Speaker 1: So, like I said, the reactors pretty gold. So it
Speaker 1: was commissioned inn and it was really commissioned because of
Speaker 1: a scientist whose name was Glenn Seaboor. A few weeks
Speaker 1: ago I made a trip to oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Speaker 1: It's an eastern Tennessee nestled in beautiful green hills and
Speaker 1: valleys down a long road flanked by forest. Some of
Speaker 1: the things we're working on will not occur during my career.
Speaker 1: How does that make you feel? It feels great. This
Speaker 1: is Ellen Eisenhower. He's a former nuclear submarine officer and
Speaker 1: now helps direct nuclear science research at the lab. The
Speaker 1: research done here helped develop the atomic bomb, and its
Speaker 1: scientists are still at it today, working toward a vision
Speaker 1: that's a little bit hard to imagine. Right now. You've
Speaker 1: probably heard the story the cathedral building story before. It's
Speaker 1: about two workers laying brick on a cathedral that they'll
Speaker 1: never see completed in their lifetimes. It's hard, repetitive work,
Speaker 1: but one of them is always cheerful, saying that one day, thousands,
Speaker 1: even millions of people will use what he's building today,
Speaker 1: and he could get the vision for what even though
Speaker 1: he knew he'd never see it he knew what he
Speaker 1: was enabling for the future. Alan and his peers have
Speaker 1: to think like this because what they're working on will
Speaker 1: most likely never be fully realized in their careers, even
Speaker 1: in their lifetimes, and when their cathedral is finally completed,
Speaker 1: it will reshape the global economy and transform the power
Speaker 1: dynamic between countries. And that is not an understatement. These
Speaker 1: scientists are working on a new source for electricity. They're
Speaker 1: trying to achieve nuclear fusion, essentially recreating the Sun on Earth.
Speaker 1: M Hi, I'm Akito and I'm Jane caw and this
Speaker 1: week on Decrypted work exploring just how close we are
Speaker 1: to realizing the silver bullet for clean, cheap, abundant energy.
Speaker 1: While nuclear power plants currently work by splitting atoms apart,
Speaker 1: this is called nuclear fission, this other type of nuclear
Speaker 1: energy works by smashing particles together, and that is called
Speaker 1: nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion has been a particularly hard nut
Speaker 1: to crack. After decades of research, scientists are still years
Speaker 1: away from building a commercially viable power plant, but scientists
Speaker 1: say they're on the edge of a major breakthrough if
Speaker 1: they can find a way to make a nuclear fusion
Speaker 1: reaction take place. In a sustainable, controlled environment, the world's
Speaker 1: energy needs would be taken care of, possibly forever. Stay
Speaker 1: with us, okay, let's we're all signed in. I do.
Speaker 1: We do have a couple of rules. Actually, I think
Speaker 1: we can take photos today. So you wanted to take
Speaker 1: a picture. Back at oak Ridge National Lab, I caught
Speaker 1: up with Ned southof who oversees a big fusion project.
Speaker 1: This this is not just you know, it's more efficient.
Speaker 1: You know, this is ten million times more efficient. Okay,
Speaker 1: So if we could make it work, it would change
Speaker 1: the world that has piercing gray blue eyes and a
Speaker 1: mop of floppy silver white hair. I spent almost three
Speaker 1: hours with him and felt like we could have talked
Speaker 1: for twenty more. Ned's in his sixties and has been
Speaker 1: working on nuclear fusion since the nineteen seventies. He's still
Speaker 1: an evangelist when it comes to the potential that this
Speaker 1: technology has to solve the world's ever grow energy needs.
Speaker 1: In sixteen, the world used more than thirty billion barrels
Speaker 1: of oil, and more than eight of energy used for
Speaker 1: things like powering homes came from fossil fuels, which are coal, oil,
Speaker 1: and natural gas. Not only are these finite resources, but
Speaker 1: The need for countries to maintain a steady supply has
Speaker 1: sparked recessions, riots, and even wars around the world. Goddamn government,
Speaker 1: he's gonna police this goddamn police situation. I will not
Speaker 1: take the plan for this thing. I will not take
Speaker 1: the crap and the harassment from these customers. Now let
Speaker 1: him police it or stop telling gas anger and bewilderment
Speaker 1: are growing. Is more and more Americans cope with gasoline
Speaker 1: lines and empty pumps. Let himself experienced the turmoil the
Speaker 1: follow the energy crisis of the nineteen seventies. I grew
Speaker 1: up in the mid seventies when they add gas lines
Speaker 1: because of the oil embargo. If we can solve this
Speaker 1: challenging scientific problem, we can solve the world's energy problem forever.
