Ideas - A machine that could save us from war — and global warming

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

How? Some scientists believe in the power of nuclear fusion. Environmentally, these machines would have the potential to meet our energy needs with zero carbon cost and remove a significant motivation behind war — the control of energy sources. Think about it. The Middle East would look a lot different today. This podcast explores what the transition to fusion energy would entail from the challenges, the rewards and the risks.Guest in this episode:Mustafa Bahran is a physics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. He came to Canada after his life in Yemen became too dangerous. There he founded the Yemeni Scientific Research Foundation and National Atomic Energy Commission.Greg Twinney is the the CEO of General Fusion.Mike Donaldson is senior vice president in technology development at General Fusion.Michael Mann is a climate scientist and director at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.JC Btaiche is founder and CEO of a nuclear fusion company called Fuse.

We all have bad days and sometimes bad weeks and maybe even bad years. But the good news is we don't have to figure out life all alone. I'm comedian Chris Duffy, host of Ted's How to Be a Better Human podcast. And our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life, actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day to day better. Whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house, each episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life's ups and downs. Find how to be a better human wherever you're listening to this.

This is a CBC podcast. How big is it? Oh, huge. It's like a, it's like a tourist. It's like a torus. It's like a donut. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

I was busy preparing for you. In a Tim Hortons beside the highway, in a suburb of Ottawa, a Yemeni-Canadian nuclear scientist is deep in conversation. I had so many hats in Yemen in the last 20 years before the war. I was the scientific advisor to the president of Yemen. I was the Minister of Electricity and Energy between 2007 and 2008. Mustafa Bahra and a fellow customer at this donut shop have snagged the only two comfortable chairs in the place beside the imitation fireplace. I was the nuclear physics and particle physics professor at Sunha University.

And I've done so many things in Yemen, like instituted the National Atomic Energy Commission from scratch, founded the Yemeni Scientific Research Foundation, many other things. Mustafa now works in Ottawa as a physics professor at Carlton University. He came to Canada through a program called Scholars at Risk, after his life in Yemen became too dangerous. A well-informed friend warned him to get out quickly. After Mustafa refused to work for the Houthi authorities who took power in 2014. Physics is the only thing that saved my life.

Because of physics, I was able to flee war and find a job, wherever I landed, first in the U.S., then in Canada. So physics saved me and my family. But that's not the story on Professor Bahran's mind today. What he's telling his table made about is a machine that could save us all. So what is exciting me right now is really started in December 2020. Since December 2020, a number of good news items, all closely related, have interrupted the relentless stream of reports about war.

and destruction. Mustafa has been paying close attention to those stories. And the upshot is this. He thinks more Canadians should be excited about the moment in which we live. Since 1985, until now, 40 years, I've been following nuclear fusion and fission as well. I'm a nuclear scientist. But nuclear fusion in particular, the reason for that is I had the teacher, the physics professor who taught me nuclear physics. one and two, a guy by the name Mahmoud, was a great man. And he was the reason got me to love fusion. So finished bachelor's degree, starting to follow fusion news in a constant manner.

On this episode, we feature a lecture of sorts delivered by Mustafa Bahrain about how developments in Mustafa's field are changing. his whole outlook on the future and why he believes we can look forward cautiously to a world that'll be better at the end of the 21st century than it was at the beginning. First of all, I learned when I was a student, the fusion is the energy of the future. Why, what's so great about it? Mustafa's lecture at Timmy's was delivered to an audience of one. Ideas producer Tom Howell.

It is one of the beacons of light in terms of lighting up the feature of humanity. It will provide the promises will provide unlimited amount of energy. That's the promise because it's based on fusing two hydrogen nuclei, sea water. The ocean is hydrogen, H2O, as opposed to having the... fossil fuel, which is underground, you have to bring it up, whether it's petroleum or coal, or as opposed to nuclear fission fuel, which is either uranium 235, which exists very, very little in nature, or you can make plutonium. The production of plutonium is very limited, and it's very, very highly toxic, very highly radioactive and so on. Yes, there are solutions.

and nuclear energy is important, no doubt. But fusion would be better. Fusion is cut unlimited fuel first. And the risk of radioactivity still exist, but much less. Mustafa's student days, when he first got excited about nuclear fusion, were 40 years ago now. And even back then, the promise of nuclear fusion had been exciting other scientists for 40 years before that.

We've been bombarded with so much information, about the energy crisis, it's hard to know where to turn. Here we are in 1979, listening to CBC's Quirks and Quarks, looking back at decades of nuclear fusion not happening. What energy sources should we pin our hopes on? Oil's going to run out. Nuclear fission presents major environmental hazards. And solar energy is just getting off the ground.

