be viable on Earth, you can't do it by the same exact same process that a star works. Because it takes something the size of a star, with some exotic examples like neutron stars.

This is why stars are actually enormously large; because gravity is a very weak force. So this all ironically comes back to what I just commented to: the thing that makes fusion hard is this electrostatic repulsion that is occurring because the two like charge particles—both have positive charge—don’t want to get close together to fuse. We actually use its cousin, which is the magnetic force, as one of the ways to do this.

We replace that gravitational force with which is something that has much higher effectiveness than gravity. Primarily, we use 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 we use to sort of recreate these temperatures, particularly that occur in the interior of the sun.

So I think your last question was why isn’t that crazy? It seems dangerous to have something at such high temperatures on Earth. It’s actually the opposite of that, and it comes from a little bit of a subtlety of understanding the thermal balance in a fusion system. While the materials—this fuel gets extraordinarily hot, there’s extremely little of the fuel, like very, very few particles.

One of the leading concepts, for example, that’s the focus of my own research in magnetic confinement, the energy content of the fuel, even though it’s 100 million degrees, is less than boiling water because there are so few particles in it. So you actually have—you basically need—in order to have something that has high energy content and therefore could be considered dangerous, it has to have high temperature and large numbers of particles.

Fusion has very high temperature but very, very few particles. So when you put those numbers together, it turns out it’s not dangerous at all. The other thing that makes it safe is because what makes fusion hard on Earth is, in fact, isolating it from anything that is terrestrial, anything that’s earthlike, anything that has temperatures anything close to what we’re used to. What tends to happen is the fuel will just leak its heat so fast into that medium, it cools down and immediately stops making fusion.

In fact, fusion has inherent safety built into the physics of it. It’s actually not really an engineering safety concern; it’s you just— in many ways, you can’t actually use it intentionally to do some bad things with it because of those physical properties of the fuel.

Okay, so let me see if I’ve got this straight so far. A star aggregates together primarily hydrogen because of gravity, and if there’s enough aggregated together, the gravitational density, especially in lower levels of the star, becomes such that fusion reactions can begin to take place. Now, is that primarily because initially—is it that the atoms are crushed together—despite their electromagnetic opposition, they’re crushed together by the pressure?

So that’s a secondary consequence of the gravity—they’re just brought into proximity. And so what happens? Does like one fusion reaction take place and then start a chain reaction under the appropriate conditions?

Yeah, so actually it doesn’t work through a chain reaction. It works rather through a thermal process, which is different. Let me just quickly explain this because this is a fundamental difference to fission. So in fission, what happens is you imagine, so here's your great big uranium nucleus, right?

The fission gets triggered by an extremely simple process; in many ways, it’s a neutron, which is one of the components of the nucleus which is made of neutrons and protons. Neutrons have no electric charge, protons have electric charge. They hold themselves together in the nucleus through the strong nuclear force.

A neutron, which can participate in that force, basically gets in proximity to the uranium nucleus and splits apart and releases energy. It also releases neutrons when it does that, and so when those neutrons leave that as the 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 that neutron, that particle that actually starts the next reaction, and you control that.

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, sixteen, and it goes and creates an explosion. Fusion does not work that way because the products that are made by fusion are very, very hard to fuse. They actually don’t trigger the next fusion reaction. So in fact, that almost comes by definition because what’s happening is primarily it’s converting the fuel into helium.

Helium is an extremely stable nucleus; it actually doesn’t want to fuse anymore. That’s actually why fusion is such a good process and such an energy-efficient process. So it’s not that particle that wants to fuse anymore; it's the heat, which is released from the fusion reaction that gets the fuel a little bit hotter.

If you get it a little bit hotter, then that will want to make more fusion reactions. As it releases heat, it’ll actually get the fuel hotter and increase the probability.

So why is it more likely for—we talked about the relationship between gravitational pressure and the preconditions for fusion. Why is that more likely at higher levels of temperature?