Speaker 1: That's how Ned turns to nuclear fusion, and decades later
Speaker 1: he's still a true believer. So you go by a
Speaker 1: typical power point. Did you know that to keep it
Speaker 1: powered and cold takes roughly railroad cars of coal every
Speaker 1: day to produce the same energy by fusion? Ready, three
Speaker 1: pounds of tradium and two pounds of deuterium. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a game change. Tridium deuterium. These are all parts of
Speaker 1: nuclear fusion that will explain in just a moment. For now,
Speaker 1: when that's trying to say is that if scientists can
Speaker 1: make nuclear fusion work, will have found a source of
Speaker 1: energy that comes with no carbon emissions, much less radioactive
Speaker 1: waste than the nuclear reactors we have today, and most
Speaker 1: importan hortuntly and almost unlimited supply of raw materials that
Speaker 1: can be accessed basically anywhere. Okay, so let's explain how
Speaker 1: it works. First, a quick review of the periodic table.
Speaker 1: Remember that from high school chemistry, the first element is hydrogen.
Speaker 1: It's the latest, simplest element in the universe, with one proton,
Speaker 1: one electron, and usually one neutron. Hydrogen is also the
Speaker 1: most abundant element in the universe, so unlike crude oil,
Speaker 1: we won't be running out of it anytime soon. Protons
Speaker 1: have a positive charge, electrons a corresponding negative charge, and
Speaker 1: neutrons are well neutral. Protons and neutrons usually sit together
Speaker 1: in the center of an atom, while electrons fly around
Speaker 1: orbiting them. I mean, as you know, the Sun million
Speaker 1: miles away produces power by transforming hydrogen into helium. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: we want to do the same thing. Down here on Earth.
Speaker 1: Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars, including our own Sun,
Speaker 1: where hydrogen atoms are placed under extreme heat and pressure
Speaker 1: two seventy four thousand times hotter than the human body
Speaker 1: and pressure that's like being crushed under a mountain. These
Speaker 1: conditions allows something extraordinary to happen. Normally, atoms would never
Speaker 1: come close enough to fuse together right, but under the
Speaker 1: intense conditions at the center of the Sun, the atomic
Speaker 1: structure of the hydrogen starts to break down. The gas
Speaker 1: turns into something called plasma, which enables the particles to
Speaker 1: move faster and more freely because the positive particles, which
Speaker 1: are the nuclei, things like deuterium and tridium, which normally
Speaker 1: repel each other because they're both positive, can now get
Speaker 1: close enough together, like ten to the minus twelve centimeters
Speaker 1: that's a millions of a millions of a centimeter together,
Speaker 1: Suddenly they stick. Deuterium and tritium, by the way, are
Speaker 1: what's known as heavy hydrogen, basically hydrogen with extra neutrons.
Speaker 1: They're the raw materials used in fusion reactions and can
Speaker 1: be sucked out of sea water or produced in nuclear reactors,
Speaker 1: and then they form this complene nucleus for a very
Speaker 1: very short period of time, and then they break apart.
Speaker 1: When that happens, a whole lot of energy is released,
Speaker 1: mostly carried by the extra neutrons, super hot moving super quickly.
Speaker 1: That energy is what we'd harness to make electricity. So
Speaker 1: it's nuclear fusion reactions happening inside the Sun that make
Speaker 1: it so hot. But those kinds of extreme conditions don't
Speaker 1: exist anywhere on the surface of the Earth, not even
Speaker 1: inside the molten lava of a volcano. The Sun's huge
Speaker 1: mass creates a really strong gravitational force that keeps the
Speaker 1: hot hydrogen from escaping. The Sun's gravity is twenty eight
Speaker 1: times stronger than the Earth's. That means if you weighed
Speaker 1: a hundred pounds, you'd feel like you weighed eight hundred
Speaker 1: pounds on the Sun. This is a huge challenge for scientists.
Speaker 1: How do you build a power plant that can resist
Speaker 1: the pressure and the heat the reactor needs for these
Speaker 1: fusions to start taking place On Earth, it needs to
Speaker 1: be more than a hundred million degrees celsius inside the
Speaker 1: reactor for fusion to occur, which is easier said than done.
Speaker 1: Plasma is a very complex nonlinear system, and then we
Speaker 1: had to learn how to understand it, and I'll control
Speaker 1: how to control it. And so it took us a
Speaker 1: few decades to really understand how do you control the plasma.
Speaker 1: One of the most ostensively researched ways is using huge
Speaker 1: and powerful magnets laid out in an arrangement called the tocomac.
