The Nuclear Tech Breakthrough That Could Make Oil Obsolete

is Ellen Eisenhower. He's a former nuclear submarine officer and now helps direct nuclear science research at the lab. The research done here helped develop the atomic bomb, and its scientists are still at it today, working toward a vision that's a little bit hard to imagine. Right now. You've probably heard the story the cathedral building story before. It's about two workers laying brick on a cathedral that they'll

never see completed in their lifetimes. It's hard, repetitive work, but one of them is always cheerful, saying that one day, thousands, even millions of people will use what he's building today, and he could get the vision for what even though he knew he'd never see it he knew what he

was enabling for the future. Alan and his peers have to think like this because what they're working on will most likely never be fully realized in their careers, even in their lifetimes, and when their cathedral is finally completed, it will reshape the global economy and transform the power dynamic between countries. And that is not an understatement. These scientists are working on a new source for electricity. They're trying to achieve nuclear fusion, essentially recreating the Sun on Earth.

M Hi, I'm Akito and I'm Jane caw and this week on Decrypted work exploring just how close we are to realizing the silver bullet for clean, cheap, abundant energy. While nuclear power plants currently work by splitting atoms apart, this is called nuclear fission, this other type of nuclear energy works by smashing particles together, and that is called nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion has been a particularly hard nut

to crack. After decades of research, scientists are still years away from building a commercially viable power plant, but scientists say they're on the edge of a major breakthrough if they can find a way to make a nuclear fusion reaction take place. In a sustainable, controlled environment, the world's energy needs would be taken care of, possibly forever. Stay with us, okay, let's we're all signed in. I do. We do have a couple of rules. Actually, I think

we can take photos today. So you wanted to take a picture. Back at oak Ridge National Lab, I caught up with Ned southof who oversees a big fusion project. This this is not just you know, it's more efficient. You know, this is ten million times more efficient. Okay, So if we could make it work, it would change the world that has piercing gray blue eyes and a mop of floppy silver white hair. I spent almost three hours with him and felt like we could have talked

for twenty more. Ned's in his sixties and has been working on nuclear fusion since the nineteen seventies. He's still an evangelist when it comes to the potential that this technology has to solve the world's ever grow energy needs. In sixteen, the world used more than thirty billion barrels of oil, and more than eight of energy used for things like powering homes came from fossil fuels, which are coal, oil,

and natural gas. Not only are these finite resources, but The need for countries to maintain a steady supply has sparked recessions, riots, and even wars around the world. Goddamn government, he's gonna police this goddamn police situation. I will not take the plan for this thing. I will not take the crap and the harassment from these customers. Now let him police it or stop telling gas anger and bewilderment are growing. Is more and more Americans cope with gasoline

lines and empty pumps. Let himself experienced the turmoil the follow the energy crisis of the nineteen seventies. I grew up in the mid seventies when they add gas lines because of the oil embargo. If we can solve this challenging scientific problem, we can solve the world's energy problem forever. That's how Ned turns to nuclear fusion, and decades later he's still a true believer. So you go by a

typical power point. Did you know that to keep it powered and cold takes roughly railroad cars of coal every day to produce the same energy by fusion? Ready, three pounds of tradium and two pounds of deuterium. Yeah, that's a game change. Tridium deuterium. These are all parts of

nuclear fusion that will explain in just a moment. For now, when that's trying to say is that if scientists can make nuclear fusion work, will have found a source of energy that comes with no carbon emissions, much less radioactive waste than the nuclear reactors we have today, and most importan hortuntly and almost unlimited supply of raw materials that can be accessed basically anywhere. Okay, so let's explain how it works. First, a quick review of the periodic table.

Remember that from high school chemistry, the first element is hydrogen. It's the latest, simplest element in the universe, with one proton, one electron, and usually one neutron. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element in the universe, so unlike crude oil, we won't be running out of it anytime soon. Protons have a positive charge, electrons a corresponding negative charge, and

neutrons are well neutral. Protons and neutrons usually sit together in the center of an atom, while electrons fly around orbiting them. I mean, as you know, the Sun million miles away produces power by transforming hydrogen into helium. Okay, well, we want to do the same thing. Down here on Earth. Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars, including our own Sun, where hydrogen atoms are placed under extreme heat and pressure two seventy four thousand times hotter than the human body

and pressure that's like being crushed under a mountain. These conditions allows something extraordinary to happen. Normally, atoms would never come close enough to fuse together right, but under the intense conditions at the center of the Sun, the atomic

structure of the hydrogen starts to break down. The gas turns into something called plasma, which enables the particles to move faster and more freely because the positive particles, which are the nuclei, things like deuterium and tridium, which normally repel each other because they're both positive, can now get close enough together, like ten to the minus twelve centimeters that's a millions of a millions of a centimeter together,

Suddenly they stick. Deuterium and tritium, by the way, are what's known as heavy hydrogen, basically hydrogen with extra neutrons. They're the raw materials used in fusion reactions and can be sucked out of sea water or produced in nuclear reactors, and then they form this complene nucleus for a very very short period of time, and then they break apart. When that happens, a whole lot of energy is released, mostly carried by the extra neutrons, super hot moving super quickly.