Right, so that does come from the fundamentals of the process. If you take a single reaction of fusion and you consider the average energy of the particles, in general, although there’s a limit to it, as you increase the average energy, the velocity of the particles to fuse gives them a higher likelihood of overcoming the electromagnetic repulsion.

That allows them to do that. A good example to speak about is: 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 particle back basically a high average energy, and you impinge them onto a target that’s of appropriate composition; you’ll trigger these kinds of fusion reactions all day long.

That cannot make net energy, 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 in the system. What’s happening inside of stars, for the reasons I said—temperature, not energy—is that it’s a contained thermal system. What I mean by thermal is that it’s the equivalent of thinking about water having a temperature or air having a temperature.

This medium, which is called a plasma, actually has a temperature. It is a system in which the particles have distributions of energies based on thermodynamics. That’s why I call it a temperature. This is key; it’s a thermodynamic process in that sense, that you have something inside of it.

What essentially happens is that individual particle reactions release kinetic energy. That energy must give that energy back as heat into the medium. The temperature increases—the average energy of the particles in the medium increases—which increases the probability and builds up your way to actually achieve fusion.

I see! 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. So I’m curious about the temperature and the movement of hydrogen atoms. This is a stupid question likely, but the answer doesn’t spring to mind as you increase the average temperature of the plasma.

What actually is happening to the atoms? Are they vibrating back and forth faster? And if they’re vibrating back and forth faster, why don’t they just go off in a single direction? Why is the motion like that? I can’t understand that exactly because you’d think that with a given momentum they would go in a specific direction. Are they bumping into other atoms? Is that the issue?

Yeah, right. So now I have to pull up a whole other level about what the medium of the fuel is. It’s because the temperatures involved always in fusion exceed tens of millions of degrees. So it turns out that any matter—when you increase it up to around 5 or 10 thousand degrees Celsius—it turns into a different phase of matter.

You can no longer think of it as atoms in a lattice as you do in solids or atoms floating, basically a fluid like water or 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.

Atoms are made up of the simplest one: hydrogen. There’s a positive charge nucleus—in the case of simple hydrogen, just a single proton—and things like deuterium, which is the heavier 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.

All the matter that we always deal with on Earth—solid, liquid, gas—are all in the phase that are all stable atoms that hold themselves together through atomic forces, not nuclear forces, which are in there. Once you get above 5 or 10 thousand degrees, the temperatures are so high they start breaking those bonds.

Basically what happens is that there’s enough energy that on average, the electrons are all pulled away from their partners, and the distinguishing feature of a plasma is that in fact, they’re not little atoms wiggling around like this—they’re actually freely floating particles that all have electric charge. Particularly when you reach temperatures required for fusion, everything has a charge in it as well.

By the way, plasma is a discipline in and of itself. I work at a place called the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Plasma is the central medium that you use to make fusion happen. What is an example of that? Well, it’s the Sun! The Sun is not actually a ball—we think of the sun as a ball—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; what does this mean about what? Well, that it’s a plasma— why is it special? So why is it difficult to think about this? This goes into your question about how on Earth do you actually contain this? What happens is from this; it goes back to this whole pushing against each other through the electromagnetic forces; in particular, the fact that they’ve got charges.

Now 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. 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.

So particles out here, like, they can be zipping by each other, like this, but actually impact each other because they interact with each other through a basic force of nature, again the electrostatic force. It turns out, sort of intuitively almost—this is why plasmas are not intuitive; because the physics that dictates them is action at a distance and therefore they have a really wild set of collective behaviors.

It’s been a source of study; it’s an entire discipline of physics, plasma physics, that has been studied for over 100 years to sort of understand this medium. But in the end, one of the ways we describe it: you can almost think of it as a gas, but rather the particles have charge.

So they’re bouncing off each other without actually physically touching into each other, which gives them a complexity of behavior. In the end, in order to, like in the sun, that’s happening in the sun; this means that their sort of randomized motion for any individual particle, as an ensemble, they have predictable ways through statistical mechanical descriptions that allow us, like we do in gases and solids 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.

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It’s like a bunch of singular north poles of magnets trying to get along together in a crowded room—is that approximately right? Because you can imagine pushing north poles together; they don’t like to come together, they twist around each other, and you can imagine that being compressed together as a consequence of gravitational force.

