Yes, a race
is underway and I expect it to be won by the presently least funded. That is the LLP Focus Fusion project. Of course I am biased as I need a pure
electron source capable of driving a starship and this is the only device that
can ever do it. It even looks like a
starship engine.
In fact it
should have enough left over to power a proper photon torpedo or two and the
obligatory lasers to go with it all.
Everything
else ends up powering a souped up heat engine of some sort and that is a terrible
waste. I want to get it right the first
time.
The Nuclear Fusion Arms Race Is
Underway
By Sam
Roudman
In
the early 70s, Rob Goldston was a graduate student in plasma physics, and
experiments to produce fusion energy were just starting to bear
fruit.
“We
had a huge party because we had made 1/1000th of a joule of fusion
energy,” he told me. “It was ridiculous, it was a tiny amount of
energy." A 35-watt light bulb, for instance, uses 35
joules every second. Now, 40 years later, the game has changed. A recent
experiment at the Joint
European Torus fusion reactor in the United Kingdom
produced 20 million joules. And the National Ignition Facility in
California just reached a milestone by producing
more energy in a fusion reaction than was needed to start that reaction.
In
other words, scientists today are much closer to creating fusion energy than
they were 40 years ago. And while most large public research projects are still
decades from producing a reactor that can compete in the marketplace, a
number of private companies have jumped headlong into the fusion race.
Propelled by advances in engineering and science, changes in public funding,
and tens of millions in high-risk high-tech investment dollars, they’re betting
they can create a scalable, sellable reactor in less than a decade.
“The
question as to whether you can coax one of these very hot gasses into making
serious amounts of fusion energy from my point of view is pretty clear,”
Goldston said. After over a decade directing Princeton’s plasma physics lab,
and a couple more in the middle of fusion science, his opinion carries some
weight, and so does his conclusion: “You can do it.”
Fusion
energy is produced by forcing two atoms together in a super hot gas called
a plasma. It’s a process already familiar to all of us, since it powers the
sun. A common approach for making fusion energy is to put two isotopes of
Hydrogen—Deuterium with one neutron, and Tritium with two neutrons—under enough
pressure and heat to make them merge, becoming an isotope of helium. But
as they combine, a neutron spins off and creates heat. Harness enough
heat, and you can operate a power plant with a renewable source of nuclear
energy that produces little to no radioactive waste.
“It’s clean, safe, secure, and sustainable,”
said Andrew Holland, senior energy and climate fellow at the American Security
Project, a bipartisan Washington DC think tank with connections
to former senators like Secretary of State John Kerry and
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, for whom Holland was once a staffer. “It has
all the benefits of nuclear without the downsides.” With a bathtub of water and
a lithium computer battery, a fusion reactor could create the same amount of
energy as 40
tons of lung-blackening coal. It could also take a cut of a domestic
energy economy that Holland says is worth a trillion dollars annually.
With
atmospheric carbon levels climbing
past 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, and Americans exploiting
our fossil fuels at record
levels, fusion’s ultimate promise would be realized
if it could compete with or, better yet, replace the energy sources that
contribute to global climate change. These ambitious companies, which are
locked in the early stages of a technological arms race, believe it can.
The
companies differ in terms of the size of their investments, their approaches to
fusion, and their degree of openness. A recent Google 'Solve for X'
conference featured three such early stage companies working on fusion, as well
as a presentation from
aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. Most are working on
a timescale of less than a decade. There’s some popular support for fusion as
well: a proposal to increase funding in fusion was a winner this year of MIT’s Climate Co Lab,
an attempt to globally crowdsource climate change solutions.
Amongst
the most secretive and best-financed is Tri-Alpha energy. They’ve released
nothing more than a Powerpoint, but have raised somewhere over
$140 million from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen,
Russian tech investment firm Rusnano, and, weirdly, former LA Law
star Harry
Hamlin.
“For
some reason the rich guys like however Tri-Alpha presented,” says Brian Wang,
who follows developments in fusion as director of research at Next Big Future.