That energy is what we'd harness to make electricity. So it's nuclear fusion reactions happening inside the Sun that make it so hot. But those kinds of extreme conditions don't exist anywhere on the surface of the Earth, not even inside the molten lava of a volcano. The Sun's huge mass creates a really strong gravitational force that keeps the hot hydrogen from escaping. The Sun's gravity is twenty eight

times stronger than the Earth's. That means if you weighed a hundred pounds, you'd feel like you weighed eight hundred pounds on the Sun. This is a huge challenge for scientists. How do you build a power plant that can resist the pressure and the heat the reactor needs for these fusions to start taking place On Earth, it needs to be more than a hundred million degrees celsius inside the reactor for fusion to occur, which is easier said than done.

Plasma is a very complex nonlinear system, and then we had to learn how to understand it, and I'll control how to control it. And so it took us a few decades to really understand how do you control the plasma. One of the most ostensively researched ways is using huge and powerful magnets laid out in an arrangement called the tocomac. Imagine this. The hydrogen plasma that's the super hot gas, is contained within electro magnetic coils shaped like a donut.

More magnets surround the doughnut to give more control. The leading configuration, the best demonstrated, the one that has the most scientific and engineering basis, is the totomac. To give you one example, the biggest fusion device functioning in Europe right now, known as the jet, has a magnetic field ten thousand times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. The larger the tocomac, the more powerful the magnetic fields, the

easier it is to get a fusion reaction going. In the last sixty plus years, the world has built more than two hundred of these machines, forty five or so that are still functioning, but no experiment has been able to sustain a fusion reaction long enough to produce more energy than was required to get it going, which is needed if we ever want to use fusion to generate electricity.

The exciting thing though, with how far science has progressed and with today's technology, we're on the cusp of making it happen. The scientific principles have been demonstrated and it's a matter now of raising it to industrial scale. This is reality. But of course moving this technology out of the lab and raising it to an industrial scale involves huge challenges. What those are and how the industry could overcome them is coming up next. The story really starts

almost eighty years ago in the early nineties. Oakridge was a secret town owned and operated by the US government. It was a big part of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was created in the middle of World War Two to develop the ability to use nuclear fission as a weapon. Okay, Germans discovered fish and right, we're worried about this. That's Alison Hummel, who took me on a tour of the historical sites at the oak Ridge Lab. Back in scientists feared what the Germans could do with

the technology to split atoms. They even convinced a reluctant star colleague to write a letter to the President about the possibility fission reactions posed. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs. And it is conceivable, though much less certain, that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded into port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the

surrounding territory. Yours truly, Albert Einstein. By the end of the war, there were eight people working here um, and that was from the pretty much zero population in December of nineteen. Their work was so secret that most of them didn't even know what they were working on. I have just returned from the White House where it has just been announced that the United States is now using

an atomic bomb, the most powerful explosive yet. Then the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and the residents finally learned the truth of what they were doing. Oakridge had actually delivered the enriched uranium used in the first bomb. The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. We run the race of discovery against the German After the war, the facility has eventually became one part civilian research lab, which is

today's Oakridge National Lab, and one part military operations. Today Oakridge is home to a group of scientists man is by ned working on building the world's biggest pokomac, the magnetic Donut reactor that we talked about earlier. They're the U S arm of a multibillion dollar multidecade joint venture in nuclear fusion between seven entities in the world, including the US, European Union, China, and Russia. It's called the

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or EATER for short. This thing is expensive, estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars to complete. It's too much and too complex for any one country, so each of the seven participants has pledged to fund and build portions of it. There is ever growing confidence that either when operated, will achieve the plasma that we predict, but it won't be completed until if

things go according to plan. That's when scientists are aiming to get the reactor up and running and forming its first fusion reactions. But while we're trying to focus on RACK right now is to have a plasma where we inject fifty million wants of power and we get out million wats of fusion power. Most power plants that exist today work the same way that they did a hundred years ago. You heat water to make steam, and the

steam turns turbines, which generates electricity. The difference is in what kind of fuel you're using to heat the water. That fuel source it can be coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear fission reactors, and hopefully one day, a nuclear fusion reactor. When that happens, scientists believe that we will have found the ultimate way to generate energy. That thinks that at this point nuclear fusion is all but a sure thing.

It will work, we just have to build it, and a lot of international scientists are pinning their hopes on the EATER project. While there are maybe faster and cheaper paths to fusion energy, Ned says that this is the least risky. EATER is on the high reliability but high cost end of the spectrum. Okay, but there's one huge problem. At this moment. The fusion program was limited by money. It suffers from the same same thing that all advanced

energy research suffers. Advanced energy research is not a priority. Ned tells me that when you look at adjusted dollars. US funding for fusion peeked in the late seventies and early eighties after the oil shocks. Well I was working on on a series of devices. I was actually at that point running US a collaboration on a variety of devices around the world, and what we saw was that we had many, many ideas that we could not afford

to follow up on. It doesn't help that most of us non scientists don't really understand how nuclear technology works. Throughout history, there have been some major accidents involving nuclear reactor meltdowns. A year after these reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear plant exploded in a triple meltdown, reporters were reminded this is still one of the most hazardous places on

the plants. One of the atomic reactors at the Churnibyl Atomic Power plant in the city of Kiev was damaged and there is speculation in Moscow that people were injured and may have died. Experts tonight say that cloud of radiation is now dissipating over the North Atlantic and poses no further threat to anyone, But as the Soviets treat an unknown number of casualties, there's no way to say how much lasting damage that cloud may have already caused.