Now would it be then that there’s a probability distribution that those interacting particles are going to actually collide hard enough to fuse? So they’re interacting, and then the interaction is such that they fuse, and there’s some set probability of that that increases as temperature and pressure increase?

That’s exactly what it is! In the end, what happens is you can take this statistical approach to the large distribution of particles that are behaving. You can’t predict the part of an individual particle, but in an enormous ensemble of them, you can start treating them statistically.

That’s in fact exactly what we do. We use laboratory measurements of things. Basically take single particles and find out their probability of interacting at a given energy; we measure those extremely accurately; and then we assume that the system is in this deep thermal state. Essentially, what’s happened is it’s maximized its entropy effect effectively because they’ve bounced off each other so many times.

Then you can statistically describe a probability that indeed the particles will infuse, and this depends—this probability depends only on the temperature. We call this a rate coefficient, to be more technical, but that’s okay. It’s basically just the probability in the ensemble of these particles that, in fact, the fusion can occur because of these interactions.

Right, and the denser that medium, the higher the probability that those are going to occur. Then, we tend to separate those—there's basically one function, and this is key, actually, in fusion—which we might get a little more into. One of the dependent we consider the independent parameter, or the controlling parameter, primarily temperature because it is an absolute requirement.

So if you take the most simple fusion reaction, there's minimum temperatures that you can get net energy out of it; it tends to be about 45 million degrees Celsius, depending only on the temperature. So we tend to break it out. There's one part of the reactivity that depends on the temperature, and then we separate it out, and there’s another one that depends on the density of the fuel, and this is actually intuitive, right?

It’s like: if I have to increase the density of the fuel and I have fixed probability for an average ensemble of them, I can calculate how many fusion reactions I’ll make in that medium in a given unit of time and in a fixed volume. So this is really important because this informs us about how much fusion power—because every time a fusion reaction occurs, it releases energy.

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, and it depends on the density of the fuel and the temperature of the fuel.

Okay, okay. So now we've explained how this occurs in the sun, we've explained why it isn't a runaway process, 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. How do you duplicate the conditions that are necessary to produce fusion?

How do you produce temperatures, approximating— you said 45 million degrees, an unimaginable temperature. It’s no wonder that things 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. So how do you duplicate these conditions, however temporarily, on Earth?

You do something like make these electromagnetic containers. I know that you use laser beams to increase the density but maybe you can walk us through the construction of the electromagnetic container, what technical innovations that’s dependent on, and then how you attain those temperatures and pressures.

Right, so I’ve introduced two of the three requirements for fusion. So one is the temperature, the other one is the density of the fuel. The third one is before I talk about the technology, I'll just describe what it means conceptually.

So we call this confinement. What do I mean by confinement? It’s that because these systems must be thermal—that is, the fuel must have a temperature. Technically, what that means is what I’ve allowed to happen is that the fuel medium is having way more interactions with themselves that don’t fuse.

It’s just like thinking about the particles in this room colliding off each other. All those things do is exchange energy and momentum, and that’s actually what allows the system to thermalize.

Once in a blue moon, a fusion reaction will basically happen. So that’s what’s going on. So what that means is you must have a system that provides particle and energy containment. What I mean by this is it’s okay because it’s isolating this fuel; it is isolated in some way away from everything else so that you basically allow these reactions, these non-fusion reactions to occur, and you don’t really care because you’ve provided containment.

So what does this mean conceptually? It’s like whatever you think of your fuel assembly; there’s some physical mechanism that is disallowing it to touch anything at room temperature or anything close to it. It’s isolating it in some way.

So that’s the concept. We call this the energy confinement time. The way you can think of it is just sort of close your eyes and imagine you’ve got some ensemble and you put some 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 the energy confinement time.

This was conceived of by a scientist in the 1950s, Lawson, who realized this important concept. It turns out that when you look at a fusion system, once you reach a certain temperature, it’s actually—and it takes a little bit of math—but whatever, it’s pretty much the first thing you teach like entering graduate students at MIT about how to establish a fusion energy system: 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.