Speaker 1: Imagine this. The hydrogen plasma that's the super hot gas,
Speaker 1: is contained within electro magnetic coils shaped like a donut.
Speaker 1: More magnets surround the doughnut to give more control. The
Speaker 1: leading configuration, the best demonstrated, the one that has the
Speaker 1: most scientific and engineering basis, is the totomac. To give
Speaker 1: you one example, the biggest fusion device functioning in Europe
Speaker 1: right now, known as the jet, has a magnetic field
Speaker 1: ten thousand times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. The
Speaker 1: larger the tocomac, the more powerful the magnetic fields, the
Speaker 1: easier it is to get a fusion reaction going. In
Speaker 1: the last sixty plus years, the world has built more
Speaker 1: than two hundred of these machines, forty five or so
Speaker 1: that are still functioning, but no experiment has been able
Speaker 1: to sustain a fusion reaction long enough to produce more
Speaker 1: energy than was required to get it going, which is
Speaker 1: needed if we ever want to use fusion to generate electricity.
Speaker 1: The exciting thing though, with how far science has progressed
Speaker 1: and with today's technology, we're on the cusp of making
Speaker 1: it happen. The scientific principles have been demonstrated and it's
Speaker 1: a matter now of raising it to industrial scale. This
Speaker 1: is reality. But of course moving this technology out of
Speaker 1: the lab and raising it to an industrial scale involves
Speaker 1: huge challenges. What those are and how the industry could
Speaker 1: overcome them is coming up next. The story really starts
Speaker 1: almost eighty years ago in the early nineties. Oakridge was
Speaker 1: a secret town owned and operated by the US government.
Speaker 1: It was a big part of the Manhattan Project. The
Speaker 1: Manhattan Project was created in the middle of World War
Speaker 1: Two to develop the ability to use nuclear fission as
Speaker 1: a weapon. Okay, Germans discovered fish and right, we're worried
Speaker 1: about this. That's Alison Hummel, who took me on a
Speaker 1: tour of the historical sites at the oak Ridge Lab.
Speaker 1: Back in scientists feared what the Germans could do with
Speaker 1: the technology to split atoms. They even convinced a reluctant
Speaker 1: star colleague to write a letter to the President about
Speaker 1: the possibility fission reactions posed. This new phenomenon would also
Speaker 1: lead to the construction of bombs. And it is conceivable,
Speaker 1: though much less certain, that extremely powerful bombs of this
Speaker 1: type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type,
Speaker 1: carried by a boat and exploded into port, might very
Speaker 1: well destroy the whole port, together with some of the
Speaker 1: surrounding territory. Yours truly, Albert Einstein. By the end of
Speaker 1: the war, there were eight people working here um, and
Speaker 1: that was from the pretty much zero population in December
Speaker 1: of nineteen. Their work was so secret that most of
Speaker 1: them didn't even know what they were working on. I
Speaker 1: have just returned from the White House where it has
Speaker 1: just been announced that the United States is now using
Speaker 1: an atomic bomb, the most powerful explosive yet. Then the
Speaker 1: US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and the residents
Speaker 1: finally learned the truth of what they were doing. Oakridge
Speaker 1: had actually delivered the enriched uranium used in the first bomb.
Speaker 1: The world will note that the first atomic bomb was
Speaker 1: dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. We run the race
Speaker 1: of discovery against the German After the war, the facility
Speaker 1: has eventually became one part civilian research lab, which is
Speaker 1: today's Oakridge National Lab, and one part military operations. Today
Speaker 1: Oakridge is home to a group of scientists man is
Speaker 1: by ned working on building the world's biggest pokomac, the
Speaker 1: magnetic Donut reactor that we talked about earlier. They're the
Speaker 1: U S arm of a multibillion dollar multidecade joint venture
Speaker 1: in nuclear fusion between seven entities in the world, including
Speaker 1: the US, European Union, China, and Russia. It's called the
Speaker 1: International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or EATER for short. This thing
Speaker 1: is expensive, estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars
Speaker 1: to complete. It's too much and too complex for any
Speaker 1: one country, so each of the seven participants has pledged
Speaker 1: to fund and build portions of it. There is ever
Speaker 1: growing confidence that either when operated, will achieve the plasma
Speaker 1: that we predict, but it won't be completed until if
Speaker 1: things go according to plan. That's when scientists are aiming
Speaker 1: to get the reactor up and running and forming its
Speaker 1: first fusion reactions. But while we're trying to focus on
Speaker 1: RACK right now is to have a plasma where we
Speaker 1: inject fifty million wants of power and we get out
Speaker 1: million wats of fusion power. Most power plants that exist
Speaker 1: today work the same way that they did a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. You heat water to make steam, and the
Speaker 1: steam turns turbines, which generates electricity. The difference is in
Speaker 1: what kind of fuel you're using to heat the water.