This is Jay Ingram. He was the brand new host of Quarks and Quarks at this moment, having just taken over from David Suzuki. Some people feel that the energy source of the future is none of these. It's nuclear fusion, not nuclear fission. Quirx and Quarks correspondent Russ McNeil talked to University of Toronto physicist Larry McNeil and asked him what fusion is.

I think it'd probably be easiest to explain that by taking a chemical analog, talking about chemistry rather than nuclear physics to start with. If you have carbon and burn it with oxygen, you get a molecule formed a more complex thing, a heavier thing, carbon dioxide. That's an example of a chemical fusion, where the two small things get together

to give something bigger and in the process give out energy. Now, correspondingly, in the nuclear situation, you can have very light nuclei, hydrogen nuclei, fusing together, forming together to form something which is heavier, helium, and in the process of that fusion, they again give out energy.

One of the big differences, of course, between the chemical and the nuclear situation, is that in the nuclear situation, the nuclear fusion, or nuclear fission, indeed, about a million times more energy is produced for every unit of mass of material. So a very small amount of material can give you a very large amount of energy if you manage to make them fuse. Does it have advantages over the fission process that we are now living with? Well, yes. Larry McNeil goes on to explain to Russ McNeil that the best thing,

thing about nuclear fusion is also the thing that makes it extremely difficult, which is you're essentially trying to burn water. If you think of Lake Ontario, for instance, there's enough there to supply Toronto with energy for 10 million years, 100 million years. Why haven't we tried fusion before or has it been tried? Oh, it's been tried. We've been trying for something like 30 years, but there are problems. Now, the problem really is exactly the same as in a chemical situation of fusion. Go back to the making of a coal fire, carbon burning with oxygen. If you just put a bit of coal on the grate there, it won't burn. What you have to do is to start a fire, raise its temperature with burning paper or wood or something,

and then when you've got the temperature sufficiently high, then you'll get a fusion reaction, a chemical fusion reaction. Now, in the same way, you have to get the temperature of the nuclei high enough in order to get a fusion process taking place. But the temperatures we're talking about are very much higher than in an ordinary coal fire. In fact, the temperatures we're speaking about are something like 10 or 100 million degrees centigrade Celsius. I have difficulty comprehending that temperature. Is there anything in the universe that's that hot?

The sun. After all, all the energy that we get and have got over the whole history of the solar system has come from the sun, from the fusion processes going on in the sun. so that if we want to make the reaction to go, we have to have some way of making and maintaining these high temperatures. And it's really the maintaining the high temperatures, which is the problem. Quite a big problem, in fact. At the time of recording this, we're now 47 years on from that episode of Quarks and Quarks,

and Mustafa tells me the big problem is finally looking solvable. This is important when you are a student and you look forward to something, then in your lifetime you see that it's started to happen. That's why we are talking today about this. It has started happening. Now, before anyone gets too excited, let's just address the caveats. I was mentioning that for the last 40 years I've been following future news. And every 10 years or so, you really,

that oh looks like we're gonna find we can realize fusion energy in a decade and 10 years from now then 10 years later they will tell you the same thing again so the promise kept being delayed and what is that promise in order to fuse two very small nuclei together you need energy so there's an input energy then once they are fused together and they form a bigger nucleus, like helium. Helium, yeah. That's what's happening in the sun. If using two light nuclei together, technically, as happened earlier,

the problem is you need more energy input than energy output. So it's no use. If the output energy is less than the input energy, then you're actually losing energy, not gaining. Right, no good at producing infinite energy if you're spending infinite energy to get it. Exactly. And the promise then, 40 years ago, was to break even.

The N equals to the out, then to have ignition. Ignition means once the out is bigger than the end, then you have ignition. So now, for the last 40 years, the ignition didn't happen. Even breaking, even didn't happen until December of 2022. World at 6 December 2022. Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century. Who doesn't love a breakthrough that involves giant lasers and terms such as the ignition threshold? Scientists have found a way to create the reaction that powers the sun and the stars.

The age of nuclear fusion now looks viable. It could eventually mean zero carbon energy. Welcome to the world at six. I'm Susan Bonner, also on the program. We are not rejecting any of Madame Arbor's recommendations. That's when excitement in me was so high. It's like it was a moment in my life that I said, finally, what I've been waiting for has been realized.

Once nuclear fusion as an energy source becomes commercially available and produces a strategic amount of energy for all countries, basically, because technology in this domain particularly is very hard to hide. So it's not going to be secrets. Okay. Then we are looking forward to a stage of affair in the universe in which there will be. will be less conflict based on energy sources. If the motivation behind wars, the control of

energy sources did not exist, the Middle East would have been much better place today. Tuning in again now to World 6 December 13, 2022. A limitless energy supply that produces no waste. What may have once sounded like science fiction, could be one step closer to reality. The U.S. government has announced a major breakthrough in fusion power. Scientists produced more energy from a reaction than what they needed to ignite it, a historic first. The CBC's Alison Dempster has more on the meaning of this leap forward.