In this, you’ve assumed some kind of temperature in it. 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 that realize what you want, which is to get net energy out of the system.

Particularly the ultimate goal is you basically put in almost no external energy and the whole thing is just keeping itself hot by its own fusion reactions. So it’s very important, and the reason—sorry, that’s a little bit complicated, but it’s so important to understand in fusion because, unlike a lot of usually when you think of physical systems, it’s rare to come across a product of two important parameters controlling each other; namely, you multiply them by each other.

It turns out the physics doesn't care about the absolute number about those as long as the multiple of them actually meets this minimum level on Earth, and that’s density and confinement time. It’s density and confinement time—so it’s how many particles there are per unit volume, and then you multiply that by this characteristic time by how long you hold it together.

Basically, how long it holds its energy. Technically, right? Okay, okay, okay, all very good. And so this is what confuses a lot of the public about fusion, because you’ll see this picture—there’s this great big magnet, “Wow, they did fusion!” Or you see this other thing which is an electrode, “They made fusion!” Or you see this laser, “And they made fusion!”

What the heck do these things have to do with each other? 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 time, basically about how you get to the multiple of those two.

You can imagine what this is: if I allow the density to be very, very high, then I don’t need a very long energy confinement time. And vice versa, if I make the energy, I made the density very low, I must get a high energy confinement time. That’s actually the approaches that are there.

So just a quick comment because this is why it is a little confusing. If you look, right now, the two methods of getting there that certainly have obtained the most publicity, but also probably the furthest along in terms of the scientific accomplishments, is in magnetic fusion, which is my focus of work.

In that case, we use very, very low-density fuel. The density of the particles in this is 100,000 times less than air. It’s very, very low density. This requires an energy confinement time of around 1 second, which doesn’t seem very long, 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, they would like I’m here in Rhode Island right now; they would go from Rhode Island to Los Angeles in about three seconds. That’s how fast they’re going.

So containing these kinds of things for a second is a pretty impressive feat, indeed. Right, so how do we do this? We use magnetic force to basically force those, and I can get back to more details on that. But just this comparison of that, then I go to the other extreme of this: it’s our colleagues that have performed this with lasers.

In the lasers, the lasers are actually not heating the fuel; they’re compressing the fuel. They’re achieving densities that are about 10 billion times higher than what we were using in magnetic fusion, and correspondingly, their energy confinement time is a fraction of a billionth of a second.

And there are people and companies and other groups which are approaching things which exist in those in-between areas as well, too—things like pinches and so forth. This is one of the reasons for H. It’s an interesting one; it’s both, I would argue, an advantage, but also has been one of the challenges of fusion.

There are 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. So this is an interesting thing as you’re thinking about how you develop it as an energy source because you’ve got a lot of choices, but there are so many choices it’s led to this—it’s an interesting race in some sense, right, about how you would get there.

So you can vary the density using various technologies, and you can vary the time to confinement using various technologies. Now, how exactly, in your magnetic fusion designs, how do you confine?

I’m trying to conceptualize this—you're using very powerful magnetic fields. I read that you’ve produced magnetic fields that are many multiples of the force of the entire Earth’s magnetic field. 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?

Is it an enclosed magnetic field? And then inside that, there’s this relatively low-density hydrogen? And when does it become hydrogen plasma? 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, so I don’t see how to jump from that to something approximating a sustainable power source.

Yeah, so I’ll parse that out. So first of all, let’s focus on magnetic confinement. 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 charged particle.

Yeah, well, this takes—I'm going to use my hands to try to get this. So magnetic fields—most people, you know, know this from using a compass. There’s two things that are important about a magnetic field: it’s amplitude, its magnitude, right? And it has a direction because the way that we comment, it’s a vector in that direction.

So I’m just going to tell you I’ve got a magnetic field which is going like this; it’s in this direction. It’s pointed in this direction. What this means is when I put charged particles in the presence of this magnetic field, it exerts a force on it. It’s an interesting force, by the way; it’s a force that always acts in a direction that is orthogonal to the direction of the charged particle.