Speaker 1: That fuel source it can be coal, oil, natural gas,
Speaker 1: nuclear fission reactors, and hopefully one day, a nuclear fusion reactor.
Speaker 1: When that happens, scientists believe that we will have found
Speaker 1: the ultimate way to generate energy. That thinks that at
Speaker 1: this point nuclear fusion is all but a sure thing.
Speaker 1: It will work, we just have to build it, and
Speaker 1: a lot of international scientists are pinning their hopes on
Speaker 1: the EATER project. While there are maybe faster and cheaper
Speaker 1: paths to fusion energy, Ned says that this is the
Speaker 1: least risky. EATER is on the high reliability but high
Speaker 1: cost end of the spectrum. Okay, but there's one huge problem.
Speaker 1: At this moment. The fusion program was limited by money.
Speaker 1: It suffers from the same same thing that all advanced
Speaker 1: energy research suffers. Advanced energy research is not a priority.
Speaker 1: Ned tells me that when you look at adjusted dollars.
Speaker 1: US funding for fusion peeked in the late seventies and
Speaker 1: early eighties after the oil shocks. Well I was working
Speaker 1: on on a series of devices. I was actually at
Speaker 1: that point running US a collaboration on a variety of
Speaker 1: devices around the world, and what we saw was that
Speaker 1: we had many, many ideas that we could not afford
Speaker 1: to follow up on. It doesn't help that most of
Speaker 1: us non scientists don't really understand how nuclear technology works.
Speaker 1: Throughout history, there have been some major accidents involving nuclear
Speaker 1: reactor meltdowns. A year after these reactors at the Fukushima
Speaker 1: Nuclear plant exploded in a triple meltdown, reporters were reminded
Speaker 1: this is still one of the most hazardous places on
Speaker 1: the plants. One of the atomic reactors at the Churnibyl
Speaker 1: Atomic Power plant in the city of Kiev was damaged
Speaker 1: and there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured
Speaker 1: and may have died. Experts tonight say that cloud of
Speaker 1: radiation is now dissipating over the North Atlantic and poses
Speaker 1: no further threat to anyone, But as the Soviets treat
Speaker 1: an unknown number of casualties, there's no way to say
Speaker 1: how much lasting damage that cloud may have already caused.
Speaker 1: Dean Reynolds, ABC News London. It's important to note that
Speaker 1: the big nuclear disasters like Fukushima or churnobil involved a
Speaker 1: different process altogether, where atoms are being split apart inside
Speaker 1: the reactor instead of being fused together. That's the difference
Speaker 1: between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Here's Alan again, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hyperbole about it that has played
Speaker 1: out over the years that we have not been effective
Speaker 1: at at countering, which is unfortunate. The damage to public
Speaker 1: perception is hard to erase, and it doesn't help nuclear's
Speaker 1: case that the US still has plenty of hydrocarbons, which
Speaker 1: is oil, gas and coal. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: the US Eater Project was hoping to get a hundred
Speaker 1: sixty million dollars in funding for the following year. I
Speaker 1: was actually driving to Florida for Christmas vacations and pulled
Speaker 1: up in the driveway of my parents house and I
Speaker 1: got a phone call and it was they just passed
Speaker 1: in appropriation for ten point six instead of one sixty.
Speaker 1: Ned got less than ten of the funding that they
Speaker 1: had asked for. The team had to toss the original
Speaker 1: plan out the window. There was some restructuring. The main
Speaker 1: thing was to not spend all the money they had
Speaker 1: or it was game over. So that particular year, the
Speaker 1: strategy was lived to fight the battle the next year.
Speaker 1: We knew we couldn't do what we intended to do
Speaker 1: that year, but we had to try to preserve the
Speaker 1: capability to rebound. That was smack dab in the middle
Speaker 1: of the global financial crisis. Other countries also pulled back funding.
Speaker 1: Ned told me, that's at Eaters timeline back five years.
Speaker 1: In November of last year, Ned and his team presented
Speaker 1: a budget that laid out how much money they would
Speaker 1: need to complete Eaters construction and achieved the first fusion
Speaker 1: reaction in At this point, the US has already spent
Speaker 1: about a billion dollars, with more than three billion dollars
Speaker 1: to go to see it through. For seventeen, Ned requested
Speaker 1: a hundred million dollars. You know, we just got a
Speaker 1: seventeen budget, and they just passed a budget in April, okay,
Speaker 1: and it was complicated. Essentially, they were given fifty million dollars,
Speaker 1: but the Department of Energy has the options at another
Speaker 1: fifty million. Today we've not received the second fifty. Okay,
Speaker 1: so so we're positioning ourselves to survive at the fifty
Speaker 1: level for fiscal year eighteen. The situation is also dire.
