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