When you work out the math of this, what this force does to the particle is that it will execute a circular orbit like this around the magnetic field. No matter how fast it's going, it basically holds—it’s tied to the magnetic field like that. This is for both negative and charged particles.

Remember my recollection of the definition of a plasma? When it gets hot enough that most of the particles become charged, and that’s certainly true in fusion plasmas. Every single individual particle is actually feeling a containment force that comes from the magnetic field.

So what does that mean? It means—and there’s another special property, not only is it orthogonal to the direction of the charged particle, it also must be orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic field itself. So what this means is that you can think of these as barber poles of motion of the particles that are going along like this. They do not get affected in the direction that is along the magnetic field, so there is no containment along the magnetic field.

So in general, what we do is we come up with a set of topologies of magnetic fields. Primarily, what we do is we make them close back on themselves, so there is no end to the magnetic field.

The way you do this is—okay, so that’s that—so in the end, you can think you had it right conceptually. Basically, you can think of these vectors or lines as the magnetic field and the magnetic force.

When put together in a particular configuration, it becomes extremely effective at holding this very hot fuel—because of that force exerting. Because that circular motion doesn’t allow them to escape unless something else happens, like they collide into another particle or something.

Which is the strength of the magnetic field necessary? Is it proportionate to the average speed of the particles in question? The higher the temperature, the higher the magnetic field required, the more powerful the magnetic field required.

Technically, the force that’s exerted is proportional to the charge of the particle, but that doesn’t matter. Because it’s always the same—the velocity of the particle; the velocity of the particles increases; the temperature increases as it changes; it goes up as the square of the velocity. It increases as the strength of the magnetic field as well.

So in the end, for fusion’s sake, what this means is that in magnetic confinement—the critical consequence of solving the particle’s motion is that when you solve the particles, the size of this orbit, the size of that orbit, because it’s basically a circular orbit, if you keep everything else fixed and increase the strength of the magnetic field, the size of that orbit decreases.

It shrinks because the force is better, so basically holds it closer to the magnetic field. This is really important because it turns up from that other argument that although there are different arguments about this, the first argument about the requirement of temperature turns out that there’s an optimized temperature to access fusion.

It’s about 100 million degrees for the leading kind of fusion that we consider on Earth, which is not the same temperature—it isn’t; that’s why it’s a different temperature than the sun—because it’s a different fuel combination that we use.

But anyway, that's about 100 million degrees. 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.

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

Does that also increase the density of the fuel?

It does, but for more subtle reasons. It depends—the details of the shape of the magnetic bottle that you make. But in general, yes, it’s not so straightforward of a path to tell you about how it does it.

But in general, the density of the fuel is allowed to increase, which is important because that actually means you can access net energy gain. 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, if you want to think of it that way.

Okay, so a couple of questions there.

No, no, yeah, well, and you had an important one about the one second business. So this is really—so right. So the second is not the duration of the existence of the fuel; it's the characteristic time at which it holds energy.

So namely, if you think of it this way, it’s almost like, because it’s the middle of winter right now, I’m thinking of heating our house and so forth—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 will basically leak out to the outside environment.

But the house is still here—all the time. That’s more what we’re doing. So this second is that leakage time; it’s not how long the house lasts.

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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 harness the heat that’s thereby generated?

How do you turn that into widely transmissible energy or mechanical force?

There’s a variety of ways to do it . . . but I’ll walk through the system of how you do this. I’ll use magnetic confinement, and it varies a little bit if you change if you use other containment schemes, but whatever.

In the end, basically, whatever you’re doing to provide this force—like the electromagnetic fields that we make—use an electromagnet. This electromagnet is not in physical contact with this fuel at all because the electromagnet makes a magnetic field at a distance.

In fact, the leading way that we do this is we configure these magnetic fields. The magnetic field can’t even escape the magnets; it’s just sort of encased inside of these. Usually, you think of these as large circles or D-shapes, 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.