Power of the sun in the palm of my hand. On the silver screen, it powers comic book villains and time machines. What are you doing, Doc? I refuse. Nuclear fusion power. It's called the Holy Grail of energy. For decades, scientists have been working toward harnessing the process that powers the sun. Today in Washington, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a big milestone.

It's the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory, anywhere, in the world. The ignition happened, and it was the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, and they were able to use laser to produce this fusion of the, and they're actually not two hydrogen. There are two isotopes of hydrogen, one called Deuterium, which is a heavier hydrogen, and another is Tritium, which even heavier than the other one. Are they hard to get? They are.

Oh, damn. They are. I mean, the Tritium is the hardest. The deetrium, which is the heavy hydrogen, exists in nature. in the ocean exists at a reasonable amount. One of the biggest challenge ahead of us will be the issue of treatum. Where are you going to get treatment?

Treatium does not exist in nature. But what happens is, believe it or not, the same process of producing energy also produces trium. So there are answers. There are challenges. And believe me, I mean, the challenges ahead of us are much bigger,

but they're not as big as the barrier we just conquered, which is ignition. By the way, you have to realize that this calculation, the energy of the laser, less than the ultimate energy, that's true. But also, there's a lot of energy that was used to put together this lab. That's the R&D cost. We are looking forward to when will the fusion energy be realized commercially? When are we going to have the first nuclear fusion? power plant. According to the policy, the U.S. policy right now, they think they can realize that

in 10 years. Well, they will be very lovely. I've heard a lot of crazy things from the United States recently. I'm not sure I'm willing to believe it just because they say it. Let's say 20 years. I'm fine with that. What I'm looking at is this. Yes, there are a number of challenges. Treatium is one of them. The second biggest challenge is not treatium. is the fact that you're producing an amount of energy is so huge, the vessel itself will not be able to maintain that energy. It'll melt? Yeah, the integrity of the material.

That's another issue. How to manage such energy. Now, how to sustain fusion for enough time. And that's what the Chinese did recently in 2025. There's a piece of news that's called the Chinese Sun. Artificial sun. Great. I'm listening. Yeah, the Chinese artificial sun was in May 2025.

Chinese scientists have reached a major milestone in the development of the country's artificial sun, known as the experimental, advanced, superconducting Tokamak, or East. Often referred to as the artificial sun, East has smashed a new nuclear fusion record. Imagine a world powered by clean, limitless energy, where we no longer rely on polluting fossil fuels. It's an experiment of advanced superconducting Tukamak.

It's a different, it's not the laser, the American laser. It's a Tukamak, which is a combination of magnetic and electric field to do the fusion. And they were able, and hear this, the Chinese were able to achieve a record-breaking 1,066 seconds of steady-state high-conflict. confinement plasma. Plasma is where the fusion happens. That is about 18 minutes. Then it melted? No, then it stopped. Oh, they just stopped the experiment. It's not they,

they didn't do the fusion. So before you fuse things, you reach a physical state called plasma. Then you confine that plasma. It doesn't go away. If you are able to confine it, then fusion will happen. They did, we're able to confine that plasma, steady. for 18 minutes. That's a breakthrough in itself. Because the laser thing had just been like a second or two, right? Five seconds. We should share also this.

It's a Canadian breakthrough in March 2025. In Richmond, the general fusion, the very good company, achieved plasma energy confinement for more than 10 milliseconds. 10 milliseconds, okay. For Canada, it's good. They're on the board for Canada. It's good. Okay.

So that's great. Right. Yeah. That's the very first, should they say, achievement, Canadian achievement. We'll go take a look at Ellen 26. We'll walk through the lab to get you there. February 2026, my colleague Matthew Lazen Rider in Vancouver, gets a chance to tour the Germal Fusion Laboratory. It's in a big industrial park in Richmond, British Columbia, just near the airport.

A lot of space out here in Richmond. It's great. All right. Come on in here. This is, you know, we've been doing this for a couple of decades. Giving Matthew the tour here is Mike Dolanson. He's kind of the engineering technological development guy at General Fusion. So what we have in here is these are a bunch of the test beds that we've used to get to where we are today.

This is technology. This is the museum. This is the museum. This is technology development at its finest. We build test beds and we test them and we figure out how to make them better and move on. Is this what I'm looking at? That's a big, what shape is that? I'm actually not even sure of the actual shape.