Speaker 1: President Trump, who made fossil fuels and especially cole a
Speaker 1: focus of his administration, has only approved about half of
Speaker 1: what NET has requested, and now we're being impacted because
Speaker 1: we're not getting the money, and so we are now
Speaker 1: struggling to try to stay with Getting us here has
Speaker 1: taken decades. Every element we just described took years of
Speaker 1: dedicated research to just understand, and then many more years
Speaker 1: to move past the theory and come up with actual
Speaker 1: experiment results. Just getting Eater up and running won't be
Speaker 1: enough to get us to the stage where we can
Speaker 1: use fusion to generate electricity. The real question is, in
Speaker 1: the next generation and a frill fusion reactor, what would
Speaker 1: you build it out? And if you were to use
Speaker 1: the search of things we're using on Eater, it would
Speaker 1: turn to a powder. You know, when Ned says it
Speaker 1: would turn into powder, he means that the materials that
Speaker 1: exists today can't handle the kinds of harsh conditions fusion
Speaker 1: requires over a long period of time. But a power
Speaker 1: plant that uses usion will need to be running the
Speaker 1: reactions constantly and for many months at a time to
Speaker 1: make economic sense. You would chew up the material completely
Speaker 1: and suddenly if you don't do anything about it. You
Speaker 1: know you can reach the lifetime of thecal material within
Speaker 1: a few days to a week. That's you're gonna wrap
Speaker 1: a plasma. Physicist at oak Ridge National Lab, he and
Speaker 1: Allen are working on a bunch of other things that
Speaker 1: will be necessary to make a commercial fusion power plant work.
Speaker 1: If you're going to have a successful power plant, it's
Speaker 1: more than this plasma. You have to be able to
Speaker 1: fuel it, you have to be able to extract the
Speaker 1: heat from it. You have to have materials that can
Speaker 1: withstand that type of environment. The best way is to
Speaker 1: do start this development now instead of waiting until Eater
Speaker 1: has produced its burning plasma and then we start only
Speaker 1: developing the materials. We know that we have to develop
Speaker 1: new maters. Innovating on these elements all require funding and
Speaker 1: even new facilities, But like NED, they're also held back
Speaker 1: by money. Although we build more community beyond it, is
Speaker 1: it enough. You know, under the budget constraints, I do
Speaker 1: not want to make a firm prediction, because it's also
Speaker 1: out of my hands. We are ready, I would say,
Speaker 1: we are ready, I hope so that the people in
Speaker 1: Washington already to for now. All the uncertainty around funding,
Speaker 1: combined with all the false starts throughout history, has made
Speaker 1: most of these scientists hesitant to offer a timeline for
Speaker 1: when the fusion power plant will be a reality. I
Speaker 1: won't speculate on the exact time frame because many haven't.
Speaker 1: Many have been wrong over and over again. Right, only
Speaker 1: Ned would entertain that question. Looking at either if all
Speaker 1: goes to plan, he estimates that we might get a
Speaker 1: working fusion power plant around by which point Ned would
Speaker 1: be a hundred and one years old. I I truly hope.
Speaker 1: I mean I realized this that this endeavored to make
Speaker 1: fusion energy a reality takes many generations. And I'm not
Speaker 1: somebody who is discouraged by it. Um and some people
Speaker 1: make fun of them. Maybe it's because I come from
Speaker 1: Europe and I come from Cologne, and the Cologne Cathedra
Speaker 1: was built over eight hundred years, you know, so so
Speaker 1: you know it is it is worth while to wait
Speaker 1: for it. And that's it for this week's episode of
Speaker 1: The Did Thanks for listening. We want to know what
Speaker 1: you think of this episode. Record a voice message and
Speaker 1: send it to Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. Also, you
Speaker 1: can find me on Twitter at jingle bells cow and
Speaker 1: I've met aki Eto seven. If you haven't already subscribed
Speaker 1: to our show wherever you get your podcasts, and while
Speaker 1: you're there, please leave us a rating and a review.
Speaker 1: This really helps more listeners find our show. This episode
Speaker 1: was produced by Pia Ga Kari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Henrikson.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Nico Grant and Isabel Gottlieb for their help
Speaker 1: with the show. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcast.
Speaker 1: We'll see you next week.