How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion
-
0:01 - 0:03Wow, this is bright.
-
0:03 - 0:06It must use a lot of power.
-
0:06 - 0:08Well, flying you all in here
-
0:08 - 0:10must have cost a bit of energy too.
-
0:10 - 0:13So the whole planet needs a lot of energy,
-
0:13 - 0:16and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel.
-
0:16 - 0:18We've been burning gas.
-
0:18 - 0:19It's been a good run.
-
0:19 - 0:22It got us to where we are, but we have to stop.
-
0:22 - 0:24We can't do that anymore.
-
0:24 - 0:27So we are trying different types of energy now,
-
0:27 - 0:28alternative energy,
-
0:28 - 0:30but it proved quite difficult to find something
-
0:30 - 0:33that's as convenient and as cost-effective
-
0:33 - 0:36as oil, gas and coal.
-
0:36 - 0:40My personal favorite is nuclear energy.
-
0:40 - 0:43Now, it's very energy-dense,
-
0:43 - 0:45it produces solid, reliable power,
-
0:45 - 0:47and it doesn't make any CO2.
-
0:47 - 0:49Now we know of two ways
-
0:49 - 0:54of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion.
-
0:54 - 0:57Now in fission, you take a big nucleus,
-
0:57 - 0:58you break it in part, in two,
-
0:58 - 1:00and it makes lots of energy,
-
1:00 - 1:02and this is how the nuclear reactor today works.
-
1:02 - 1:03It works pretty good.
-
1:03 - 1:05And then there's fusion.
-
1:05 - 1:08Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better.
-
1:08 - 1:10So you take two small nuclei,
-
1:10 - 1:12you put it together, and you make helium,
-
1:12 - 1:13and that's very nice.
-
1:13 - 1:15It makes lots of energy.
-
1:15 - 1:18This is nature's way of producing energy.
-
1:18 - 1:20The sun and all the stars in the universe
-
1:20 - 1:22run on fusion.
-
1:22 - 1:24Now, a fusion plant
-
1:24 - 1:26would actually be quite cost-effective
-
1:26 - 1:28and it also would be quite safe.
-
1:28 - 1:33It only produces short term radioactive waste,
-
1:33 - 1:35and it cannot melt down.
-
1:35 - 1:37Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean.
-
1:37 - 1:39In the ocean, you can extract the fuel
-
1:39 - 1:41for about one thousandth of a cent
-
1:41 - 1:43per kilowatt-hour, so that's very, very cheap.
-
1:43 - 1:47And if the whole planet would run on fusion,
-
1:47 - 1:48we could extract the fuel from the ocean.
-
1:48 - 1:52It would run for billions and billions of years.
-
1:52 - 1:55Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it?
-
1:55 - 1:57Where is it?
-
1:57 - 1:59Well, there's always a bit of a catch.
-
1:59 - 2:02Fusion is really, really hard to do.
-
2:02 - 2:04So the problem is, those two nuclei,
-
2:04 - 2:06they are both positively charged,
-
2:06 - 2:08so they don't want to fuse.
-
2:08 - 2:09They go like this. They go like that.
-
2:09 - 2:10So in order to make them fuse,
-
2:10 - 2:13you have to throw them at
each other with great speed, -
2:13 - 2:13and if they have enough speed,
-
2:13 - 2:15they will go against the repulsion,
-
2:15 - 2:17they will touch, and they will make energy.
-
2:17 - 2:20Now, the particle speed
-
2:20 - 2:22is a measure of the temperature.
-
2:22 - 2:23So the temperature required for fusion
-
2:23 - 2:27is 150 billion degrees C.
-
2:27 - 2:28This is rather warm,
-
2:28 - 2:32and this is why fusion is so hard to do.
-
2:32 - 2:34Now, I caught my little fusion bug
-
2:34 - 2:38when I did my Ph.D. here at the
University of British Columbia, -
2:38 - 2:41and then I got a big job in a laser printer place
-
2:41 - 2:43making printing for the printing industry.
-
2:43 - 2:45I worked there for 10 years,
-
2:45 - 2:47and I got a little bit bored,
-
2:47 - 2:50and then I was 40, and I got a mid-life crisis,
-
2:50 - 2:52you know, the usual thing:
-
2:52 - 2:54Who am I? What should I do?