It's a sphere. It's a sphere on the inside. It's got all the pistons on the outside. This is our first test bed to demonstrate that we could create a liquid metal cavity and collapse it with pistons. We inject a hot, magnetized plasma of fusion fuel into a cavity of liquid metal, and we collapse that cavity with pistons. Cavity? like a swirling sphere of liquid metal with a hollow part in the middle of that swirling sphere of liquid metal

and when you want to collapse the cavity you fire the pistons all in once. Cablang. So the first machine Matthew gets shown is a giant bubble crusher for crushing bubbles of molten metal. General Fusion needed to make this machine first before they go on to make the machine that's going to actually save us all, because crushing bubbles is one of three key jobs that the final machine is going

to have to do. That said, crushing bubbles is maybe not the perfect description, because when you crush a soap bubble, it pops. In this machine, the bubble does not pop. So Matthew suggests thinking of it as crushing a jam-filled timbit from all directions at once. So the jam in the middle of the timbitt compresses to the point that its atoms explode. Right. In this scenario, the dough of the timbid is liquid lithium. Yes. Yum. All right. Yeah, and the plasma is the jam. Got it. Charging. Charging. Ten. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, Four, three, two, one. Fireing!

That's the sound of some people using the next machine that Matthew's going to get to see. It's called LM26. Its job is to practice crushing the hot jam, or as we should call it, plasma. This is a bit of a staging area for the machine that we're going to go see. LM26 is made to compress plasmas and demonstrate our MTF technology.

MTF is magnetized target fusion. So this is LM26. What LM26 does is we take a hot magnetized plasma and we compress it. These guys here, this is one of our key components that's in the middle of the machine. They're getting it ready for the next time that we do one of these compression shots. The whole process of being able to repeat through the shots requires a big team, tightly coordinated. It's got the people that are planning what we want to do on any one compression. We have a whole series of engineers and technicians that are involved in putting all the diagnostics,

actually being able to measure what goes on this machine. After we've done one of these compression shots, we have to strip it all down and start again. Can you walk me through this machine? So what started with a kind of Dungeons and Dragons dice with 14 pistons attached to it, to this. Like, what are the analogs between the two? For this machine, what we want to demonstrate is that the fusion actually works. So in this machine, we still compress plasmas. We compress them with a solid metal rather than liquid metal.

If you were a bug sitting on the inside of the machine and you were being compressed along with the plasma, you wouldn't know whether or not it was big pistons on the outside doing the compression or whether or not it was using electromagnetic fields like we do, on this machine. So... Okay, I just want to stop for a second. It sounds like there's a Geiger counter going off.

Are you in a radioactive situation when you're recording this? Well, I heard that as well while we were recording, and I asked Mike, whether we were... Because what they are testing, the big machine there is full of magnets. And so I asked, Mike, I'm picking up some interference on my... What sounds like interference on my microphone, and he double-checked, and all of the things. were turned off. So it was kind of a mystery what was affecting my microphone and it could have been because we were by the airport or it could have been a faulty piece of equipment that I brought from home. Okay. All right. So a useless data point. I mean, he did offer to go get a

something to measure magnetic fields just to see if there was. But you took him at his word. I took him at his word. I hope they understand that the nearby airport is sending some sort of signal in there that might affect the science too. And the second question, a squashed bug. I didn't quite understand what he was saying there. He was saying that from the perspective of the inside of the jam of the timbitt, if you suddenly find yourself squished, you don't know whether it's a physical thing or a magnetic thing.

It all feels the same squishiness to you. He's excusing the fact that they don't use liquid metal on this one. Yeah, it's not a final prototype. It's not like, and now we scale up this machine. This one is specifically to tap. When you compress plasma, will it heat up to the fusion temperatures? That's what this machine is meant to demonstrate and do. Here's what it sounded like in 2025, the first time they used the machine to fire a bit of plasma into the middle and hold it together in the right spot.

We're going to keep out this, but this might work, this might not work. Fireing. Let's call Stephen. Do we make first plasma? We did make first plasma. If only it were as easy as crushing a donut, the quest to make a machine to save us all, using nuclear fusion. This is Ideas.

I'm Nala Ayad. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives. Discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we're, we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant,

the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi and Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives, wherever you get your podcasts. Every few months, a news item will break through about some advance in nuclear fusion science. In March 26, the European Commission announced a $350 million fund

for one year's worth of new research on fusion. That same month, the UK government announced a jaw-dropping $4.5 billion, Canadian dollars, it plans to give over five years to British fusion research and building prototype power plants. China and the U.S., meanwhile, are pumping billions of dollars in public and private money towards fusion projects in their countries.