From what Wang can tell, Tri Alpha’s approach looks like the one put forward by a
NASA and Department of Defense funded company called Helion
Energy, which involves colliding units of plasma and magnetic fields
known as plasmoids, but he says “the paper that’s been released does not
indicate technical results that they’re way ahead.”
Amongst
the fusion companies willing to explain what they’re doing to the public—and
to get
their work peer reviewed by actual scientists—is Vancouver
Canada’s General Fusion. The company has raised over $33 million from a variety
of venture funds, Amazon founder and newspaper lover Jeff Bezos, and the
Canadian government, via an organization called Sustainable
Development Technology Canada.
If
a fusion reactor were a matter of aesthetics, the General Fusion approach would
probably take the prize. It takes a sphere filled with circulating liquid
metal, injects plasma into its vortex, and then bangs the sphere with a bunch
of giant electronically controlled steam hammers simultaneously. The hammers
create a spherical acoustic wave that applies incredible pressure inside the
sphere, forcing a fusion reaction, and then the production of heat.
“EVEN
IF THERE WAS ONLY ONE CHANCE IN 3 OR 50/50 OR ONE CHANCE IN 2, THE POTENTIAL
PAYOFF IF THEY SUCCEED IS SO AMAZING, THAT I WAS WILLING TO RISK MY MONEY”
“All
we’re doing is applying modern industrial technologies to actually take a crack
at what has been an existing idea,” says Michael Delage, General Fusion’s vice
president. He says the approach has been around since the 1970s—the only major
missing components were sophisticated enough electronics to control 200 100kg
hammers down to within microseconds. The plan is to create a fleet of
small-scale generators that could produce energy for a small town, instead of
one giant plant that powers a whole region. Of course, first it has to
work.
“If
we’re not pushing the risk envelope a little bit you won’t catch the big
winners,” says Rick Whittaker, vice president and chief technology officer from
Sustainable Technology Development Canada. Whittaker’s agency, which exists to
carry promising technology over the “valley of death” from R&D to
commercialization, supplied around one third of General Fusion’s
investment money. He predicts commercialization right around the corner. “I
place this one in the 2020 timeframe.” The cost could be as low as 3, 4, or 5
cents per Kw/Hr, which is competitive with coal.
Lawrenceville
Plasma Physics, a small New Jersey-based outfit, is going in a more
complicated, but similarly
open route.
As opposed to approaches that use the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium
(DT) as fuel, LPP is attempting to use a hydrogen and boron-based fuel known as
pB11 instead. Although the hydrogen and boron fuse at a much greater
temperature than DT, they don’t make any radioactive particles in the process,
and the energy produced comes directly in the form of electricity as opposed to
heat, which is much more efficient.
“We’re
a tiny operation,” says Derek Shannon from LPP. “We’re ridiculously small
compared to what we’re trying to achieve.” Shannon says there’s just a couple
employees LPP’s New Jersey lab, and another employee offsite. LPP has been
funded to the tune of a few million dollars, but money is tight.
“We’re
only a year away but we have to get the funding for a year up front,” says
Shannon, “instead we’re on a treadmill where we’re not as able to invest as
efficiently as we would like.”
They
have also published a peer-reviewed paper that shows they’ve
created temperatures hot enough for pB11 fusion,
which could lead to cheaper fusion down the road.
So
far, LPP has attracted a number of small-scale individual investors. One of
them is Bob Fitzgerald, who works in business intelligence, but has
always been fascinated by fusion science. “I made my investment out of a sense
of wanting to participate or invest in something that would be exciting to
follow.”
Despite
scant funds, the potential economics of LPP reactors make them more appealing
than other approaches.
“If
you have another clean way to produce [energy] at 2 to 10 cents per Kw/Hr, the
world does not change,” says Brian Wang. In that range, the fusion energy would
be cost competitive with other renewables, as while as fossil fuels. But
it would not be cheap enough to prevent investment in new capacity for dirty
energy. New coal plants and oil refineries would continue to be
built. “Only LPP, if they can get it down to .1 cent per Kw/Hr does the
world change.”