-
2:54 - 2:57What should I do? What can I do?
-
2:57 - 2:59And then I was looking at my good work,
-
2:59 - 3:01and what I was doing is I was cutting the forests
-
3:01 - 3:02around here in B.C.
-
3:02 - 3:04and burying you, all of you,
-
3:04 - 3:07in millions of tons of junk mail.
-
3:07 - 3:09Now, that was not very satisfactory.
-
3:09 - 3:11So some people buy a Porsche.
-
3:11 - 3:14Others get a mistress.
-
3:14 - 3:16But I've decided to get my bit
-
3:16 - 3:20to solve global warming and make fusion happen.
-
3:20 - 3:22Now, so the first thing I did
-
3:22 - 3:24is I looked into the literature and I see,
-
3:24 - 3:27how does fusion work?
-
3:27 - 3:30So the physicists have been
working on fusion for a while, -
3:30 - 3:31and one of the ways they do it
-
3:31 - 3:34is with something called a tokamak.
-
3:34 - 3:36It's a big ring of magnetic coil,
-
3:36 - 3:38superconducting coil,
-
3:38 - 3:39and it makes a magnetic field
-
3:39 - 3:41in a ring like this,
-
3:41 - 3:42and the hot gas in the middle,
-
3:42 - 3:44which is called a plasma, is trapped.
-
3:44 - 3:46The particles go round and round and round
-
3:46 - 3:48the circle at the wall.
-
3:48 - 3:49Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there
-
3:49 - 3:52to try to cook that to fusion temperature.
-
3:52 - 3:54So this is the inside of one of those donuts,
-
3:54 - 3:55and on the right side you can see
-
3:55 - 3:57the fusion plasma in there.
-
3:57 - 4:00Now, a second way of doing this
-
4:00 - 4:02is by using laser fusion.
-
4:02 - 4:04Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball,
-
4:04 - 4:06you put the fusion fuel in the center,
-
4:06 - 4:09and you zap that with a whole
bunch of laser around it. -
4:09 - 4:11The lasers are very strong, and it squashes
-
4:11 - 4:13the ping pong ball really, really quick.
-
4:13 - 4:15And if you squeeze something hard enough,
-
4:15 - 4:16it gets hotter,
-
4:16 - 4:17and if it gets really, really fast,
-
4:17 - 4:20and they do that in one billionth of a second,
-
4:20 - 4:22it makes enough energy and enough heat
-
4:22 - 4:23to make fusion.
-
4:23 - 4:25So this is the inside of one such machine.
-
4:25 - 4:27You see the laser beam and the pellet
-
4:27 - 4:28in the center.
-
4:28 - 4:31Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere.
-
4:31 - 4:34They always think that the physicists are in their lab
-
4:34 - 4:36and they're working hard, but nothing is happening.
-
4:36 - 4:38That's actually not quite true.
-
4:38 - 4:40This is a curve of the gain in fusion
-
4:40 - 4:42over the last 30 years or so,
-
4:42 - 4:43and you can see that we're making now
-
4:43 - 4:46about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to
-
4:46 - 4:47when we started.
-
4:47 - 4:48That's a pretty good gain.
-
4:48 - 4:50As a matter of fact, it's as fast
-
4:50 - 4:52as the fabled Moore's Law
-
4:52 - 4:54that defined the amount of transistors
-
4:54 - 4:56they can put on a chip.
-
4:56 - 4:59Now, this dot here is called JET,
-
4:59 - 5:00the Joint European Torus.
-
5:00 - 5:03It's a big tokamak donut in Europe,
-
5:03 - 5:06and this machine in 1997
-
5:06 - 5:09produced 16 megawatts of fusion power
-
5:09 - 5:11with 17 megawatts of heat.
-
5:11 - 5:13Now, you say, that's not much use,
-
5:13 - 5:14but it's actually pretty close,
-
5:14 - 5:16considering we can get
-
5:16 - 5:18about 10,000 times more than we started.
-
5:18 - 5:20The second dot here is the NIF.