The electromagnets have no idea there’s a star inside of them, and all they’re feeling is the magnetic field that’s coming from the electromagnets. That’s the key; it’s the physical isolation of the systems completely from one another, right? Because that’s also confusing to everyone.

It’s like, so it’s not a physical container in that sense that’s holding the fuel.

Right, it’s like the gravitational field keeps the Earth in orbit around the sun.

Exactly! It’s an action at a distance; that’s the right way to think about it.

What this means is: Well, what is fusion energy? Where is the energy that's the important one, and how do you get access to it?

Right, so the original energy source, as I said, is that the two particles collide, and they actually make new particles. By the nature of the fact that this is coming from the strong nuclear force, which is the thing that holds all nuclei together, the energy gets released in the kinetic energy or the velocity of the particles that result from this.

So the fusion particles . . . yeah! So we take heavy forms of hydrogen like deuterium and fuse them together, and then what will come out is actually the same subatomic particles—the neutrons and protons; it’s the same number that comes out afterward. They’re just rearranged.

For example, deuterium can come together and then what you would have is something called helium-3, which is two protons in one neutron and then one spare neutron. Or you can rearrange it into another way that is actually a proton and a Triton, which is a proton and two neutrons.

Basically, it’s just rearranged, and those have lower mass, and they release energy. But because it interacts through that mechanism, it turns out the energy is only released in the kinetic energy of those particles that come flying off.

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, and what happens—and they can escape, can they escape from the magnetic chain?

It depends, actually! Some of them have electric charge, and some of them don’t have electric charge, in particular if it’s a neutron, which is one of the fundamental particles. It has no electric charge and therefore it can immediately escape the medium because it has no electric charge. It feels no interaction with the plasma particles, let alone the magnetic field, which it has no interaction with, so it escapes.

So I’ll use this one because it’s the most prevalent approach right now: dyum-triton fusion. What happens there is that those are the two heavy forms of hydrogen, and what is released is helium, just a normal helium nucleus and a neutron.

So the helium has two protons and two neutrons; it has a net charge, and this cannot escape the magnetic bottle because it’s feeling that force from the magnetic fields. More not to say more important, but just as important, it’s also feeling the electrostatic reactions like you said; the magnets pushing against one—the poles pushing against each other.

Well, it has electric charge, just like all the other particles in it, so it has way more energy than all the other particles that it’s in. Therefore, it starts undergoing collision, so it’s sort of like releasing, like a cannonball.

I think of it like a cannonball into one of those kitty things where they have the big balls that they go play in. It’s like putting a cannonball into that; it basically forces the cannonball to give its energy into all those other ones. That’s what’s happening because that’s the heavy particle that has a mass of four units, because it’s got two protons and two neutrons.

There’s a total mass of five particles; it has the inverse of those—so it gets one out of five; sorry for the math—but that means 20% of the fusion energy is released. That's very important because where does that energy go?

This is the heat, remember way back at the beginning? Fusion sustains itself by the fact that the particle energy, which is released by these single events, actually just ends up as being heat distributed amongst all the rest of the fuel. This helium will not fuse again because it doesn't want to fuse because it’s extremely stable, so it’s basically the ash product of fusion.

By the way, just a quick comment about why fusion: the process—the ash product—of the fusion itself releases energy is helium, which is a harmless neutral gas. Right, wonderful! Unlike fission where the thing that’s made by the reaction itself is this soup or mix of just hundreds of radioisotopes because you’re splitting apart this really stable uranium, that’s one of the other fundamental differences between the two.

Okay, so you have this increasingly hot plasma, and you explained the mechanisms there. How is that converted into usable electricity?

Yeah, so in some way you’ve got to get back. You’ve got to get this back into heat; that’s essentially how you’re going to do it. So the two—I like to say fusion is basically two forms of recycling heat. So it’s taking this major kinetic energy in these local particles and converting it into heat.

The first mechanism I just described, which is that heats the fuel itself—this is the key mechanism about how you make fusion a net energy source on Earth. It was that process that was the solution to the thing with the product of the density.