For now, the only nuclear, fusion power plants that actually work are the stars. In Canada, our longest running participant in the race to make fusion power happen is a company called General Fusion. It was founded in 2002, and Ideas, producer Matthew Laysen-Rider remembers that. As a local radio maker years and years and years ago, I covered the launch of General Fusion when it started. And back in those days, when they were only raising private funds then, right, they were seeking

private investors. And what they had said at the time was that they were very, very clear with investors, like, look, this is a long shot. You can give us your money, but we want to be very upfront. This is a long process with a high chance of nothing actually coming out of it. And that's what you get in return for being on the ground floor. and then things seem to have gone pretty well with their process. And at this point, right, if they solve this problem, if they crack it, everything changes.

It's not like everything is solved and is perfect forever, but that's a significant amount of our energy grid that you can replace. The tantalizing prospect is luring governments and hopeful investors. But how much hope should we really place in the promises of a new technology arriving and arriving in time to help humanity stop heating up the planet beyond livable conditions this century. Tom Howell in Montreal and Matthew Laysen Rider in Vancouver

pursue that question. Matthew's been getting a tour of the latest developments at General Fusion's Laboratory in Richmond, British Columbia. This machine is all about the fusion part of our fusion power plant. Now, we're not the only people out there that do fusion, but the way that we do fusion, we know the path to a power plant when we demonstrate that. So the focus of this team right now is, does the way that we do fusion, can we demonstrate that we can reach those fusion conditions, and then we know how to apply that to a power plant.

But at the heart of it is the fusion going to work, so that's where the team is focused right now. Is it going to work? Many would like to know the answer And if it is going to work, when? Building up and also tempering expectations is the job of Greg Twini, the CEO, he's in charge of the whole thing. Our goal is still mid-2030s, first-of-kind power plant.

We're not sitting still between now and then. We've built a machine called LM26, which is 50% power plant scale plasmas, that will achieve these fusion conditions and ultimately be able to translate those through to a commercial power plant. Because, yeah, you've got to be able to get more energy out of the reaction overall. Otherwise, you're not a power-producing plant.

You're just a demonstration. Can you give me the short version of how the General Fusion project is different than other approaches to fusion? Yeah. So you can produce fusion conditions inside of all sorts of different machines, Tokomax using lasers, all different approaches. At General Fusion, we recognize you need to be able to do that. You've got to be able to produce fusion conditions. But if you can't do it and ultimately,

translate it to a power plant, you're kind of just working on science and you might actually be climbing the wrong mountain by demonstrating that science. For us, it was important that we not only demonstrate fusion conditions, but we do it in a way that overcomes four key barriers. One, when you create fusion conditions inside a machine, conditions are harsh. You have neutrons flying around everywhere. If those neutrons hit a hard surface, they will destroy it. You need to be able to protect the machine from those neutrons breaking it over time. Two, you need to be able to produce the fuel that you're going to use. In our case, we use what's considered the easiest fuel to fuse, which is deuterium and tritium. Tritium you need to breed, and you need to be

able to breed enough of that that you can constantly sustain the power plant. And so we made sure that in the design that we have, we can produce enough tritium to also continue with the producing fusion on an ongoing basis in a power plant. The third challenge is making sure that you can extract the energy, capture the neutron energy, and turn that into ultimately putting energy on the grid. And lastly, you've got to be able to do all this in a way that's going to be cost competitive. If you're using superconducting magnets, we're using high-powered lasers, or maybe materials to try and solve this neutron damage problem, you're not going to be able to do it in an economical way. So we made sure that we're using a lot of existing technologies, existing materials,

so that when we produce energy, it's going to be competitive with existing energy technologies today. You mentioned the kind of abundance of deuterium, easy to find deuterium. Where does the tritium come from? So tritium is not naturally found. In our case, we breed it. And the breeding happens through an interaction as part of our design for our machine. When we create fusion conditions inside our machine, the fusion happens in a way that is completely encased with liquid lithium. And I talked earlier about the fusion process. And when, when, when fusion happens, you get these neutrons that fly off of the fusion reaction. And those neutrons, in our case, fly into this liquid lithium. They hit the liquid lithium and they actually

create tritium through that process. So not only is this liquid that's surrounding the fusion reaction protecting the machine, but it's actually breeding tritium. And in our case, we can actually breed more tritium than we need to sustain the current power plant that's being operated. And what that means is we can extract tritium. And in our case, we can actually breed act tritium and start new power plants one after the other and really own that fuel cycle indefinitely. We can create our own fuel. What can go wrong? Like what is the worst case scenario? You know, things populate the public imagination about new energy sources, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, things that go wrong with new experiments. What's the worst thing that can happen with what you're

working on here? Yes. So the beauty of fusion is that it's very different. from fission, which is what most people think of when they hear the word nuclear. They think of fission and radioactive waste and, you know, meltdowns and run-ons and those types of challenges that you have with traditional fission, which the vision industry has been working hard to, you know, protect from. And I think has made quite a bit of progress in that regard. With fusion, you actually don't have any of those challenges. One way to think about fusion, actually, is to think about all the benefits of nuclear without the downsides of nuclear fission.