-
5:20 - 5:23It's the National Ignition Facility.
-
5:23 - 5:25It's a big laser machine in the U.S.,
-
5:25 - 5:27and last month they announced
-
5:27 - 5:28with quite a bit of noise
-
5:28 - 5:31that they had managed to make more fusion energy
-
5:31 - 5:32from the fusion
-
5:32 - 5:35than the energy that they put in
the center of the ping pong ball. -
5:35 - 5:37Now, that's not quite good enough,
-
5:37 - 5:39because the laser to put that energy in
-
5:39 - 5:40was more energy than that,
-
5:40 - 5:42but it was pretty good.
-
5:42 - 5:44Now this is ITER,
-
5:44 - 5:46pronounced in French: EE-tairh.
-
5:46 - 5:49So this is a big collaboration of different countries
-
5:49 - 5:51that are building a huge magnetic donut
-
5:51 - 5:53in the south of France,
-
5:53 - 5:55and this machine, when it's finished,
-
5:55 - 5:58will produce 500 megawatts of fusion power
-
5:58 - 6:00with only 50 megawatts to make it.
-
6:00 - 6:01So this one is the real one.
-
6:01 - 6:02It's going to work.
-
6:02 - 6:04That's the kind of machine that makes energy.
-
6:04 - 6:06Now if you look at the graph, you will notice
-
6:06 - 6:08that those two dots are a little bit
-
6:08 - 6:09on the right of the curve.
-
6:09 - 6:11We kind of have fallen off the progress.
-
6:11 - 6:13Actually, the science to make those machines
-
6:13 - 6:14was really in time
-
6:14 - 6:17to produce fusion during that curve.
-
6:17 - 6:20However, there has been a bit of politics going on,
-
6:20 - 6:22and the will to do it was not there,
-
6:22 - 6:23so it drifted to the right.
-
6:23 - 6:26ITER, for example, could have been built
-
6:26 - 6:27in 2000 or 2005,
-
6:27 - 6:30but because it's a big international collaboration,
-
6:30 - 6:32the politics got in and it delayed it a bit.
-
6:32 - 6:34For example, it took them about three years
-
6:34 - 6:35to decide where to put it.
-
6:35 - 6:38Now, fusion is often criticized
-
6:38 - 6:40for being a little too expensive.
-
6:40 - 6:41Yes, it did cost
-
6:41 - 6:43a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year
-
6:43 - 6:44to make this progress.
-
6:44 - 6:46But you have to compare that to the cost
-
6:46 - 6:47of making Moore's Law.
-
6:47 - 6:49That cost way more than that.
-
6:49 - 6:51The result of Moore's Law
-
6:51 - 6:53is this cell phone here in my pocket.
-
6:53 - 6:55This cell phone, and the Internet behind it,
-
6:55 - 6:57cost about one trillion dollars,
-
6:57 - 7:01just so I can take a selfie
-
7:01 - 7:03and put it on Facebook.
-
7:03 - 7:05Then when my dad sees that,
-
7:05 - 7:08he'll be very proud.
-
7:08 - 7:12We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year
-
7:12 - 7:14in subsidies for oil and gas
-
7:14 - 7:16and renewable energy.
-
7:16 - 7:20Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion.
-
7:20 - 7:23So me, personally, I don't think it's too expensive.
-
7:23 - 7:24I think it's actually been shortchanged,
-
7:24 - 7:27considering it can solve all our energy problems
-
7:27 - 7:29cleanly for the next couple of billions of years.
-
7:29 - 7:32Now I can say that, but I'm a little bit biased,
-
7:32 - 7:34because I started a fusion company
-
7:34 - 7:37and I don't even have a Facebook account.
-
7:37 - 7:42So when I started this fusion company in 2002,
-
7:42 - 7:45I knew I couldn't fight with the big lads.
-
7:45 - 7:46They had much more resources than me.
-
7:46 - 7:49So I decided I would need to find a solution
-
7:49 - 7:50that is cheaper and faster.
-
7:50 - 7:52Now magnetic and laser fusion
-
7:52 - 7:54are pretty good machines.
-
7:54 - 7:55They are awesome pieces of technology,
-
7:55 - 7:57wonderful machines, and they have shown
-
7:57 - 7:59that fusion can be done.