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 because it’s keeping itself hot. That in this form of fusion, that's 20% of the energy; very important. The 80% of the energy in 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. We tend to think of it as either something liquid or something solid that forces this neutral, which is like a cannonball—again, another cannonball going into this—and you force it to undergo interactions with the atoms that are in that solid or liquid phase.

This we call a blanket because you basically wrap the fusion thing around it. The idea is that we force these neutrons, even though they escape the plasma and magnetic fields, to interact with this blanket. After about 30 or 40 collisions—kind of on in general—they basically give up all their energy. Where is this energy? It’s in the motion of the atoms that were in that blanket.

You think of heating up water with it, say. I don’t know what you use in the blanket, but—

Yeah, so this is actually why fusion isn't . . . it’s another reason why fusion is such an attractive energy source. This all sounds very exotic, but if you just close your eyes and think, “I’ve got a fusion power plant—what are you actually getting?” You’re getting a heat source because this blanket heats up.

You just get out this heat, and then you do whatever you use heat for: make electricity, run industrial power plants, make synthetic fuels. It’s really just adaptable to almost anything that you can imagine that we use from any other fundamental energy source.

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. They’re built as one-offs. There’s tremendous bureaucratic red tape; there’s a bit of a problem with nuclear waste, and people are afraid of it.

It’s got a bad name, 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. There are all these thorium salt reactors and so forth that have come on the market recently.

It looks like we’re starting to mass-produce them. So 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.

So we have fission as a potential alternative, and the fusion problem is very interesting to solve technically, but why not devote our attention more particularly collectively to the fission issue? Why pursue fusion? And then if we’re going to pursue fusion, where are we with fusion? Because I’m old enough now that, you know, fusion has been 10 years in the future for 50 years.

So how do you feel about all those issues?

So to make it clear, I am personally totally in favor of deploying fission at a larger scale to meet our energy security demands. It’s actually, you know, the reality is that fission is one of the—if not the safest forms of energy that we use right now. It’s a great fit into the things that renewables are not. Renewables are a lot of great things, but they’re not reliable because of their intermittency and their low power density.

Fission is like that as well, too, and as you commented too, it's like we’ve got a lot of experience with this, and we know that we can make it work. My comment 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 as a society, we’re not yet serious about it just based on the math of where we are—but if at some point…

Let’s put it this way: we know mathematically that at some time, human civilization will run out of fossil fuels. We can argue about what it is, but it will—because it’s a finite resource. We need to think about what is the sustainable and deployable, almost universal, high energy density, dispatchable energy source.

Our choices are so few that it's basically—it's not my argument about fission versus fusion; it’s just that 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. We don’t have monolithic solutions to these complex problems; they just don’t really exist.

So my comment to this is that, in many ways, I think the free market will decide this as well because there are just intrinsically different properties of fusion about its inherent safety and about the long-term consequences of the waste products that come out of fusion—the ability to license them is very different than fusion.

So while it has a commonality in some of the physics to fusion, it’s really such a different energy source and there are so few other options in the long term. It’s like, let’s do this in some sense now while we have the resources and the wherewithal to actually get after this problem.

So you’re not seeing them—in competition in some sense at all and your point, not—

Well, because you know, fusion’s—you know, the time scales are such that fission can be deployed now.

Right, and we’ve got that. But there are serious—look, any technology has consequences. If somebody comes and says, “I’ve got a technology, and it’s got zero societal and environmental consequences,” then go buy a bridge or something; it doesn’t exist.

It just doesn’t, and we know about these. We know about the consequences of fossil fuels, which have, you know, honestly been the reason that we get to live the way that we do now by burning fossil fuels, but we also know there are direct health consequences. We can track these through air quality with a direct link actually to people dying prematurely.

We know these things; there’s always a consequence to it. So that’s the meta view I would say is that, yeah, you better get after these. So what does it mean about a scalable energy source? This is an interesting one about deploying it at a global level.

Well, an interesting one that comes—it’s not a criticism of fission—but it’s just the reality of it is that, because of the physical process that fission works on, it’s actually at the heart of actually how you make a nuclear weapon.