To create the conditions of fusion requires a huge effort, a huge huge effort. And if you don't create those conditions, kind of nothing happens and there's no fusion. So very, very safe. And that's not because we're protecting in and around the fusion. It's because of the fusion process itself is just inherently safe.

It's a game changer. I got four kids. I want to leave this world in a much better place. place, and Fusion absolutely can do that once we commercialize. The rosy vision of the future we hear from the nuclear fusion industry is strikingly different from the one suggested by the Hockey Stick graph. That's the famous image showing the sudden sharp rise in average global temperature at the very end of the last millennium after a thousand years of not much variation.

The International Panel on Climate Change republished the Hockey Stick graph from the original scientific paper where it first appeared, and it quickly became central to the public debate that occurred in the early 2000s, back when the reality of climate change was hotly disputed. One of the authors of that paper is Michael Mann. He's an American climate scientist. He's gone on to be a leading international voice on the climate crisis. I met him recently in Montreal, and I asked him what he makes of the optimism around nuclear fusion. If within 15, years, nuclear fusion comes online as a power generator for the world. Does that change everything? I mean, in principle, one could imagine it helping. But the reality is that we have the clean

energy infrastructure to decarbonize the global economy right now. The obstacles aren't technological. They're political. So we have to recognize that. And how does the addition of when new energy, clean energy technology, change that? Well, marginally. because we can already do it with wind, solar, geothermal, battery technology. If we have another source of clean energy, of course, that makes it even easier. But it's not necessary. And the thing about fusion energy, I started out in theoretical physics, my training. And I was studying physics back in the 1990s.

And fusion was always 10 years away. It's always 10 years away. And so there is a bit of a – I think there's some skepticism. And this idea that it can be, there's a difference between it being, you know, achieving what they call a cue of one. Like if you get more energy out than you put in, well, that's good. Then you're actually producing net energy. You just did that, right? We just got to that point.

Yeah. The experiment I think you're talking about was based on laser energy, putting laser energy into, and it turns out that the laser, the inefficiency of the laser is such that if you do, the energy you put in, into the laser to then put into the fusion reactor, is such you're not actually getting a queue of better than one. Much depends on where you start counting. Exactly. But nonetheless, there's still a difference between that sort of that Q equal one boundary

that has been taught threshold that's been talked about for so long and achieving sort of economic viability. And some estimates are that you probably need a queue of 10, 10 times as much energy out as you put in, for it to be viable given the other sources of energy. that are available. So we need one cue a year improvement. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. Is techno-optimism, which let's call the belief that we will be able to arrive at something like scenario one by inventing things using money that we get possibly from burning more fossil fuels?

Right. Is that techno-optimism crazy? Is it just very optimistic? Or is it something else? Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it's all of the above in the sense that there are people who are genuinely optimistic, who believe that, you know, we can come up with sort of an energy miracle. There are people like Bill Gates who promote this sort of framing, this way of thinking, and at the same time downplay the role that existing clean energy can play. And that's sort of the trade-off that you too often see here. The sort of the techno-fixes and those who promote the techno-fixes often are doing so while downplaying the role of existing clean energy, which is actually problematic,

because it sort of makes it sound like we need this miracle, and we'll just have to wait for the miracle. And by the way, in the meantime, we'll just continue burning fossil fuels. I think it plays into that. And that's why, you know, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson once said that this is just an engineering problem. They love that framing. The fossil fuel industry loves the framing of technophixes of geoengineering because it kicks the can down the road.

It's like, yeah, in 10 years we'll be able to do this. So why don't you let us continue to extract and burn fossil fuels now with the promise that we'll fix it? There's also the view that fixing our problems without a new miracle machine would itself require a miracle. And to sum, the miracle of a quick collective action by a sensible human race seems less plausible than the miracle of a quick invention. There's a pass where you just build more solar panels and things like that, but that's not how we're going to really, exponentially meet the energy demand that's growing. This is J.C. Pettesh, the Canadian founder and CEO of a seven-year-old nuclear fusion company called Fuse. They're building machines at a research facility near Montreal in Napierville.