-
7:59 - 8:01However, as a power plant,
-
8:01 - 8:02I don't think they're very good.
-
8:02 - 8:04They're way too big, way too complicated,
-
8:04 - 8:06way too expensive,
-
8:06 - 8:07and also, they don't deal very much
-
8:07 - 8:09with the fusion energy.
-
8:09 - 8:10When you make fusion, the energy comes out
-
8:10 - 8:13as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma.
-
8:13 - 8:15Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine.
-
8:15 - 8:17It damages it.
-
8:17 - 8:19And also, you have to catch
the heat from those neutrons -
8:19 - 8:21and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere,
-
8:21 - 8:22and on those machines,
-
8:22 - 8:25it was all a bit of an afterthought.
-
8:25 - 8:28So I decided that surely there
is a better way of doing that. -
8:28 - 8:29So back to the literature,
-
8:29 - 8:31and I read about the fusion everywhere.
-
8:31 - 8:34One way in particular attracted my attention,
-
8:34 - 8:36and it's called magnetized target fusion,
-
8:36 - 8:39or MTF for short.
-
8:39 - 8:41Now, in MTF, what you want to do
-
8:41 - 8:43is you take a big vat
-
8:43 - 8:45and you fill that with liquid metal,
-
8:45 - 8:47and you spin the liquid metal
-
8:47 - 8:48to open a vortex in the center,
-
8:48 - 8:50a bit like your sink.
-
8:50 - 8:52When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex.
-
8:52 - 8:54And then you have some pistons driven by pressure
-
8:54 - 8:56that goes on the outside,
-
8:56 - 8:57and this compresses the liquid metal
-
8:57 - 8:59around the plasma, and it compresses it,
-
8:59 - 9:01it gets hotter, like a laser,
-
9:01 - 9:02and then it makes fusion.
-
9:02 - 9:03So it's a bit of a mix
-
9:03 - 9:05between a magnetized fusion
-
9:05 - 9:07and the laser fusion.
-
9:07 - 9:09So those have a couple of very good advantages.
-
9:09 - 9:12The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons
-
9:12 - 9:14and no neutrons hit the wall,
-
9:14 - 9:16and therefore there's no damage to the machine.
-
9:16 - 9:17The liquid metal gets hot,
-
9:17 - 9:19so you can pump that in a heat exchanger,
-
9:19 - 9:21make some steam, spin a turbine.
-
9:21 - 9:22So that's a very convenient way of doing
-
9:22 - 9:23this part of the process.
-
9:23 - 9:27And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen
-
9:27 - 9:29comes from steam-powered pistons,
-
9:29 - 9:31which is way cheaper than lasers
-
9:31 - 9:33or superconducting coils.
-
9:33 - 9:34Now, this was all very good
-
9:34 - 9:37except for the problem that it didn't quite work.
-
9:37 - 9:39(Laughter)
-
9:39 - 9:40There's always a catch.
-
9:40 - 9:41So when you compress that,
-
9:41 - 9:43the plasma cools down
-
9:43 - 9:45faster than the compression speed,
-
9:45 - 9:46so you're trying to compress it,
-
9:46 - 9:49but the plasma cooled down and
cooled down and cooled down -
9:49 - 9:51and then it did absolutely nothing.
-
9:51 - 9:53So when I saw that, I said,
well, this is such a shame, -
9:53 - 9:54because it's a very, very good idea.
-
9:54 - 9:57So hopefully I can improve on that.
-
9:57 - 9:58So I thought about it for a minute,
-
9:58 - 10:00and I said, okay, how can we make that work better?
-
10:00 - 10:02So then I thought about impact.
-
10:02 - 10:04What about if we use a big hammer
-
10:04 - 10:06and we swing it and we hit the nail like this,
-
10:06 - 10:08in the place of putting the hammer on the nail
-
10:08 - 10:10and pushing and try to put it in? That won't work.
-
10:10 - 10:12So what the idea is
-
10:12 - 10:14is to use the idea of an impact.