Dean Reynolds, ABC News London. It's important to note that the big nuclear disasters like Fukushima or churnobil involved a different process altogether, where atoms are being split apart inside the reactor instead of being fused together. That's the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Here's Alan again, and there's a lot of hyperbole about it that has played out over the years that we have not been effective

at at countering, which is unfortunate. The damage to public perception is hard to erase, and it doesn't help nuclear's case that the US still has plenty of hydrocarbons, which is oil, gas and coal. In two thousand and eight, the US Eater Project was hoping to get a hundred

sixty million dollars in funding for the following year. I was actually driving to Florida for Christmas vacations and pulled up in the driveway of my parents house and I got a phone call and it was they just passed in appropriation for ten point six instead of one sixty. Ned got less than ten of the funding that they had asked for. The team had to toss the original plan out the window. There was some restructuring. The main thing was to not spend all the money they had

or it was game over. So that particular year, the strategy was lived to fight the battle the next year. We knew we couldn't do what we intended to do that year, but we had to try to preserve the capability to rebound. That was smack dab in the middle of the global financial crisis. Other countries also pulled back funding. Ned told me, that's at Eaters timeline back five years.

In November of last year, Ned and his team presented a budget that laid out how much money they would need to complete Eaters construction and achieved the first fusion reaction in At this point, the US has already spent about a billion dollars, with more than three billion dollars to go to see it through. For seventeen, Ned requested a hundred million dollars. You know, we just got a seventeen budget, and they just passed a budget in April, okay,

and it was complicated. Essentially, they were given fifty million dollars, but the Department of Energy has the options at another fifty million. Today we've not received the second fifty. Okay, so so we're positioning ourselves to survive at the fifty level for fiscal year eighteen. The situation is also dire.

President Trump, who made fossil fuels and especially cole a focus of his administration, has only approved about half of what NET has requested, and now we're being impacted because we're not getting the money, and so we are now struggling to try to stay with Getting us here has taken decades. Every element we just described took years of dedicated research to just understand, and then many more years to move past the theory and come up with actual

experiment results. Just getting Eater up and running won't be enough to get us to the stage where we can use fusion to generate electricity. The real question is, in the next generation and a frill fusion reactor, what would you build it out? And if you were to use the search of things we're using on Eater, it would turn to a powder. You know, when Ned says it would turn into powder, he means that the materials that exists today can't handle the kinds of harsh conditions fusion

requires over a long period of time. But a power plant that uses usion will need to be running the reactions constantly and for many months at a time to make economic sense. You would chew up the material completely and suddenly if you don't do anything about it. You know you can reach the lifetime of thecal material within a few days to a week. That's you're gonna wrap

a plasma. Physicist at oak Ridge National Lab, he and Allen are working on a bunch of other things that will be necessary to make a commercial fusion power plant work. If you're going to have a successful power plant, it's more than this plasma. You have to be able to fuel it, you have to be able to extract the heat from it. You have to have materials that can

withstand that type of environment. The best way is to do start this development now instead of waiting until Eater has produced its burning plasma and then we start only developing the materials. We know that we have to develop new maters. Innovating on these elements all require funding and even new facilities, But like NED, they're also held back by money. Although we build more community beyond it, is

it enough. You know, under the budget constraints, I do not want to make a firm prediction, because it's also out of my hands. We are ready, I would say, we are ready, I hope so that the people in Washington already to for now. All the uncertainty around funding, combined with all the false starts throughout history, has made most of these scientists hesitant to offer a timeline for when the fusion power plant will be a reality. I won't speculate on the exact time frame because many haven't.

Many have been wrong over and over again. Right, only Ned would entertain that question. Looking at either if all goes to plan, he estimates that we might get a working fusion power plant around by which point Ned would be a hundred and one years old. I I truly hope. I mean I realized this that this endeavored to make fusion energy a reality takes many generations. And I'm not somebody who is discouraged by it. Um and some people

make fun of them. Maybe it's because I come from Europe and I come from Cologne, and the Cologne Cathedra was built over eight hundred years, you know, so so you know it is it is worth while to wait for it. And that's it for this week's episode of The Did Thanks for listening. We want to know what you think of this episode. Record a voice message and send it to Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. Also, you can find me on Twitter at jingle bells cow and

I've met aki Eto seven. If you haven't already subscribed to our show wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please leave us a rating and a review. This really helps more listeners find our show. This episode was produced by Pia Ga Kari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Henrikson. Thanks to Nico Grant and Isabel Gottlieb for their help with the show. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.