People will consume more energy over time. And GDP per capita is directly tied to kilowatt hour per capita. People want to spend energy. People want to use new technology. So the only answer is how do we create a leap of energy innovation that would enable us to go into this era of abundance where we have clean, sustainable future, but without compromising on the technology and lifestyle that we all want that we've been growing into. And from my perspective, like going nuclear and specifically fusion is really the only way we do that, which is why I chose to work on fusion energy as a lifelong pursuit and chose to do that instead of going to college. J.C.'s company has the same overall goal as germal fusion, that is, to make the world's first

nuclear fusion power plant. But their focus is on a different part of the problem. The plasma shots that everyone's working on, where the aim is to get more energy out than goes in, each of those shots currently takes about a day to execute. Right now, when we do one shot, like people generally celebrate, and we should celebrate because it's a big deal. But in a commercial setup, that's just like a piston engine, right? Like in a car, it needs to be good. going in an automated fashion. Eventually, we need to get to about one shot a minute or one shot a second, right, for years at a time, ideally. And so what we're doing is we've broken down the piece of the puzzle in a few ways. So first, given the scale, right, you're dealing with

megajoules, so millions of joules, millions of amps, millions of volts. So you're dealing with a regime of extremes. So the first step was like, how do you create the power and be able to drive the current at that rep rate. We needed to build a completely novel driver technology to just create that power. Second, once you're doing that implosion, there's going to be some damage and you've got refurbished the electronics, et cetera, and the material. So that's going to require more experimental data. That's an engineering problem, but it's a hard one. And then third, I think, and that's the problem that some folks don't talk about, but you need the components of your machine to be built for a large lifetime, right? Like, for example, your components, they're good for maybe 10,000

shots, like suppliers may sell you a capacitor that's good for 10,000 shot or 100,000 shot. But if you're thinking about, I'm going to do 8,640 shots a day, which is a shot a minute, it's like two days or, you know, so that's why it's, I think there's significant challenges. is. A machine that would save us all, except for the fact that it breaks down every two days, doesn't sound ideal. But J.C. Pettesh thinks a machine where the parts constantly break could be okay, as long as they can make and install new parts fast enough. We've vertically integrated the supply chain too, so we can make our own parts. About 75% of the parts in our machines are fabricated inside the fuse facility. Just because that rate of learning and, you know, the devil's

the details and taking control of our supply chain has been really critical, both from a resilience perspective, but from a technology perspective as well. So you envision a plant might be remaking its own machines kind of constantly while it's firing its machines? Correct. There's some part of the machine, like the fuel palls and other parts, like you need to remove, fix, clean, replace, all within a matter of like seconds. That's a really hard challenge, you know? When facing a hard challenge. There's always a gamble. The expenditure of effort in tackling it must be weighed against the level of difficulty, the costs of failure, and of course, the potential reward. For J.C. Batesh, this calculation is clear. If I were to die next year, like, what would I want to

spend the last year I'm alive on? And when you think about, like, the basic of Maslow's pyramid of need, right? I think energy is pretty much at the baseline. Like, without energy, there's no AI, there's no quantum, there's no like fast consumer fashion and all the things, right? So energy is at the core of everything. And right now, when you think about how much inefficient or energy production system is, there's been no energy innovation for the past 50 years. We've just been trying to optimize old ways. You have the climate problem. There's also like just lack of energy to power key technologies. We've stalled essentially. When you think about like dual program, right, like energy.

density. One liter of hydrogen into deuterium from seawater can replace about 55,000 barrels of oil. It's like talking about like tens of thousands of tons of like carbon in the air. And that's I think like the way we need to think about some of those problems. It's not like what's an incremental one, two percent change that we can make. But how do we actually really solve the problem at the core? And my bet was like we need to think of what our exponential technologies and technological leap frogs that need to do and fusion is from my perspective the only one available that we know of today that could actually get us exponential gain so we can catch up with the energy demand that's growing.

However, the fact that we want it isn't quite the same as therefore we can have it, is it? I mean, there are some things that are just impossible. Well, you know, I think it's how bad do you want it is the question and how much resilience have you got? Like how bad do you want? I guess if you want it in the next one, two years, I would say that's very difficult. But I'm also from the mindset of like fusion is the less energy source humanity would ever need and we need to make it happen. But there's no laws of physics we're breaking. It's just hard work and tenacity. Like how much are you willing to put before you give up? And for me, the best thing that I could wake up on every day and my

contributions like waking up every morning and thinking about, you know, how to, what can I do today to essentially make sure that we feel more optimistic about the future, free from existential threats like nuclear war or running out of dinosaur carcasses to burn. And for me, that's working on fusion and accelerating towards transition to fusion energy and safeguarding humankind and think it's the most constructive contribution I can make to currently where the world is going. back in the donut shop beside the highway in Ottawa. It's the afternoon shift. The sun's going down,

