Fusion Is Promising, but Isn't a Near-Term Solution

to be a pretty science heavy episode today. We're talking about the future of energy in light of a major scientific breakthrough. Scientists the Department of Energies Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California announced this week that they created a net energy positive fusion reaction, or in other words, a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create. After the announcement, you might have heard some folks saying that this could be in a future without energy scarcity

and without carbon emissions. Pretty exciting prospect. But as you'll hear today, that future is actually pretty far off, a lot further than many policymakers and Joe Biden in particular, would be willing to admit. We're gonna be talking about nuclear fusion with Bloomberg News energy reporter Will Wade, and of course I started off by asking Will to give us a little science lesson and explain exactly how fusion really works. Nuclear fusion, it's an idea that's been around

since the fifties. You're probably familiar with nuclear fission. That's what we use in nuclear power plants. And what happens there is you have a large atom and it literally splits, and in that process it releases a whole lot of energy. It's the same thing we saw in the first nuclear bombs back in the nineties. So nuclear fusion is the process that happens inside stars. It's inside our sun. And

what happens is you have small atoms. In this case, they've used two isotopes of hydrogen and you smash them together and they fuse into something else. So the hydrogen becomes helium and in the process that also releases a lot of that gy So the concept has been around for decades. It's been one of those theoretical things that people have said, we think this will work. So what happened that Lawrence Livermore Labs was they call it net energy game so they smashed atoms together and they used

a whole bunch of lasers. In fact, they use some of the most powerful lasers on Earth. And it took them about two mega joules of energy to trigger this reaction, and when the fusion reaction happened, it released three mega jules of energy. So what that means is more energy came out than came in, and that's what they've been trying to achieve for decades. That's one of the things that surprised me, and I think that I learned from your reporting and other reporting on this is that fusion

itself is not difficult. I mean, of course it's very difficult, but it's not something that we just learned how to do. Fusion is is something that's been around for a while. It's this concept of a fusion reaction that generates energy instead of takes up energy. That's the real, the big breakthrough. Yeah. Actually, the thing with the fusion reaction is that it's hard to get it going, and it takes a lot of energy to trigger a fusion reaction. A lot of times it uses a lot of heat. In this case, I

think it was about three million degrees centigrade. And that heat is what sort of helps the atoms fuse together. Well, I will say I grew up in twoson Arizona, so three million doesn't sound that you know, doesn't sound that bad to me anyway. Um So, So the idea is that it takes energy to get the fusion reaction going, but if it is releasing more energy, that means you

can sustain the reaction. So if it takes two mega jewels to get it going and you've got three mega jewels coming out, that means you can use the two mega jewels in theory to keep it going, and it gives you a surplus mega jewel of energy which you can harvest and use for a commercial power plant. I mean, that's the basic theory. You're gonna need a lot more gain than that, but that's the key idea. So let's

talk about the benefits of fusion versus fission. UM. I think we all know the downsides of fission, which is radioactive waste among other uh potential downsides, but they sounds like the main issue is that you create a lot of radioactive materials that are going to be radioactive for thousands of years. UM. I get a sense with fusion, that's not necessarily the case. Do I have that right? Yes,

that's exactly right. So with nuclear fission, we what we use now is uranium, and the fuel rods, once they've been used up, they're probably some of the most dangerous things on Earth. They're deadly for thousands of years. And our strategy right now is to seal them up in a big steel and concrete cask and it just sits there. So fusion doesn't do this. Fusion runs on hydrogen. Hydrogen is really safe. The byproduct in this case has been helium.

Helium is safe. We don't have that leftover uranium that's super toxic. Now, it's not correct to say there's no waste.

There's also a lot of neutrons flying around, and neutrons will eventually leave some of the materials radioactive, but it's not nearly as dangerous as the toxic waste from new clear power plants now and we should also, I mean, we're you know, fusion sounds it sounds like could be cleaner and safer than fission, but I mean, you know, anything that involves millions of degrees if temperature, it can't be totally safe, right, I mean, there are some risks

here to nuclear fusion, right, Well, there's some risks, but it's not quite the same. Now, you've probably heard of meltdowns or something called the China syndrome, and that's because once you have a nuclear fission reaction going a nuclear power plant, it's hard to control. That's why they have water to keep it cool. That's why they have boron rods to sort of act as damping elements in the in the reactor core. That reaction is going and it's hard to control it. You could lose control of the

reaction in a nuclear power plant. Now, fusion, if you remember, takes a lot of energy to get it going. What that means is if you somehow lose control of the system, if something breaks down, that energy goes away, you lose control of the reaction. It shuts down. It shuts downs in like a fraction of a second, it goes away. It's not a problem that's really interesting. So it's almost like a fail safe pretty much. If if something goes wrong with a fusion power plant, the first thing that

happens is it shuts itself down. Okay, let's blessedly move away from the science here and get to the public policy. Okay, Um, you know, so President Biden has said that he wants a working nuclear fusion reactor to be up and running in ten years from now. Um, based on your reporting, I get the sense that's a very aspirational goal, and that may be putting it kind. Is that possible ten years from now we'll see a reactor? Well, I'll say that it's okay for him to want that. I don't

know if it's going to be possible. It's it's an aspirational goal. We've heard different things. When they announced its Energy Secretary Grant Home said yeah, we could do this in a decade, and then they brought out the head of Lawrence Livermore Labs, who is the scientist and not the politician and maybe knows a little bit more about it, and her reaction was decades. Maybe not five or six decades like we used to think, but decades. So it sounded like she was pouring a little cold water on that.

I don't know if we can have it in a decade, but it's a nice target to shoot for, because if we can actually have a fusion power plant, it's not overstating it to say that this would solve a lot of the world's problems. It's abundance clean energy that runs around the clock. It's it's exactly what we need. Uh. And then finally I wanted to talk about the research aspect of this. And when I say research, I mean

research funding. You reported that, you know, this breakthrough is going to kind of trigger a big increase in research dollars towards nuclear fusion. However, when I read that, I was thinking, you know, is this a zero sum game, because there's a lot of potential energy projects that could yield you know, interesting results. I'm specifically thinking of, you know, batteries that could be used to make wind and solar

more reliable and less intermittent um. Is the funding that's going to go towards nuclear fusion research, is it going to come from other areas of clean energy research? You know, that's an interesting question. I don't know for sure, but my guests would be not so much. The people that are putting money into fusion are making long term bets, and it's a bit of a risk. It's a bit of a gamble. We don't know if it's going to work or how long it's going to take. The people

that are putting money into batteries. That's a much shorter play. We see huge demand for batteries now. We can see the bands of the batteries that exist now, and we see, you know, plenty of interest in a new kind of battery, and there's a lot of research going to new battery technologies. And if you can come up with a better battery, it's not as complicated a project as a nuclear fusion power plant, and you pretty much have a guaranteed market. Yeah that makes sense. I mean, yeah, I guess I'm

thinking of renewable energy research. It's like a zero sum game, and it sounds like that's just not the case. There's room in the in the sandbox for everyone. I think people are just investing in energy period, instead of just thinking, well, this is the money I've got to allocate for renewable energy.

The global energy markets have been completely upended since the war started almost a year ago, and there's just unlimited interest in trying to find new ways to either get more of the energy we have or new kinds of energy. All Right, Well, that was Will Wade talking about the future. Thank you Will for joining us. Uh, let's hope we have more news here. In the future. Okay, and that's

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