Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Fusion Power

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Ever since humans have understood the workings of the atom, the potential has existed for humanity to exploit the energy source which powers the stars: fusion power. Yet, for decades fusion power has been just out of our grasp. Some have said fusion is the power source of the future, and always will be. Learn more about fusion power and why it is so hard and has taken so long, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever since humans have understood the workings of the atom, the potential has existed for humanity to exploit the energy source which powers the stars. Fusion power. Yet, for decades, fusion power has always just been out of our grasp. Some have said that fusion is the power source of the future and always will be. Learn more about fusion power and why it's so hard and has taken so long on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow.

That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally follow it. sleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every

Monday and Thursday. This episode is sponsored by Scotty Vest. I've spoken before about how Scotty Vest is great for carrying your electronics, and that's true. However, one of the best uses of Scotty Vest gear I found is just being prepared. When you're traveling, you never know what you might encounter, having some hand sanitizer, some hidden emergency cash, a car, a car, car, with your hotel's address and telephone number, and even a small first-aid kit can be smart when you're traveling somewhere that you're not familiar with. Not to mention the oh-so-important need for carrying some extra toilet paper with you, because you just never know.

You can easily and discreetly carry all the things you just might need in your Scotty Vest jacket, and I know because I've worn my Scotty Vest gear to all seven continents and over 100 countries. You can get 15% off your next order by going to ScottyVest.com and using coupon code, Everything Everywhere, all one word at checkout. Once again, that's Scottyvest.com, coupon code, everything everywhere. There are two types of nuclear power, fission and fusion. Fission releases energy by splitting apart the nucleus of an atom. If you get the right kind of atoms together, you can create a chain reaction that keeps

splitting nuclei and keeps producing energy. It involves using heavy elements, which are naturally radioactive. Fission is how all the nuclear reactors on the planet work right now. Fusion is the opposite of fission. Instead of splitting atoms apart, you're fusing them together. This is how stars generate energy. Stars are massive bodies with huge gravitational poles. The gravitational pull is so great that it creates incredible pressure inside the star which can fuse atoms together. The reason why it takes so much energy has to do with something called the strong nuclear force. The strong force is one of the fundamental forces of nature.

Inside the nucleus of an atom are protons. protons have a positive electrical charge. Left to themselves, protons will repel other protons with a light charge. The strong force is what binds the nucleus of an atom together. It makes protons that would otherwise want to repulse each other stick together. The strong force only works, however, at very small distances, like really, really small distances. The strong force is the strongest force in nature,

but only at distances of less than one femtometer, which is one quadrillionth of a meter. So that is the fundamental problem with fusion. You need a whole lot of energy to smash atoms together that don't want to be smashed together. Actually, getting atoms to fuse together isn't even the hard part. I mean, it's hard, but it isn't the hardest part. You can create a big enough explosion and the shock waves will fuse atoms together. We can fuse atoms together using a hydrogen bomb.

Supernovas also fuse atoms together this way. However, that type of fusion can't really be harnessed for energy. To be able to harness the power of nuclear fusion, there are several things you have to do. First, you need a tremendous amount of energy to fuse atoms together. This means a whole lot of heat and incredibly high temperatures. The level of temperatures we're talking about can easily reach 100 million degrees Celsius. And I'd convert that into Fahrenheit, but it is so ridiculously hot that it doesn't really matter. The hotter something is, the faster the individual particles are moving, and the more kinetic energy it has when atoms smashed together to allow for fusion.

Second, you have to contain the hot matter which is going to fuse. A hundred million degrees is hot enough to melt or destroy anything. There is no container you can put it in. That means the material has to be suspended somehow without touching anything. Finally, you have to get more energy out than you put in. This is ultimately what really matters. All of the energy you put into the system has to pay out at the end if it's to become a usable source of energy. Unlike fission, the primary fuel used for fusion are light, plentiful elements.

The elements which are best for fusion are hydrogen and helium. In particular, an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, which has one neutron, and an isotope of helium known as helium-3. Deuterium can be found in seawater, and there's plenty of it on Earth. and helium-3 is suspected to be in abundance on the moon created by eons of solar wind. The efforts at creating a controlled nuclear fusion began in the 1950s. At the time, physicists didn't think that the problem would be all that hard to solve. After all, they had created fission reactors and hydrogen bombs. Certainly, this would just be one more step along that same path.

Sure, it might involve more engineering, but they figured it shouldn't be an instrumentable problem. The first attempts at fusion, and most of the projects that are used today, use what is known as magnetic confinement fusion. The idea is that because nothing can contain an incredibly hot plasma, it can be suspended via incredibly powerful magnets. All of the magnetic confinement designs are based on a torus. A torus, if you don't know what that is, is basically the shape of a donut. A torus is a cylinder with the two ends turned around and connected. If you tried to contain plasma in a cylinder, it could bleed out of the ends, which is why a torus is the natural shape for containing plasma.

In the early 1950s, Soviet and American teams came up with similar but different designs. Soviet physicist Igor Tam and Andrei Sakharov came up with a design called a Tokomac. Tokomak is a Russian acronym for toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field. The American version was designed by Lyman Spitzer at Princeton, and it was called a Stellarator, which comes from the word stellar. The basic differences between a tocomac and a stellarator is that a stellarator has a twisted magnetic field and the tocomac is more symmetrical. Both the Soviet and American designs managed to achieve fusion. However, they weren't able to sustain it for very long and consumed far more energy than it produced.

Everyone soon realized that the problem of fusion wasn't going to be as easy as they originally thought. The stellarator had some early problems with leaking plasma, and most efforts then went into the tocomac design. However, even the Tokomac design developed problems of its own over time. The next several decades saw billions of dollars put into the design and creation of experimental fusion reactors. Whenever a new reactor was about to come online, there would always be reports about how a breakthrough infusion was right around the corner and that we would have clean, plentiful energy in about 20 years.

Given the enormous upside diffusion energy, there has been no lack of effort or funding put into fusion, and over time there have been advances. One new technique which has been tried is called inertial confinement fusion. It involves blasting small pellets of fuel with incredibly powerful lasers. There's been a lot of activity on the fusion front lately, which has been the primary impetus for doing this episode. A group from MIT just announced in September of 2021 that they have created a new more powerful magnet that can create magnetic fields powerful enough to contain a plasma, but with much less energy. On August 8, 2021, an initial confinement system at Lawrence Livermore Labs created 1.3 megajoules of energy output.

It took 192 laser beams that used 1.9 megajoules of energy, meaning it had a 70% return on energy. And this matches the highest efficiency created by the Joint European Taurus in 1997. There are several other very large projects underway right now. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, is being built in southern France. It's a consortium of 35 countries, and it'll be the largest fusion reactor to date. They're hoping to get a 10-fold return on energy by 2030, inputting 50 megawatts and getting 500 megawatts out. Given that no one has ever gotten a one for one return on energy yet,

this remains to be proven. In the UK, the spherical token-AC for electrical production, or steppe, is being built, and they hope to have a working reactor by 2040. Likewise, China is also putting a great deal of effort into a fusion reactor of their own, and there are several private companies working on the problem as well. While fusion energy has been easy in theory, it's proven extremely difficult in practice. Solving all the problems to make a workable fusion reactor has turned out to be an engineering nightmare. Even if a reactor can be made to work, the cost of creating energy this way may have to come down considerably before it's considered practical.

However, if these hurdles can be overcome, and things do keep improving, then fusion could be the the ultimate answer to the world's energy problems, an unlimited source of clean energy with no emissions and no waste. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.