commuters stopping in on their drive home from work. And, humming in the background, all of us are heading towards what we're told will be a climate catastrophe if we don't hit net zero carbon emissions within... just checking the online carbon countdown clock here. Within 21 years, zero months, and 21 days. Of course, it'll be less,

the time you're hearing this. Sitting here across from Professor Mustafa Bahran, I express my fears about the timeline here regarding the invention of a nuclear fusion machine that's going to save us all. Is there a danger it's going to come 10 years too late? This is a very good question, and the reason for this is fusion is a promise that will help humanity and our planet to survive survive our activity, humankind activity. On the other side, we have the current

world affair, political affair, the populism, the new push for fossil fuel that means more carbon dioxide, that means more harm to the environment, you're right. So we have two competing narratives.

In one hand, we have Those who are working to produce nickel fusion, renewable energies, and so on, to save the planet. And those who are working to continue reliance, maybe increase reliance on fossil fuel, dirty fossil fuel. And that competition will tell whether this planet and humanity will survive. I cannot answer that question right now. We are telling our colleagues in the fusion industry, our scientists, our technologists, our engineers, our investors.

Please work harder, faster, because we cannot guarantee what the rest of humanity is going to do. We can't stop ourselves. Particularly politicians. Nobody can guarantee politicians. And why do you think it's better to pour billions of dollars into making fusion happen, hopefully in time, rather than put those billions of dollars into technology we already have.

We've got the solar, we've got the geothermal, and they all need money too. We're good. Let's say I'm going to put the $4 billion into solar, or I put it into wind, hydrogen production, there's hydrogen fuel. The problem with all of these, let's take solar energy, for example. The biggest problem of solar energy is storage, and the storage issue has not been solved. As a scientist, as a human being, I encourage people to work on the problem of storage. There are two types of energy sources. Energy sources that are strategic, meaning they produce huge amount.

These are fossil, nuclear, and fusion in the future. Producing solar panels is very dirty, by the way. It pollutes. People do not know this. And that's why in certain countries, without name and names, is cheaper because there are no regulations. But we're not here to reign on the parade of solar power. Mustafa wanted me to meet him in this cafe to deliver a hopeful message. For a person who've been following fusion for 40 years,

I think the time has come for the fusion age to be realized. We have crossed the threshold for that age. We have entered that age, but it's the first few states. There are more, much more steps to be taking. And this is going to take maybe 20, maybe years, maybe more. But we will get there. And that is a source of excitement. Very, very big source of excitement,

because in many dimensions, it means that what the universe, the political universe has been fighting over, which is energy, will be less of an issue. and then I am hoping that the dynamics will be as such that the universe will be much more peaceful. The human development will be much better and the environment, particularly our planet, will have a better chance of survival.

When you picture the year 2085, you don't just feel depressed? First of all, I'm not going to be alive then, so... Me neither. Yeah, so... But we care about other people. Exactly. It's my kids and my grandkids. I believe for those who are young enough to realize the year 2085, it will be much better than today.

That's what I think. We are in a place in history, which is dark, a bit dark. We have hundreds of thousands of people who are being innocent people are being killed everywhere, particularly in the Middle East. and we have greedy politicians and corporations. Cost of living, university has risen. The middle class is shrinking even in Canada. It was a struggle.

Yet, taking that all into consideration, I still say 50 years from now, actually 60 years, we will be much better off. Your optimism does hang on this fusion thing actually coming through. this time. Partially, but the other, my apt-to-noisse also hangs on the power of the people. I think, I give an example, Yemen. Yemen is now in the worst place. It has been since 1980. The Yemeni human development, the UN Human Development Index today are worse as if Yemen is back to 1980. We went backward 25 years. But in 50 years from now, I'm telling you right here.

I know Yemen very well. Yemen will be much better. Because of the forces I know, the young generations, the academics, the professionals, the knowledge bearers. I like all these people, too. It's just that, like, it's going to be hard for it to be better if the world is five degrees hotter than it was then. I mean, these nice people might want to go live somewhere else.

That's very good. That's something I cannot. Yeah. the universe becomes five degrees hotter, then all of this discussion is... Yeah, which is back to why we need fusion. Right. I mean, if we are fast, fusion will be part of not getting the five degrees. Well, thank you very much.

I'm going to try to hold on to this feeling of optimism for as long as I can. It's a cautious optimism. Yeah. Cautious by two factors, the environmental damage, how fast and how bad. to how fast and how good can we go for all the fusion? Makes it pretty stark, yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

We just heard a machine to save us all on ideas. The episode was produced by Tom Howell with help from Matthew Laysen Rider. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production, Johnny Casamatta and Emily Caravaggio. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Craig Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.