If
LPP is able to develop a reactor that’s a quarter or a fifth the price of dirty
energy, than Fitzgerald thinks anyone in their right mind would switch over
“purely as a market-driven proposition.” It’s a potential market of untold
billions. “Even if there was only one chance in 3 or 50/50 or one chance in 2,
the potential payoff if they succeed is so amazing, that I was willing to risk
my money,” he says.
“IT’S
AN INVESTMENT TO POTENTIALLY BRING SOMETHING ABOUT THAT WOULD REALLY TRANSFORM
THE WORLD.”
There’s
one joke those involved nuclear fusion always tell (I heard it four times in
the course of reporting this article), and it’s not really funny. It’s
something to the effect of “Oh yeah, fusion energy is just twenty years
away…and it always will be.”
Any
yuks attributable to this little mantra must be of the funny-because-it’s- true
variety. Because despite over a half century of research, gigantic,
multi-billion dollar public fusion projects like those at the National Ignition Facility in
California, or the 34-nation International Thermonuclear
Research project in France are still some decades
away from producing energy in a commercial reactor. To wit: despite the
National Ignition Facility’s recent experimental success, a blog
post in Science describes how “the experiment in
question certainly shows important progress, but it is not the breakthrough
everyone is hoping for.”
The
current private market for fusion is both a product and sometimes a victim of
the two major public approaches.
“It
probably took 20 years to get ITER funded and get going,” says Michael Delage
from General Fusion, “but as a consequence of this huge investment…a lot of
those other ideas from the 60s and 70s have received orders of magnitude less
investment if at all.”
ITER's
research focuses on a kind of fusion reactor known as a tokamak, which was
invented in Russia in the late ‘60s. “It blew everything out of the water in
terms of performance at the time,” says Delage, and so naturally it attracted
the most government research money. “It became this political beast,” says
Wang, which had momentum and funding, “even though they started running into
all these trouble re actually delivering on the timeline.” The ITER will be up
and running in 2020, but it will be delivering commercial scale energy until
years later.
Over
a decade ago, there was Department of Energy money for alternative approaches
to fusion known as innovative confinement concepts. Rob Goldston, was deeply
involved in getting workshops together, in part as a way to build and maintain
interest in fusion science. While the workshops were successful, he says “none
of them got to the kind of fusion parameters that the early tokamak got to
which was a little frustrating.” The money has dried up. “Pressure to fund ITER
has gone up frankly,” he says.
“Even
when [the DOE] has an innovative confinement concept solicitation it still
wants those innovative confinement concepts to be something that supports the
tokamak,” says Shannon fromLPP. In other words, public research money is geared
towards supporting big public projects that are decades off, to the detriment
of chancy but promising new approaches.
But
the lack of funding for ideas presented in these workshops played a roll in
pushing some into the private market. “Some of the ideas these companies are
now involved with got discussed and were a part of that process,” says
Goldston.
“It’s
possible that you could get simpler cheaper ways to fusion than the mainline
that we’re doing,” says Goldston, but “I think the odds are not high.” He
thinks it’s more likely that continued work on the DT track will slowly reduce
the cost and size and complexity of reactors. He envisions the long, patient,
not-so-sexy slog of scientific advancement winning the day. “Some of this stuff
may come to fruition,” but “the more likely outcome is that some of this stuff
comes to fruition but in the longer run.”
In
the longer run fusion could still create abundant clean energy, but it won’t do
anything to slow the damage we’re doing now—it’s certainly not going to be the
quick fix techno-optimists have long hoped it would be. The “longer run” view
is not nearly so fun as imagining a handful of scientists in New Jersey on a
shoestring budget, creating a device in the next few years that would solve the
energy problem for the entire planet. It’s a powerful fantasy, just plausible
enough for LPP investor Bob Fitzgerald to indulge.
“It’s
an investment to potentially bring something about that would really transform
the world.”
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