You must have proliferation control. In fact, next week, I’m going to be at a workshop that’s discussing proliferation aspects of this. So you have to take this 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 require uranium or plutonium in a fusion device, so it's very different.

And also—I think the, you know, for, although people would argue that there are solutions to that, like the long-term waste storage one is an interesting one. In fusion, this is linked to the physical process really of the fusion itself.

In fusion, the physical process doesn’t actually make any radioactive waste—it makes helium. But the engineering that you put around this, like what you make this blanket out of and what you do in these other things, these are engineering and design choices that you have about improving the public acceptance and the viability, the licenseability of fusion.

It’s an engineering choice that you have, even though there are some pretty severe challenges around making that engineering work. So that’s where I would comment on.

In the end, the fact—and I should get back to this—this is like, you know, they call—we have to watch out how you use analogies—but the Holy Grail of fusion energy is... And this is why: 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.

It’s like, that’s why you pursue it, right? But it’s important to understand what you're pursuing, which I think was your second question.

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Today.

Well, let’s—I'd like to take the skeptical approach to that now because, as I said, this has been for so many years now. We haven’t really been trying to develop fusion technologies for very long, if you think on any reasonable time scale of technological advancement.

I mean, we’re so accustomed to having complex technological problems solved within the spans of single lifetimes, that we think anything that takes like 200 years is hopeless. And so I’m certainly not making the case that fusion is an uncrackable problem, but having said that, it has been continually announced for many decades that, you know, fusion is a decade into the future—viable fusion.

And that would be fusion—as you pointed out—that produces more energy than it takes to produce. Now you’ve been involved in a—until recently headed a very thorough project developing this magnetic technology that we described. You stepped down from that position in November, if I have my facts straight.

So tell us about that project—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. And maybe you could also tell us why we might not, why we might be optimistic about that timeline.

Yeah, right. Again, the meta-comment is it’s interesting on AI, right? 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?

Or maybe in the 60s, like Marvin Minsky and, anyway, like these ideas are around because they survive—because they’re compelling ideas, is my argument. Then all of a sudden, things happen that all of a sudden makes this thing, which people conceive of—oh yeah, I get the dream of this, right? And then 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-comment. Why fusion?

Some of it is the pull, right? I would argue that as a society, if we really are serious about decarbonizing, the set of choices we have in front of us about replacing that 82% of our fundamental energy, which still comes from fossil fuels and basically hasn’t changed in decades, you need just massive amounts of carbon-free energy, like massive amounts.

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

Very important! 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.

The science just, you know, the science is against it. Nothing against renewable. You just have to be cognizant of the limitations of any kind of energy source.

It’s like the limitations of fusion, by the way. You can’t make a fusion power plant that heats this home because everything’s got to be at a bigger scale. They have to make way more power than would be appropriate for heating a house, so everything’s got limitations surrounding that.

So the question is: what does this mean, and what is the timeline? We have to cut ourselves some slack and base it on how we deploy these technologies and how quickly they can penetrate.

So that means we rely on multiple factors to consider sci-tech advancements and economics and how available labor forces are. All of this comes down to the presentations we give to investors to signal whether or not the capital markets support such projects, and if it’s a side door to state and federal government, determining how they react to energy sector needs, financing subsidies for production, and how much they push carbon-free solutions.

We also consider that as we see better performance from the Department of Energy-funded projects, how many public-private partnerships exists, what the net energy conversion potential is, and other factors. Thus, the key? How prepared is the market to scale up?

This is qualitative but also actually serves well to separate fission and fusion even beyond so. What are fission and fusion?

Fission has taken slower so far because it’s stuck in a historical sense, while fusion based on quantum leaps has quickened development phases prior to being toxic traditional as militaristic.

I guess I’ll leave with the assorted context if you can think of timelines just as easily as a range; a four to five or so-year period seems realistic. At that time, a semi-commercial reactor could exist without fear of scale or optimization, and there’s even evidence that spectrum analysis techniques stand at the ready to improve standard efficiency far beyond prior models as launch-pad designs evolve.