-
10:14 - 10:16So we accelerate the pistons with steam,
-
10:16 - 10:17that takes a little bit of time,
-
10:17 - 10:19but then, bang! you hit the piston,
-
10:19 - 10:22and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly,
-
10:22 - 10:23down instantly to the liquid,
-
10:23 - 10:25and that compresses the plasma much faster.
-
10:25 - 10:28So I decided, okay, this is good, let's make that.
-
10:28 - 10:32So we built this machine in this garage here.
-
10:32 - 10:33We made a small machine
-
10:33 - 10:35that we managed to squeeze
-
10:35 - 10:36a little bit of neutrons out of that,
-
10:36 - 10:39and those are my marketing neutrons,
-
10:39 - 10:40and with those marketing neutrons,
-
10:40 - 10:43then I raised about 50 million dollars,
-
10:43 - 10:45and I hired 65 people. That's my team here.
-
10:45 - 10:47And this is what we want to build.
-
10:47 - 10:49So it's going to be a big machine,
-
10:49 - 10:50about three meters in diameter,
-
10:50 - 10:52liquid lead spinning around,
-
10:52 - 10:53big vortex in the center,
-
10:53 - 10:56put the plasma on the top and on the bottom,
-
10:56 - 10:57piston hits on the side,
-
10:57 - 10:59bang!, it compresses it,
-
10:59 - 11:00and it will make some energy,
-
11:00 - 11:02and the neutron will come out in the liquid metal,
-
11:02 - 11:05going to go in a steam engine and make the turbine,
-
11:05 - 11:06and some of the steam will go back
-
11:06 - 11:07to fire the piston.
-
11:07 - 11:09We're going to run that about one time per second,
-
11:09 - 11:15and it will produce 100 megawatts of electricity.
-
11:15 - 11:16Okay, we also built this injector,
-
11:16 - 11:19so this injector makes the plasma to start with.
-
11:19 - 11:20It makes the plasma at about
-
11:20 - 11:24a lukewarm temperature of three million degrees C.
-
11:24 - 11:27Unfortunately, it doesn't last quite long enough,
-
11:27 - 11:30so we need to extend the life
of the plasma a little bit, -
11:30 - 11:31but last month it got a lot better,
-
11:31 - 11:34so I think we have the plasma compressing now.
-
11:34 - 11:37Then we built a small sphere, about this big,
-
11:37 - 11:3814 pistons around it,
-
11:38 - 11:40and this will compress the liquid.
-
11:40 - 11:42However, plasma is difficult to compress.
-
11:42 - 11:43When you compress it,
-
11:43 - 11:46it tends to go a little bit crooked like that,
-
11:46 - 11:47so you need the timing of the piston
-
11:47 - 11:48to be very good,
-
11:48 - 11:51and for that we use several control systems,
-
11:51 - 11:53which was not possible in 1970,
-
11:53 - 11:55but we now can do that
-
11:55 - 11:58with nice, new electronics.
-
11:58 - 12:01So finally, most people think that fusion
-
12:01 - 12:03is in the future and will never happen,
-
12:03 - 12:06but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close.
-
12:06 - 12:07We are almost there.
-
12:07 - 12:10The big labs have shown that fusion is doable,
-
12:10 - 12:12and now there are small companies
that are thinking about that, -
12:12 - 12:14and they say, it's not that it cannot be done,
-
12:14 - 12:16but it's how to make it cost-effectively.
-
12:16 - 12:18General Fusion is one of those small companies,
-
12:18 - 12:22and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone,
-
12:22 - 12:23will crack that nut,
-
12:23 - 12:25and perhaps it will be General Fusion.
-
12:25 - 12:26Thank you very much.
-
12:26 - 12:31(Applause)
- Title:
- How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion
- Speaker:
- Michel Laberge
- Description:
-
Our energy future depends on nuclear fusion, says Michel Laberge. The plasma physicist runs a small company with a big idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that could produce clean, cheap energy. His secret recipe? High speeds, scorching temperatures and crushing pressure. In this hopeful talk, he explains how nuclear fusion might be just around the corner.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 12:50
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Madeleine Aronson edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Madeleine Aronson edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Joseph Geni edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion | ||
Amara Bot edited English subtitles for How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion |