- 7/6/2023
Category
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PeopleTranscript
00:00 (dramatic music)
00:02 - But what we're able to do is take technology,
00:07 physics that was predicted to work in the 1950s and '60s,
00:10 take modern semiconductors, modern electronics,
00:12 and apply those and build those systems.
00:14 We think about this technology
00:17 from the point of view of climate change,
00:19 which is a worldwide phenomena.
00:21 And in fact, a lot of the places
00:22 where we generate power are the worst,
00:25 the dirtiest, with the most carbon dioxide
00:27 and the most pollution,
00:28 are exactly the places where geopolitically
00:30 we can't use fission power, we can't use nuclear power.
00:33 There really isn't a fusion design textbook
00:42 of how to build a fusion system,
00:43 particularly not a pulse-inductive,
00:46 pulse-magnetic system like what we do.
00:48 What we're doing, a lot of what we're doing
00:49 has never been done before,
00:50 and so you can't just follow a rote plan.
00:54 (upbeat music)
00:56 - I'm David Kirtley, CEO at Helion Energy.
01:04 I got into fusion originally in my early academic career,
01:09 learning everything there was to learn about fusion
01:11 and pivoted away from fusion.
01:14 Actually moved in a totally different direction,
01:16 take my academic plasma physics and aerospace background
01:19 to go build spacecraft to fly in space.
01:22 And what I saw was that while fusion was really promising,
01:26 energy source of the future,
01:28 I didn't see a commercial path forward
01:29 to build fusion systems in my lifetime.
01:32 And I really wanted to build those
01:33 and get them out in the world.
01:34 So I went off, worked for NASA, Department of Defense,
01:38 came up to Washington State in Seattle area
01:41 and started running R&D teams,
01:43 looking at space propulsion
01:45 and some new approaches to fusion.
01:46 And one of those worked, one of those really worked,
01:48 where we saw immediately we had a commercial path to fusion,
01:51 we could build small systems that actually did fusion
01:54 and lots of it and did it in a way
01:56 that could be deployed commercially.
01:57 So we spun off Helion Energy, built a team,
02:00 raised private money and started building
02:02 real big prototypes to do fusion.
02:04 - What was the kind of eureka moment for Helion
02:08 that you noticed that there was like
02:09 a commercial path forward for this?
02:11 - Even early in my academic career
02:13 and then the early founding team at Helion
02:15 and looked at all the ways that fusion was being done
02:18 with steam turbines and giant six-story cryogenic machines
02:21 and said, "Look, none of those are practical.
02:23 "Let's try a few things."
02:25 A lot of those early things didn't work.
02:26 But what we were able to do is take technology,
02:28 physics that was predicted to work in the 1950s and '60s,
02:32 take modern semiconductors, modern electronics
02:34 and apply those and build those systems.
02:36 And so for a small amount of money,
02:37 we were able to build tabletop type systems
02:40 that did fusion, heated up gases over a million degrees
02:43 and then over 10 million degrees and showed,
02:45 and we were the first private companies to do this,
02:47 that you could actually make fusion systems
02:49 that make tremendous amounts of energy
02:50 and then do that for a moderate amount of money.
02:52 And that really set the stage of that,
02:54 plus all of the engineering that we were looking at
02:57 at the same time, that we could get
02:58 to commercially practical fusion
03:00 for modest amounts of money
03:02 and do it in a real timeframe that matters.
03:05 - Was there a lot of crossover
03:07 between the work you were doing for propulsion
03:09 and what you're doing now?
03:11 - Yeah, so in space propulsion,
03:13 the key things you worry about are efficiency.
03:17 You only have a limited amount of power
03:19 and a limited amount of propellant,
03:20 and you have to use every ounce of that propellant
03:22 and every ounce of that power to give you thrust.
03:25 And that same thought process, we apply to fusion,
03:28 that we wanna make sure we're putting energy
03:29 into the fusion process as efficiently as possible
03:31 and taking electricity out of it as efficiently as possible.
03:34 And same thing, using our fuel, fusion fuel is expensive.
03:37 We wanna use every ounce of it and do fusion with it
03:40 and then recover everything that we can,
03:41 both fusion fuel and electricity.
03:44 And so a lot of those same thought processes,
03:46 and then even some of the same circuit topologies
03:48 that we had developed for space propulsion,
03:50 we could apply directly to fusion.
03:52 And then that enabled us to build those systems.
03:55 - What do you actually call the packets?
03:57 Is it a packet you call it?
03:58 - The plasmoid that we make
04:01 is called a field reverse configuration plasmoid.
04:03 That's the packet of gas, if you wanna think about it,
04:06 that we inject into the main compression chamber.
04:10 - Is there a similarity between how you fire those
04:13 at each other to how an actual propulsion system works?
04:17 - There's some similarities.
04:19 The scale is quite a bit different,
04:20 but actually we use some of the same technologies
04:23 of injecting the neutral gas, where we puff the gas in,
04:26 and how we initially ionize the fuel and form the plasma.
04:29 So that has a lot of the same topologies.
04:31 In fact, some of the circuits that we developed
04:33 for recovering electricity are some of the same circuits
04:36 we developed for space propulsion.
04:38 In these post-magnetic systems, repetition rate,
04:40 how often we run it, is one of the key parameters.
04:42 Where we pulse it in Entrenta,
04:44 we run it about once every 10 minutes right now.
04:46 Polaris that we're building,
04:48 actually you can see the injector behind me,
04:50 we'll get up to on the order of a few seconds
04:52 between pulses.
04:53 In space propulsion, we had to demonstrate
04:55 that we could actually run at hundreds of times per second,
04:58 and then run it steady in a vacuum system.
05:01 And we're able to demonstrate billions of operations
05:04 of these field reverse configurations.
05:06 Admittedly, much smaller scale than what you see behind me,
05:09 but that's what we were able to show.
05:11 And that gives us a really good proof
05:13 that we can go build these systems
05:14 and have them last for long periods of time.
05:16 - Is there any particular reason you've been quite stealthy
05:20 for most of the company's life,
05:22 but recently you've been looking to engage the public
05:25 a bit more with it.
05:26 Is there any, what's your goal with coming out of stealth,
05:30 I guess?
05:31 - Yeah, so Helion has been stealthy for a long time.
05:35 We've built now six prototypes that do fusion.
05:37 Earliest prototypes go back over a decade,
05:40 doing fusion, outperforming all other private fusion.
05:44 We're coming out of stealth now,
05:45 mostly so for two big reasons.
05:47 One, as we start to build commercial systems,
05:50 we wanna put these out in the world.
05:52 And that means the general public needs to understand
05:55 what fusion is, how real it is, how safe it is,
05:58 as well as working with politicians and regulators
06:00 and cities as we wanna deploy these.
06:02 But the other big thing is that we're hiring,
06:04 and we're hiring a lot.
06:05 We've grown to over 107 people right now,
06:08 and we're in the process of doubling again in size.
06:10 And so I want people to know that fusion is real.
06:13 We're building really amazing machines,
06:15 and so that the best engineers and scientists in the world
06:18 can look at fusion and say,
06:19 "That's what I wanna do with my career."
06:21 - This is Polaris that's being built behind us, right?
06:25 And this is gonna be the first prototype
06:28 that demonstrates net electricity?
06:31 - Right now we're building Polaris,
06:32 their seventh generation system.
06:34 The goal is that it will demonstrate electricity production
06:37 for the first time, come online in 2024.
06:40 - Okay, so this isn't net,
06:41 it's just electricity production in general?
06:45 - So this should be into the reaction, net electricity.
06:48 However, we're not right now focused on
06:51 what we call the balance of plants,
06:52 so all the commercial aspects around it.
06:54 And that is what our eighth generation system will do.
06:57 The stepping stone between our seventh generation system
07:00 we're building Polaris, and the eighth generation system
07:03 is a lot of the engineering around the system.
07:05 That we wanna turn up the power output,
07:07 the yield even further.
07:08 We wanna make sure we're taking that electricity
07:11 that we're recharging capacitors with,
07:12 turning that into 60 Hertz AC,
07:15 and putting that on the grid.
07:16 And then also repetition rate, that's a big one.
07:18 Is that going from operating every few seconds,
07:21 to now operating multiple times a second,
07:23 is another engineering jump, leap we have to make
07:26 in some of the thermal engineering,
07:27 structural engineering, and gas handling systems.
07:30 - What do you think is gonna be the biggest challenge
07:33 in making that jump?
07:35 Is it the thermal?
07:36 - If you ask any engineer or scientist on my team,
07:39 you're actually gonna hear a different answer
07:40 for what is the hardest thing that we're trying to solve.
07:44 My personal belief in building the steady operating systems
07:46 that we built in the past,
07:48 is it comes into the thermal operation of these systems.
07:51 Whereas things start to heat up, they change,
07:54 the structural mechanics change of these pulse magnets,
07:57 how the way the fusion plasma,
07:59 actually the wall temperature changes
08:01 as it changes in temperature.
08:03 We saw that on our earlier subscale systems,
08:05 and so we expect to see that on the big scale systems too.
08:08 And so understanding that, predicting that,
08:10 and then engineering all the mechanisms in place for that,
08:13 I think are gonna be some of the most exciting
08:15 engineering challenges that we're solving right now.
08:18 And so we're hiring those teams
08:19 to do solve those problems right now.
08:23 - And what sort of engineers
08:24 are you looking to hire right now?
08:26 - I'm looking at, I'm looking at,
08:28 I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:30 So I'm looking at engineers from all over the world
08:32 who are gonna be working on the future.
08:34 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world
08:36 who are gonna be working on the future.
08:38 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:40 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:43 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:45 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:48 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:50 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:53 And so I'm looking at engineers from all over the world.
08:55 And so we hire across the spectrum.
08:58 A successful engineer that joins Helion
09:00 is gonna be somebody that's really multidisciplinary,
09:03 that is gonna be extraordinary at one thing,
09:05 whether it's thermal engineering
09:06 or transient structural analysis,
09:08 but also experience putting their hands on
09:11 and building things, taking data at the same time.
09:14 And being able to like look outside the box.
09:16 What we're doing, a lot of what we're doing
09:17 has never been done before.
09:18 And so you can't just follow a rote plan.
09:21 You have to be able to innovate, try new things,
09:23 take risks, have courage to take risks,
09:26 but then also be able to admit when things aren't working.
09:28 I think one of the challenges
09:30 that some of our new engineers that will join us
09:33 is that there is no textbook to follow.
09:35 There's no, unlike aerospace actually,
09:37 there's rocket textbooks.
09:38 You can open up and say, "This is how you design a rocket.
09:40 "I'm gonna go make a better one."
09:41 There really isn't a fusion design textbook
09:44 of how to build a fusion system,
09:45 particularly not a pulse inductive,
09:47 pulse magnetic system like what we do.
09:50 And so what I actually like to tell them is,
09:51 "I'm sorry, there's no textbook.
09:52 "We have lots of things for you to learn.
09:54 "You're gonna help us write the first textbook."
09:56 And so it's a pretty exciting thing
09:57 for a lot of people who are willing to take that risk
09:59 to be able to be a part of defining
10:02 how fusion generators are made in the future.
10:05 - Were there any surprising learning moments recently
10:08 that you've discovered with Trenta, just like unexpected?
10:13 - There were some exciting things that we learned on Trenta
10:14 that were unexpected.
10:16 We were really worried early that the timing accuracy
10:19 is emerging these two high-speed plasmas
10:21 over a million miles an hour, compressing them,
10:23 working on getting their alignment,
10:25 that that would be really a tough challenge.
10:27 And what we found that is, in practice,
10:28 it's actually quite a bit easier than the theory
10:30 or the basic computation simulations would actually show
10:34 that we can, with a lot of freedom, merge these
10:37 and get really good results that are really repeatable.
10:40 Some of the things we did find, however,
10:41 that are a little bit more challenging
10:42 is as these plasmas got hotter
10:44 and we got above 10 million degrees
10:46 and got to the 100 million degrees,
10:48 what we found is that there's probably
10:50 some other effects, good effects,
10:52 where we're producing more fusion than we maybe predicted,
10:55 but the fusion plasma interacts with the vacuum chamber
10:59 a little bit more than what we thought as well.
11:01 And so what we're having to do for future systems
11:04 is build them just a little bit bigger,
11:05 about 25% bigger than what we'd originally planned
11:08 to account for those things.
11:09 And so there's some engineering iteration
11:11 that has to happen as we discover the advanced physics
11:14 and the engineering of implementing
11:16 these systems in practice.
11:17 - And this, the Polaris, is 25% bigger
11:20 than Trenta, is that because of that discovery
11:23 or is that just a coincidence?
11:24 - Polaris is about 25% bigger.
11:26 Some parts are actually up to 50% bigger.
11:29 And a lot of that is what we learned on Trenta,
11:31 that we learned that we wanna actually be
11:33 a little bit farther away from the chamber walls
11:36 than we had originally planned
11:37 as we go down our accelerator systems,
11:39 as well as trying to turn up the energy out.
11:41 Interestingly, in fusion, all fusion, in fact,
11:44 the reaction, the amount of energy you get out
11:45 scales with the volume of the plasma.
11:47 So in a cylindrical geometry,
11:49 it's on the order of radius cubed.
11:51 So very modest changes in radius
11:53 yield very large changes in power output.
11:56 - Is the commercial version going to be
11:57 much larger than Polaris?
12:00 - It's a very great question of what is the commercial scale
12:04 of a pulsed magnetic fusion like what we do.
12:07 And honestly, that depends on your application.
12:10 So we've designed two sets of systems.
12:13 The smallest we believe that we can make
12:15 that are commercially practical
12:16 are on the order of 50 megawatts.
12:17 That's about 40,000 homes,
12:19 maybe a very, very small data center, for instance.
12:23 But we've designed systems that can go up
12:24 to 500 megawatts of power output.
12:26 So now larger towns, very large data centers,
12:30 those types of applications.
12:32 And so once you get up to that 500 megawatt systems,
12:34 get even more efficient, cost for electricity goes down,
12:38 but you start to push some of the engineering challenges
12:40 you have to do.
12:41 So the scale of Polaris that we're building right now
12:44 is on the 50 megawatt scale.
12:46 - There's inherent safety involved with this.
12:47 Could something like this live near homes?
12:50 - So one of the beauties of fusion is how energy dense it is
12:54 unlike other renewable forms of power,
12:56 wind farms and solar that take up
12:58 a tremendous amount of area.
12:59 Fusion actually has a very high power density.
13:02 But because of that,
13:04 we believe it'll always be industrial scale power.
13:07 This is not something we're gonna put in your basement
13:08 or in your car or any of those kinds of things.
13:11 And so we imagine situations where this could be near towns,
13:14 but it would still be industrial scale power.
13:17 And you'll end up building these generator plants
13:20 that are on the very lowest, about 50 megawatts in scale,
13:23 but probably bigger.
13:24 Probably you'll have maybe multiple units
13:26 and talk about 500 megawatts in scale.
13:28 And so you won't have to be centrally located
13:30 far away from many people,
13:32 but you still industrial scale.
13:34 - Even this facility,
13:36 you're like the one in Redmond as well.
13:39 There's no signage outside.
13:40 You wouldn't think that there's like an active
13:42 like nuclear fusion reactor inside the building.
13:45 So it's hideaway quite easily.
13:48 - The idea that these can be compact
13:50 is one of the commercial benefits of it.
13:52 I would actually say it's one of the requirements
13:54 because you need to be able to build and iterate quickly
13:58 and you need to build systems
13:59 where you can iterate quickly.
14:01 And that means the smaller, the better.
14:03 Building giant six-story tall systems
14:05 means that it's gonna take a very long time
14:07 to iterate and learn.
14:08 I mean, what we've seen in the aerospace industries,
14:10 the modern electric car companies
14:12 is that being able to iterate, get products out,
14:14 do launches and learn from them
14:16 so that you can make the next one
14:18 is really the key to making rapid progress.
14:21 - And can we talk about the fuel?
14:23 Like where we can actually get the fuel from
14:25 for a little bit, like the deuterium
14:27 and the helium three as well.
14:30 Obviously the helium three is more difficult to get.
14:32 What's your approach to like the fuels you use?
14:35 - So Helion's approach to fusion
14:36 use a deuterium and a helium three fuel.
14:38 Deuterium is really common.
14:40 It's one part in 500 in all water,
14:42 it's in the coffee you drink
14:44 and safe and readily abundant and low cost as well.
14:49 We buy it in compressed gas cylinders.
14:51 It's already purified,
14:52 but you can imagine doing the purification yourself.
14:54 It's pretty straightforward.
14:56 The helium three, however, is ultra rare.
14:58 And in fact, while helium three was theorized
15:00 in the early days of fusion
15:01 as being the best fusion fuel,
15:03 because of its rarity,
15:05 there haven't been a lot of approaches
15:07 that have used helium three
15:08 or demonstrated helium three.
15:10 To our knowledge,
15:11 Trento was the first system we know about
15:13 that did bulk deuterium helium three fusion
15:16 for a power generation application.
15:18 One thing Helion has done is we patented
15:20 a helium three process of creating helium three,
15:25 of taking two deuteriums found commonly in nature
15:27 and at high pressure in a fusion system, ironically,
15:30 fusing them together to form helium three,
15:32 taking one more deuterium,
15:34 fusing that with the helium three to make helium four.
15:36 And that's what makes the electricity.
15:38 - So it's only the reaction of deuterium
15:41 with helium three that generates the...
15:43 - It generates about one eighth
15:45 of the deuterium helium three reaction.
15:48 So it influences the amount of power output per reaction
15:51 is the actual atomic physics that's happening.
15:53 Where when two deuteriums combine,
15:56 they have a few reactions,
15:58 but the one we care about most will create a helium three.
16:01 And that helium three will have a lower mass deficit.
16:05 So the amount of missing mass of that final product.
16:09 So E equals MC squared,
16:11 and that mass deficit is the amount of energy
16:13 that's released in terms of the particles
16:15 that are created and their temperatures.
16:17 And so deuterium helium three has a larger mass deficit
16:20 when it forms helium four.
16:21 And so you end up with more energy trapped
16:24 in that helium four,
16:25 as well as in the other proton that is made.
16:27 - Can you explain that term, the mass deficit?
16:30 - The nucleus of an atom is made up of protons and neutrons.
16:34 And when those protons and neutrons come together,
16:38 they end up typically for anything of atomic mass,
16:41 less than iron,
16:42 way less than the combination of a proton plus a neutron.
16:45 So deuterium for instance, is one proton plus one proton.
16:49 And that has less mass than the proton by itself
16:51 and a neutron by itself.
16:53 And that has to do with how the atomic structures
16:56 and the quantum mechanics of those structures
16:58 come together to form that monolithic atom.
17:01 Same thing with a helium three is two protons
17:04 and one neutron,
17:05 and a helium four is two protons and two neutrons.
17:08 And so by, as you come together,
17:11 those reactions will release more energy
17:14 than it took to put into them.
17:15 And in fact, the mass deficit for some reactions,
17:18 some fusion reactions is more,
17:20 therefore more energy released than others.
17:22 This is a mix of deuterium and helium three,
17:27 where it's a pre-made mix of that ultra rare helium three,
17:30 a few liters STP of helium three, and then deuterium.
17:34 So this is what we used in Trenta
17:35 when we were doing full helium three operation
17:38 and the bulk fusion of deuterium and helium three.
17:41 - Are you able to talk about
17:43 how much something like that would cost?
17:46 - I can.
17:47 So this helium three is ultra rare and pretty expensive.
17:49 So this bottle costs about $2,500
17:52 for three liters of helium three at STP.
17:57 - And how long could that like last
18:00 when you're running Trenta?
18:02 - Yep, so that actually would power quite a few shots
18:04 of Trenta, particularly if we did a good job
18:06 with the gas flow system
18:08 and making sure we weren't wasting a lot of gas
18:10 in the gas injection system.
18:12 The other thing we do on all of these systems
18:15 is we recover the fuel.
18:16 So any fusion fuel that's burned or unburned,
18:19 we actually exhaust it into a separate storage container.
18:22 We take that storage tank,
18:24 we put it in a processing system to separate out
18:27 any extra deuterium, helium three, hydrogen, helium four,
18:31 any other byproducts that were maybe made
18:33 during the fusion processes.
18:34 And then so that we can purify it ourselves,
18:36 put it back in the machine.
18:38 So fusion systems use surprisingly little fuel
18:41 for the amount of energy that they produce.
18:44 A 50 megawatt deuterium helium three fusion system
18:47 would use one 55 gallon drum of heavy water
18:50 of deuterium oxide, the kind you find in all water.
18:52 And it would use one 55 gallon drum
18:54 to operate for 10 years at 50 megawatts.
18:57 So it would power 40,000 homes for 10 years.
19:00 - And you're creating your, like the rare elements
19:04 with the deuterium, so you don't have to buy
19:06 helium three as much, right?
19:08 - That's correct, that's our goal.
19:09 In fact, early systems will make extra helium three
19:12 that we can sell to other people that need helium three
19:14 'cause it is pretty rare right now.
19:15 - Oh, okay.
19:16 And like what is the source of helium three
19:18 naturally on Earth, right?
19:20 I know we're even like running out of regular helium.
19:24 - Yeah, we have a helium four,
19:25 so regular balloon helium shortage
19:27 as well as helium three shortage.
19:29 Helium three comes from the decay,
19:31 the radioactive decay of other isotopes.
19:33 So mostly we don't make it from fusion right now,
19:35 it's made from fission reactors.
19:37 So in the bath of a heavy water reactor,
19:41 can do reactor is tritium in the water.
19:43 And that tritium over 12 and a half years
19:45 decays into helium three.
19:47 So literally the helium three bubbles out of the water
19:49 that comes from a fission plant,
19:52 from the coolant of a fission plant.
19:54 And that's where we get them.
19:55 Now we have a shortage because we're shutting down
19:57 a lot of those, the can do,
19:58 the heavy water reactors in Canada.
20:01 And so we're running out of the tritium
20:04 and therefore we're running out of the helium as well.
20:06 - I always had this notion in my head
20:08 that nuclear fission is kind of hard for like,
20:11 say a country like Ireland.
20:12 I feel like no one's ever going to allow a country
20:15 like Ireland to have a nuclear fission power plant
20:18 because you can like breeder reactors and all of that,
20:21 that you can actually create like weapon grade
20:25 radioactive materials.
20:26 And you obviously don't have that issue here.
20:29 - Siting nuclear fission plants is really hard
20:31 because of the proliferation concerns
20:33 that you can torture them and make them into things
20:35 that can make atomic weapons, nuclear weapons.
20:40 Fusion doesn't have that problem.
20:42 We actually just published a paper earlier this year
20:44 and have worked with a number of external agencies
20:46 showing how fusion does not lead to proliferation,
20:49 can't be used for weapons.
20:51 And so we did a lot of technical
20:53 as well as political work in that.
20:55 And so we believe you can cite fusion systems
20:57 throughout the world and it doesn't have
20:59 the same geopolitical concerns that fission power plants do.
21:02 - So that's one of the things that I see,
21:04 especially online these days,
21:05 people are very pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear
21:08 and they tend not to consider the fact that
21:12 I see like a lot of people being pro-nuclear for Ireland.
21:14 It's like, that's never going to happen.
21:15 Like no one's going to allow us to have like weapons grades,
21:18 plutonium or anything like that.
21:21 But like, it would be like a fantastic world
21:24 if these could be cited like in countries around the world.
21:28 - We think about this technology
21:30 from the point of view of climate change,
21:31 which is a worldwide phenomena.
21:33 And in fact, a lot of the places where we generate power
21:37 the worst, the dirtiest with the most carbon dioxide
21:39 and the most pollution are exactly the places
21:41 where geopolitically we can't use fission power.
21:44 We can't use nuclear power.
21:45 And so that we definitely have always aimed towards fusion
21:49 in a way that we could be able to build these,
21:51 develop these, cite these and deploy them
21:53 anywhere in the world.
21:54 So right now we are here in our Everett facility,
21:57 which we moved the team up to earlier this year.
22:00 We call this one Antares,
22:01 named after the helium burning star Antares.
22:04 Where we're going to be doing the manufacturing
22:06 to build fusion generators.
22:08 So behind me, you can actually see an injector for Polaris,
22:11 our seventh generation system
22:12 that we're building right now.
22:13 This is testing the gas injection system.
22:16 It's testing our initial ionization system
22:19 and testing our formation of how do we make these FRCs
22:22 and do it in a reparated way.
22:24 So rather than once every 10 minutes in this system,
22:26 we're going to be able to do it every few seconds
22:28 and show that we can make these plasmas,
22:30 we can make them in the repeatable, reliable way we need.
22:34 - So you obviously have a lot of space here too.
22:37 And you mentioned this is where you're going to be
22:39 manufacturing them.
22:40 Obviously like there's only so much mass producing
22:43 you can do with something like this,
22:44 but this is where you see building commercial units from.
22:48 - Yeah, so here in our Antares
22:50 is where we're starting to manufacture
22:52 the first fusion generator systems.
22:54 So some of the key technologies that we work on
22:56 that are different than you can buy commercially
22:59 or that we can make better,
23:01 capacitors, the energy storage system.
23:03 Some of the semiconductors we use are off the shelf now,
23:07 but we know ways to make them for fusion
23:09 that are even better than the off the shelf technologies.
23:11 And so behind me,
23:12 all the way at the other end of the building,
23:13 we're starting to manufacture capacitors for the first time
23:16 here in the United States.
23:18 And so we're very excited to be able to bring
23:19 those systems online.
23:21 It'll provide capacitors for our seventh generation system,
23:23 Polaris, but then it'll also be the stepping stone
23:26 for all the future systems too.
23:28 And we'll be able to manufacture,
23:29 we have a large machine shop where we can machine
23:31 a lot of these high field magnet coils,
23:33 and then as well as all the assembly for these parts.
23:36 So this will definitely provide the manufacturing required
23:38 to get Polaris online and maybe the system after that.
23:41 Mass production of these is going to take a bit more
23:45 than even what we can do in this facility.
23:47 - Was there any individual component on Polaris
23:51 that was extremely difficult to manufacture
23:54 that you kind of had to develop your own processes for?
23:57 - There's a number of things that we do for these systems
24:00 that are unique.
24:02 We've been able to get very close
24:04 with off the shelf components,
24:05 but as particularly as we get bigger and more energetic
24:08 and higher repetition rates, faster operating,
24:11 going from once every 10 minutes to every few seconds.
24:13 Now we get to a point where we need to start developing
24:15 some of our, I mean, manufacturing
24:17 some of our own technologies.
24:18 So some of the machining requirements of these complex,
24:21 large, high strength magnetic coils are really hard.
24:23 So we make those ourselves.
24:25 Capacitors, again, there are commercial technologies
24:28 that get close, but we, because we want to rep rate them
24:31 and have them long life and be very high power,
24:33 that we're pushing the boundaries
24:35 of what any commercial technology
24:36 anywhere in the world can do.
24:37 And so we're designing and building those custom in-house.
24:40 And even the big one is, and this is one of the tests
24:43 that we have going on here, is the vacuum vessels,
24:46 the actual where we inject the fuel
24:47 and make the fusion plasmas,
24:49 are right now they're all quartz vacuum vessels.
24:51 So high temperature silica, fused silica.
24:54 And right now Trento was the biggest tubes
24:57 anywhere in the world we could find
25:00 that someone else would make.
25:01 They actually no longer even make tubes that big any longer.
25:04 They've stood, they only make smaller tubes now.
25:06 And so what we have in house
25:08 is our own internal fused quartz manufacturing
25:11 so that we can make tubes of any size,
25:13 significantly bigger than what other people have done,
25:15 so that we can build bigger fusion systems
25:17 that produce more energy.
25:19 - Are there applications for those technologies
25:22 outside of just nuclear fusion?
25:23 Do you see that being able to work elsewhere?
25:26 - So some of the technologies, the capacitors,
25:28 the high power switching,
25:30 obviously the large scale machining,
25:32 absolutely there's applications.
25:33 For the fused, big fused tubes,
25:35 actually originally they were developed
25:37 for silicon processing.
25:40 And so you needed very high temperature,
25:41 very pure vacuum systems and vacuum vessels.
25:44 Really the industry has moved away from that
25:46 to smaller ones, mass produced.
25:48 So I think this one, probably the fused tubes
25:51 will be focused for us.
25:52 A common question I get is why do we use that fuel
25:55 over other fusion fuels?
25:57 Most fusion use a deuterium and a tritium fuel,
25:59 another two isotopes of hydrogen,
26:01 one a mass of two and one a mass of three.
26:03 And deuterium tritium indeed is the lowest energy
26:06 to get to net energy out from fusion.
26:09 But that energy is in the form of heat,
26:11 not in the form of electricity.
26:13 And what we found in doing our calculations
26:15 and our publications is that by doing deuterium
26:18 and helium three fusion,
26:19 it's harder to get the reaction going,
26:21 but the products it makes are all charged particles.
26:24 Those charged particles means we can make electricity
26:26 directly at really high efficiency.
26:28 So while they produce less heat energy,
26:30 they produce more net electricity out for the grid.
26:33 And so our belief is that we can build
26:35 these helium three deuterium, helium three fusion systems,
26:38 and they actually make more electricity
26:39 than a traditional fusion system would.
26:41 - Is tritium as rare as helium three?
26:45 - Tritium is indeed as rare as helium three.
26:48 In fact, there's been a number of publications recently
26:50 that we may not have enough tritium for ITER to even work,
26:53 or that ITER will use up all of the world's supply
26:55 of tritium.
26:56 - Why does the source of tritium,
26:58 is it the same as coming from nuclear fission,
27:00 like heavy water?
27:01 - So right now we get tritium mostly in the world
27:04 for from the heavy water, from the pools,
27:07 the water pools of a heavy water fission plant.
27:10 - Is there a world where they would just have that
27:13 as a manufacturing by itself without,
27:15 like you'd hardly have a nuclear fission plant
27:17 without actually trying to get the electricity out of it?
27:19 - So the way to make tritium is to do fusion.
27:21 So you can actually from a fusion system,
27:24 do fusion and make tritium as one of the byproducts.
27:26 - Okay, so you can do that too?
27:27 - And so you could do that if you wanted to sell that
27:29 for an application.
27:30 - Okay, so you could potentially sell that
27:32 as a byproduct as well.
27:33 - And tritium decays into helium three naturally.
27:36 So it's another way to get helium three.
27:38 - Okay.
27:39 - Yeah, so all tritium decays naturally into helium three
27:41 with about a 12 year half-life.
27:43 - So we don't have to go to the moon?
27:46 - Well, if you could go to the moon,
27:48 you would definitely be well served
27:49 to get the helium three while you're there.
27:51 But I don't know that it would be worth a dedicated trip
27:54 just to go to the moon.
27:55 - What is the actual like concentration of helium three?
27:58 Is that something you know about?
28:00 - Yeah, so that's the challenge is in the lunar regolith.
28:02 The helium three in the lunar regolith comes from the sun.
28:05 So during the fusion process in the sun,
28:07 it makes helium three and it blows it on the moon.
28:09 And then it gets trapped in the regolith
28:11 and builds up over time.
28:13 Unfortunately, it's very, very low concentrations.
28:15 So you have to mine many, many miles of the moon
28:18 to get even a little bit of helium three.
28:21 - Yeah, the regolith is not exactly kind on machinery.
28:25 - And it's only for that top little skimmer.
28:27 So you gotta go a large area.
28:29 And there's been lots of publications on it.
28:31 It still ends up because of the energy density
28:33 of the fusion process and how much electricity
28:35 you get out of it.
28:36 It still actually makes sense financially
28:39 if you're already there.
28:40 It may not make sense for a large scale mission to the moon.
28:44 Or Jupiter, actually Jupiter has a lot more helium.
28:46 - Really?
28:47 - Yeah.
28:48 - Is that located, is it in the atmosphere there?
28:50 - Yeah, so you just have to dip down and scoop it up there.
28:53 - Just dip down.
28:53 - Just dip down, not a problem.
28:54 - Super easy, barely any inconvenience.
28:57 - Actually, honestly, once you have working fusion systems,
28:59 now you have the power to actually get
29:01 into the deeper solar system where you're far away
29:03 from the sun and solar power no longer really makes sense.
29:06 And so that's something that I think a lot of our team
29:08 is still excited about is,
29:10 and we're actually on a couple of space committees
29:12 and give a talk every few years on fusion space propulsion.
29:15 And I actually have a patent in it too,
29:17 to be able to apply this technology
29:19 once we're successfully generating electricity
29:21 throughout the world here on Earth,
29:23 to build now systems that can operate under vacuum
29:25 and have to be lightweight.
29:26 We don't have to worry about weight right here
29:29 to be able to put them in space.
29:30 - How would that, what would your actual propellant be?
29:33 'Cause you still need a propellant, right?
29:35 - Yes, very good question.
29:36 And so we've spent a lot of time thinking about this
29:38 in that the hydrogen and the helium that you emit
29:41 from a fusion system is much too light, ironically.
29:44 It will generate a tremendous,
29:46 it'll be very, very efficient, but have very low thrust.
29:48 So you'll very efficiently not go very far.
29:51 And so you have to be able to now couple this
29:53 with a higher mass system.
29:54 And so in our fusion systems that we've worked on,
29:58 or we've theorized for propulsion, just theorized,
30:01 you inject a heavier working fluid,
30:03 whether it's argon or whether it's actually using metal,
30:06 and so that you can actually eject part of your magnets
30:08 with the fusion fuel.
30:10 One of the key enabling technologies and approaches we do,
30:13 we call direct energy recovery.
30:15 When I first got into fusion,
30:16 it was actually something
30:17 that really annoyed me about fusion,
30:19 which is that we have all this beautiful
30:20 electromagnetic energy, charged particles,
30:22 the working fluid are already charged,
30:25 they're already electric,
30:26 they're wrapped in magnetic fields,
30:27 which is also electromagnetic.
30:29 And then we do everything we can,
30:30 and we have flowing gases too,
30:32 we have electrical currents flowing in this system.
30:34 And then we do everything we can to heat water,
30:37 boil water, run a steam turbine, and at low efficiency.
30:41 And so one of the things we focused on early on this
30:44 is what are all the ways you can to recover everything,
30:47 all the input electricity you can,
30:49 so that you have to make as little electricity as possible
30:52 to get it out on the grid and sell it.
30:55 And so that's what we focus on a lot
30:56 is how do we directly recover the electromagnetic energy
31:00 of the full system,
31:00 not only the unused energy that we put into the magnets.
31:03 And that's one of the most important parts.
31:05 We put energy into the magnets, we take it back out.
31:07 Even if there was no fusion,
31:08 we've just recovered 90 plus percent of all the input energy.
31:11 And then once we've done fusion,
31:13 you have charged particles,
31:14 they're pushing back on the magnetic fields,
31:16 let's extract that energy too.
31:18 And so in practice, what that means
31:19 is we can build systems now,
31:21 at least an order of magnitude,
31:22 if not two orders of magnitude smaller
31:24 than any other fusion approach,
31:26 because we can directly harness all that electricity.
31:28 The analogy I like to use is it's a gasoline engine
31:32 versus the electric car.
31:33 The electric car was theorized
31:35 and first recorded that I know is 1890,
31:38 but we didn't have the technology, the batteries,
31:40 the switches, the regenerative braking
31:42 to be able to really build
31:44 commercially practical electric cars.
31:45 So we switched to a thermal system,
31:47 but we believe now for fusion,
31:49 we finally have those technologies
31:51 that we can apply to fusion
31:52 to be able to extract electricity
31:54 and deliver electricity out to the grid directly.
31:57 - Is there much waste heat from your system at all
32:00 that you have thought about capturing?
32:02 - Yeah, so there's definitely waste heat.
32:04 In this, when you do fusion,
32:06 it makes photons, it makes X-rays.
32:09 Those come out when you run large mega amps
32:11 worth of electrical current through the coils,
32:13 you get ohmic heating of those coils.
32:15 And so you do have waste heat to deal with.
32:17 And so we have various engineering designs
32:20 at various scales of taking some of that thermal energy
32:22 where it's high entropy heat,
32:24 where it's easy to extract at high efficiency
32:26 and using that in small turbine systems.
32:30 Generally though, especially as we get bigger in scale,
32:32 we wanna use as little of the low efficiency,
32:35 more expensive heat
32:37 rather than the high efficiency direct electricity.
32:39 I got it.
32:40 - Yeah, we have a lot to work with.
32:42 - I'm out, I got nothing else drained of information.
32:45 - Thank you for watching this video on Nebula.
32:49 Your support here helps us keep improving
32:51 and investing in our craft.
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